The impact of London on the county

V. THE IMPACT OF LONDON ON THE COUNTY KENT was bound to London by the closest of ties. Not only was its northwestern corner already part of the great urban complex which was the Stuart metropolis, but the whole of the county was tightly linked to the capital economically and culturally. Important lines of land communication ran from London to Canterbury and to the Kentish coast, while the Thames was an all-important route of communication and trade defining the northern border of the county. The closeness of these contacts was strengthened by the fact that throughout the years under survey there was a constant and an important migration of young men of the county to London, seeking employment and, as apprentices, feeding talent and an aggressive ability into the livery companies and into the various crafts and trades of the capital. Of all the counties in the realm, Kent was perhaps the principal supplier of men for the inexorable need and the limitless opportunity which the city presented. And, almost as important, Kent, lying as it did within an easy day's journey from London, was a favourite county for the investment of the surplus capital of rich London merchants and tradesmen who had reached that stage in their careers when they had begun to think of retiring, of diversifying their assets, or of founding a landed family estate. There was a constant and a steadily inflationary demand for land by these London entrepreneurs who looked somewhat greedily on this pleasant and fertile countryside. These new lords of the manor, whether Kentish born or not, were, as we have so frequently observed, disposed to establish themselves as quickly as possible in the community of their choice, and one of the most effective means of so doing was to found a substantial and a needed charitable trust there, even though such benefactions did not immediately lend them the precious perquisites and prestige of which they dreamed as they arranged with their agents in London for the purchase of Kentish manors. But these new men of the gentry spawned in trade were at once aggressive and intelligent, and they were as a group to make a most important contribution to the framing and the endowment of the social and cultural institutions of the county. The impact of London wealth and of London aspirations on the institutions of Kent was almost unbelievably great. It is not too much to say that in quantitative as well as qualitative terms a few score Londoners, principally Kentish born and still Kentish rooted, were to be of decisive importance in building the institutions of the county and in the definition of its aspirations for the future. London bene- 132 THE IMPACT OF LONDON ON THE COUNTY factors during the course of our period provided the great total of £102,576 4s. of the charitable funds of the county. We have observed that the impact of London's wealth and almost prodigal generosity were important in the endowment of the charitable institutions of every county in the realm ; in Kent this wealth was to be decisive. The London benefactions account for 40 • 74 per cent, of all the charitable funds of the county, by far the largest proportion for any county in England,1 and, it must be observed, these gifts were particularly effective since almost the whole of them (93-64 per cent.) were in the form of endowments. This massive total was provided for the charitable needs of Kent by 290 benefactors, of various classes, a large proportion of whom made their gifts or bequests after the accession of Elizabeth, when the economic and social ties between London and Kent became close indeed. This means, of course, that in average terms these were very large gifts, the average amount of £353 14s. 3d. being quite sufficient to found a modest grammar school or almshouse. The scale and the impact of these London benefactions is suggested by the observation that while the London donors comprised not more than 4 • 35 per cent, of all Kentish donors, they gave slightly more than 40 per cent, of all the charitable funds of this rich county. Of these 290 London donors, considerably more than half were sons of Kent who had made their fortunes in the capital but who had maintained close ties with their native parish and who had in many cases built up considerable landed estates in the neighbourhood of their birth. A surprising number, seventy-four, had been born in other parts of England, but had by the time of theh- death either retired as gentry, or quasi-gentry, on Kentish estates purchased for a whole complex of reasons during their lifetime, or, as was the case with a few very rich merchants, held extensive Kentish properties as part of huge landholdings scattered over much of England. The birthplaces of the remaining forty-nine donors are unknown, though a fair proportion of this group were linked to Kent by landholdings or because the county was the birthplace of an ancestor or, more commonly, a wife. Among the London benefactors to Kent there was a group of seventyfive men, or their widows, who were members of the twelve great livery companies. This relatively small group of merchants alone gave 1 The proportion of London benefactions in the charitable wealth of the several counties follows : Bristol Buckinghamshire Hampshire Kent Lancashire i 19 17 /o •73 •04 29-23 40 28 •74 •03 Norfolk Somerset Worcestershire Yorkshire < 13 26 23 12 /o •21 •05 •01 •09 133 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 £35,375 lis. to the various charities of the county, with a very heavy proportion of this sum being dedicated to the relief of the poor or to the educational needs of Kent. There were fifty-one tradesmen, almost all of whom were natives of Kent, who provided the surprisingly large total of £10,307 6s. for charitable uses, while seventeen Londoners drawn from the several professions gave a total of £8,341 7s. to varied Kentish charitable needs. There were in all twenty men who at least deemed themselves as of the gentry, most of whom we should suppose were retired merchants, who gave a total of £3,074 8s., while almost as many, eighteen in number, who can be no more accurately described than as " additional burghers ", are credited with benefactions totalling £2,674. The remaining sum of £42,803 12s. was given by four of the nobility resident in London at the time of their death, by five Londoners who were members of the upper gentry, by three of the lower clergy, one of whom made a very large gift, by two public officials, by fifteen artisans, and by a large group of eighty men whose status, unfortunately, cannot be exactly determined but the size of whose gifts would strongly suggest that they were in fact merchants. I t is particularly important to note that the spectrum of London interests and aspirations differed notably from that of the county as a whole. The facts may best be set out in a brief table stating the proportions of total benefactions provided under the several charitable heads for the county at large as compared with those vested by London benefactors : Poor Social rehabilitation Municipal betterment Education Religion I t is very apparent, indeed, that London's concern with the affairs of the county was intensely secular, not much more than a tenth of all benefactions having been made for religious uses as contrasted with substantially more than a fourth for the county as a whole. Almost 80 per cent, of all London's gifts to Kent were made for the relief of the poor, and most particularly for almshouse foundations, or for the betterment of educational opportunities. This intervention by London wealth could be decisive. Thus nearly half of all the county's endowments for the several forms of poor relief was furnished by London generosity, while substantially more than half of all the funds devoted to education and to the various plans for social rehabilitation were drawn from this comparatively small group of London benefactors who knew quite precisely how to implement their aspirations for England with effective instruments for their attainment. County at large £ s. % 102,519 7 40-72 12,043 4 4-78 11,558 15 4-59 58,255 16 23-14 67,389 10 26-77 London gifts to the County £ s. % 50,466 16 49-20 7,454 0 7-27 2,130 18 2-08 31,425 10 30-63 11,099 0 10-82 134 THE IMPACT OF LONDON ON THE COUNTY I t is even more dramatically evident in Kent than in other counties that these London gifts were so extraordinarily important historically because of their great qualitative strength. They were not spread thinly and ineffectually over the whole of the county : they were not dissipated pointlessly in the form of outright doles ; they were, rather, very heavily concentrated in favoured communities as substantial and well-disposed endowments for almshouses, scholarships, grammar schools, apprenticeship schemes, and other carefully framed and administered trusts which could and did transform the communities in which they were vested. The incidence and impact of these great charitable sums can perhaps best be examined by noting the disposition of London benefactions in the parishes, observing first a group with substantial charitable funds of £400 or more in which there was little or no London influence and then a second group in which London wealth and London aspirations bore very heavily indeed on the social and cultural development of these communities. [See Table A, p. 136.] In these thirty-eight towns and rural parishes, the impact of London charitable benefactions, while by no means insignificant, was in no sense decisively important in shaping institutional development. These parishes, a preponderance of which lay in parts of Kent rather distant from London, held charitable wealth by the close of our period amounting to slightly more than 40 per cent, of the whole disposed by the county, while, considering the group together, only about 12 per cent, of their charitable funds had been drawn from London sources. These more self-reliant towns and parishes, all with substantial charitable endowments, had built their institutions under the leadership of local gentry, or, as was the case in the six larger market towns included in the group, by the efforts of the local burgher aristocracy. There was, at the same time, quite as large a group of towns and rural parishes in which the impact of London wealth was decisive. In most cases these parishes were lifted into modernity by the generosity of a native son who had made a considerable fortune in trade in London and who when the time came to dispose his affairs and to implement his aspirations remembered the place of his birth. In still others, and especially in a considerable group of rural parishes, a London merchant family which had by its purchase become the leading local landowners sought by its endowments to fabricate those bonds of local responsibility which were still conceived to be vested in the title of lord of the manor and by a veritable explosion of generosity to accomplish in one generation the translation from the aristocracy of trade to the aristocracy of land. In this group of parishes there are a fair number within a radius of twenty miles from St. Paul's. These parishes lay in a corner of Kent, a portion of which has long since been absorbed as part of metropolitan London, in which London wealth and 135 IOA SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 TABLE A. PABISHES WITH SUBSTANTIAL CHABITIES RELATIVELY UNAFFECTED BY LONDON GIFTS Ash (next Sandwich) Ashford Aylesford Benenden Biddenden Bromley Canterbury Chart, Great Chiddingstone Chislet Cobham Dover Eastry Faversham Folkestone Fordwich Frindsbury Hoo AUhallows Hothfleld Hythe Ightham Lenham Mailing, West Milton (near Gravesend) Rainham Reculver Romney, New Sandwich Sellinge Sittingbourne Smarden Sutton-at-Hone Throwley Wateringbury Wickhambreaux Woodchurch Wrotham Yalding Charities ft >-om local or county sources £ 813 1,736 5,958 792 1,804 659 39,824 631 1,538 451 2,351 2,853 659 9,351 540 823 492 477 852 1,836 337 1,042 1,478 631 323 738 1,284 2,244 846 449 666 615 548 638 733 479 549 487 £88,546 s. 5 18 14 3 11 16 7 6 0 2 5 15 13 2 8 11 12 4 8 11 18 4 18 7 5 11 18 11 19 15 13 15 6 8 0 9 4 17 9 Charities from London sources £ 324 91 10 140 140 8,780 241 30 135 1 863 200 43 52 123 253 82 52 660 31 127 48 100 50 £12,579 s. 7 7 0 0 5 15 5 0 0 0 13 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 0 2 Totals £ s. 813 5 2,061 5 6,050 1 802 3 1,944 11 800 1 48,605 2 872 11 1,568 0 451 2 2,351 5 2,988 15 660 13 10,214 15 740 8 866 11 492 12 477 4 852 8 1,836 11 389 18 1,042 4 1,602 3 884 7 405 5 790 11 1,284 18 2,904 11 846 19 481 0 666 13 742 15 548 6 686 8 733 0 479 9 649 4 537 17 £101,124 11 136 THE IMPACT OF LONDON ON THE COUNTY influence had as early as 1600 spilled over in what can only be described as an economic and cultural inundation. [See Table B.] The forty-four communities in this group included nine of the larger towns in seventeenth-century Kent, as well as the cathedral TABLE B. PABISHES WITH SUBSTANTIAL CHARITIES DECISIVELY AFFECTED BY LONDON BENEFACTIONS Charities from local or county Charities from Beckenham Bexley Boxley Chatham Chilham Cranbrook Dartford Deptford Ebony Eltham Erith Farningham Gravesend Greenwich Greenwich, East Harrietsham Hawkhurst Heme Horsmonden Lee Lewisham Lullingstone Lydd Maidstone Mereworth Milton Regis Northbourne Ospringe Ripple Rochester St. Lawrence Intra St. Nicholas at Wade Sevenoaks Snave Southfieet Speldhurst Sutton, East Sutton Valence Tenterden Tonbridge Whitstable Wickham, West Woolwich Wye sources £ 250 447 428 227 136 2,958 2,501 756 27 1,272 235 26 856 1,400 296 147 188 1,717 163 94 658 679 636 2,043 44 923 7 159 81 7,979 129 359 1,145 1 1,277 57 185 10 917 723 752 487 811 996 £35,200 s. 8 19 4 11 0 14 6 6 4 12 3 0 5 3 14 3 7 3 10 15 13 0 13 13 3 5 1 16 5 12 8 18 14 0 11 6 18 15 7 13 4 17 10 2 11 London sources £ 153 2,920 494 1,518 650 1,799 2,362 1,515 800 1,089 252 400 395 10,743 336 4,198 1,070 1,438 531 861 2,149 892 537 1,805 413 796 2,500 1,400 440 6,823 845 300 1,406 590 604 1,000 227 1,700 759 6,190 457 380 629 1,006 £67,379 s. 0 0 0 0 11 0 11 6 0 13 2 0 0 12 10 0 0 0 0 1 7 3 0 6 7 8 0 0 0 15 0 0 0 0 11 0 0 0 7 0 0 10 19 0 19 Totals £ s. 403 8 3,367 19 922 4 1,745 11 786 11 4,757 14 4,863 17 2,271 12 827 4 2,362 5 487 5 426 0 1,251 5 12,143 15 633 4 4,345 3 1,258 7 3,155 3 694 10 955 16 2,808 0 1,571 3 1,173 13 3,848 19 457 10 1,719 13 2,507 1 1,559 16 521 5 14,803 7 974 8 659 18 2,551 14 591 0 1,882 2 1,057 6 412 18 1,710 15 1,676 14 6,913 13 1,209 4 868 7 1,441 9 2,002 2 £102,580 10 137 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 city of Rochester. It happens that the total of the charitable funds disposed by these parishes, dominated as they were by London benefactions, is very nearly the same as for the communities relatively unaffected by the charitable aspirations of the capital. But nearly two-thirds (65-68 per cent.) of the whole of the great charities with which these forty-four favoured communities were vested was the gift of interested Londoners. It is clear that in this large and representative group of communities, disposed in every part of Kent, the impact of London on local institutions and development was at once dominant and decisive. It will be observed, as well, that the whole weight of the immense contribution made by London to the charitable needs of Kent was heavily and certainly effectively concentrated in these most favoured communities, almost two-thirds (65-69 per cent.) of the whole sum having been dedicated to the institutional needs of these fortyfour parishes. Eighteen of these communities lay within a radius of twenty-six miles from St. Paul's, and these communities, particularly those in Blackheath Hundred, tended to be almost completely dominated by the great outpouring of charitable wealth from the metropolis. But what was true of Greenwich and Deptford was almost equally true of large and substantial communities such as Chatham, Sevenoaks, Maidstone, and Tonbridge, which, like hundreds of communities across the length and breadth of England, happened to have sent to London a poor youth who, his fortune made, repaid his native parish by generous and carefully ordered benefactions which revolutionized its institutions and lifted it into the modern world. 138