Preface

PREFACE THIS study is part of a larger work. The first volume, published in 1959 under the title, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660, was an essay commenting on evidence drawn from ten English counties which together comprised something like a third of the land mass of the realm, about a third of the population in 1600, and perhaps half of the wealth of England in the age with which we are concerned. An effort was made to assess the social problems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to describe the nature of the problem of poverty in this era, and to trace out the heroic measures which men took to secure its control, if not its cure. Though important remedial legislation was enacted, it was our conclusion that men of the age reposed their principal confidence in private charity, gathered in charitable trusts into large and disciplined aggregates of wealth with which extremely effective and enduring social institutions could be founded and maintained. Men of the age by their own efforts and with their own substance gained a large measure of control over the spreading and chronic social blight of poverty and, more importantly, went far towards securing its prevention by a vast enlargement of the ambit of social and economic opportunity. The reader may wish to refer to the first volume of the larger work for a fuller explanation of the historical method employed and for certain conclusions based upon large masses of evidence drawn from the ten selected counties, among which Kent is numbered. It is perhaps appropriate here to refer especially to an extended section of that volume entitled " The Method", where several important cautionary notes involving the whole study are discussed, where certain underlying statistical assumptions are set forward, and where we have explained why it seems desirable not to attempt to adjust our statistical data to the rising curve of prices over the course of our period. In general, it may be said that it was our conclusion in the first volume that the philanthropic impulse was derived from many sources during our period and that it evoked a steadily and rapidly mounting response which reached a great climax of giving in the first generation of the seventeenth century, when, it is not too much to say, the basic institutions of the modern society were securely established. Men's aspirations underwent a notable metamorphosis in the century following the English Reformation, an almost complete absorption with the secular and visible needs of the society marking this transformation. All regions and all classes yielded, rapidly or reluctantly as the case vi PREFACE might be, to these powerful forces of change and to the resolution to build a better, a more comfortable, and a more civilized habitation for mankind. The second volume of this study, published in 1960 under the title, The Charities of London, was concerned with the immensely important contribution of London to the social and moral betterment of the whole kingdom, as London's great and generous wealth flowed out (not the least to Kent) to form new institutions and to safeguard manldnd against the terrors of poverty, disease, and ignorance. London, in terms of its size, its wealth, and its lusty confidence, was an urban colossus fixed in what can only be described as a rural setting on a national scale. We sought in the second volume to comment on the vast charitable contribution which London made, to describe at some length the corporate social philosophy of the merchant aristocracy which ordered its affairs, and to assess the social dominance gained by London in this era, as the flood of its charitable generosity literally poured out across the face of the entire realm. The series will be concluded with a third volume, The Charities of Rural England, in which three diverse and widely separated rural counties (Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, and Yorkshire) are studied in detail. Here we observe a quite different pattern of social aspirations, a slower yielding to the secular metamorphosis which marks our period, and a surviving parochialism which is most dissimilar to the almost evangelical concern of London with the whole society. Of the counties that remain, Kent possesses particular interest and importance. There were two cathedral churches within its borders, one ranking with the greatest and proudest in Christendom. Its monastic wealth was unrivalled in all of England, its area and population being taken into account. Kent was an old county even in 1480, being blessed with relatively mature social and administrative institutions. The county was justly famous for its numerous gentry, while its yeomanry were regarded as the richest of their class in the whole of the realm. It was in every sense a stable, a rich, and a well-integrated community of men. Yet even this remarkably stable and conservative county was to undergo a veritable revolution not only in terms of the social aspirations of its people, but in terms of the transfer of leadership from older to newer classes. This great and decisive metamorphosis of aspirations was to produce new and extremely effective social institutions which were to shape and to order the life and culture of the society. In part at least these new and thrusting forces within the society were the consequence of the nearness, geographically and economically, of Kent to London, for it, more than any other English county, was enriched by the stream of London's generosity. Great and numerous London benefactors built within the county those institutions vii PREFACE which would secure in perpetuity the translation of their vision of a new society. At the same time, in Kent itself we shall see that all classes of men yielded, with varying degrees of intensity and enthusiasm, to those forces which were moulding a new and a very different England. We should mention that we have defined the Kentish boundaries for the purposes of this study as they stood at the beginning of our period. We have sought to examine all the relevant printed sources as well as the principal manuscript materials, with the result that the bibliographical apparatus is large. Since it seems not practicable to present a formal bibliography, an effort has been made in the instance of a first citation to give the full bibliographical particulars, a short title form being employed thereafter. We have also employed convenient abbreviations for manuscript materials and for frequently cited printed sources, as the following table of abbreviations will suggest. No biographical notes have been provided when the subject is treated in a Dictionary of National Biography memoir unless it has seemed desirable to suggest a correction or to add new particulars to that treatment. The writer is honoured to publish this essay under the imprint of the Kent Archseological Society, which has done so much over so many years to make easily available to students the historical sources for an old and a famous county. The extent of our indebtedness to the publications of the Society will be suggested by even a casual glance at the footnotes of this work. We are also grateful to Mr. John H. Evans, Honorary Editor of the Society, and to Mr. Frank W. Jessup, Honorary Secretary, for their kindly interest in this study and for their many helpful suggestions for its improvement. Dr. Felix Hull, the Kent County Archivist, has been kind enough to read the manuscript with great care, and his detailed and thoughtful criticisms have been of very great assistance and have rescued us from at least certain of our errors. W.K.J. Cambridge, Massachusetts. January, 1960. viii NOTE ON THE CONVENTIONS EMPLOYED IN the key tables on which this study rests we have been obliged for statistical reasons to follow quite arbitrary conventions which do some violence not only to the usual chronological divisions but also to historical facts. The period covered extends from 1480 to 1660, beginning some years before the triumph of Henry Tudor and including as well some months of the period after the restoration of the monarchy. This was regarded as essential for statistical and comparative purposes, since thereby the accumulation of benefactions and their analysis could be made in decade intervals for the whole of the long era under study. Useful as are the decade intervals in which we have assembled our data, they are relatively unimportant as compared with the more generally recognized historical periods of our era into which our material has been aggregated and among which useful and most revealing comparisons and changes may be observed. But since the decade intervals must be kept intact, we have necessarily in this basic scheme of organization done some violence not only to convention but to fact. The period 1480-1540 has been called with reasonable accuracy " The Pre-Reformation Era " and, as with the other periods, will ordinarily be mentioned without repeated and certainly monotonous reference to the dates with which it is defined. The years 1541-1560 have been described somewhat inexactly as " The Age of the Reformation ", while " The Age of Elizabeth " has been foreshortened to the four decades from 1561 to 1600. The period 1601-1640 has been regarded as " The Early Stuart Period ", while the remaining two decades have been described as " The Revolutionary Era ". These divisions, in addition to being methodologically desirable, have the further merit, for purposes of statistical convenience, of establishing successive chronological units of 60, 20, 40, 40, and 20 years, which may, of course, be easily and accurately compared in various ways. IX TABLE OF ABBREVIATIONS Alum, cantab.—Venn, John, ed., Alumni cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922-1954, 10 vols.). Alum. oxon.—Foster, Joseph, ed., Alumni oxonienses (Oxford, 1891-1892, 4 vols.). Arch. Cant.—Archaeologia Cantiana. Cant. Archiepis. Reg. Warham.—Archbishops' Registers, Canterbury, Register " Warham ". DNB—Dictionary of National Biography. Harleian MSS.—British Museum. K.A.O. : CCC—Kent Archives Office : Consistory Court of Canterbury. K.A.O. : CCR—Kent Archives Office : Consistory Court of Rochester. K.A.O. : PRC—Kent Archives Office : Probate Registry, Canterbury. L. and P., Hen. VIII—Letters and Papers, Henry VIII. PCC—Prerogative Court of Canterbury. PP—Parliamentary Papers. Charity Commissioners' Reports. S.P.Dom.—State Papers, Domestic. VOH, Kent—The Victoria History of the County of Kent. Waters-Withington MSS.—Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts. X