The structure of class aspirations

III. THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS A. The poor THE persistent and the principal concern of Kentish donors, if our whole long period may be taken in view, was the care of the poor. The immense sum of £102,519 7s., amounting to 40-72 per cent, of the total of the charitable funds of this rich county, was poured into one or another of the several forms of poor relief. The largest amount was provided for the relief of the poor in their own homes, a total of £52,242 7s. having been given for this purpose, constituting more than one-fifth (20- 75 per cent.) of all charities and considerably more than that given for any other specific charitable use. As we have already noted, a heavy proportion (90-05 per cent.) of this total was vested in the form of permanent endowments, thereby establishing institutional mechanisms for the alleviation of what may be regarded as the most pressing of the social problems of the age. Another great sum, £44,614 3s., was provided for almshouse establishments in all parts of the county, this being the second largest amount given for any one charitable use and amounting to 17-72 per cent, of the whole of the charitable resources of Kent.1 In addition, the sum of £5,067 17s., of which about 97 per cent. (96-60 per cent.) was capital, was designated for general charitable uses, which in Kent as elsewhere almost invariably meant that the income was employed for some form of poor relief. And, to conclude, the relatively small sum of £595 was given with specific provision that it was to be used for the care of the aged poor. A variety of evidence may be adduced to suggest that the problem of poverty was at no time so acute in Kent as in most parts of the realm. The economy of Kent was well balanced and resilient. There was no great urban complex, while the numerous industrial towns recovered quickly and prosperously from each set-back in trade. More importantly, the basic rural economy of the county evidently included very few really blighted areas, and it was in such communities that the worst and the most hopeless of sixteenth-century poverty was to be found, modern agrarian sentimentalism notwithstanding. All this was true, yet Kent was one of the most generous of all English counties in its provision for the poor. Seemingly, its very prosperity made such great generosity possible and clearly it possessed an extraordinarily responsible group of dominant social classes. 1 The proportion given for almshouse endowments in Kent was exceeded only by the 25-24 per cent, for Somerset, the 18-48 per cent, for Buckinghamshire, and the 18-12 per cent, for Bristol. 16 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Even during the decades prior to the Reformation when provision for the poor was normally confined to the distribution of funeral doles and alms, there was in Kent not only a substantial but an intelligent concern with the already serious problem of indigence. A total of £9,415 7s. was given for the several forms of poor relief during these years, constituting 12-64 per cent, of all charitable benefactions for the period. Somewhat more than half of this considerable amount was designated for outright relief, but the needs of almshouses attracted £1,562 5s. and an even larger sum was given, in the main as endowments, for general charitable purposes. With the Reformation there came an immediate and a marked increase in the rate of giving for the relief of poverty and a notable bettering of what can only be described as the quality of benefactions. During these years a total of £5,091 18s. was provided for the several forms of poor relief, amounting, it should be emphasized, to well over 40 per cent. (43-24 per cent.) of all the benefactions of the era. Very nearly £2,000 (£1,915 9s.) of this amount was for almshouse endowments, while more than 90 per cent, of the £3,092 13s. given for outright relief was in the prudent and durable form of endowments established within more than a score of the parishes of the county. It is notable that from 1531 onwards the total vested in Kent for poor relief never fell under the considerable sum of £2,000 in any decade and that after 1571 it never fell under £5,000 in any decade. Responsible and socially sensitive men and women had taken the problem of poverty firmly and intelligently in hand in Kent long before the central authorities had progressed beyond fumbling and not particularly helpful efforts to assess and then to remedy a social ill which had for so long harassed manldnd. Benefactions for the relief of the poor increased steadily in amount during the Elizabethan era, accompanied by a notable strengthening of the quality of the provisions being made by donors for the administration of their gifts. In the course of these four decades a total of £24,048 10s. was given for the several forms of poor relief, this amount being substantially more than half (53-23 per cent.) of the whole provided for all charities in Kent during that interval. It is particularly significant that during this era the establishment and endowment of almshouses commanded as widespread support from donors of the county as did funds for household relief, the large sum of £11,385 13s. having been given for the founding of numerous almshouses in all parts of the county. But the great flood of benefactions for the care of the poor came during the early Stuart era, when the really immense total of £51,950 l i s . was provided for the several forms of relief. Not only did this sum amount to somewhat more than 55 per cent. (55-28 per cent.) of the total of all Kentish charitable funds for these generous deoades, 17 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 but it may be noted that in this brief interval of forty years slightly more than half of all the benefactions for the poor in the whole course of our long period was bestowed by benefactors of the county. It is noteworthy, too, that the large total of £26,060 14s. was given to almshouse endowments in the course of this generation by men and women who were resolved that abject and undeserved want must be relieved and cured by institutional arrangements calculated to treat the problem with decent sympathy and with the assurance of steady care. The flow of funds into endowments for the relief of poverty was sharply diminished but by no means halted by the great political convulsion of our final period. Something over 45 per cent, of all the charitable benefactions of these two decades was for these uses, and the rate of giving during these difficult years was well over £5,000 for each decade. But it is clear that the golden age of charity for poor relief was over, not only because of the immense economic dislocation of the era but because the great generosity of the past had constituted provisions so adequate that the normal and most compelling needs had been met. Private charity in Kent had in the course of roughly a century wrought a great social and cultural achievement in freeing the generality of men from the terrible spectre of completely hopeless and helpless poverty. We should now note at least briefly certain of the larger of the benefactions for the household relief of the poor, with particularly close attention to those establishing helpful endowments which were to attract later gifts for the same healing uses. In Kent, as in all of England, gifts for the relief of the poor prior to the Reformation tended to be in the form of alms distributions or funeral doles which were of very doubtful value in aiding in the frontal attack on poverty that was to characterize the philanthropy of the period after 1540. But even in this early period the more useful tradition of endowed funds for relief within the parish was becoming firmly established. Thus in 1493, to cite a relatively modest endowment, a fisherman of Shorne, Thomas Davy, left ten acres of land, lying in the hamlet of Merston, to trustees in order to secure the annual distribution of a cade of red herring and a half-barrel of white herring to the poor of the community, while also providing that a small almshouse which he owned should be available for the lodging of a poor family and " soe continew and abide for ever ".x In all, twelve such endowments, with capital values ranging from £14 to an estimated £400, have been noted in this early period when most benefactions for the poor took the form of casual doles. Perhaps one more of these endowments, around which there has been considerable controversy, may be mentioned. 1 K.A.O. : CCR 6/209a, b, 210a, 1493 ; Kent Records, IX (1924), 58 ; Thorpe, John, Custumale Roffense (L., 1788), 43 ; Hasted, Kent, Til, 479. 18 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Just prior to the close of the interval, and possibly in 1534, valuable lands comprising in all twenty-two acres were left in trust to the churchwardens for the benefit of the parish of Biddenden. It appears that the income from the property, which a century later possessed a capital value of about £300, was employed for the relief of the poor of the parish. The benefaction had been made by unknown persons, but almost certainly by spinster sisters named either Chalkhurst or Preston. Whatever may be the facts, the identification with the Chalkhurst sisters prevailed, since they were Siamese twins who died in 1534 and who enjoyed more than a provincial notoriety in their own generation.1 As we have already noted, there was a marked increase in the funds provided for the relief of parish poor with the advent of the Reformation. During the years 1541-1560 a total of £3,092 13s. was given for this use in Kent, of which a now considerable proportion (61 per cent.) was in the socially more useful form of endowments. Among these numerous capital sums was one of the most interesting and prudently vested of the period, created in 1550 under the will of William Fordred, a merchant residing at or near Sellinge. Fordred left lands and an annuity of £6, with a combined capital worth of £370, to six trustees for the relief of the poor of his own and six nearby parishes. He required the clergyman of each favoured parish to prepare annually bills providing the names of the worthy poor and to distribute Is. 4d., Is., or 8d. weekly to each household as the need and the annual income of the trust might suggest. It was his expressed intention that payments should be made only to old, lame, and impotent householders, or to working people with many children, and by no means to young and lusty persons who would not labour for their bread.2 Some years later, probably in 1556, the vicar of Boughton under Blean, Richard Meopham, conveyed to trustees lands with an estimated capital value of £200, with provision that the income be distributed in alms to the poor of Boughton under Blean and of Hernhill between Whitsuntide and Midsummer, while voicing hope that the recipients would pray for the donor and for two of his predecessors in the parish.3 An immense increase in the founding of endowments to secure the relief of poverty occurred during the Elizabethan era. During these 1 PP 1837, XXIII, 514 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 138 ; Igglesden, Charles, A Saunter Through Kent (Ashford, 1925-1946, 34 vols.), V, 38-39 ; Howell, G. O., ed., The Kentish Note Booh (Gravesend, 1889-1891, L., 1894), I, 102-103. The distribution was for many decades in the form of bread, cakes, and cheese for the poor of the parish. The figures of two women were impressed on the cakes, thus lending credence to the attribution of the charity to the Chalkhurst sisters, though Hasted heatedly denies this origin of the charity. 2 K.A.O. : PRO, A. 27/68, A. 27/72, 1550 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 433 ; Hasted, Kent, VIII, 8, 311. 3 Ibid., VII, 14 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 405. 19 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 forty years the massive total of £11,372 14s. was provided for this charitable use, of which very nearly the whole (93-70 per cent.) was in the form of capital sums. The particulars regarding at least a few of these endowments may be noted. Thus in 1566 George Usmer of East Sutton, a member of the lower gentry, vested in trustees lands with a capital worth of £50 for the maintenance of a resident curate or for the care of the fabric of the church if non-residence were continued, as well as property with a capital worth of £110, the income of which was to be distributed annually to the poor of the parish by the churchwardens with the advice and assent of the principal inhabitants.1 The rural parish of Sellinge, probably a year later received from unknown donors valuable lands and a messuage, which some years afterwards possessed a capital value of approximately £275, the income of which was applied by the local trustees for the relief of the poor of the parish.2 The poor of Nonington, as well as of three nearby parishes, were beneficiaries under the will of William Boys, a gentleman of that place, who in 1572 left six quarters of wheat to be distributed annually for a period of sixty years to the needy and deserving poor of these communities.3 A similar scheme of capital distribution was ordered under the will of Lawrence Hevar of Ivychurch, who arranged that £4 should be paid annually to the poor of that parish and of Brookland, as well as £2 to the poor of Fairfield, until the sum of £140 should be exhausted.'1 As scores of such bequests all over the county began to accumulate in the mid-Ehzabethan period, not only was there visible evidence of their efficacy in the betterment of the state of the poor, but also one such benefaction tended to induce another. A tradition of charity, of social responsibility of a new and intensely secular kind, was rapidly establishing itself in Kent. As an example, a gentleman of Monkton, with the improbable name of Lebboeus Orchard, in 1581 left an annuity of £8 17s. 8d. for the relief of the poor of Canterbury, with particularly detailed and somewhat crabbed instructions for its administration by the mayor as trustee. Cloth of grey frieze or rug was to be provided for gowns of full length each year for thirteen poor and aged men who should also have " close button capps " and " shoes close buckled to the feet". No recipient might be eligible in two successive years, no resident of an almshouse might qualify, and each of the thirteen poor was to have as well 4d. at the time of the distribution of the clothing. Orchard's endowment, which inexplicably was lost about 1690, was the model 1 Hasted, Kent, V, 381, 385 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 395, 397. 2 Hasted, Kent, VIII, 311 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 432. 3 Arch. Cant., XX (1893), 110, n. 16 ; Hasted, Kent, X, 79. The favoured parishes were Nonington, Tilmanstone, Eastry, and the Castle of Canterbury. 4 K.A.O. : CCC 32/129, 1575 ; Miscellanea genealogica et heraldica, ser. 5, V (1925), 119-120. 20 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS taken a decade later by Sir Roger Manwood when in 1592 he settled the constitution of his hospital at Hackington.1 In the same year, 1581, another member of the lower gentry, John Taylor of Cobham, left a farm and smaller tracts of land with a total estimated capital worth of £310 for the benefit of such poor people of the parish of Chislet as had not in the preceding year received alms from the parish.2 The poor of Faversham and Canterbury were substantially benefited under the will of Thomas Stransham in 1584. Stransham, the son of a former mayor of Faversham, was a merchant who was in his turn mayor of his native town for three terms during the Marian period, but who removed his business and residence to Canterbury during his later life. He left £20 for the repair of the city walls at Canterbury, a similar amount for purchasing cards and spinning wheels for the use of thirty poor of the city, £5 for the relief of prisoners in the gaols of Canterbury and Faversham, and small outright bequests to the poor. But his principal concern was with the chronic needs of the poor in both towns. Naming the municipal government of Faversham as trustee, he provided that an outright distribution of £8 to the poor should be made in the year following his death from certain properties which were thereafter to be charged with an annuity of £3 for the relief of poor householders. He likewise settled on trustees extensive properties in Canterbury, then worth not less than £300, the income of which was in perpetuity to be employed in St. Dunstan's parish to care for poor householders, to clothe poor children and to apprentice them in useful occupations.3 Somewhat similar provision was made for the poor of Whitstable and the nearby parishes of Seasalter and Swalecliffe in 1588 by the will of Thomas Lunce, a merchant of Whitstable, who left a landed estate of an estimated value of £260, the income of which was to be employed for the relief of poor inhabitants of these communities. 4 Generous endowments were being made in rural parishes throughout Kent, as brief notices of two foundations in the same decade will suggest. A rich yeoman of Eastry, Thomas Appleton, in 1593 bequeathed rent-charges totalling £20 p.a. for the relief of his own and 1 PCC 15, 39 Darcy 1581 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 281-282 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, V (1925), 215 ; Hasted, Kent, X, 259, XI, 242 ; Arch. Cant., XII (1878), 277, 394-395. For Manwood, vide post, 42-43, 78-79, 108, 120. Orchard's estate was valued by inventory at £1,135 lis. lOd. 2 PCC 16 Tirwhite 1582 ; Hasted, Kent, IX, 105 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 296 ; PP 1867-68, LII, i, Kent, 16-17. The property produced an income of £28 p.a. in 1786, of £80 p.a. in 1863. 8 Master, G. S., Notes Relating to the Family of Streynsham (L., 1879), 12-13, 55-56 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 208, 309 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 358. Stransham's charities totalled £413 13s. His will sets forth his testament of faith first in English and then in Latin. 1 Ibid., VIII, 514 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 315 ; Goodsall, R. H„ Whitstable, Seasalter and Swalecliffe (Canterbury, 1938), 62, 82. 21 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 four nearby parishes, the distribution to be made by the churchwardens, whose accounts were to be audited annually by six of the "honest inhabitants " of each parish.1 At about the same time, in 1597, Anthony Roper of Farningham, a grandson of Sir Thomas More, died bequeathing properties in East Greenwich to trustees to be employed for the relief of the poor of Farningham, Eynsford, and Horton Kirby. The trustees were instructed to pay at least £10 p.a. to the poor of the three benefiting parishes and the remainder of the income to such charitable uses in the county of Kent as his heirs might direct.2 In 1594 William Saker, a merchant of Faversham and mayor in 1590, by will provided a rent-charge of £10 p.a. for the relief of the worthy poor of that town as well as £5 p.a., to be vested in the corporation, towards the maintenance of a godly lecture to be preached weekly in the parish church.3 At about the same time (1591), the parishes of Harrietsham and nearby Hollingbourne were benefited under the terms of the will of Francis Culpepper, Esq., of Hollingbourne, who left, after the death of his wife, lands with an approximate capital worth of £130 for the relief of the poor of these two communities. These lands appear shortly afterwards to have been merged with other small parcels, amounting to about four acres, and the whole to have been administered by the clergyman and the churchwardens for the relief of the worthy poor of the parish.4 The funds provided for the household relief of the poor in the early Stuart period were so generous in amount that they endowed more than half the parishes of the county with at least some stock for that purpose. Almost the whole of the great total of £24,658 5s. accumulated during these four decades was in the form of capital, and it was given in varying amounts by every class of the society. While adhering to a chronological order, it might be revealing to choose the few examples that space will permit for this great period of charity in such wise as to demonstrate the wide and substantial participation of the several classes of men in the great crusade then being mounted against poverty. 1 K.A.O. : CCC 37/146, 1593 ; Misc. gen. el her., ser. 5, V (1925), 366 ; Hasted, Kent, X, 114, 131, 139, 284. 2 PCC 103 Cobham 1597 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 498-499 ; PP 1908, LXXVIII, Kent, 73-76 ; Hasted, Kent, 1,474, I I , 505, 515. Anthony Roper was the youngest son of William and Margaret (More) Roper. He inherited considerable estates in and near Farningham from his father. He married Anne, daughter of Sir John Cotton of Cambridgeshire. The charitable estate mentioned in the text had a probable capital worth of £400 in 1614. A portion of the income came to be used for the education of poor children and for apprenticeship fees. This urban property increased enormously in value, being sold in 1885 for £11,827. 6s. 6d. The income in 1908 was £393 2s. 4d. 3 PCC 46 Dixy 1594 ; Arch. Cant., XX (1893), 210 ; PP 1837, XXI I I, 208-209 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 358. 4 Ibid., V, 455, 459, 467, 473, 495 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 581. Culpepper purchased his estate in about 1574. He left an only son, Sir Thomas Culpepper, who maintained his residence in Hollingbourne. 22 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS A shipwright of Deptford, John Addey, on his death in 1606, in addition to bequests of £45 to be distributed immediately to the poor of Deptford, " Redriff " (Rotherhithe, Surrey), and Ratcliff (Middlesex), vested in the overseers of the poor of Deptford the sum of £200 to be invested by the trustees for " the relief of the poor people of Deptford, to last for ever ".1 A few years later, a Flemish or German refugee artisan, William Reiffgins, bestowed by his will on the parish of Boughton Monchelsea an annuity of £4, with thirty-four years to run, for the relief of its poor and devised as well a capital sum of £60 to be vested in land, the income on which was to be employed for the care of poor but worthy householders.2 In 1618 a very large charitable trust was created under the will of Robert Gunsley, the rector of Titsey in Surrey, for the benefit of Rochester and Maidstone. Gunsley left properties in Devon, Lincolnshire, and Kent, with an indicated capital value of more than £2,000, to the corporations of the two favoured towns, the income to supply food and clothing for the poor of both communities, the distribution to take place on each Sabbath day. In addition, as we shall later note,3 he provided rich scholarships at Oxford for natives of the two towns, while ordering the residue of his estate to be sold and the proceeds invested for the relief of the poor of Strood, Frindsbury, Chatham, and a Rochester parish. This great bequest, despite the legal complications which came to beset it, was of decisive importance in dealing with the problem of poverty in Maidstone and Rochester, and it evidently inspired a number of most substantial endowments for similar use in the course of the next two decades.4 A family just thrusting its way into the gentry in a distant part of the county, the Maycotts of Reculver, found itself in some legal 1 PCC 23, 53 Stafford 1606 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 361 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 612; PP 1867-68, LII, i, Kent, 22-23. The principal was invested in 1611 in three tenements and in four acres containing valuable gravel pits. In 1863 the properties yielded £691 3s. Id. p.a. 2 PP 1837, XXI I I , 323 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 343. 3 Vide post, 73. 1 PCC 108 Meade 1618 ; PP 1819, X-A. 128 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 350-351, 365 ; PP 1867-68, LII, i, Kent, 38-39, 62-63, 76-77 ; Hasted, Kent, III, 540, IV, 105, 182, 187, 313-315 ; Russell, J . M., History of Maidstone (Maidstone, 1881), 175-176, 377 ; Records of Maidstone (Maidstone, 1926), 100, 102-103 ; Smith, F. F., History of Rochester (L., [1928]), 451-452. The property constituting the endowment for poor relief comprised the rectory and parsonage of Broadhempston, Devon, with the tithes and lands there, a parsonage and rectory in Lincolnshire, and two rectories in Kent. The value of the estate is difficult to reckon because in part it consisted not of fees, but of leases with eighteen to forty-two years to run. The apparent value at the time of Gunsley's death was about £4,200, but , lease terminations being taken into account, the estimate of £2,000 seems more prudent. I t should be noted that in 1635 the lease of the principal property in Devon was surrendered to the Corporation for £2,000, subject, however, to payments of £34 to the Crown and the vicar. Because of the nature of the property the income tended to fluctuate markedly in different later periods. 23 3 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 embarrassment in the same year, 1618, when Sir Cavalier Maycott was cited by the Archdeacon of Canterbury for failure to honour an endowment created by his father for the benefit of the poor of the parish. It appears that the father, George Maycott, who had purchased the estate of Brooke from Lord Cheney in the earlier Elizabethan period, had left a legacy of £10 p.a. and allowances of wheat and malt for the poor of the parish, which had been improperly held by the presumably improvident son.1 Elizabeth Sedley, wife of Sir William, of a family long prominent in the affairs of the county, at her death in 1619 vested in trustees the considerable sum of £531 for the relief of poor families in the parish of Horsmonden. In 1622 a messuage, an orchard, and other lands with an extent of forty acres were purchased with the principal part of the bequest, while a house and garden were bought by the trustees with the remainder in 1641, an endowment which yielded a substantial annual income and, we are told, proved sufficient at least for this period for the care of the needy poor of the parish.2 In the next year, 1620, a London lawyer, William Hatcliff, who maintained his residence at East Greenwich, bequeathed to trustees under the " statute 43 Elizabeth for charitable uses ", as he carefully noted, extensive real property in or near East Greenwich, then possessing a capital worth of approximately £800. The large endowment was to be employed in such wise that half the annual income should be used for the relief of the poor of East Greenwich and the second part, in equal amounts, for the support of the needy in the parishes of Lee and Lewisham.3 1 Arch. Cant., XX (1893), 30, XXV (1902), 44, 48, XXXI I (1917), 128 ; Hasted, Kent, IX, 117-118. The rise and fall of the family was rapid even by seventeenth century standards. Camden had granted arms to the family in 1604. The administration of Sir Cavalier's estate was granted to his principal creditor, William Fowler, on his death in 1639. 2 PP 1837, XXIII, 585-586 ; Burke, John and J. B., Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies (L., 1844), 483 ; Cokayne, G. E., ed., Complete peerage (L., 1887-1898, 8 vols.), I, 19. This interesting woman was a native of Horsmonden, being the daughter of Stephen Darrell, Chief Clerk of the Royal Kitchen, and of Philippa, daughter of Edward Weldon, Clerk of the Green Cloth. She married first Henry Nevill, Lord Abergavenny, who died in 1587, and then William Sedley, who was created a baronet in 1611. He maintained a pleasant house, was himself a notable benefactor, and in 1621 founded the famous lectureship in natural philosophy in Oxford bearing his name (vide post, 96). 3 PCC 73 Soame 1620 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 463, 625 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 411-412, 416, 519 ; Kimbell, John, An Account of the Legacies to Church and Poor of Greenwich ([L., 1816]), 51-70 ; Venn, John, ed., Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922-1954, 10 vols.), I, ii, 330. Hatcliff was the son and heir of Thomas Hatcliff of Hatcliffe, Lincolnshire. He was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1586. The bequest was challenged by Hatcliff's two sisters, Ann Duck and Dorothy Jermyn, who contended that their father, Thomas, had entailed these lands to their brother, with a remainder vested in them if, as was the case, he left no heirs of the body. The Commission of Charitable Uses in 1622 reported, that the sisters produced an old will which " hath upon inspection thereof . . . divers blemishes and badges (Footnote 3 continued at foot of page 26). 24 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Julian Kenward, the widow of a substantial yeoman of Yalding, by her will proved in 1621 created an endowment for the relief of the poor of that parish, which was later to attract other benefactors. She devised certain parcels of land, then let at £5 p.a., to trustees who were to distribute the income for the support of the " poor, aged, impotent, weak, and sickly poor " of the community. In addition, she devised another annuity of £5 and other remainders which in all ultimately yielded £20 p.a. for the clothing of the poor of Yalding.1 This endowment possessed a capital value of £220 at the time of its creation, to which four other benefactors of the community were in the course of the next two decades to add £200 of capital for the same or related charitable uses.2 This instance exhibits the tremendous social leverage which a carefully devised and useful charitable endowment possessed and suggests how rapidly accumulation could occur once some responsible donor, even in a small and thinly populated rural parish, had created the necessary institution. A similar trust was created a few years later for the parish of Eltham under the will of another yeoman's widow, Thomasine Sampson. Her bequest provided that an immediate gift of one shilling should be made to every poor householder of the parish and that considerable property owned by her in Meopham, then possessing a capital value of £160, should after her son's death be converted into an endowment for the relief of the most indigent persons of the parish and for the arranging of apprenticeships for poor children. The will failing clearly to establish a legal trusteeship, an inquisition under a Commission of Charitable Uses was held in 1626 which appointed Sir William Roper and nine other freeholders and their successors as feoffees to secure the charitable purposes of the donor.3 In this same year, 1626, still another woman donor, of a very different social status, made most generous provision for the relief of the poor of the parish of Mereworth. Mary, Baroness le Despencer, settled lands to the value of £20 p.a. in trust for the perpetual relief of ten poor men and ten poor women of the parish, as well as providing £1 p.a. for a sermon 1 PCC 66 Dale 1621 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 402-403 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 155 ; vide post, 84. 2 PP 1837, XXI I I , 403. 3 PCC 35, 75 Hele 1626 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 483 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 460. (Continuation of footnote 3 from page 24). of suspicion ". They further noted that Hatcliff was a " gentleman literate, of good integritie ", who would have known how to destroy the entail at law if entail there had been. They also noted that the father had left but a small estate and that Hatcliff had aided one sister with £250 of money, £20 p.a. in land, and £100 to her son for the purchase of an office, while he had vested in the other as much as £400 during his lifetime, £600 at his death, and real property worth at least £200. With considerable and rather evident scorn the commission upheld the charitable use desired by the testator. 25 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 to be preached every Lady Day. The income was to be made available to the clergyman of the parish, who was empowered to choose the poor who would be supported, or at least assisted, by the charity.1 As the political crisis which finally erupted in civil war was developing in England, generous endowments for the relief of the poor in Kent were being established by a great variety of donors. Between 1628 and 1640 gifts ranging from £16 to £600 had accumulated to a total of £8,500 for poor relief ; we shall content ourselves with mentioning at least briefly only four of these foundations and selecting donors from four social classes : the yeomanry, the tradesmen, the professional group, and the lower gentry. The earliest of these benefactions was also the largest. Thomas Terry, a yeoman and a substantial landowner, created by will and deed four separate trusts under which real property with a capital value of about £410 was devised to feoffees for the relief of the poor of Sutton-at-Hone, Shoreham, Horton Kirby, and Eynsford. The most valuable of the properties incorporated in the trust was that for Shoreham, which a generation later was yielding a gross rental of £10 Is. p.a., but substantial income was likewise provided for the other parishes, to which, it seems evident, Terry was attached because of the ties created in this era by the ownership of land.2 Three years later, in 1631, Walter Bigg of Fordwich, a member of a renowned family of clothiers which supplied a mayor in each of three generations for their town, died leaving £10 outright to the poor and the aged of six Kentish parishes in which he had business connections. His will provided in addition that property recently purchased in the parishes of Sturry and Westbere, with an estimated worth of £210, should be vested for the relief of the poor of Fordwich, the distribution of the income to be made semi-annually by the mayor and jurats of the town.3 A very large bequest was left to the poor of Canterbury 1 PCC 38 Ridley 1629 ; Complete Peerage, I, 19, III, 94 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 86, 89 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 373 ; Tablet of Benefactions, Mereworth. This benefactor was the stepdaughter of Lady Elizabeth Sedley (vide ante, 24), and she was the only child of Henry Nevill, Lord Abergavenny. The title and estate were inherited by a cousin, Edward Nevill. On his death, this woman, who had married Sir Thomas Fane, laid claim to the barony of her own right. A settlement was reached under which Edward Nevill's son retained the barony of Abergavenny and Dame Mary became in 1604 suo jure Baroness le Despencer, a barony to which she was co-heir. She was succeeded by her son, Francis Fane, later Earl of Westmorland. 2 PCC 39, 94 Barrington 1628 : PP 1837, XXIII, 470, 498, 500, 608. 3 PP 1837, XXIII, 298 ; Woodruff, C. E., History of Fordwich (Canterbury, 1895), 134, 160, 192-194. Bigg was the grandson of Walter Bigg, mayor in 1538, and the son of George Bigg, mayor in 1570. He was himself mayor in 1606. His brother Stephen (vide post, 28) was an even greater benefactor to Fordwich and Sturry. Bigg's will forgave one old customer a debt of £40 and arranged for his life tenancy in a house at a low rental and likewise cancelled £10 of the debt of another customer, while enjoining his executor to be merciful to still other business friends. Stephen Bigg was his residuary legatee. 26 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS in 1637 by William Penn, who described himself as a royal servant of that city. Penn, who died with debts owed to him of upwards of £8,000, left an annuity of £225 for the relief of the poor of the city, until a balance of approximately £900 should be exhausted, as well as £20 p.a. from an endowment created by his will. The small sum of £10 was left outright to the poor of Canterbury, while an annuity of £10 was likewise established for the poor of Shewsbury.1 One of the most useful and certainly the gayest of all the charitable bequests of the county was that provided under the will of the redoubtable parliamentarian and diplomatist, Sir Dudley Diggs. A native of Barham, Kent, Diggs had acquired the manor of Chilham by his marriage to Mary, daughter of Sir Thomas Kemp, and likewise owned valuable estates in nearby Faversham. By the terms of his will, his lands in Chilham were charged with an annuity of £20, from which the young men who on each May 19th rang a peal in remembrance of the donor should have £1 for their dinner, while £19 p.a. should be distributed for the relief of twenty poor men, twenty poor women, and twenty poor children of the parish. These poor people were to be chosen by the lord of the manor and the vicar from those who had received no alms or any other support from the public funds of the parish. In addition, Diggs charged his manor of Selgrave in Faversham with a like sum for what he declared—and he had been Master of the Rolls—was a charitable use. The lord of the manor of Faversham, with the advice of the jurats of the town and the further advice of the lord of the manor of Chilham, should each year choose two young men and two young maidens, between the ages of sixteen and twentyfour, who should on May 19th run a foot-race at Chilham, with £10 each being the reward to the young man and to the young woman who should prevail. It is pleasant to note that the terms of the bequest were honoured at least to the end of the eighteenth century, and we have happily credited it under the capacious heading of " public parks and recreation", though the Charity Commissioners dourly took the view that it " does not appear " that the bequest fell within the legal definition of a charitable use.2 The last of the benefactions of this period chosen as being representative of various social classes was that made by Christopher Milles of Heme, a member of the lower gentry of the county. Milles, by his will drawn in 1638, vested in trustees the lease of the parsonage 1 PCC 65 Goare 1637. In addition, Penn left £2 to the relief of prisoners in Canterbury, £13 to London prisoners, and £20 for church repairs in London. We have been unable to discover many biographical particulars relating to him. The will and his choice of executors suggest that he was a merchant, very possibly the William Penn, then of Bristol, who in the Jacobean period pleaded for relief and protection for five years from creditors (S.P.Dom., 1618, XCVII, 96). 2 PP 1837, XXIII, 482 ; DNB; Hasted, Kent, VII, 265, 287. 27 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 of Reculver, Hoath, and Heme to the extent of an annual charge of £11 which should be paid to the poor of four parishes in the following amounts : Reculver, £4 ; Heme, £3 ; Hoath, £3 ; and Westbere, £1. In his will Milles enjoined the Archbishop of Canterbury and his successors to perpetuate the renewal of the lease, as " they tende the welldoeinge of their owne children they shal leave here behind them and would not the guilt of conscience they else shall hence carry with them for neglecting to gaine the charity of the dead towards the liveing poor so adopted my children ".1 A total of £6,776 19s. was added to the parish endowments of Kent for the relief of their poor during our final interval. These gifts and bequests, too, came from all classes of the society and ranged in amount from £10 to £700. It is particularly noteworthy that the great accumulations of the two preceding generations were having their inevitable institutional and social effect, since slightly more than £1,100 of the total for the period was added to the capital of trusts or parish stocks already in being for the relief of the poor of the county. We shall content ourselves, with one exception, with a brief notice of no more than the most substantial of the many gifts and bequests made for the maintenance of the poor in their own homes. In 1646, Stephen Bigg, like his brother Walter2, a leading clothier of the county, left property in trust with a total worth of about £400, the income of which should first be used for the support of six of the poorest householders of Fordwich and as many of the parish of Sturry, each household to have £1 p.a. for its maintenance. The residue of the income was, according to the instructions of the will, to be devoted to placing out poor boys and girls from the two parishes in apprenticeships which would prepare them for earning their own livelihood.3 A trust with the same capital value was established in 1648 by a merchant of nearby Canterbury, Avery Sabine, secured by a rent-charge and, if need be, the fee of certain lands in Monkton. The sum of £12 10s. p.a. was to be paid to trustees for the distribution of woollen gowns and shoes to ten " honest, aged poor people, not of any hospital ", and aged at least sixty years, who had likewise been inhabitants of Canterbury for the preceding six years. The remainder of the income, amounting to £6 13s. 4d. p.a., was to be paid over as an addition to the endowment of a Canterbury almshouse, while any residue was to be used for the clothing of still more poor persons.4 1 Hasted, Kent, IX, 72, 90, 99, 119 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 302. 2 Vide ante, 26. 3 PCC 95 Fines 1647 ; Hasted, Kent, IX, 65 ; PP 1837, XXI I I, 298. * K.A.O. : PRC, A. 70/715, 1648 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 131, 203 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 268 ; Arch. Cant., IX (1874), 35 n., X (1876), 218. Sabine was an alderman of the city and one of those who sought to quell an anti-parliamentary rising in 1647 when an attempt was made to suppress the celebration of the Christmas festival. 28 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Sir Edward Hales, of Woodchurch, one of the richest of the gentry of Kent, was through a long lifetime renowned for his private charities and for his concern with the state of the poor, though his formal benefactions were relatively modest for a man of his wealth. He had as early as 1610 vested in trustees lands and buildings with a capital worth of approximately £150, the income of which was to be employed for the relief of the most honest, impotent, and aged poor of Woodchurch, with the careful additional provision that men who had begged or pilfered in their youth should under no circumstances benefit from the trust. At his death in 1654 his will provided outright bequests totalling £50 for the poor of Tenterden and three nearby parishes, to be paid to the overseers of the poor for distribution to honest poor persons of those communities, but " not to such as inhabitt or dwell in cottages illegalie erected on wastes or in the high waies or live idlely by freeboothing begging filching or stealing ".1 One of the largest of all the benefactions of the county and one of the most generous in providing for its poor was that made by a remarkable clergyman, Abraham Colfe. He was a native of Canterbury, where he was born in 1580 of a family which had settled there as refugees from Calais at the time of its fall. Educated at the grammar school in Canterbury and at Christ Church, Oxford, Colfe was appointed curate at Lewisham in 1604, a town for which he was to possess an abiding affection. He became vicar there in 1610 and at about the same time was appointed Rector of St. Leonard Eastcheap, London. In 1612 he married the widow of a Lewisham tanner, a wife whom he described on her death in 1644 as having been for " above forty years a willing nurse, midwife, surgeon, and in part physitian " to all in her community. Colfe was an able preacher who endeared himself to his parish by the ardent and successful defence which he undertook of certain traditional common lands against threatened enclosures. Though he had no inheritance, he displayed not only great frugality in his own life but skill in land purchases as he built up an estate of at least £200 p.a., which he had as early as 1634 dedicated to the public 1 PCC 221 Alchin 1654 ; Arch. Cant., XIV (1882), 61-84 ; Burke, Extinct Baronetcies, 232; PP 1837, XXIII, 599. Hales was the son of William Hales, Esq., of Tenterden. He married an heiress of Woodchurch, from whom he acquired a large estate. From his second wife, Martha, daughter to Sir Matthew Carew, he gained an even larger estate. Hales was created a baronet in 1611 and served in several parliaments. He was a grandson of John Hales, Baron of the Exchequer in the time of Henry VIII, and had served as Sheriff of Kent in 1608. He supported Parliament in the constitutional crisis, but his grandson and heir, Sir Edward, was a Catholic convert who accompanied Charles II into exile. Hales' estate, land not being valued, amounted to £2,340. He died aged seventy-eight years, and his personality pervades his carefully drafted will in which he enjoined that he be decently buried " without any pompe or ceremonies at all no funerall sermon no vaine commemoracon no invitation strangers or friends farr off but such friends onlie as are neare at hand my honest neighbours . . . no vanity of heraulds ". 29 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 use. He chose the Leathersellers' Company of London to serve as his trustee for the charities he had in mind and began gradually to alienate properties to them on trust. Colfe weathered the religious storms of the revolutionary period reasonably well without concessions to extreme Puritanism, though a group in Lewisham, led by a zealous lecturer, sought vainly to turn him out of the parish he had served for forty years. His London living, where he had seldom preached, was lost in 1647, but Colfe was by that date completely absorbed in his plans for the endowment of two schools in Lewisham, which were opened in 1652 and which we shall treat in later pages. He died in 1657, aged seventy-eight, leaving the whole of his extensive property for charitable uses. Colfe in 1651 transferred into the hands of the Leathersellers' Company £1,100 in money, with which they undertook to purchase lands yielding from £56 to £57 in yearly rentals. He added considerable properties in the years before his death and by his will, with the apparent expectation that capital of something like £2,850 would be available to meet his very complex and certainly ambitious bequests, which we shall treat under these heads : the relief of the poor, the endowment of the almshouse, and the support of education.1 Colfe's will provided for total distributions of £28 l is. 4d. p.a. to the poor, principally to the poor of Lewisham and Canterbury, this being the aggregate of an extraordinary variety of bequests of a specific nature. Among these were provision for Is. p.a. for bread for those attending an annual sermon at Lewisham ; £1 p.a. for still another bread distribution ; £1 p.a. for children mastering their catechism ; £1 p.a. outright to the poor of Lewisham as well as 6s. p.a. to the poor, to be gained from the herbage of certain waste lands he had granted to his school ; £1 7s. p.a. for bread for the poor of Canterbury ; 4s. 4d. p.a. for a pennyloaf each week for the poor of the French congregation in Canterbury ; £1 to fifty poor householders of Lewisham who could recite the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments ; and numerous additional bequests of this general but complicated type. There were as well small bequests, which may be mentioned here, of £1 p.a. for the relief of prisoners, £2 p.a. for apprenticeships, £2 13s. 4d. p.a. for various anniversary sermons, £1 10s. p.a. for making drains and repairing footpaths, and a tiny subvention of 5s. p.a. for marriage portions.2 All in all, this is one of the most complex of the charitable 1 Vide post, 53, 85-87. 1 PCC 10 Wootton 1658 ; Kimbell, Greenwich Legacies, 96-103 ; PP 1819, X-A, 121-125, App., 169-193 ; PP 1824, XIII, 258-263 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 224, 464 ,- PP 1840, XIX, i, 130 ; Black, W. H., Bibliothecae Colfanae catalogus (L., 1831), passim ; Lysons, Daniel, The Environs of London (L., 1792-1811, 6 vols.), IV, 639-534 ; Duncan, L. L., History of Colfe's Grammar School (L., 1910); DNB. (Footnote 2 continued at foot of page 31). 30 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS trusts created in our period, but very evidently one on which a deeply pious and humane man had laboured in the course of a long and fruitful life in which his absorbing dream had been to leave men better than he had found them. A gentleman of Canterbury, John Cogan, made ample provision for an almshouse foundation in that city,1 as well as liberally endowing a restricted charity for the poor. Cogan's will, proved in 1658, settled on trustees properties then possessing a capital value of £700 with instructions that the income should be distributed to maidservants who had served one master or mistress within the city for a period of at least six or seven years at wages not exceeding £2 10s. p.a. Three such servants were to have first claim on the then income of £35 p.a., with very generous stipends of £5 p.a. each, while the residue was to be employed by the mayor and other city officials for the clothing of six fatherless and needy girl children of the city.2 In the same year, a London grocer, John Wardall, who was a considerable benefactor to the almspeople of his "own company, bequeathed £6 10s. p.a. to the churchwardens of East Greenwich, to be distributed in weekly sums for supplying bread to fifteen poor widows residing in that parish.3 Our review of the principal legacies for the relief of the poor of Kent may well be concluded with a notice of an old-fashioned bequest of an outright distribution of alms made under the will of John Leigh, a gentleman residing in Cranbrook. Leigh ordered his executors to give a shilling each " unto 77 of the most antient poore people . . . being now in my 77 yeares age and as many more as I shall live yeares, as I have laid them upp ha Edward shillings in a yelloe bagg in my coffin ".4 We have noted but a few of the many endowments created during the course of our period for the relief of the poor in their own homes, designed, at least in most instances, to preserve intact the structure of family life and responsibility. When we combine the benefactions 1 Vide post, 53. 2 PCC 156 Wootton 1658 ; PP 1837, XXI I I, 264, 277 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 184. Cogan was chairman of the committee in Kent for the sequestration of royal estates. 3 PCC 705 Wootton 1658 ; Kimbell, Greenwich Legacies, 24, 104-106 ; PP 1822, IX, 276. 4 The will was dated 26th March, 1655, and was proved in 1658 (PCC 199 Wootton). (Continuation of footnote 2 from page 30). Colfe provided in his will that any surplus available from his estate should be used to aid those writing and printing commentaries on the Scriptures for the stirring up of " gentlemen and yeomen of this hundred . . . to be forward, and make conscience to do good to the poor, both in life and after death, to the utmost of their power ". Colfe disposed of his properties to his trustees at a tragic time and the Leathersellers suffered severe losses on his estate between 1651 and 1660. They assumed full responsibility, however, and were in 1664 constituted by Act of Parliament owners and governors of his charities. The company had by 1819 paid out to meet the terms of the will £8,489 15s. Id. more than the total of tho income received from the estate. 31 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 for household poor relief, for general charitable purposes, and those specifically for the care of the aged poor, we find that the very large total of £57,905 4s. was provided by donors who held these worthy purposes in view. We have also observed that a considerable proportion of this sum, particularly in the early decades of our period, was given in the form of immediate alms or doles, but there remained the great total of £52,487 Is. with which the county had armed itself during the course of our era for a vigorous and certainly a frontal attack on the age-old problems of poverty. These endowments were by the close of our period, if we may assume a yield of 5 per cent, on trusteed funds, providing an income each year for the parishes of Kent of approximately £2,624 7s. for the direct relief of extreme or hopeless poverty. Since it is abundantly clear that in the view of scores of responsible benefactors of this age £2 10s. p.a. was sufficient to provide at least the bare necessaries for a poor household, it seems probable that by 1660 the accumulations of private charity were of such extent and strength as to lend protection and sustenance to something like 1,050 households or possibly as many as 4,000 human beings. This is a record of an immense accomplishment, of an immense gain in the sensitivity of responsible men for human want and suffering. It explains, as well, why any general application of the Elizabethan poor law was in normal times not required in Kent. Private charity, warmer and possibly kindlier in its efficacy, had in fact undertaken the great measure of social responsibility which the Elizabethan Parliament had determined must somehow be shouldered either privately or publicly. Nor was this by any means all. In the course of our period almost as large an amount was provided by donors of the county for the establishment and endowment of almshouses for the cases of hopeless poverty. The huge sum of £44,614 3s., or 17-72 per cent, of Kent's charitable funds, was provided for this single use, of which all but a trifling amount (£68) was in the form of capital. As we shall observe, interest in this institutional device for the care of incurable poverty was well founded in Kent even in the early decades of our study, the not inconsiderable total of £1,562 5s. having been given for this use in the years preceding the Reformation. But in Kent as elsewhere the great welling up of gifts for almshouses was coincidental with the Reformation, the sum of £1,915 9s. having been given for this purpose in this brief period. The fruits of these gifts were soon evident in many places in the county, with the result that they were increased in amount from decade to decade during the Elizabethan era, a total of £11,385 13s. having been vested in these endowments during the course of that interval. But the great climax of interest was to occur during the first two decades of the Stuart period, when considerably more was 32 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS furnished for almshouses than in the whole of the preceding century. There is no evidence of any flagging of this enthusiastic interest until about 1625, when, it seems clear, men believed that as many almshouses had been established as the needs of the age required. In the relatively brief interval of four decades, 1601-1640, the great total of £26,060 14s. was given for these foundations, by a considerable amount the largest sum provided for any single charitable use during this most generous and fruitful of periods in the history of the charities of the county. The apparently inexhaustible interest of Kentish benefactors in these establishments was by no means at an end, however, since even during the unsettled years of the Puritan Revolution the considerable sum of £3,690 2s. was given either for new foundations or for the augmentation of the endowments of existing almshouses.1 Kent, graced as it was with Canterbury and lying athwart the most heavily travelled highways to the Continent, was richly endowed by medieval donors in its almshouses, hospitals, and hostels. In the long course of the Middle Ages, it appears that thirty-two such foundations were made, of which, at one time or another, twenty seem to have served functions as least roughly comparable to those of a sixteenth century almshouse. Of this number, fourteen endowed institutions survived until the late decades of the fifteenth century, two of which were dissolved or abandoned just as our age opened. Consequently, we begin our period with twelve almshouses—or quasi-almshouses— serving as the cornerstone for the remarkable enlargement and strengthening of this form of social institution in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 The medieval houses were in 1480 providing shelter and sustenance for approximately 148 almspeople and, if the valuations made a half-century later may be regarded as reasonably trustworthy, enjoyed capital assets of the order of £6,421. Only one of these foundations, a weak house in Dover, was dissolved in the Reformation settlement, and, as we shall note, it was to be refounded during the course of our period. These surviving medieval establishments were not well distributed across the face of the county, four being in or just outside Canterbury, three in Sandwich (of which two were under secular control), and one each in Hythe,3 Dover, Chatham, Dartford, and Harbledown. 1 The total provided by Kentish donors for almshouse foundations exceeded by a considerable margin that afforded in any other of our ten counties, London excepted. 2 Kent was relatively well served by these remaining medieval foundations, which in number ranked only after those in Yorkshire among the ten counties comprehended in this study. Vide Jordan, W. K., Philanthropy in England (L., 1959), 257-262. 3 This was the Hospital of St. Bartholomew. It seems quite certain that the Hospital of St. John in Hythe was not in 1480 serving the funotions of an almshouse. 33 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 We shall first concern ourselves with the larger augmentations made to the endowments of existing medieval foundations during the course of our period, before turning to the new establishments made by generous and responsible men deeply concerned with the problem of poverty. Thus the Hospital of St. Thomas in Sandwich had been founded in the late Middle Ages (1392) by a draper of that town, Thomas Ellis, with an endowment comprising 132 acres of nearby land. In 1483 Henry Greenshield, a resident of Sandwich and lord of the manor of Hamwold, conveyed to the feoffees additional lands with a capital value of approximately £200 as an augmentation of the stock of the almshouse, which was by that date wholly under secular control and provided maintenance for twelve almsmen.1 Similarly, the Hospital of St. John in Sandwich, founded in the late thirteenth century and since the late fourteenth century under municipal control, was to enjoy the support of early modem donors. This almshouse was always relatively poor, possessing in 1535 endowments yielding no more than £5 Is. 3d. p.a., from which it undertook the support of twelve almspeople. In 1566 this slender capital was increased by a rent-charge of 7s. given by Samuel Lynch of Sandwich and was still further augmented in 1616 by the gift of Nicholas Jones, a local merchant, who provided a yearly rental of £2 for the " relief and succour of such poor distressed weak or sickly persons as by the mayor and jurats . . . shall be sent . . . to be relieved and harboured " in the almshouse.2 St. Bartholomew's Hospital in Hythe, which had been founded by the Bishop of Rochester in 1336 for ten poor, old, and infirm persons, had suffered a steady erosion in its endowments until in the valuation of 1535 its effective income was no more than £3 12s. 4d. p.a. The almshouse was not dissolved, and a number of small capital benefactions totalling £88 were made to the institution by local donors during the next generation. In 1580 the endowment was further strengthened by the bequest of lands valued at £80 under the will of a local mercer, Richard Crompe, for the further relief of the poor sheltered there.3 As we have observed, the Hospital of St. Mary in Dover was the only one of the surviving medieval foundations to be confiscated during the period of the Reformation. It had been founded in the early thirteenth century as a place of shelter for the poor, for the infirm, and for travellers, and had received substantial gifts and privileges from Henry III and Edward I. The house was evidently decayed and mismanaged on Archbishop Warham's visitation in 1511, only a small 1 Hasted, Kent, X, 133, 183-184 ; Boys, William, History of Sandwich (Canterbury, 1792), 149-171 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 571-572 ; VCH, Kent, II, 227. 2 Ibid., II, 226 ; Boys, Sandwich, 132-144 ; Hasted, Kent, X. 20, 182-183 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 569. 3 VCH, Kent, II, 220-221 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 422-428 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, V (1925), 215. 34 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS fraction of its considerable revenues being devoted to the charitable purposes originally specified, since the brethren of the foundation were by this date more nearly fellows than almsmen. In 1544, accordingly, the house was confiscated. Though no portion of the original endowment was apparently restored, successive benefactions were made by residents of Dover for the continuation of the services of the original almshouse, quarters being provided in particular for the reception of indigent sailors and soldiers. In 1552 a bequest was received for the building of a more suitable structure and in 1588 the amount of endowment in hand seems to have been sufficient to yield an income of about £8 15s. p.a. It was not, however, until 1611 that a proper almshouse was built, principally for the care of poor soldiers and sailors landing destitute from foreign service, who were sent on to the next adjoining parish when they had been relieved. In addition to these services, the almshouse gave succour to " casual and afflicted " poor of the town. Gifts to the foundation continued, until its endowment in 1640 was approximately £420, its affairs being administered by the mayor and two of the senior aldermen of the city.1 In 1500 William Millett, of Dartford, probably a tradesman or merchant, by will made numerous charitable provisions for his community. Property valued at £90 was left to secure prayers for the repose of his soul, and a residue of perhaps £60 was given for church repairs, the covering of the cross in the market place, and the repair of the abbey wall closing the churchyard. In addition, Millett, possibly carrying out the intentions of an earlier benefactor of whose estate he was executor, instructed his feoffees to build five almshouses in Dartford for as many " poure men & poure women having everyche of them oon house" , and to endow the institution with lands which a generation later were yielding a revenue of £6 10s. p.a.2 A small lay foundation was likewise established in Canterbury in the period prior to the Reformation by Henry Swerder, a burgher of that city. In 1504 Swerder by will conveyed to trustees three messuages, with an estimated worth of £75, to be employed in perpetuity for the free lodging of as many poor families. No endowment was 1 VCH, Kent, II, 217-218 ; Hasted, Kent, IX, 535-537 ; PP 1837, XXI I I, 533 ; various wills. 2 PCC 18 Moone 1500 ; Kent Records, I I I (1914), 121-125 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 497 ; Arch. Jour., XXXVI (1879), 264 ; Dunkin, John, History of Dartford (Dartford, 1844), 151; Keyes, S. K., Dartford (Dartford, 1933,1938,2 vols.), I, 616; VCH, Kent, II, 217. Licence was granted for the foundation of this almshouse (Hospital of the Holy Trinity) in 1453, one of the proposed founders being William Rodley [Rotheley] (PCC 5 Godyn, 1464). Millett was the executor of Rodley's will. I t seems clear that Millett was in part at least honouring Rodley's earlier intention. 35 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 provided and the almspeople were to be responsible for the repair and maintenance of the premises.1 The last of the foundations made prior to 1540, if it may properly be described as an almshouse at all, was the Trinity House at Deptford, first chartered, with Sir Thomas Spert as master, by the Crown in 1514. The fraternity of pilots and seamen thus incorporated presumably had its origin in an early fifteenth century guild of seamen of the Deptford region. The importance of the fraternity was greatly increased with the establishment by Henry VIII of the royal dockyards in the town, which was as well the point where outgoing vessels took on their pilots. It seems certain that the fraternity possessed an endowment at the time of its incorporation, and for some years afterwards its principal activities were the provision of pilots, the burial of dead brethren, and the care of indigent seamen and the dependents of members. As many as twenty-one almsmen were being supported in houses belonging to the foundation shortly after its charter was issued. The interest and responsibilities of the Trinity House began substantially to be enlarged after 1566 when Elizabeth authorized it to set out beacons, buoys, and other sailing marks along the coasts of England, but it continued to care for a considerable number of almspeople throughout our period. Subsequently, thirty-eight almshouses were added, the aggregate being known as Trinity Hospital.2 The Hospital of St. John in Hythe was certainly of medieval foundation, having in the mid-fourteenth century been devoted to the care of lepers. It was not in 1480 an almshouse and seems at the time of the Reformation to have served no particularly significant social function and may very possibly have been derelict, though it possessed endowments then worth £4 10s. 10£d. p.a. The property was conveyed to trustees in the second year of Edward VI's reign, under covenant to dedicate the endowment and the house to use as an almshouse, the administration being vested in the jurats of the town. Archbishop Parker in his visitation of the institution in 1562 noted that the almshouse provided maintenance for eight " needy poor people and such as ar meymed in the wars ", while its revenues had by that date been augmented until they stood at £6 p.a. In 1574 the endowment was conveyed by the two surviving trustees to four jurats, and three other feoffees. A number of bequests and gifts were added during the remainder of our period, with the result that the capital stock in 1660 was of the order of £560.3 1 K.A.O. : CCC 8/68, 1504 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 294. The site was sold in 1806 for £62 12s. and the funds invested for the relief of the poor. 2 Barrett, C. R. B., The Trinity House of Deptford Strond (L., 1893), passim ; Lysons, Environs of London, IV, 379-380 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 358-361 ; (Spert) PCC 8 Spert 1544 ;' DNB. 3 VCH, Kent, III, 221 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 426 ; Hasted, Kent, VIII, 247-248. 36 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS The earliest of the Elizabethan almshouse foundations was made by the bequest of Mildred Philipps, a widow of Maidstone, in 1558. She enjoined her executors to convert her house and garden into an almshouse "t o be used and reputed as such and not otherwise " for the free lodging of poor men and women to be nominated by the churchwardens. The will further stipulated that these almspeople might dwell in the premises " for their natural fives ", provided they were " of good behaviour and vertuous conversation " and undertook to keep the property " windtight and watertight ".1 Two years later (1560), Sir Thomas Moyle of Eastwell, a former Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, left most generous bequests for the benefit of his parish. He ordered the distribution of £20 in funeral doles and provided as well rich ornaments for the refurbishing of the church. But his principal benefaction was the construction of an almshouse for ten of the poor of the parish on a plot which was to be made available by his executors. The institution was endowed with lands worth £7 13s. 2d. p.a., all of which was to be disbursed to the almsmen in weekly stipends of Id. to supplement a daily distribution of a half-penny for each inmate. A rent-charge of 5s. lOd. p.a. was likewise laid against the testator's manor of Wilmington in order to secure the maintenance of the institution.2 In the same year, an almshouse was built at West Mailing under the terms of the will of John Taylor. Provision of an uncertain value was made for the maintenance of the building and a small endowment with a capital value of £20 was left for the support of an unknown number of almspeople.3 Archbishop Parker, in his visitation of 1562, also mentions six almshouses at Wye which had been built, presumably recently, by the Kemp family of that place. These houses possessed no endowment but were maintained by Sir Thomas Kemp, who likewise provided sustenance for the almspeople. This almshouse never gained an endowment, but came in time to be vested in the parish, which kept the buildings in repair and sustained the poor lodgers from income gifts and from parish funds.4 Still another Elizabethan almshouse was founded in Woolwich in 1 K.A.O. : CCC 27/48, 1558 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, IV (1922), 94-95 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 369. 2 PCC 55 Mellershe 1560 ; DNB ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 3, I (1896), 164 : Hasted, Kent, VII, 400, 403, 410. Moyle, who built a large fortune in the practice of law, had purchased the manor of Eastwell. He was a grandson of Sir Walter Moyle, the judge. He was laiighted in 1537 and was a Member of Parliament in 1542, 1544, 1553, and 1554, having been Speaker in 1542. He left two daughters as co-heirs of an extensive landed estate including a manor in Devon, three in Somerset, and three in Kent. 3 K.A.O. : CCR 12/426(2)a, 1560 .- Thorpe, Custumale, 52. 4 PP 1837, XXIII, 440 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 360 ; Arch. Cant., XX (1893), 3. The manor of Wye was held by the Kemp family from the fourteenth century until 1607, when Sir Thomas Kemp died without male issue. Among his ancestors were an archbishop of Canterbury, a bishop of London, and several sheriffs of Kent. 37 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 1566 under the terms of the will of a Lord Mayor of London, Sir Martin Bowes. Bowes, who was a resident of Woolwich in his later years, had in about 1560 erected five pleasant and spacious almshouses in that town for the reception of five almspeople who must be over fifty years of age and who were to be nominated by the Goldsmiths' Company, in which the property was vested as trustee. According to early tradition, this charitable act was occasioned when Bowes' son was saved from drowning. These houses, costing upwards of £300, were presumably maintained by Bowes during the remainder of his life, but on his death in 1566 were endowed with property worth £16 p.a. and vested in the company, out of which £1 10s. 5d. p.a. was to be paid for the support of each of the almspeople. A small sum was likewise provided for an annual sermon and for distribution to the poor of the parish, while the residue was to be retained by the company for its own charitable uses.1 A leading member of the upper gentry of the county, Sir Percival Hart, at an uncertain date, but probably prior to 1570, built three almshouses at Orpington at a cost of about £110, which he endowed with the sparse capital of £26 for the care of the three inmates. His son and heir of the same name a half-century later (1622) devised to trustees £2 p.a. for the relief of the poor of the parish, which was in fact treated as an augmentation of the income of the institution, as well as leaving 13s. 4d. p.a. for an annual sermon to be preached in Eynsford church.2 Still another scantily endowed almshouse was established at Wester ham in 1572 under a deed of trust given by Edward Colthurst, a resident of Essex, who owned property in the neighbourhood and who was probably a native of the parish. A commodious house, containing six tenements, and with an ample garden, was provided for the care of the most destitute persons of the parish who should be chosen by the vicar and churchwardens, who were also designated as trustees. A small additional plot of land was likewise conveyed, ultimately to be rented at £2 p.a., but it is clear that no adequate provision for the 1 PCC 3 Stonarde 1566 ; DNB ; Beaven, A. B., Aldermen of London (L., 1908, 1913, 2 vols.), II, 29 ; Vincent, W. T., Records of the Woolwich District (Woolwich, [189?], 2 vols.), I, 122 ; PP 1823, VIII, 326-327. Vide Jordan. W. K., The Charities of London, USO-1660 (L., 1960), 97, 142, 330. Bowes, a native of Yorkshire, was a goldsmith. He served as Sheriff of London in 1540 and as mayor • in 1545. He was a Member of Parliament for London for at least five terms between 1547 and 1559. He was Master of the Mint from 1533 to 1644 and prime warden of his company from 1559 to 1562. He left a very large estate, and the total of his charities was £2,574. 2 PCC 19 Arundell 1680 ; Arch. Cant., XXXI (1915), 197 ; Hasted, Kent, II 100, 358, 530, 549 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 497-498. The elder Sir Percival came into the possession of the manor by royal grant in 32 Henry VIII. He was Knight of the Body to Henry VIII, built a great seat in the parish, and entertained Queen Elizabeth there in 1573. The younger Sir Percival lived to a great age, dying in 1622. 38 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS support of the " decayed housekeepers " chosen was made by the founder.1 We have sketched all too briefly the circumstances relating to the foundation or re-establishment of twelve almshouses in Kent in the course of the period 1500-1572, or a number equal to the foundations which had survived in 1480 as the legacy of the Middle Ages. In addition, three of the older establishments in Sandwich and in Hythe had been considerably strengthened in endowment and the whole of a now extremely important institutional structure of social responsibility had been brought securely into lay hands. Most of these Tudor foundations had been modestly conceived and supported, while, as we have noted, several had been provided with no endowments at all. But the great period for this form of social experimentation was only now at hand. In the mid-Elizabethan decade, 1571-1580, the total of benefactions for the foundation of almshouses in the county rose abruptly to £2,033 10s., an amount somewhat more than double that provided in any preceding decade. This was only the beginning, for the total per decade vested in almshouse endowments rose rapidly and steadily until in the early years of the seventeenth century (1601- 1610) it reached the great sum of £16,657 lis. In a really very brief period of a half-century (1571-1620) the enormous total of £34,616 7s. was poured into these foundations, or well over three-fourths (77 per cent.) of the whole amount provided for almshouses during the entire course of our long period. To this amazing half-century of almost prodigal charity we should now turn. The first of the foundations made in this period was that of John Byer, a gentleman of Dartford, in 1572. Byer had shortly before his death built four almshouses adjoining his mansion house at a cost of upwards of £200 for the perpetual relief of poor, impotent, sick, and aged persons. By the terms of his will, proved in 1573, Byer endowed his hospital with real property worth approximately £100, from the income of which each almsman was to receive £1 6s. 8d. p.a. for his support, while the trustees were to maintain the premises.2 In 1574 an almshouse was endowed at Cranbrook by Alexander Dence, probably a merchant of that town and one of its most generous benefactors.3 Dence provided three small houses for the lodging of needy and reputable widows of the town, which he endowed with lands possessing a capital worth of £453 for the support of the three almswomen, with any surplus 1 Hasted, Kent, III, 171 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 610. 2 PCC 37 Peter 1573 ; Keyes, Dartford, I, 154-162, 186-199 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 489. Byer had acquired a considerable fortune by marriage and built up a large estate by purchasing land from the dissolved Dartford priory. His hospital was in fact built on the site of a former lepers' hospital. 3 Vide post, 61-62, 81, for Donee's endowment of a school and for his large benefaction for municipal uses. 39 4 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 to be employed as marriage portions and to help young " folkes . . . into some beginning ".1 In the same year (1574) one of the most carefully devised of all the almshouses in the county was built at Sutton Valence by William Lambe, a London clothworker and the founder of grammar schools at Maidstone and at Sutton Valence.2 Lambe built quarters for twelve almspeople at an estimated cost of £200 and settled on his company lands in Essex then possessing a capital worth of £400 for the full support of the poor and the aged who were to be his almspeople.3 William Lambarde complained that one of the great foundations of this period was " very unskilfully conceaved " and would have been frustrated save for the efforts of a law apprentice at the Middle Temple.4 He referred to the bequest of Richard Watts, an entrepreneur who settled in Rochester in 1552 and who made a fortune as a contractor to the government. Watts, who died in 1579, had during his lifetime built a large almshouse in Rochester which he had maintained from his private purse. His will provided that on the death of his widow the trustee of his charitable estate should sell his great house in Rochester and rebuild and enlarge the almshouse for the care of the permanent almspeople. Six rooms, with chimneys and good mattresses, should also be set ready for the care of respectable wayfarers who should be lodged for one night only and then sent on their way with a present of 4d. Watts further devised, with immediate possession, to his trustees lands and other properties which he reckoned had a then annual value of £36 16s. 8d. for the carrying out of the provisions of his trust. This endowment, with other properties which ultimately came to hand at the death of the widow, was sufficient by 1601 to provide an income of £60 p.a., which in accordance with Watts' will was divided between the care of the almspeople and poor travellers and the provision of a stock on which the poor of the city were, under direction, set at work. I t seems evident that the total original capital worth of this most substantial and thoughtfully devised bequest, the construction of the almshouse and repairs made by the donor's widow at a charge of £66 13s. being included, totalled something like £1,866 13s.5 At the same time, far more modest provisions were being made in several other parts of Kent for almshouses which were either very 1 PCC 20 Martyn 1574 ; Igglesden, Saunters, VII, 21-22 ; PP 1819, X-A, 97 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 515 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 108. 2 Vide post, 77-78, for a fuller treatment of Lambe and his remarkable charity. 3 PP 1837, XXIII, 397. 1 Lambarde, Perambulation, 343. 6 PP 1837, XXIII, 380 ; Smith, F. F., Rochester in Parliament (L,, 1933), 99-100 ; Smith, Rochester, 28 ; Hasted, Kent, IV, 185 ; DNB. The charity was well managed and its investments were fortunate. In the mid-nineteenth century the income had risen to the enormous total of £7,000 p.a., when the charity was reorganized and expanded. 40 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS poorly endowed or which depended for their support on casual benefactions from the neighbourhood. It seems probable that such an almshouse was built at High Halden about 1581 and another slightly later at Shoreham.1 Lambarde, who evinced a deep interest in these institutions even before his own great foundation was made, likewise mentions an endowed almshouse at " Sennock " (Sevenoaks) and an unsupported one at " Whitdiche " about which we have been able to glean no further information.2 Francis Toke, a gentleman of Great Chart, in 1583 by will directed his twelve trustees to employ the income on property then valued at £185 to pay an annuity of £1 Is. established by his father, John Toke, for the relief of the poor of the parish and to use the remainder for the support of two poor families who should reside without charge in two small almshouses which he had erected.3 In 1583 John Beare, very probably the son of John Byer, the founder of an almshouse at Dartford some years earlier,4 not only augmented the endowment of the grammar school at Dartford with an annuity of £2 but conveyed to trustees three messuages in Greenhithe, with surrounding gardens, to serve for all time as an almshouse for three poor and aged persons of Swanscombe, who should be chosen by the parson and the churchwardens. These properties, of an estimated capital worth of £200 at the time of the bequest, were not supported by any endowment but were most usefully employed by the community.5 An almshouse was likewise built at Sevenoaks at about this same date. The foundation received its first endowment in 1589 by the gift of a rentcharge of £5 p.a. made by John Pett, a gentleman residing in the community, this being further augmented in 1619 by an annuity of £1 Is. 4d. given by Edward Sisley, a yeoman.6 The great Elizabethan naval hero, Sir John Hawkins, was granted letters patent in 1594 to found in Chatham an almshouse for the relief and support of poor seamen and shipwrights, veterans of service in the Royal Navy, who had been wounded or become destitute. The trust was vested in twenty-six governors, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, the High Admiral, and the Warden of the Cinque Ports, to whom in 1598 properties worth £75 18s. p.a. were conveyed as the endowment for this ambitious and certainly worthy undertaking. The project had been long in Hawkins' mind, the 1 Waters-Withington MSS. 2 Lambarde, Perambulation, 57. 3 Hasted, Kent, VII, 499, 509 ; .PP 1837, XXIII, 413. 4 Vide ante 39. 0 PCC 22 Butts 1583 ; PP 1819, X-B, 22 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 471 ; Hasted, Kent, II, 416-417. Beare also left to the poor of Swanscombe £5 outright in alms, ten quarters of wheat annually to the poor householders there for a period of five years, a permanent rent-charge of £1 p.a. for the relief of the poor of the town, and 13s. p.a. for church repairs. 0 PCC 57 Nevell 1593 (Pett) ; PCC 90 Parker 1619 (Sisley) ; PP 1819, X-A, 141. 41 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 buildings having been completed at an unknown cost in 1592 during the great seaman's lifetime. The governors drafted the statutes of Chatham Hospital in 1598, providing care for twelve poor seamen, each of whom was to receive 2s. weekly for his support. Married men might bring their wives with them into the institution ; as widows they had the privilege of remaining with a full stipend for their lifetime unless they should remarry.1 One of the greatest of the Elizabethan benefactors to Kent was Sir Roger Manwood, a lawyer and after 1578 Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer. A native of Sandwich, where he was with his brother the founder of a grammar school,2 Manwood early attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth, who in 1563 granted to him the royal manor of St. Stephen's in Hackington, lying just outside the city of Canterbury. There Manwood built a great manor house and maintained his principal residence until the time of his death in 1592. Somewhat before his death, he had undertaken extensive repairs on the parish church at Hackington and had augmented the stipend of the vicar there with £12 p.a. of income. By his will, he added a gift of 13s. 4d. p.a. for an annual sermon and a distribution of £1 p.a. for seven years to the poor who should attend the sermon. Manwood set out a carefully ordered instruction to the minister to dilate on " the frayltye and vain delightes of this worlde, and what greate travaile and care mankinde dothe use to take for provisione of this lyfe . . . and howe little care for provicion to lyfe eternall ", to note as well that it is " meete for every man to walke worthelie in that vocation wherein he is placed, with a contented mind, daylie in the feare of God respectinge how many be in the world in povertie and of less habillitie then himselfe ", and towards the close of the sermon to " wishe good contynuance and success to the schoole at Sandwich and to the almeshowses at Hackington ". Manwood left, as well, £127 outright to the poor of Hackington, Canterbury, 1 PCC 26, 50 Drake 1596, 60 Kidd 1599 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 335 ; Hawkins, M.W.S.; Plymouth Armada Heroes (Plymouth, 1888), 55-57, 72-75 ; Williamson, J.A., Sir John Hawkins (Oxford, 1927), passim, Hawkins of Plymouth (L., 1949), passim ; DNB. Hawkins also left £50 to the poor of Deptford, where he maintained his residence, and equal sums to the needy of Plymouth and London. He provided, as well, an annuity of £10 for the support of an almshouse in Plymouth, his birthplace. Chatham Hospital found itself in grave difficulties in the Cromwellian period. Revenues had declined, while between eight and nine hundred war pensioners had been lodged on the foundation without adequate income from the state to supplement a modest income from endowments. Most of the pensioners were to some degree disabled, upwards of two hundred having lost arms or legs. Commissioner Pett, writing in April, 1658, to the Master of Requests, reported that he had just visited Chatham, where he had paid out £1,000 recently received from the government, " which gave little satisfaction to so great a multitude of poor people... so that I was forced to come out of town to avoid their clamours ". For an extended review of the matter vide S.P.Dom., 1655-1666, CXXV, 39, i i ; 1656, CXXIX, 92 ; 1657, CLVIII, 11 ; 1658, CLXXX, 143 ; 1659, CCIII, 34. 2 Vide post, 78-79. 42 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS and certain other Kentish parishes ; £60 as a capital stock for the repair of three miles of highways in the vicinity of Canterbury ; and a workhouse with a capital fund of £40 to provide a stock of wool or other materials for the setting of the poor on work in Hackington and in five other parishes in or near Canterbury.1 But his great benefaction was the founding of the almshouse at Hackington, built of brick and consisting of seven commodious apartments with a cloister, a forecourt, and gardens, all at a cost of approximately £500. This institution was to provide complete maintenance for six almspeople, one apartment being set aside for the residence of the parish clerk. Manwood's will specified payments requiring an income of approximately £22 6s. p.a. for the support of his institution, including dinner in his great house for the inmates, a weekly payment of Is. and two penny-loaves for their sustenance, an estimated £2 p.a. for fuel, £1 p.a. to the mayor for his annual visitation of the premises, and a stipend, valued at £1 2s. p.a. in 1625, to provide in alternate years complete clothing for his almspeople.2 In all, this great benefactor, irascible and arrogant though he seems to have been, made during his lifetime and by his will carefully considered gifts which may be estimated, with reasonable accuracy, to total £2,179 13s.3 1 " And like as I ment my free grammer schoole . . . for helpe of yowth, and my St. Stevens almeshowses for helpe and reliefe of age, so for middle age and lustie bodies to be sette on woorke and kepte from idleness, I have likewyse made a correction howse with a common woodyard and backsides . . . for restrainte of such as will not by labourre live honnestlie in theire parrishes att home, those are to be broughte and placed in the howse of correctione, there to be sett on woork with straite and harde diett . . . and due punishmente, till they doe soe amend and become honeste laboure takers as some honneste howse holder will take them into service..." 2 Manwood's property dispositions were not immediately adequate to meet the bequest, the early income of the endowment being £19 4s. p.a. 3 PCC 1592 [no will registered], admon. May, 1627 ; DNB ; PP 1819, X-A, 137 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 255, 299 ; Boys, Sandwich, 199-269 ; Cross, F. W., and J. R. Hall, Rambles Round Old, Canterbury (L., 1884), 81. Vide post, 108, 120. Vide S.P.Dom., 1636, CCCXII, 13, for a request to the Archbishop from the Mayor of Canterbury for his help in constituting a commission under the Statute of Charitable Uses to investigate " the miserable state of the poor folk in the late Lord Chief Baron Manwood's almhouse . . . who are in arrears for thenpay well nigh £100 ". The document suggests, quite perfectly, the effective mechanisms provided by the Elizabethan legislation governing charitable uses. Manwood (1525-1592) was the second son of Thomas Manwood, a substantial draper of Sandwich. Educated at St. Peter's School there and at the Inner Temple, he was called to the bar in 1555. He was at once appointed Recorder of Sandwich and entered Parliament as a member for Hastings, but from 1557 until 1572 sat for Sandwich. He was steward of the Admiralty Court of Dover for some years, until in 1672 he was appointed a judge of common pleas. In 1576 he was made a member of the Court of High Commission, in which he supported a repressive policy against Puritanism and all sectarianism. He enjoyed the full confidence of the Queen until late in life, when numerous complaints agamst him as a grasping and possibly corrupt judge led to a rebuke by the Privy Council and confinement in his house for a season. He died shortly after this incident but not, apparently, before trying unsuccessfully to bribe Lord Burghley to secure his appointment as Chief Justice. 43 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 A few years later, in 1596, a far more modest provision was made for the indigent poor of Sutton-at-Hone by a widow, Katherine Wrott. This benefactor was a native of the parish, having brought to her marriage the moiety of the manor of Sutton-at-Hone, but was a resident of London at the time of her death. She bequeathed a large site comprising an orchard, a garden, and one acre of land, on which she wished an almshouse to be built with £100 which her will provided. She instructed her executors so to construct the building that each of the four almspeople to be maintained would have one chamber above the other and a chimney, and she stipulated that each should share in a common garden. Other property, then valued at £1 6s. 8d. p.a., was left to the trustees to secure the proper maintenance of the premises, though no endowment for the benefit of the almspeople was available until the real property left could be rented at more favourable terms by her later trustees.1 Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, for some years before his death in 1597 had been contemplating the complete rebuilding of the ruined fabric of the college at Cobham which had been suppressed at the time of the Reformation. He was resolved, however, to refound it as a college for the perpetual relief of the poor. In pursuit of his design he had collected forty tons of timber, one hundred thousand bricks, and the necessary funds for the construction. His death intervening before his plan was well advanced, his will required his executors, one of whom was William Lambarde, to carry forward his intention. An Act of Parliament was accordingly secured shortly after his death, vesting the foundation in the Wardens of the Rochester Bridge, of which body two of the executors were also feoffees. The great fabric was repaired, or, more accurately, rebuilt at a cost of more than £500 and endowments with a capital value of upwards of £1,600 were provided for the support of the almsmen, each to have the generous stipend of £4 p.a. The inmates, who might be men or women, were to be appointed three from Cobham, three from Hoo, two from Strood, two from Shorne, and one each from eight other nearby parishes. This most generous bequest, the careful ordering of which bespoke the skill and devotion of Cobham's executors, excited wide attention and served as the model for numerous foundations in many parts of England, though it was in its turn undoubtedly inspired by the example and the pertinacious interest of William Lambarde, the historian, who had served Cobham as steward as well as executor and trustee.2 1 PCC 16, 17 Kidd 1599 ; Hasted, Kent, II, 348, 360 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 469. 2 PCC 1, 45 Cobham 1597 ; Arch. Cant., XI (1877), 200-216, XXVII (1906), 64-135 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 344 ; Pocock, Robert, Gravesend and Milton (Gravesend, 1797), 47 ; VCH, Kent, II, 231. Cobham was the eldest of the ten sons of George Brooke, Lord Cobham, whom he succeeded in 1558. He married first (Footnote 2 continued at foot of page 45). 44 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS I t seems very probable that Lord Cobham's notable benefaction may have influenced quite directly the even more ambitious foundation begun in Canterbury by Sir John Boys in 1599. Boys had built at an estimated charge of £350 an appropriate brick building in the parish of St. Mary Northgate, which he conveyed to trustees by deed poll in 1599. He named his establishment Jesus Hospital and undertook to provide endowment for the support of a warden and from twelve to twenty almspeople, depending on the income available. The constitution of the hospital was seemingly enlarged between this date and the founder's death in 1612, as additional capital became available for the financing of his great undertaking. One-third of the almspeople were to be women, the warden should be a discreet and literate man of from thirty to fifty years and should have a stipend of £10 p.a., while each brother and sister on the foundation should enjoy the very generous sum of £4 p.a. for full maintenance. The warden was likewise charged with the responsibility for teaching without further stipend twenty poor boys of the city, nominated by the churchwardens and overseers, until such time as they should be ready for apprenticeships; £10 p.a. was charged on the donor's estate for apprenticing four scholars from the hospital school each year. An additional fund, producing £24 p.a., was put by Boys into the hands of the mayor and aldermen, who were required to choose six youths annually to be bound out in desirable and instructive apprenticeships. In all, Boys vested the hospital with capital valued at £1,961 12s. for the support of this great almshouse and £680 for the maintenance of its ancillary functions as an experimental institution in social rehabilitation. By his own calculation the hospital possessed endowments of £96 12s. p.a. in the closing years of his life and would on the death of his wife gain an additional income of £38 p.a., suggesting a capital slightly greater than that which we have computed. The whole foundation was carefully and lovingly ordered by Boys with wise statutes and a sensitive perception of the social and human problems of his age.1 No man could have left a finer monument. The last of the great Elizabethan foundations has been perhaps improperly assigned for statistical purposes to the year of the donor's 1 Hasted, Kent, XI, 21, 195, 390 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 246 ; Ireland, W. H., History of Kent (L., 1828-1830, 4 vols.), I, 139 ; Alum, cantab., I, i, 195. Boys was a member of an old and distinguished Kentish family. He was trained as a lawyer, serving as steward to five archbishops of Canterbury. He was the recorder of the city of Canterbury and served in the court of the wardens of the Cinque Ports. It is certain that he knew Lord Cobham well. (Continuation of footnote 2 frontpage 44). Dorothy Nevill, the daughter of Lord Abergavenny ; later the daughter of Sir John Newton. He served the Queen in many capacities, as Warden of the Cinque Ports from 1558 to 1597, as ambassador to the Low Countries in 1578, as a Privy Councillor from 1585, and as Lord Chamberlain in 1596. 45 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 death, 1601, since the completion of his great design occupied the whole of the last quarter of his life. William Lambarde, the son of a London draper, had in 1554 inherited the manor of Westcombe, Kent, on the death of his father and remained intimately identified with the county as a landowner, justice, and historian during the rest of his life. We have observed that he was a friend and a trustee of Lord Cobham, and it was Lambarde who drew up the statutes for the government of Cobham's great almshouse charity. In 1575 Lambarde secured letters patent empowering him to establish a college or hospital for the sustenance of poor persons at East Greenwich and in the course of the next year purchased an appropriate site of seven acres on which he erected his almshouse at a cost of £584 8s. Bd.1 At the same time, Lambarde prepared the statutes of the institution and began to transfer to the Drapers' Company, as trustee, the large endowment with which the almshouse was to be supported. It was to provide complete maintenance for twenty poor persons and was to be known as the Collegium Pauperum Reginae, Elizabeth. The Master of the Rolls should be president and the two senior wardens of the Drapers' Company governors of the hospital, Lambarde reserving the right to appoint the almspeople during his lifetime. Save for two nominations reserved to the governors, the remaining eighteen inmates should be chosen from any of the parishes in the hundred of Blackheath. The nominees might be men or women, married or unmarried, who must, however, exhibit a respectable character and be able to recite the Lord's Prayer, the Articles of Faith, and the Ten Commandments. The statutes, as finally drafted in 1578, set the annual stipend for each almsperson at £3 12s. p.a. and stipulated that the poor on the foundation should themselves choose their warden and sub-warden from their own number. Endowments adequate for the specified outlay of £72 p.a. were provided, as well as for small stipends to be laid out as honoraria and for necessary repairs. Lambarde's will, proved in 1601, added still more land, possessing at that date a capital value of £133. In all, the endowments conveyed to the governors were worth £87 13s. p.a., or a capital value of £1,753, which, added to the outlay for the construction of the hospital, suggests that Lambarde, who vested a large proportion of his fortune in this notable institution, had disposed a total of £2,337 8s. 6d. on this great charity.2 The already substantial almshouse foundations in Canterbury were strengthened in 1604 under the terms of the will of a merchant of that city, Leonard Cotton, who had served it as mayor in 1579-1580. 1 The principal outlays were : letters patent, £20 ; seal and chest, £7 7s. ; site, £70 ; construction, £477 Is. 6d. 2 PCC 63 Woodhall 1601 ; DNB ; Arch. Cant., V (1863), 247-256 ; PP 1837-38, XXVI, 397 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 390-391, 410 ; Richardson, H. S., Greenwich (L., 1834), 115. 46 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Cotton erected three tenements adjoining Maynard's Hospital at an estimated cost of £90 some years before his death. Accommodations were to be provided, on the nomination of the mayor, for one poor man and two poor and respectable widows. This foundation was endowed by Cotton under his will with property possessing a capital worth of £400, the income of which was to be distributed amongst his almspeople.1 Just a year later, in 1605, a most substantial almshouse was founded in the rural parish of Aylesford by John Sedley, a member of a prominent gentle family whose charitable concern for the county had been at once consistent and informed. Sedley's will required his executor to build suitable quarters for the care of six poor persons and to settle on the trustees of the foundation an endowment of at least £60 p.a. for the complete support of the inmates. Sedley's brother, heir, and executor, Sir William Sedley, recited in a deed dated 1617 that he had carried forward the instruction of the founder and had himself expanded the original constitution. He had in 1607 built an almshouse for ten poor, at a cost of about £200, and had endowed it with lands worth £76 p.a., or, we may assume, a capital worth of £1,520, for the most generous maintenance of the foundation.2 Still another ambitious and certainly experimental foundation was undertaken at New Romney in 1610 under the terms of the bequest of John Southland, a gentleman of that neighbourhood. This endowment, which bears an interesting resemblance to that created by Manwood for Hackington in 1592, sought to combine the customary functions of an almshouse with those of a free school for poor children, placing both responsibilities under the direction of a literate and dedicated master. The executors of Southland's will recited in the deed of incorporation (1610) that the donor had designated his own dwelling as " The Abiding-house for the Poor ", in which two poor couples should be lodged without charge, to whom £5 p.a. should be paid for their complete sustenance. In addition, two poor children should be lodged and supported until they were fourteen years of age. The entire institution was to be administered by a schoolmaster, also on the foundation, who should teach " the said poor children to write and read the English tongue, and to cast accompts ". Southland, it appears, had for some years past maintained a schoolmaster for New Romney, who was designated the first governor of the hospital, his successor to be a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge qualified to teach 1 Ireland, Kent, I, 157 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 258 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 61. We have been unable to find the will. 2 PCC 55 Hayes 1605 ; PP 1833, XIX, 196 ; Burke, Extinct Baronetcies, 482 ; Foster, Joseph, ed., Alumni oxonienses (Oxford, 1891-1892, 4 vols.), IV, 1356. Sedley was the brother-in-law of Elizabeth, Lady Abergavenny (vide ante, 24). He was High Sheriff of Kent in 1666. 47 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 Latin as well as English, and to be appointed by the bailiff of Romney Marsh. Finally, the trust was to pay annually £6 10s. for the care of the fabric of the parish church. Southland's executor conveyed from the estate houses and lands with a value of £1,100 to secure the performance of the trust, which, it is pleasant to relate, was well and certainly fruitfully administered for many generations.1 The largest of the almshouse foundations made in Kent during the whole course of our period was that of Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, at Greenwich in 1613. Northampton, who likewise endowed a substantial almshouse at Castle Rising in Norfolk, and another at Clun, Shropshire, lavished particular care and great resources on his Trinity Hospital in Greenwich. We have been able to reach no very reliable estimate of the cost of this commodious and welldisposed building, but the institution was heavily endowed at its foundation with properties then worth £181 12s. p.a., to which a stock of £200 was added by the terms of the peer's will in 1614, suggesting a total capital worth of £3,833 for the endowment. The Mercers of London were named trustees of the institution, to which Northampton wished twelve poor men of East Greenwich and eight from his birthplace (Shotesham) in Norfolk to be admitted as almsmen. He indicated that the endowment should produce an annual surplus after the statutory payments had been met, this to be employed for general charitable purposes after prudent additions had been made to the stock of the three institutions on his foundation. Most liberal provision of £9 17s. 8d. p.a. was made for the support of each almsman, not to mention £1 p.a. for clothing and £2 p.a. as a free stipend. The warden was carefully instructed regarding the care of the inmates, any one of whom might be expelled for blasphemy or heresy, while such luxuries as a cook, a laundress, and a barber were provided by the terms of the deed of gift. The properties constituting the endowments were well and shrewdly disposed by the trustees, with the result that the revenues rose steadily to reach the great total of £3,148 14s. 4d. p.a. available to the hospital in 1863.2 The generous intentions of Thomas Menfield, a merchant, and Mayor of Faversham at the time of his death, were not so well protected or respected as those of the great peer. Menfield, by his will proved in 1614, bequeathed to the mayor and jurats of Faversham the sum of £1,000 for the building and endowment of an almshouse for six poor widows of the town. This bequest was to be void if the executor, Christopher Saker, should build the projected almshouse and endow it with lands worth £30 p.a., but the testator did not specify any clear 1 PP 1819, X-A, 136, App., 211 ; Hasted, Kent, VIII, 459. 2 PCC 55 Lawe 1614 ; DNB ; Kimbell, Greenwich Legacies, 45-50 ; PP 1834, XXII, 5-18 ; PP 1867-68, LII, i., Kent, 42-43. 48 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS time limit for the fulfilment of his wishes. Saker purchased the required lands and built the almshouse, probably at a cost of £400, but as late as 1623 had not provided the required endowment from Menfield's estate. Saker, being " very sick and likely to die ", was waited on by a committee representing the town government, the municipality having been vested as trustee, which agreed to accept the sum of £450 as an endowment rather than to risk further delay and possibly greater losses in the event of the executor's death. The town apparently from the beginning regarded itself as morally bound to pay £27 p.a. as income on the endowment, frequently borrowing from the funds at an interest rate of 7 per cent, and in 1686 formally pledging itself to this annual amount.1 An almshouse was provided, with a most adequate endowment, for the rural parish of Lenham in 1622 by the gift of Anthony Honywood, a gentleman of that place. He conveyed to the vicar, the churchwardens, the overseers, and eleven private trustees scattered but valuable properties as an endowment for an almshouse which he had already erected at an estimated cost of £340. These properties possessed a clear capital value of approximately £1,000 and were to be employed for the complete maintenance of six poor almspeople to be appointed by the vicar and the parish officers, all such nominees having been residents of Lenham for at least seven years. Each of the almsmen was to receive an annual stipend of £6 13s. 4d. for his support, the residue of the income, then about £10 p.a., to be first employed for maintaining the premises in good repair and then for the personal uses of the governors.2 An almshouse was provided for Gravesend and Milton in 1624 by the terms of the will of Henry Pinnock, who some years earlier had established a loan fund for the benefit of the two towns. Pinnock, a tradesman who had served as a jurat of Gravesend, left to trustees his own messuage and other properties, with a total value of £210, to serve as an endowment for an almshouse which he was evidently already supporting and which then contained seven apartments. His estate was also charged with the enlargement of these premises, we would suppose to sixteen tenements, of which eight were to be reserved for the " better relief and maintenance . . . of poor decayed people " of Gravesend and as many from Milton. Pinnock likewise provided £20 as a stock for setting the poor of his town at weaving for their 1 PP 1837, XXIII, 206 ,- Hasted, Kent, VI, 357, 359, 399 ; Jacob, Edward, History of Faversham (L., 1774), 136. 2 PP 1837, XXI I I , 587-588 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 425, 438. Honywood was the son and heir of Robert Honywood, Esq., of Lenham, who died in 1576 leaving a wife who survived him for forty-one years, dying in 1620 in her ninety-third year, when she left sixteen children, 114 grandchildren, and 228 great-grandchildren. 49 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 own better support, maldng available as well a house for a master weaver who should direct this interesting undertaking.1 We have been sketching very briefly an ordered and certainly a remarkable succession of great almshouse foundations of the early seventeenth century—all well endowed, all carefully constituted, and all adding impressively to the social resources which donors of the county were so rapidly mobilizing for the relief of hopeless indigence. Accompanying these great foundations were even more numerous small and frequently unendowed establishments, usually in thinly populated rural parishes, which when taken as a group were to make a substantial contribution indeed to the care of poverty. The almshouse was the institution which, in terms of the thought and traditions of the period, was regarded as the most humane and satisfactory of all the many social devices responsible men had evolved for the relief of the desperately and hopelessly poor. We must at least note briefly a group of these smaller almshouses founded between 1605 and 1651. In 1605 the overseers of the poor at Strood took up a subscription of £2 3s. towards building a much-needed almshouse, though it appears that two generations and a decree of Chancery were to intervene before the parish gained its objective by being permitted to share in the foundation of Richard Watts.2 A London cutler, John Franldin, in 1609 bequeathed to the parish officers of his native village of East Farleigh £100 for the erection of six dwellings which might be used by the poor of the town without charge under the direction of the constituted authority.3 In the next year (1610) William Stanton of Greenwich left, among other charitable bequests, an annuity of £2 to be added to the stock of Lambarde's almshouse in that parish for the " better relief of the poor people harboured " there.4 The parish of Linton benefited from the will of Sir Anthony Mayne, of Linton Place, who had built almshouses there for four poor families at a cost of about £120, which he endowed in 1611 with a small annuity of £2 13s. 4d. 1 Harris, John, History of Kent (L., 1719), ii, 136 ; Hasted, Kent, III, 332 ,- PP 1837, XXIII, 354 ; Cruden, R. P., History of Gravesend (L., 1843), 274 ; Pocock, Gravesend, 95. 2 Kent Records, V (1928), Strood, 88 ; Hasted, Kent, III, 556, IV, 185-187. In 1672 Strood petitioned that it enjoyed no share in Watts' charity (vide ante, 40), though it lay in part within the precincts and liberties of Rochester. Strood was awarded £20 p.a. from the income of Watts' trust. By 1721 the appropriation had reached £50 p.a., which the parishioners resolved to employ over six years towards building a poorhouse. 3 PCC 96 Dorset 1609 ; Hasted, Kent, IV, 380 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 348. It seems possible that a small tract of about three acres was intended as endowment, but by a decree of a charity commission in 1638 it was apparently set aside as a garden. 4 PCC 20, 82 Wood 1611 ; Kimbell, Greenwich Legacies, 42. Stanton left as well £2 p.a. to the poor of East Greenwich and £2 p.a. for the repair of the parish church. 50 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS laid as a charge against his considerable estate.1 It appears that William Crow, a gentleman of Brasted, gave that parish an almshouse and a small tract of land in 1618, but there is no suggestion either of the number of persons for whom lodging was provided or that there was any supporting endowment.2 Similarly, a yeoman of Westerham, Arthur Willard, in 1623 granted to trustees a messuage and a garden for the free lodging of two poor widows of the parish, without, however, providing any endowment.3 In 1623, as well, Thomas Pettit, a member of the lower gentry of the county, added £50 to the stock of Boys' Hospital in Canterbury, in order to secure the maintenance of two additional youths in that interesting and useful institution.4 Continuing our review of lesser and unendowed almshouses provided by Kentish donors, we may note the bequest of Thomas Fulnetby of Deal, who in 1625 conveyed to trustees four dwellings in Sandwich, valued at perhaps £140, to be employed for the free lodging of decayed tradesmen of St. Mary's parish in that town.5 Four unendowed almshouses were established by unknown donors for the parish of Elham, probably in 1631,6 while two years later (1633) a burgher of Faversham, John Ford, devised three tenements for the use of as many widows of his parish, again with no provision for endowment.7 In 1642 John Tilden and his wife, Ann, by deed devised to trustees a messuage valued at about £30 as an almshouse for two " well reputed " widows of Wye, creating as well a tiny endowment with a capital of about £12 for the payment each year of a stipend of 6s. to each almswoman and a possibly larger, though uncertainly described, endowment for the maintenance of the structure.8 A few years later, in 1648, John Brightling of Tonbridge by will established an almshouse with an estimated capital worth of £60, for the free lodging of' two aged, needy, " painful and laborious " men of that town. Brightling also left an annuity of £2 2s. to be distributed weekly in bread to six worthy poor 1 PCC 25 Wood 1611 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 360; Hasted, Kent, IV, 367, 369, VII, 132. Mayne purchased the estate of Linton early in his lifetime. He was the son of John Mayne[v] of Biddenden, who was sheriff of the county in 1566. 2 PP 1837, XXIII, 604 ; Hasted, Kent, III, 152, 155. 3 Ibid., Ill, 172. In 1837 the premises were occupied as an almshouse by four old poor persons (PP 1837, XXIII, 610). 4 PP 1837, XXIII, 282, 297 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 283, 286, XI, 61, 206, 22S. Pettit likewise left £2 p.a. in perpetuity to the poor of Chislet and an equal annuity to augment the income of the minister of that parish. His will stipulated, as well, that a loan fund of £50 should be established to provide loans of not more than £5 each to young married couples of Chislet, Chartham, and Chilham. He also bequeathed £2 10s. to be distributed outright to prisoners in the common gaol of Canterbury. 5 Boys, Sandwich, 314 ; Hasted, Kent, X, 197. 0 PP 1837, XXIII, 600 ; Hasted, Kent, VIII, 107. 7 Ibid., VI, 359 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 213. 8 K.A.O. : PRO, A. 697, 1645 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 439. 51 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 of the town, the recipients to be nominated by the churchwardens.1 And, finally, in describing at least a few of the numerous small institutions for the relief of the poor, so much overshadowed by the great endowments, we should mention the apparently wholly unsuccessful effort of a yeoman of rural Kenardington to found not only an almshouse, but a school and orphanage as well. Edmund Watts, of that parish, in 1651 left £6 to be expended by the overseers and other principal inhabitants of the community towards building a house for the free lodging of poor widows or widowers; he also bequeathed to the parish of Appledore a house there to be employed for a school building and for the care of poor and fatherless children.2 But it is evident that the amount was too small and that the purposes were too inexactly defined to enlist the local support that Watts' bequests were intended to induce for the institution which his mind projected but which his slender resources could not alone finance. We shall conclude our discussion with some mention of three larger and more enduring foundations made during the last of our intervals, 1641-1660, when Kent was seriously disturbed and torn with internal dissension. In total, £3,690 2s. was added to its almshouse endowments during this period, representing in average terms a falling away of support for these institutions to a decade level more nearly comparable with the period 1541-1570 than the almost prodigal generosity towards almshouses which had marked the decades between 1571 and 1640. In part, this doubtless may be explained by the economic and social dislocations of the revolutionary years, but more significantly perhaps by the fact that the structure of almshouse foundations in Kent stood very nearly complete in consequence of the sustained efforts of the two preceding generations. The law of diminishing returns applies quite as rigorously in charity as in every other human activity. In 1644 John Smith, then residing in Hornsey, Middlesex, whose estates and principal interests were in Kent, drew the will which, with subsequent additions by his wife Ann, was to result in a very considerable and certainly fruitful charity. The couple was apparently moved by " humble thankfulness to God " for the birth of a son after " full twenty years and four months " of marriage. Smith by his will proved in 1656 devised to trustees the sum of £200 for the erection of an almshouse in Longport (Canterbury) for the suitable care of four old men and as many old women. His widow, as executrix, vested in three trustees £1,500 in lands, from the income of which £32 p.a. should be paid for the full support of the almspeople. In addition, the trust was charged with the payment of £20 p.a. as a stipend for 1 PP 1837, XXIII, 507 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 248. 2 PCC 167 Grey 1651. 52 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS an " able and orthodox " minister to preach each Sunday afternoon in St. Paul's church (Canterbury), and a further annuity of £20 was to be paid to the churchwardens and overseers of Hornsey for the setting out of poor children as apprentices, while any residue should be paid over the the churchwardens of St. Paul's for the same purposes.1 Abraham Colfe, another great benefactor, whose large and complex dispositions for the care of the poor of Lewisham have already been described, by his will proved in 1658 likewise arranged an almshouse foundation under the care of his trustees, the Leathersellers' Company. Colfe and the company, in view of the appreciation of his estate to be expected as income was added, had agreed that in 1662 an almshouse would be begun in Lewisham. In that year £100 was to be laid out on a building for three almspeople, while in 1665 an enlargement would be undertaken to provide for two additional inmates. Each almsperson was to have a principal room with the comfortable dimensions of fifteen feet by twelve feet, with a chimney, and a small buttery, as well as a garden plot measuring sixteen feet. The endowments already vested by Colfe in the company were to be charged with £22 15s. p.a. to be paid in weekly stipends of Is. 9d. to each almsperson, while each was to have as well a gown worth 18s. in every second year. Despite the unfortunate erosion which the estate experienced as a consequence of the economic unsettlement of the period, the London company carried forward the undertakings to which it had made its moral commitment.2 The last of the almshouse foundations of our period to be mentioned was less fortunate in its fate. John Cogan, whose large benefaction for poor maidservants of Canterbury has already been discussed, also devised to trustees by his will in 1658 not only his house and grounds as an almshouse for six poor widows of clergymen, but vested in them as well the residue of his estate as an endowment for the comfortable support of these almswomen. All must be widows of men who had been " painful and diligent preachers of God's word " in Canterbury and London, and they were to be attended by an " ancient maid of honest life and conversation " who should have a stipend of £6 for her services. The dwelling and the grounds, valued at £100, were devoted to this purpose and still another almshouse thereby provided for Canterbury, but the bulk of Cogan's property consisted of lands expropriated from the Archbishop of Canterbury by the Committee on Sequestration, of which he had been chairman ; these, being restored with the return of the monarchy, were lost to the trust.3 1 PCC 211 Berkeley 1656 ; PP 1828, XX, 384 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 292 ; PP 1867-68, LII, i, Kent, 112-113. In 1662 the widow gave an additional £400 to the corpus of the trust to provide £20 p.a. for putting out four children as apprentices from families resident in the parishes of St. Paul and Bridge. 2 Vide ante, 30, and post, 85-87. ' 3 Vide ante, 31. 53 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 We have commented on forty-six well-established almshouse foundations made in Kent in the course of our period, as well as the substantial augmentations of the endowments of three of the twelve almshouses which survived the Middle Ages and were reconstituted during the era of the Reformation. There was poured into these institutions, a few of which were unendowed, the great total of £29,046 Is. in endowments or construction costs, while the sum of £415 had been added to the existing funds of the medieval establishments. The forty-six foundations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provided lodging and sustenance for a total of 344 almspeople by the close of our period, to which must be added, as we assess the social resources of Kent in 1660, probably somewhat more than 148 almsmen cared for in the reconstituted medieval institutions, or 492 in all. But this by no means represents the whole of the amazing contribution made by men and women of the county to this important social resource during the period under study. An additional £13,568 2s. of endowment had been provided either for the augmentation of the forty-six almshouses whose foundation we have noted and the twelve surviving medieval institutions or for the support of smaller and often unenduring almshouses which space has not permitted us to treat. If the wishes of these donors were met, we may assume that another 195 men and women were receiving their complete sustenance and lodging in Kentish almshouses by the close of our era. In all, then, there is reason to believe that as many as 687 persons were provided for through the generosity and social sensitivity of some scores of donors drawn from all ranks of society. It must be noted further that an additional £1,585 had been given either for the repair of existing almshouses, as outright gifts for immediate use, or for the support of almshouses in other parts of the realm. We have suggested that the endowments accumulated for the care of the poor in their own homes must by the close of our period have provided means for the support of something like 1,050 households in the county, or possibly not far from 4,000 destitute human beings in whom at least the possibility of rehabilitation and employment was to be found. In addition, society had armed itself with resources in Kent sufficient to ensure the complete responsibility for nearly 700 persons who were hopeless casualties in the new and harsher social and economic environment of the modern world. This was a notable, a magnificent achievement of which any age might well be proud, one which went far beyond the responsibility which the society had undertaken as a matter of law. These almshouses, great and small, were distributed rather evenly and strategically over the length and breadth of Kent save, one would suppose, for a too heavy concentration in and about Canterbury. Only 54 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS one region, in the extreme south and lying along the Sussex border, was as much as ten miles from the nearest almshouse.1 The deeds of gift of most of the smaller establishments necessarily limited reception to almspeople from only one parish, but, as we have observed, many of the larger institutions were open to deserving and unfortunate men and women from the whole of the county or, more commonly, from a considerable group of parishes lying about the almshouse. The benefactors of Kent had learned to take a broad view of their responsibilities and they had mustered formidable resources in the struggle which men had for so long and so desperately waged against privation and hopeless want. B. Social rehabilitation. The concern of Kentish donors with the plight of the poor was on the whole conservative, having been confined principally to provision for their relief in their own homes and in the numerous almshouses built and endowed during the course of our long period. No strong or systematic attempt was made to experiment with the several forms of social rehabilitation which, as we have observed in certain other counties, seemed to appeal to the burgher mind in those urban communities in which there were strong and well-articulated merchant groups.2 None the less, the considerable total of £12,043 4s. was provided for these most interesting undertakings, representing not quite 5 per cent. (4 • 78 per cent.) of the whole of the charitable benefactions of the county. As we might expect, relatively little interest in these schemes is manifest during the early decades, but in the Elizabethan period a total of £3,938 13s., amounting to 8 -72 per cent, of all charities for the interval, was provided for these purposes. Though a somewhat larger total of £4,681 2s. was given for these same uses in the early Stuart years, the proportionate strength of interest in plans for social rehabilitation declined markedly, since this sum represented slightly less than 5 per cent, of the whole. During our closing interval, the generous sum of £3,051 was provided for one or another of the plans for social rehabilitation, amounting to the substantial proportion of 11 -58 per cent, of all charitable benefactions given during these unsettled years. Certain kinds of social rehabilitation in which donors from many parts of England were beginning to take an interest were only casually and thinly supported in Kent. Thus the total provided for the relief 1 This particular region lay close to the Earl of Dorset's great foundation in East Grinstead, Sussex. This foundation we have not counted as of Kent, though Dorset's principal seat was at Knole and much of his property lay thereabouts. I t was endowed, after some litigation, with the very large stipend of £215 12s. 9d. p.a. (S.P.Dom., 1631, CXC, 50, CXCVI, 24). 2 The proportion of all charitable wealth devoted to social rehabilitation ranges from 2-66 per cent, for Somerset to 13-32 per cent, for London. 55 6 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 of prisoners or the redemption of debtors amounted to no more than £610 7s. during the entire course of our period, or 0-24 per cent, of the whole of Kentish charitable funds. This total, comprised of a large number of small gifts, included only £376 10s. of capital, which was, of course, yielding no more than a modest income at the close of our period. Nor was there any considerable or sustained interest in providing dowries or marriage portions for young women in Kent, a form of social rehabilitation which appealed particularly to the gentry in so many other counties. In all, £746 18s. was given for this purpose, representing no more than 0 • 30 per cent, of the charities in the county. Rather more than half the entire sum was the gift of Thomas Iddenden, a gentleman of Hawkhurst, who in 1566 left land and other properties valued at £410 to the churchwardens of Hawkhurst and Frittenden to support marriage portions, as well as lands of an estimated value of £500 for the general charitable uses of these communities. 1 A considerably larger sum, amounting to £1,994 Is., or 0-79 per cent, of the total of the county's charities, was given in our period for the relief of the sick or the support of hospitals. These gifts were with few exceptions small in amount, the largest of them being for the great hospitals constituted and endowed in London and Southwark during the course of the sixteenth century. I t is surprising, considering the importance of Kentish industry, and more particularly of its cloth trade, that so little was provided as endowments for loan funds. No bequest was made for this purpose prior to 1561, and the total of the accumulations of such capital during our whole period was only £894 15s., or not more than 0-36 per cent, of the whole of the charitable resources of the county, this being, incidentally, one of the lowest proportions of funds for this purpose in all of England. Among the larger of these endowments may be mentioned the share which Canterbury possessed in the revolving loan fund created in 1566 by Sir Thomas White of London,2 which made the sum of £104 available for loans to freemen of the city every twenty-fourth year.3 Two generations later, in 1630, Henry Vanner, an alderman of Canterbury, created by will a loan fund with a capital worth of £200. Vanner charged the mayor and commonalty with responsibility for lending up to £5 to poor tradesmen of the city upon such terms and security as they might determine, but with the stipulation that no interest should be required.4 1 Harris, Kent, i, 148 ; Dearn, T. D. W., Weald of Kent (Cranbrook, 1814), 113 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 517, 519 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 117, 152. 2 Vide Jordan, Charities of London, 174-175, 257-258, 370. 3 PP 1823, VIII, 585, 596 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 273 ; Ditchfield, P. H., and George Clinch, eds., Memorials of Old Kent (L., 1907), 299. Vide post, 58. 4 Hasted, Kent, XI, 207 ; Ireland, Kent, I, 591 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 283. Vide infra. 56 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS A considerably larger total of £3,580, amounting to 1-42 per cent, of all charities, was given by donors of the county for the establishment of apprenticeship plans of one sort or another. In addition to gifts for this purpose noted in earlier pages in connection with other benefactions, at least a few of the larger or more interesting of these funds may be mentioned. Thus in 1620 a member of the upper gentry, Sir William Stede of Harrietsham, instructed his executors to purchase lands with an annual value of £10, to be employed in setting forth in apprenticeships poor children of large families in the parishes of Harrietsham, Milton Regis, and Tonge. The endowment was vested in feoffees, but the appointment of the children was settled on the owner of the manor house in which Stede resided at the time of his death.1 Some years later, in 1630, Henry Vanner of Canterbury, whose loan fund has just been described, vested in the municipal authorities of Canterbury capital of £150 to secure the care of six poor children and their placement in apprenticeships where they might learn trades to help them become self-supporting.2 In his will drawn in 1644, as we have noted, John Smith, then of Hornsey, Middlesex, set forth his intention of founding an amply endowed almshouse in Longport (Canterbury) as well as providing other substantial benefactions for Hornsey and Canterbury. The residue of his estate, with a capital worth of probably £1,200, was vested for placing poor children of St. Paul's parish, Canterbury, in apprenticeships that would fit them for proper callings. His widow, Ann, in 1662 generously augmented this fund with real property then worth £20 p.a., which was to be employed by the trustees for apprenticing four additional children.3 In 1651, a merchant of Faversham, John Castlock, gave to trustees, subject to a life interest for his widow, property valued at £160 capita] at the least, the income of which was to be employed in putting out poor children of that town as apprentices.4 Of all the numerous experiments in the social rehabilitation of the poor, the provision of workhouses and stocks of goods on which poor men might earn their living and possibly learn skills as well was most favoured by Kentish benefactors. By far the largest amount of capital was provided for this purpose, the total of £4,217 3s. representing 1 • 67 per cent, of the whole of the charitable funds of the county. The first of these benefactions was a modest sum of £20 given in 1 PCC 39 Dale 1621 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 141 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 214. 2 Vide ante, 56. Vanner likewise bequeathed an annuity of £6 13s. 4d. to secure the augmentation of the living of Goodnestone. 3 This apprenticeship endowment yielded £196 p.a. in 1863. 4 PCC 183 Grey 1651 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 328, 359 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 208. A Castlock was the last abbot of Faversham. The family, which secured its standing in the town during the days of this great relation and patron, remained promment in the affairs of the community for a whole century. This donor, as well as his father, served as Mayor of Faversham. 57 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 the early Elizabethan period, but from that time until the outbreak of the Civil War there was a continuing and a considerable interest in divers undertakings of this sort. Sir Thomas White of London, among his many munificent charities, gave the city of Canterbury £100 to be employed as a stock to provide the poor with materials for spinning and weaving.1 John Amies, a Maidstone merchant, who also left £45 to the sick of that town, in 1595 left £30 outright to the poor on the death of his wife, and a residue of approximately £100 for the same use. Amies' will, firmly riveted with scriptural injunctions, likewise established a trust fund of £100 wherewith the town authorities should set the poor at work on " hempe, flax, woolle, and other wares". The instrument further provided that unless this fund were matched by other funds of the same value within a period of seven years, the bequest should be employed for the outright relief of the poor. In 1602 the town officers were able to report that they had secured " one other Cli. and more " and determined that the income on the entire trust should be used to teach " the poor sorte of children to learne the makyng of cawles, buttons, button mouldes, thread or wynding thereof and like honest easy artes " in which, after some skill had been gained, a child might earn from lOd. to 12d. a week. Such children, who might at once earn enough to support themselves and to lend some aid to their impoverished families, were to be set at this work or, upon refusal, to be placed in the house of correction with no reward given for their labour.2 1 Vide ante, 56. 2 Gilbert, W. B., Accounts of Corpus Christi Fraternity (Maidstone, 1865), 106-114 ; Records of Maidstone, 35-37, 40-44. This eloquent testament of faith and of the persuasive power of Scriptures, as the pious layman interpreted the Bible, is set forth in some detail in Amies' will : " . . . And wheras within this towne and parishe of Maidston, ther are and by all former tymes ther have bene . . . an exceadinge number of very aged lame and poore people, who through their greate wantes have not wherwith to sett them nor their children in woorke, wherby they might relieve their extreame necessities, but contrarily are by that meanes forced to become beggers from doore to doore, in which they beinge a little accustomed they doe never falle to labour againe but to whordomes, robberies and all other profanenes, to the greate offence of almighty God who hath expressely sayed that ther shalbe noe beggers in the lande ; and yeat the same God hath sayed Deutronomie 15, verse 11, that ther shalbe alwayes founde needy folke in the lande, and Matt : 26, verse 12, Christ sayeth that he himself will not be alwayes with us, but the poore shall ever be with us, to the ende the ritch should have occasion to offer such sacrifice and homage unto him as he requyreth, with the goodes which they have abundantly bestowed upon them, namely to doe good willingly and readily unto the poore that stande in neade, for God doth accepte the almes deedes donne to the poore as donne unto himself. And whore the lorde sayeth in Deutronomie afore cyted, the poore and the neady, his meaning is to make such an entercourse as the ritch may be mingled with the poore and either of them meete with the other, to the intente they shoulde communicate togeather, the poore to receave and the ritch to gyve, so tha t he may be honoured a t the handes of them bothe as well for that the ritch man hath wherwith to doe good as for that (Footnote 2 continued at foot of page 59). 58 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS The matching gift wherewith Amies' workhouse benefaction was ensured for Maidstone was made in 1602 by Sir Henry Cutts, a prominent landowner and a justice of Thomham, Kent, subject to an annuity of £4 payable to him and his wife during their lifetimes. At about the same time Cutts granted to the municipality of Maidstone an annual rent-charge of £3 for the relief of the poor of the parish.1 A few years earlier a Cranbrook tradesman, Alexander Weller, had left considerable property to trustees for the erection of a workhouse in that parish, together with an endowment which would supply a stock of raw materials on which the poor might be set on work. These funds became merged, probably in 1605, with properties left by Alexander Dence for the support of the poor of the community,2 the combined fund perhaps possessing a capital value of not less than £420. Though the particulars are unfortunately by no means clear, it seems likely that the income was used for work projects by the parish authorities until the eighteenth century, when a house of correction was built with a portion of the capital and the remainder employed for setting the poor at useful occupations.3 Some years later, in 1622, one of the trustees under Amies' will, Henry Hall of Maidstone, devised to overseers of the parish of Wye a modest endowment of £20 which they were requested to employ for the purchase of flax, wool, and other materials on which poor children and the aged poor might be set at work, in such wise " that out of the increase of it, they should have some recompense for their labours, and yet the principal sum or stock [be] reserved whole ".4 A much larger stock was provided for the parish of Ashford in 1625 by Thomas Milles, a gentleman of that community, who bequeathed £200 as a fund for securing the employ- 1 PCC 4 Harte 1604 ; Records of Maidstone, 35 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 369. 2 Vide ante, 39, and post, 61, 81. 3 PCC 55 Drake 1596 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 515. 4 Hasted, Kent, IV, 297, VII, 344, 361 ; Records of Maidstone, 43, 66, 67, 75. Hall was a member of the lower gentry of the county. The family resided at Wye for some generations before removing to Maidstone in the early seventeenth century. (Continuation of footnote 2 from page 58). the poore acknowledge themselves to be sustayned for his name sake, and so both of them blesse and praise his name. And although (for my parte) I am not worthy to be numbred amongest those that (in this worlde) are cauled ritch, nor my porcion greate ; yeat, for that the Lorde in his greate mercy and providence towardes me hath increased the same to a good measure, to my exceadinge comforte in my longe infirmities and sicknesses, and to the ende that hereby I may the more fully declare my thanckfullnes to the same god for these his blessinges and tny sayd assured hope layed upon Jhesus Christe concerninge the life eternall and to come after the dissolution of this my mortall bodye, and that hereby the said poore people may be perpetually the more occasioned to glorifye the name of this our god I will and deuise . . . " 59 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 ment of the poor. In 1628 this endowment had been increased to £250 by other gifts, the principal of which was a bequest of £30 made by Sir Richard Smith, and the income was employed to provide facilities, tools, and materials for the manufacture of various fabrics.1 A very large charitable estate was created in 1636 under the will of Sir John Hayward of Rochester, whose fortune stemmed from the mercantile prowess of his father and his father-in-law in London. Hayward left to two trustees the rich manor of Minster in the Isle of Sheppey and other lands, which together possessed a capital worth of upwards of £1,000 in the year of the bequest. His feoffees, with the advice of named persons, were to use this great endowment for the erection of workhouses and furnishing the poor with remunerative work in such places as might be decided on, provided only that St. Nicholas' parish, Rochester, be one. In 1651 the trustees vested a major portion of the property, then yielding £50 p.a., for the erection and maintenance of such a workhouse to serve the needs of the poor in Rochester, while at a much later date a similar establishment was provided at Crediton (Devon) by the then trustees, harassed as they were by the litigation arising from the imprecise instructions of Hayward's will.2 C. Municipal betterments. The benefactors of Kent gave approximately as much for various undertakings designed to bring physical improvements to their communities as they had given for experimentation in social rehabilitation. In all, £11,558 15s., or 4-59 per cent, of the whole, was provided for the several heads included under this somewhat amorphous category. As compared with several other rich and socially mature counties, this 1 PP 1837, XXIII, 409 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 378, 403, VII, 537. This wellfounded charity was flourishing in Hasted's day, employment at that time (ca. 1790) being given to about sixty poor persons in the bleaching of Irish linen. 2 PCC 69 Pile 1636 ; PP 1819, X-A, 133 ; PP 1820, V, 81, 226 ; PP 1824, XIII, 57 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 388, 474 ; PP 1837-38, XXV, 423 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 220-221. Hayward's father, a London clothworker, was Sir Rowland Hayward, Lord Mayor of London in 1571 and again in 1591 (vide Jordan, Charities of London, 231, 392, 395). Sir John made a rich marriage with Catherine, a daughter of Customer Smith, and settled near Rochester. He purchased the manor of Minster, with the site of the monastery, from Sir Michael Livesey in 1623. This charitable estate increased enormously in value. When it was sold and the funds re-invested in the early nineteenth century, the total worth was £10,300 12s. 6d., of which Rochester received one-half. The workhouse at Crediton, established in 1805, was to care for twenty-four persons and to provide education for the children, training in trades, and apprenticeship stipends. Surplus income accruing to the Rochester branch of the charity had in 1718 been assigned towards the support of three charity schools for Rochester, Strood, and Frindsbury. It should be noted, as well, that before his death Sir John had given an annual rental of £20 for the support of a school at Bridgnorth, Shropshire, previously founded by his father. 60 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS represents a remarkably slight interest in municipal betterments,1 particularly when, as we shall observe, these gifts were so heavily concentrated on the improvement of communications. The small sum of £235 was provided for public parks and recreation, and of this amount the largest benefaction has perhaps been somewhat dubiously assigned to this charitable head.2 A total of £938 10s. was likewise given to various merchant and tradesman companies, the income of which was designated for the general charitable benefit of a number of communities. In every decade at least a nominal amount was given for a great variety of civic purposes, with the bulk of these bequests concentrated in the period 1591-1660. We should discuss at least briefly a few of these gifts in order to indicate the breadth of interest in benefactions of this type. In total, £2,448 10s., or not quite 1 per cent, of Kentish charities, was given for various civic purposes. One of the earliest of these trusts was established at Eltham in 1492 by royal grants of scattered lands in the parish with an estimated capital worth of £300, the income to be employed for the relief of the parish from the weight of taxation, the care of the poor, and other civic needs.3 Two generations later a merchant and bailiff of Lydd left a considerable estate for various charitable uses in his native town. Thomas Hart, who wished to be buried in his parish church " in the place before the upper seat where the bailiff sitteth ", provided in his will, proved in 1557, that accurate measures of one gallon, one pottle, one quart, and one pint be made in brass by the " stander of the Tower " and continually kept by the Bailiff of Lydd for his official use. He likewise bequeathed an estate of sixty-eight acres, then valued at about £600, the income of which should be distributed in equal portions for the uses of the chamber of the town, for the repair of the parish church, and for the maintenance of the poor of the community.4 Some years later, in 1574, Alexander Dence of Cranbrook, some of whose charities have already been mentioned, left one hundred marks for the better 1 The proportion of total charitable wealth given for these uses in the several counties is as follows : Bristol Buckinghamshire Hampshire Kent Lancashire 2 Vide ante, 27. 3 PP 1837, XXIII, 455 ,- Hasted, Kent, I, 483 ; Kentish Note Book, II (1892), 359. It may be noted that in 1674 a commission for charitable uses decreed that the property, then yielding £56 9s. p.a., was thenceforward to be employed for the relief of the poor. 4 K.A.O. : CCC 26/155, 1557 ; Misc. gen, et her., ser. 5, IV (1922), 71 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 483. 0/ 9-/1o0 8-80 10-92 4-59 1-22 London Norfolk Somerset Worcestershire Yorkshire 61 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 paving of the market place in that town, £100 in lands to provide a community Christmas dinner in the inns and taverns of the community for householders, meaning " not the poor nor the ritche ", and created a fund of £230 for the maintenance of roads in the vicinity of his town, which had benefited so greatly from the interesting and lively group of charities he left.1 And, finally, we should mention the bequest of Edward Barnes of Greenwich, who in 1641 left " unto the parliament of England now assembled at Westm' the summe of Lli. to be imployed and disposed for the good of the state ". There can be little doubt regarding the political sentiments of this testator.2 Helpful and heartening as the gifts made for the general needs of numerous Kentish communities may have been, the interest of most donors was throughout our period concentrated in this regard on the betterment of transport. The principal fines of communication to the Continent ran across the county, while Kent itself was an important agricultural and industrial community with a geographical situation which imposed serious needs for bridges, the maintenance of havens, and the protection of low-lying areas against tidal floods. In all, the considerable total of £7,936 15s., amounting to 3-15 per cent, of all Kentish charitable funds, was disposed in the course of our period for uses of this general kind. One of the most notable of these improvements, the building of the great bridge at Rochester, in point of fact had been completed in the late fourteenth century, while pious benefactors had provided in the course of the next generation a substantial endowment for its maintenance. But the bridge was in poor condition towards the close of the fifteenth century, when in 1489 Archbishop Warham appealed for gifts to carry forward repairs and to augment the endowment under promise of remission of sins. It is impossible to separate the later from the earlier benefactions with any comfortable certainty, but we have estimated with all too little supporting evidence that something like £2,000 of outright gifts and endowments were supplied at this time.3 We possess much more accurate information concerning a charitable trust created sometime prior to 1520, very possibly in 1511, for the maintenance of a stone bridge in the centre of Edenbridge. Scattered parcels of land with a total capital worth of about £100 were provided for the perpetual care of the structure. The trustees were local freeholders, who each year paid over the income to bridge wardens charged 1 Vide ante, 39, and post, 81. 2 Thorpe, Custumale, 57. But there is doubt concerning his identity. He was very possibly the Edward Barnes (or Baron) who in 1607 augmented his father's gift of £100 to the Mercers' Company for loans to young men of the company with a gift of £33 6s. 8d. (PP 1822, IX, 298). 3 Becker, M. J., Rochester Bridge (L., 1930), passim ; Smith, Rochester, 398-423 ; Harris, Kent, ii, 255-262. 62 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS with keeping the fabric in good repair. In 1594 the charity was reconstituted and new feoffees appointed, at which time the endowment was yielding approximately £4 p.a.1 A London merchant, James Wilford, who had purchased two manors in Cranbrook, stated in his will, proved in 1526, that he had built at his own charge a highway between Riverhill (Kent) and Northiam (Sussex) during his lifetime at a cost which cannot be estimated. By the terms of his will, which required certain distributions to be made by the Merchant Taylors' Company, to which he had given £433 6s. 8d. in 1514, Wilford revoked a chantry bequest of £7 p.a. and ordered this amount to be made available for the maintenance of his highway upon the request of any one of the three towns through which it ran, and with the further provision that income unexpended for this purpose in any one year should be laid out on other roads of the neighbourhood. Wilford's son, John, either carrying out his father's wishes or sharing his passion for road-building, excited the admiration of Lambarde for the great causeway which he built about about 1530 just outside Tonbridge on the London road.2 The largest single benefaction for municipal betterments was made in 1533 for the benefit of Faversham by a rich merchant adventurer and jurat of that town, Henry Hatch. . Hatch, in a particularly— indeed, a magnificently—complicated will, left extensive estates in Sussex and Kent to the mayor and jurats on trust after the death of his wife, subject to the securing of a licence in mortmain by the trustees, stipulating an extraordinary dispersal of the assets in the event the licence was not forthcoming. However, the licence was obtained by the town at a charge of £200. The properties evidently possessed a capital value of about £2,400 7s. at the time of Hatch's death. The will specified that one jurat and one commoner should be named by the mayor and jurats as receivers of the income and that an annual public report on outlays should be rendered before the city government and " four of the most honest and discreet commoners " of the town. During the first five years following the death of his widow, the testator instructed that the income should be distributed £1 p.a. to the feoffees, £40 p.a. for the repair of a lane and the road leading to the quay of 1 Arch. Cant., XXXI (1915), 202 ; PP 1908, LXXVIII, Kent, 67-68. 2 PCC 13 Porch 1526 ; Arch. Cant., XLVIII (1936), 29-37 ; PP 1826-27, X, 430 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 201 ; Beaven, Aldermen of London, II, 20 ; Furley, Weald of Kent, II, ii, 491 ; Lambarde, Perambulation, 383. Wilford's wife was a native of this region in which her husband, a rich merchant tailor, made his manorial purchase. Wilford was at various times master of his company, auditor, and Sheriff of London, The son, John, was in his turn an alderman of London and in 1544-1545 sheriff. Another son, Nicholas, represented the City in Parliament in 1542-1544. This stretch of highway was part of the main road from London to Rye. The causeway built by John Wilford formed part of the highway. 63 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 Faversham, £10 p.a. to the repair and maintenance of the common wells of the town, and 15s. p.a. to a monastery in Canterbury. During the following nine years the whole of the income was to be applied to the betterment and maintenance of the inlet (the Creek) extending for about three miles from the Swale to Faversham haven. Then in the next interval of six years the income was to be used for the repair, ornamentation, and betterment of the parish church, including the purchase of a new organ at a cost of £26 13s. 4d. and a new hearse-cloth for £15, and the residue for the building of a new jewel house for the church. After the first period of twenty years, the whole of the income was to be used for the maintenance of roads in and near Faversham, the care of the haven and inlet, and the refurbishing of the ornaments of Faversham church. This delightfully complicated will, creating as it did a charitable trust which could not become effective until the death of a widow who remarried and survived Hatch for more than forty years, was of course an invitation to the bitter litigation which in the Tudor period could be a form of private warfare. The first round at law lay between the widow and Hatch's heirs. The widow, now Lady Arncott, then attempted to set aside the will by unscrupulous methods, including the dangerous attempt to enroll a forged will. The town, having spent £200 already to obtain the licence in mortmain, gave battle manfully and bore further legal costs of upwards of £300, raised in part by direct taxation, until the doughty widow was at last defeated in Chancery. But Lady Arncott took her revenge by living, as Tudor widows often did, an unconscionable length of time, and it was 1574 before the estate came into the hands of the town and could be applied for the charitable uses for which it was intended. A portion of the property was sold for £400 to repay the legal costs that had been incurred, while the income on the remainder had been reduced over the preceding generation, with the result that the revenues available at the institution of the charity were only £66 13s. 4d. p.a. It is pleasant to note, however, that the properties, particularly a large holding of 313 acres in Sussex, were valuable and that under good and steady management by the feoffees the income was rapidly restored, having risen to £250 p.a. in 1774 and to a gross total of £694 13s. lOd. in 1863.1 The remainder of the substantial benefactions for the betterment of communications within the county must be much more briefly treated. Thus in 1567 a member of the gentry, John Tufton of Hothfield, left, in addition to an outright bequest of £30 to the poor and £3 8s. for sermons, the sum of £200 to be expended on the " amendmente of ffoule 1 K.A.O. : CCC 15/212, 1533 ; Jacob, Faversham, 131-134 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 358, 363 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 203 ; PP 1867-68, LII, i, Kent, 34-35 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, I I I (1919), 45-46. 64 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS wayes " in Kent and Sussex.1 A full generation later, John Rose, a mayor and merchant of Canterbury, who had some years earlier created by gift a substantial workhouse trust for his city, left a considerable sum for the deepening of the Stour in order to give the city direct access to the sea. His will, proved in 1592, recited that the donor had long had in mind an attempt to make the river navigable, but " it had pleased God to lay his loving and favourable visitation of sickness " on him, with the result that God would probably " call him to his mercy before he should see the performing thereof ". Rose accordingly left £300 to the mayor and commonalty of Canterbury on condition that it be spent within six years to make the Stour navigable for vessels of at least ten tons burthen.2 George Abbot, one of the most generously charitable of all the archbishops of Canterbury, built a useful and muchneeded conduit of stone for the city at an estimated cost of £400 during the late years of his life.3 At about the same time Sir John Fowle of Sandhurst left the residue of his estate, with a capital value of at least £80, the income of which he wished to be employed for the repairing of such roads in Sandhurst as might be decided upon by the trustees and surveyors.4 As we have observed, the total provided for the various kinds of municipal improvement, communications aside, was surprisingly slight in a county which dealt so richly and generously with all other charitable uses. This may well be explained by the fact that the interests of donors in the county were so persistently fastened upon other charitable needs and by the fact that Kent was, in terms of its internal development, even at the outset of our period one of the most mature and advanced of the counties of the realm. None the less, as we have seen, large and enduring public works had been undertaken 1 PCC 32 Stonard 1567 ; Cokayne, G. E., ed., Complete Baronetage (Exeter, 1900-1906, 5 vols.), I, 70 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 517. Tufton, originally of Northiam, Sussex, had been granted the manor of Hothfleld late in the reign of Henry VIII. He married Mary, daughter of Sir John Baker, Recorder of London. He was Sheriff of Kent in 1562. His son, Thomas, was created a baronet. 2 K.A.O. : CCC 37/22, 1591 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 139 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 282 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, V (1925), 331. In 1575 Rose, then mayor, had vested in trustees 15 acres of land and his own house at Wickhambreaux, with a total capital worth of about £140, the income to provide a stock of hemp and wool on which the indigent of the city might be gainfully employed. This endowment was ultimately lost, or more probably consumed. An attempt to deepen the Stour was authorized by an act of Parliament in 6 Henry VIII, but failed, as did Rose's venture. A more ambitious effort to open the river to boats of twelve tons burthen undertaken in the Jacobean period was likewise unsuccessful, as was another made in 1638. 3 PCC 85 Russell 1633 ; DNB. Abbot's great endowment of an almshouse in Guildford and his other charities are not included in this survey of Kentish benefactions, since they brought no benefit to the county and since the lands constituting the endowments lay outside the county. 4 PP 1837, XXIII , 592-593. Fowle's trust also provided an annuity of £1 10s. for poor relief and £2 10s. for the apprenticing of poor children. 65 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 as the result of the generosity of many benefactors, with the result that Kent was a better county in which to live and work as the aspirations of these donors were realized. D. Education. The benefactors of Kent were through the entire course of our period deeply interested in expanding and strengthening the educational resources with which the county was provided at the close of the Middle Ages. In all, the great total of £58,255 16s. was given for the various educational uses between 1480 and 1660, amounting to almost a quarter (23-14 per cent.) of the whole of the charitable funds of the county.1 This proportion was only slightly less than that given for the numerous religious needs of Kent (26-77 per cent.), but was of course dwarfed by the outpouring for the several forms of poor relief. Even during the decades prior to the Reformation substantial sums were provided for the educational needs of the shire, the total of £13,286 10s. given in this interval substantially exceeding the whole amount given for poor relief and amounting to about 18 per cent, of all benefactions made during these decades. This proportion rose slightly in the troubled Reformation era and then very sharply indeed during the Elizabethan age, when somewhat more than a fourth (25-38 per cent.) of all benefactions was designated for educational purposes. The great outpouring occurred in the early Stuart period, when £25,170 7s. was provided for the various educational needs, an amount accounting for 26-79 per cent, of all charities in the interval. I t will be observed, too, that during this one generation substantially more than 40 per cent. (43-21 per cent.) of the entire sum vested in education during our whole period was given by some scores of donors. Gifts for all purposes fell away steeply indeed during the period of political revolution, though it may be noted that the £6,111 10s. given for education in these decades represents somewhat more than 23 per cent, of the whole of the charitable funds then provided. By far the largest proportion of the benefactions made to education was given for the founding of grammar schools or for the augmentation of the endowments of existing schools. The very large total of £28,308 18s. was provided for these purposes, representing 11-24 per cent, of 1 Kent devoted approximately the same proportion of its charitable resources to educational needs as did most English counties, with the notable exception of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The proportions are as follows for the several counties : Bristol Buckinghamshire Hampshire Kent Lancashire % 21-33 21-26 24-84 23-14 41-79 London Norfolk Somerset Worcestershire Yorkshire 0/ /o 27-04 23-00 25-88 26-77 31-12 66 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS all charitable funds for the county, an amount far larger than that given for any other single charitable cause save, of course, outright poor relief and almshouse foundations. The concern of men of the county for the meagre educational facilities available was evident from the beginning of our period, the not inconsiderable total of £2,673 having been provided as school endowments in the two generations just prior to the Reformation. It is quite certain, in fact, that in this interval alone greater capital outlays were made available for grammarschool education than were accumulated in the whole course of the Middle Ages. The ferment of interest in the educational needs of the county spread during the two decades of the Reformation, the £2,037 8s. given for schools in this brief period representing a steeply heightened curve of giving. In the course of the Elizabethan age not less than £800 was given in any one decade and the total of £7,397 13s. provided during this generation made possible the founding of at least nine schools within the county and two in other parts of the realm. But the climax was to come in the next generation, when the great total of £12,348 7s. was given for the founding of new schools and, as importantly, for the strengthening of existing institutions. There was, of course, a sharp falling off in these foundations during the period of the Civil War, but the £3,852 10s. given during these years was sufficient to found several additional schools and to bring to an almost precocious maturity what was by 1660 an excellent and well-financed structure of popular education. Almost the whole of this structure of education was the contribution and achievement of the period under examination, since in Kent, as in other counties, the claims of medieval antiquity do not often bear close examination. There were probably not more than four schools to which lay pupils were admitted in Kent in 1480, it being particularly noteworthy that only two of these were chantry foundations, despite the very large number of these endowments scattered all over the county. Moreover, of these four schools, three were in effect to be wholly re-established or endowed, while the remaining institution (Higham) slipped into complete obscurity and was presumably abandoned. The educational resources of the county were, then, very weak at the outset of our period, being with the exception of Canterbury of only slight consequence even in local terms. The school at Canterbury was undoubtedly old, though there is only scanty documentary evidence of its work or of its institutional existence before 1259, when its master is mentioned in an official communication. From that time forward the records are sufficiently continuous to suggest that the school prospered under the direct patronage of successive archbishops, though towards the close of the fifteenth century it appears that the school house was in a ruinous 67 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 state and that there was some apprehension lest another school might be opened in the city.1 The fact is that there is no documentary reference of any kind to the school from this time forward to the Reformation, and it seems unlikely that it could have been of any great consequence without having left some mark over a period of a full half-century on the history of the times and of the city. The school was in any event unendowed, without any clearly defined constitution, and it was certainly decaying when in 1541 it was completely reorganized and in effect refounded by Henry VIII as part of the collegiate body with which the King replaced the dispossessed monks. Under the new constitution the King's School was to have, by the appointment of the Dean and Chapter, a master " learned in the Latin and Greek languages and of good character and pious life ", as well as a second master proficient in Latin and competent in the teaching of the rudiments of grammar. There were to be admitted to the foundation fifty " poor boys, both destitute of the help of friends, and endowed with minds apt for learning ". Scholars might be chosen between the ages of nine and fourteen and might remain for not more than five years or until they had become proficient in the reading and speaking of the Latin language. Cranmer, who probably framed this constitution, shortly afterwards most eloquently insisted that able boys of all classes, even the " plowman's son ", must be admitted if they could give evidence of high ability and that no fees of any kind could be laid against the King's fifty scholars. An endowment was provided from the cathedral revenues which supplied each scholar with the generous stipend of £4 p.a., as well as £20 p.a. for the master and £10 p.a. for the lower master.2 This, if we may convert the sums into a capital value, suggests an endowment of the order of £4,600 for the school and made it at the time of its foundation probably the richest in the realm. At the same time, it should be observed, this great sum has not been regarded as part of the endowments given during our period, for it was in effect a transfer to secular uses, by royal decree, of properties gained from the expropriation of monastic foundations. The earliest endowed school in Kent was at Sevenoaks, having been founded in 1432 under the terms of the will of a great London grocer, William Sevenoaks. This benefactor was evidently strongly secular in his views on education, since his will provided for the founding of a grammar school in his native town to be taught by a master who must be a bachelor of arts and competent in the science of grammar, but " b y no means in holy orders ". An endowment of approximately 1 Prior Sellyng to Archbishop Bourchier, quoted in Woodruff, C. E., and H. J. Cape, Schola Regia Cantuariensis (L., 1908), 36. 2 Woodruff, King's School, 1-59. 68 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS £200 was provided for the wages of the master and the care of the school, it being further stipulated that all boys from the neighbourhood who presented themselves for instruction should be taught without any fees being required.1 This school, so well and carefully founded, was to prosper as successive patrons strengthened its endowments. In or about 1511 the first substantial gift was received when William Pett, Richard Pett, Richard Blackboy, and probably others, all of 3reoman status, conveyed in trust lands with an estimated value of £100, to be used for the joint support of the grammar school and an almshouse.2 One of its former students, John Potkine, who became a London merchant, by his will in 1545, " of his godly zeal towards the better maintenance " of the school, charged certain of his London properties with an annuity of £9.3 Still another native of the town who had settled in London, Anthony Pope, in 1571 left the school London properties with a capital value of at least £200 as an augmentation of its endowment and " towards the maintenance of God's glory, and the erudition and bringing up of the poor scholars there in virtuous -discipline, godly learning, and good and civil manners ". A few years later another substantial bequest was received from a member of the local gentry, John Porter, who in 1578 left a rent-charge of £10 p.a. as an addition to the school's stock, the amount to be employed as an augmentation of the salary of the master and usher, which suggests that the grammar school had by this date attained a considerable size and importance. The endowment by this date must have been of the order of £1,030, not taking into account probable increases in value, and it seems that not many years later the school numbered upwards of sixty students.4 There was a chantry school at Higham at the time of the Reformation, founded at an uncertain date, but fragmentary evidence would suggest somewhat before the beginning of our period. The Chantry Commissioners reported that the foundation was held by St. John's College, Cambridge, and possessed in 1548 endowments with an annual value of £6 13s. 4d. The stipendiary priest, then thirty-eight years of age and " of honest learning and conversacon ", was required by the terms of the endowment to say prayers within the chapel and to teach 1 PCC 16 Luffenham 1432 ; Leach, A. F., The Schools of Medieval England (L., 1915), 244. This foundation was the first of the many grammar schools to be founded by London merchants during the next two hundred and fifty years. 2 K.A.O. : CCC 10/147, 1611 (Blackboy) ; PCC 30 Fetiplace 1513 (R. Pett) ; PP 1819, X-A, 141, App., 220. The circumstances surrounding this gift arc most uncertain. Ordinarily one would suppose that these were feoffees creating a new trusteeship, but that does not seem to be the case. 3 PCC 2 Alen 1545 ; PP 1819, X-A, 141. Hasted (Kent, III, 98) has the history of the school badly confused. 4 PCC 49 Holney 1571 (Pope) ; PP 1819, X-A, 141, App., 220-221. Porter also left £2 p.a. to the poor of Seal, where his estates wore situated. 69 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 the children of the community without charge. The foundation was evidently not suppressed, but the endowment may have been too small or the educational services too slight to have attracted the support necessary for survival in the new world of the mid-sixteenth century. We have, in any event, found no evidence to suggest that this school did survive.1 The last of the school foundations certainly made prior to 1480 was involved in Archbishop Kemp's creation of the College of Wye, for which he received royal licence in 1432 but did not carry forward until 1448. This foundation, which received rich endowments not only from the founder but from Edward IV, was by the terms of the constitution to include a " maister of grammar " who should " frely teche withoutyn any thing takyng " all who presented themselves to him for instruction. The master was to be a graduate of a university, was to rank after the provost, and was encouraged to take students outside the foundation as well as those regularly in the school. The endowments of the college included the revenues of Newington next Hythe, Brenzett,and Boughton Aluph, livings from which apparently the annual stipend of the schoolmaster was to be paid. The college was of course expropriated at the time of the Reformation, but the sale of the properties in 1545 to Walter Bucler, the Queen's secretary, was subject to an understanding that he should pay £13 6s. 8d. p.a. for the maintenance of a sufficient schoolmaster in Wye and the stipend of a curate. Bucler failed to abide by these conditions of purchase, with the result that the properties were resumed by the Crown under Elizabeth, to be regranted by Charles I in 1627 on condition of an annual payment of £16 to the schoolmaster of Wye and £50 to the chaplain of that place.2 At the advent of our period, then, there appear to have been four schools in scattered places in Kent. The most renowned of these schools, that at Canterbury, was unendowed and was at this date at a low ebb in its history. Those at Wye and Higham functioned as ancillary enterprises to the religious foundations of which they were part. The school at Sevenoaks, already almost a half-century old, was well and securely established as a lay foundation which was shortly to command the financial support of its own former members and of the community which it served. These four institutions were endowed with not much more than £600 of funds, if we may capitalize the stipends which the Reformation settlement assigned to them two generations later. They constituted a very slender basis for the great 1 Kent Records, XII (1936), 150-151 ; Leach, Schools of Medieval England, 299. 2 VCH, Kent, II, 235 ; Leach, Schools of Medieval England, 319 ; Ducarel, A. C, Repertory of Endowments in Canterbury and Rochester (L., 1782), 126-127 ; PP 1819, X-B, 46 ; Mackie, S. J., Folkestone (Folkestone, 1883), 248 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 357, VIII, 208. 70 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS charitable movement of the next two centuries which was so richly and adequately to endow secondary education in Kent. There were to be two substantial foundations made in Kent in the course of the period preceding the Reformation. The first was established at Tenterden by the concerted efforts of several men. The initial gift to the school was made by a member of the ancient gentle family of Hayman, probably about 1510 and very possibly by Peter Hayman, who acquired the manors of Somerfield and Wilmington by marriage. It is all but certain that Hayman gave no endowment or building, his generosity being confined to the grant of the premises on which the school was shortly to be built.1 The vicar of Tenterden at this time (1494-1512) was one Peter Marshall, who evidently interested his younger brother, William, in the needs of the community. William Marshall was also a priest, who had enjoyed the favour of Archbishop Morton as well as of lay patrons and whose pluralities enabled him to maintain residences in Warehorne, Appledore, Canterbury, and London, where he died in 1523. Marshall, who left a total of £456 14s. to various charitable causes, bequeathed an endowment of £10 p.a. out of messuages and twelve acres of land for the support of the school at Tenterden, as well as £10 towards the " purchasing bilding or making of a convenient house " for a chantry priest to live in, " and to teche his scolers accordingly". Marshall likewise left a silver chalice "to be made out of my silver plate ", to what was clearly a chantry foundation at Tenterden with a connected grammar school. When the Chantry Commissioners made their report just a generation later, it appeared that the chantry priest had £10 10s. p.a. " as well for celebrating divine service in the church, as for teaching a grammar school ". The Commissioners accordingly ordered the school continued with the chantry revenues, " forasmuch as it appeareth that a grammer scole hath beene heretofore continually kept ", and ordered that the then schoolmaster, John Forset, should have £10 yearly as his stipend.2 That the school enjoyed local support is suggested by the bequest in 1525 of George Strekenbold of Tenterden, who left £1 towards the building of a schoolhouse on condition that it be completed 1 PP 1819, X-A, 148 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 214, VIII, 308. The family was very old and held estates in Kent, Essex, and London. One of its later members, Sir Peter (1580-1641), was an active parliamentary opponent of the Crown. 2 K.A.O. : CCC 12/158, 1519 (Peter Marshall) ; PCC 18 Bodfelde 1523 (William Marshall) ; PP 1819, X-A, 148 ; Kent Records, XII (1936), 304-306 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 214 ; Arch. Cant., XLIV (1932), 129-146 ; Leach, A. F., English Schools at the Reformation (L., 1896), ii, 115, Schools of Medieval England, 299, 326. William Marshall's other benefactions included £50 to the Church of Holy Trinity Minories, London, for repairs and general uses ; £36 for prayers for a period of twelve years ; £10 to prisoners in Canterbury, London, and Southwark ; £20 for vestments at Warehorne and £4 for Tenterden ; £40 for the building of a water conduit at Appledore ; £23 7s. in doles to the poor ; £2 to poor scholars at Oxford ; and his books to Oxford and the Friars Minor of Greenwich. 71 8 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 within a term of seven years, as well as a gift of £10 to be used for repairs on the parish church.1 Very shortly afterwards a substantial foundation was made at Faversham by John Cole, a royal chaplain and the Warden of All Souls. Cole in 1527 conveyed to the Abbot of Faversham 317 acres of land with a then annual value of £14 10s. for the founding of a school within the monastery precincts for the novices and " all other children that be disposed to learn the science of grammar ". With the revenues provided under the deed of gift a schoolmaster was to be appointed with a stipend of £10 p.a. and £1 for his gown, while the remainder was to be employed for his meat and drink and for necessary repairs on the schoolhouse and the master's chamber within the monastery.2 Cole must have understood that he was taking a calculated risk in vesting so large and so generous a foundation in an abbey which since 1499 had been persistently mismanaged by a now tottering abbot, John Sheppey, against whom Archbishop Warham had laid a blistering indictment after a visitation in 1511, and who, in his correspondence with Cromwell many years later (1536), seemed to be incompetent in mind as well as in body.3 There is in fact every reason to believe that the school had not more than begun its functioning when expropriation overtook the abbey, a petition to the Crown from the inhabitants of Faversham for the endowment of the school having been denied. After a lapse of a generation another petition was in 1574 laid before Queen Elizabeth, who had recently stopped for two nights in the town, for the reinstitution of the school and the restoration of such of its endowments as remained in the Crown. The Queen granted the request in 1576, vesting the trusteeship in the mayor, jurats, and commonalty. That portion of the endowments remaining in royal hands, which was by this date more valuable than the whole of Cole's original grant, was vested in the trustees.4 The site for the new school was provided, probably in that year, by William Saker, a merchant of the town who was later to be its mayor, but the building was not completed until 1587, at a cost of £30, which was raised by a local tax imposed by the town authorities.5 1 K.A.O. : PRC, A. 16/269, 1525 ; Arch. Cant., XLIV (1932), 131 ; Kent Records, XI I (1935), 305. 2 PCC 33 Hogen 1535 ; Jacob, Faversham, 53 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 337-355 ; Arch. Cant., XLVII (1935), 189-190 ; Lewis, John, Abbey and Church of Faversham (L., 1727), 17. 3 Cant. Archiepis. Reg. Warham, fol. 40b ; VCH, Kent, II, 139-140. 4 Arch. Cant., XLVII (1935), 190 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 355-357 ; Jacob, Faversham, 53-57 ,- PP 1819, X-A, 104. 6 PCC 46 Dixy 1594 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 208-209 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 358 ; Arch. Cant., XX (1893), 210n., XLVII (1935), 191. Saker was jurat of the town in 1587 and its mayor in 1590. A strong Puritan, he left £10 p.a. for the relief of the poor of Faversham and £5 p.a. to the city authorities, as trustees, to ensure a weekly sermon " to be read and preached " in the parish church forever. 72 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS At Rochester, where there may well have been a priory school of some sort during much of the Middle Ages, a well-constituted royal grammar school was founded in 1542 by Henry VIII after the dissolution of the priory. The foundation was to consist of twenty scholars and a master qualified to teach grammar. From these youths four scholars were to be appointed to the universities on stipends of £5 p.a., the scholars at the time of election to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty. The endowment provided, subject to the control of the dean and chapter of the new cathedral church, seems to have been of the order of £800.1 The next considerable benefaction received by the school was under the will of Robert Gunsley, a clergyman whose great foundation for the relief of the poor of Rochester and Maidstone has already been noted. Gunsley left an endowment of £60 p.a. to the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford, in 1618, half being for the benefit of the Rochester Grammar School and half for Maidstone. Four scholars, all of whom must be natives of Kent, were to be chosen in these two schools and maintained there until fully ready for the university, when they should be supported with generous stipends of £15 p.a. each.2 We may conclude, then, that there were in all six schools in Kent in 1540, Rochester having been added as an incident in the great convulsion which we call the Henrician Reformation. These schools possessed in 1540 endowments with a roughly estimated capital value of £1,141, to which the Crown was to add by fiat from older charitable funds endowments of perhaps £800 for the support of Rochester. It was upon this slender foundation that Elizabethan donors were to build the schools of that generation with an infinitely greater generosity and with a more certain sense of purpose. As we shall note, eleven new schools were to be founded in the course of the Queen's reign and, almost as importantly, life-giving transfusions of capital were to be provided for several of the older and ill-provided institutions. The earliest of the Elizabethan foundations, at Tonbridge, is almost classically typical of those that were to follow and exhibits quite perfectly the aspirations and the purposes of the new age. In 1525 Wolsey proposed the foundation of a grammar school for forty boys on the site of the suppressed priory of Tonbridge, whose revenues he had appropriated to his new college at Oxford ; exhibitions at the college were also to be part of the scheme. Archbishop Warham, delegated in June of that year to find out the sentiments of the townspeople, reported that " a good multitude of the saide towne . . . thinke it more expedient to have the continuation of the said monastery . . . thanne 1 Hasted, Kent, IV, 93-97 ; Leach, Sclwols of Medieval England, 312 ; [Denne, Samuel], History of Rochester (Rochester, 1772), 198. 2 Vide ante, 23. 73 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 to have a grammer scole . . . thinhabitantes . . . had levyr to have the said place not suppressed..." Nothing came of the Cardinal's proposal, and with his fall both monastery and school were lost, the priory and its possessions falling to the Crown.1 It remained for a great London merchant and lord mayor, Sir Andrew Judd, a native of the town, to constitute the school. Judd had begun the erection of his school, which he was shortly and richly to endow, in 1553, building it of Kentish sandstone so sturdily and well that it was to be used for somewhat more than three centuries ; his will makes it clear that it was completed before 1558. Judd named as his trustees his own company, the Skinners, vesting in them properties in London and in nearby suburban areas which, when they were settled as endowment, possessed a capital worth of about £1,786. The master was to be paid £20 p.a. and the usher £8 p.a. as a first charge on the revenues. The Company was requested to send its master and warden once a year " to ride to visit the said school " to see that the statutes were observed and that its scholars kept themselves " virtuous and studious", for which the Skinners were to have £10 p.a. for their pains. Judd himself drew up the constitution of the school and named the first master. No charges for tuition might be imposed ; twenty boarding students might be admitted from the surrounding countryside. The principal interest of the founder was in providing full and excellent instruction for local boys in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The master was enjoined to conduct all classes in the Latin tongue, and Judd's injunctions required the appointment of a master of the highest possible scholastic excellence.2 1 L. and P., Hen. VIII, IV, i, 1459, 1470, 1471 ; Arch. Cant., I (1858), 31-33 ; VCH, Kent, II, 168. 2 PCC 58 Noodes, 54 Welles 1558 ; PP 1819, X-A, 149, App., 233 ; PP 1823, VIII, 358 ; PP 1884, XXXIX, iv, 327 ; Rivington, Septimus, Tonbridge School (L., 1925), passim ; Vere-Hodge, H. S., Sir Andrew Judde (Tonbridge, n.d.), passim ; Beaven, Aldermen of London, II, 30 ; Lambert, J. J., ed., Records of the Skinners of London (L., 1934), 177. The London properties, particularly the Sandhills estate in St. Pancras, bought by Judd for £346 6s. 8d., proved to be enormously valuable. The gross income of the school in 1924 was £31,784, of which £25,534 was derived from Sandhills. Judd was the son of John Judd (d. 1493), a member of a family long resident in Kent and one which rose during his lifetime into the lower ranges of the gentry. Judd was apprenticed to a London skinner in 1509, but by 1517, when his term of training was finished, he was already trading in wool to Calais as a merchant of the staple, while in 1520 he was importing oil on his own account. In 1523 he married the daughter of a wealthy skinner who had been lord mayor in 1518. He became first warden of his company in 1531 and two years later its master, by which time he was referred to as a " stapuller of reputacion " (L. and P., Hen. VIII, Addenda, I, i, 917). In 1534 he, with his brother John, was assessed for the subsidy at £100, which placed him by this date among the richer merchants of the city. In 1543 he purchased for £669 lis. 4£d. confiscated monastic property in Suffolk and Leicestershire, disposing of the Suffolk properties within a month. In 1541 he became an alderman and in 1544 was elected sheriff. By (Footnote 2 continued at foot of page 75) 74 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Judd had intended to complete the purchase of the endowment for his school and to convey it directly to the Skinners' Company before his death, but his wishes were carried out by a friend and trustee, Henry Fisher, also a member of the company. Fisher added by gift in 1560 certain London properties then worth £6 p.a., for the founding of an exhibition at Brasenose College, Oxford, for a scholar to be chosen from the Tonbridge School, as well as providing £1 p.a. for two sermons at which " a learned and godly preacher ", appointed by the master and wardens, should exhort the Skinners' Company " to unity and concord and to be favourable maintainers of the said grammar school ".1 Still another of Judd's London friends and associates, Sir Thomas White, endowed one of the scholarships on his foundation at St. John's College, Oxford, for a student from Tonbridge, " in respect of great love we did bear Andrew Judd . . . builder of the grammar school there ",2 But the great second benefactor of the school was the famous London merchant and entrepreneur, Sir Thomas Smith, the son of Customer Smith and the grandson of Sir Andrew Judd. Smith, who was prominently concerned with all leading mercantile and colonial ventures of his day, was for many years the Treasurer of the Virginia Company. As early as 1619 he had notified the Skinners' Company of his intention to augment the income provided under his grandfather's legacy by adding £10 p.a. to the salary of the master and £5 p.a. to the salary of the usher at Tonbridge, as well as giving £10 p.a. to a scholar from the school to be appointed in either of the universities. 1 PP 1819, X-A, 150 ; PP 1823, VI I I , 360 ; Rivington, Tonbridge School 83 ; Fuller, Thomas (P. A. Nuttall, ed.), History of the Worthies of England (L., 1840, 3 vols.), II, 156. The company was much troubled by suits laid against it by Fisher's son, Andrew, who introduced forged documents claiming that the endowment of the school was intended for a period of sixty years and was then to fall in to him as a legacy. An Act of Parliament (1572) disposed of this claim, but still another (1589) was required finally to quiet this apparently unscrupulous man. Thomas Fuller says that the Skinners expended £4,000 at law before all claimants were quieted. 2 Rivington, Tonbridge School, 38-40. (Continuation of footnote 2 from page 74) this date his mercantile activities were widespread and he was apparently dealing in wool, alum, lead, and possibly grain. Judd was made Lord Mayor in 1550, his term of office being troubled by scarcity, uncertain trade because of the devaluation of the coinage, and still another outbreak of the sweating sickness. In the same year he married again, this being his third wife, the widow of a skinner, who brought with her a fortune of at least £6,000 (Wriothesley, Charles, A Chronicle of England, 14S5-15S9 [L., 1875, 1877, 2 vols.], I I , 46). Probably in the next year (1551) he informed the Skinners' Company of his desire to make them trustees of London real property worth £20 3s. 4d. p.a. to be distributed to " six folk inhabiting in certain six almshouses erected by the said Sir Andrew Judde ", the almspeople to have in all £10 8s. p.a. and the residue to be employed for the maintenance of the property and the almshouses. 75 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 These payments were made each year by Smith until his death in 1625, when the Skinners' Company was vested with properties sufficient to maintain the augmentations he had made to the salaries of the teachers in the school, as well as an annuity of £6 13s. 4d. to the company for its pains in administering the trust. Smith added by bequest capital with a then value of £1,200 for the support of six scholars in the universities for the benefit of students from the school, as well as settling the great sum of £1,420 for the distribution of weekly bread rations in the parishes of Tonbridge, Speldhurst, Otford, Sutton-at-Hone, and Darenth and providing from what proved to be a sufficient residue an additional payment of £10 p.a. to Tonbridge Grammar School and £30 p.a. more for the poor of the six Kentish parishes favoured under his wffi.1 These great successive benefactions, almost the whole of which were derived from London and all of which may be attributed directly to the power of the example of that remarkable merchant, Andrew Judd, had in the course of a half-century made Tonbridge one of the most heavily endowed schools in England. Including, as we should, the numerous exhibitions, capital totalling at least £3,739 had been poured into this notable foundation by men of large and daring vision who knew what they wanted and who possessed the experience and the knowledge required to build this institution for the enduring benefit of a whole community. Men like Judd and his grandson were in fact carving out by their great charities a new ethic and a quite new sense of social responsibility which may well be the greatest of all the contributions of the Puritanism which they came to exemplify. We have the sense of this in the sermon of the great Puritan divine, Thomas Gataker, who, in his visitation sermon at Tonbridge in 1620, when Smith's first annual support of the school had been announced, spoke thus to Smith, who was in the congregation : " The schoole was first erected and endowed by your worships ancestor. And you have worthily built upon his foundation, and added liberally to his gift. So that through your munificence it is very likely to flourish, and not to come behind some of those that be of chiefe note. Your bounty herein, and in other workes of the like nature, is the rather to be regarded, for that you doe not (as the manner is of the most, unwilling to part with ought, till they must needs leave all ;) defer wholly your well-doing to your deaths-bed, or your dying day ; but bend your selfe thereunto, while you may yet surviving your owne donation, your selfe see things setled in a due course, and receive comfort by view of the fruit and benefit that may thereby redound both to church and common-weale ".2 1 Vide Jordan, Charities of London, 116, 342, for a full discussion of the charities of this remarkable and munificent man. Smith's philanthropies totalled £4,695, of which £3,440 was designated for Kent. 2 Gataker, Thomas, Gertaine Sermons (L., 1637), " Davids instructor ", dedic. 76 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Judd's great benefaction to his native county was rivalled by that of still another native of Kent who had become a renowned merchant in London. William Lambe, a clothworker, was born of humble parentage at Sutton Valence. Having made a great fortune in trade, he devoted the closing years of his life to the perfecting of charitable plans for the benefit of London, Kent, Suffolk, and Shropshire, on which he was to lay out by gift and bequest the great sum of £5,695.x Among these charitable interests was the endowment of a free grammar school at Maidstone and one at his birthplace in nearby Sutton Valence. As early as 1550 the burghers of Maidstone had wished to found a grammar school, in that year securing a charter empowering them to erect a school and to hold lands worth £10 p.a. for its support. In consideration of the sum of £205 4s., a house and certain other properties of a recently expropriated fraternity were purchased by local subscription, as the initial endowment for the projected institution. There is, however, no certain evidence that the school was founded much before 1561, when Archbishop Parker's visitation mentions a school for whose administration the town government was responsible and whose annual income of £9 6s. 8d. was not quite sufficient to pay the stipend of £10 p.a. to the master. The limited endowment of the school was greatly strengthened in 1574 when William Lambe vested a rent-charge of £10 p.a., the title of which was to be conveyed to the town on his death, with the stipulation that an usher be employed at £6 13s. 4d. p.a. and that the salary of the master be increased to £13 6s. 8d. p.a.2 We have observed that the school was further and certainly greatly assisted in 1618 by the considerable benefaction of Robert Gunsley, providing scholarships for its former members at Oxford on even terms with nominees from the Rochester Grammar School.3 An even more substantial augmentation of the resources came in 1649 under the will of a physician, John Davy, who left the school lands with a capital worth of £400, almost doubling its endowment and establishing the foundation as one of the well-endowed schools of the county.4 But Lambe's greater interest was in the founding of the grammar 1 Fuller comment on Lambe's career and charities will be found in Jordan, Charities of London, 99, 142, 177, 204, 228, 384. 2 PP 1819, X-A, 127 ; Records of Maidstone, 29, 54 ; Russell, Maidstone, 173. 8 Vide ante 23 73 4 PCC 85 Fairfax 1649 ; PP 1819, X-A, 128 j Records of Maidstone, 116-117, 121 ; Newton, William, History of Maidstone (L., 1741), 86 ; Alum, cantab., I, ii, 14. A native of Norwich, Davy had been educated at Cambridge and had been licensed as a doctor in 1609. He settled in Maidstone some little time prior to 1645, when the town records suggest that " Mr. John Davy, phisitian, useth the trade or mistery of an appothecary within this towne, and hath for many yeares last past soe done to the detriment of other the inhabitantes of the like mistery ". The matter was settled when Davy paid what amounted to a licence fee of £10, the town authorities then ordering that " Mr. Davy shall and may continue his imployment as hee now doth at his pleasure with his owne appothecary in his house for the particuler practice of the said Mr. Davy ". 77 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 school in the village of Sutton Valence. In 1576 he secured a charter for the founding of " The Free Grammar School of William Lambe " for the education of boys and youths in grammar, with the provision that the master and warden of the Cloth workers' Company should serve the school as governors and trustees on his death. Lambe built the school at an estimated cost of £200 and shortly afterwards vested in his company a rent-charge of £30 p.a. on lands in Kent for its endowment and for the payment of stipends of £20 to the master and £10 to the usher. These funds were subsequently augmented by the gift of property then worth £10 p.a., from which the Cloth workers were to receive £4 for an annual visitation of the school. At about the same time, as we have seen, Lambe built well-endowed almshouses in Sutton Valence.1 In the early sixteenth century there had been a chantry school at Sandwich for at least a brief season, but this prosperous and important town had no grammar school until 1563, when Sir Roger Manwood, a member of a prominent merchant family of that place, interested himself in the need. Manwood, whose later provision for a heavily endowed almshouse has already been noted,2 was encouraged by his friend Archbishop Parker, who assisted in securing the royal licence and who rode over on a particularly rainy morning from his house at Bekesbourne to inspect the site. Manwood committed himself to the ultimate endowment of the school and assisted personally in raising £286 7s. 2d. by local subscription as the first capital for the foundation.3 The great and widespread interest in the proposal is demonstrated by the fact that 225 persons made voluntary contributions, the largest gift being £20 from Simon Lynch, one of the jurats, and the more typical being the £9 9s. 6d. given by twenty persons in the first ward, or an average of 9s. 4d. from each subscriber. By deeds executed in 1566 and in 1570 Manwood granted to the mayor and jurats of Sandwich as governors of his school lands then possessing an estimated capital worth of £440 as further endowment. His continuing interest in the institution is evidenced by the will of Joan Trappes, a London widow, who named him as executor of her estate and who in 1563 bequeathed to Lincoln College, Oxford, lands worth £11 6s. 8d. p.a. for four scholars, of whom two should be nominated by the governors of Sandwich School.4 In 1570 Manwood's own brother, Thomas, a 1 PCC 19 Arundell 1580 ; PP 1819, X-A, 147, App., 228 ; PP 1822, IX, 219 ; DNB. Vide ante, 40. 2 Vide ante, 42. 3 Baker, Oscar. History of the antiquities of Sandwich (L., 1848), 81 ; Boys, Sandwich, 199. 4 In 1581 a second distribution was made under this will by which four scholarships were established in Caius College, Cambridge, with a then value of £11 6s. 8d. p.a. for the benefit of as many scholars from the Sandwich School (Boys, Sandwich, 202). Vide post, 91 - 92, for a fuller discussion of the Trappes scholarships. 78 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS former mayor, subscribed £10 p.a. to the endowment, which he apparently paid out of income during his lifetime. By will he settled lands worth £200 to fund the endowment " for the better maintenance and sustentation " of the school.1 A local jurat and merchant, Thomas Thompson, bequeathed property of a value of about £8 p.a. to the endowment of the institution in 1570, with the provision that the stipends of the master and usher be increased.2 In 1580 Manwood, who had until then managed almost every detail of the school's existence, drew up statutes for its further governance that it might " perpetually . . . endure and remaine for the bringing upp of yowth in vertewe and learnynge ". He desired the master to be chosen if possible from Lincoln College and to be of the degree of master of arts, while the usher should be appointed by the master. The master should receive £20 p.a. for his stipend and the usher £10 p.a. All students drawn from Sandwich were to be taught without charge, while scholars from other towns were to be assessed according to " the childe and habilitie of his parentes ", as should be determined by the mayor and jurats. The master and usher were permitted to offer board and lodging to eighteen such outside students. A sternly classical curriculum was laid out in detail, with, however, the injunction that in the founder's view " during a schollers remayninge in the grammer schole, he should learne but a fewe bookes in lattin, and in greek correspondent to them, and not to be suffered to rove in many awcthors, but that fewe should be learned most perfectlie, and then he maie after with better judgement reade as many as he lyste ".3 Manwood's interest in later life turned to the founding of his almshouse at Hackington, and no further assistance was provided for the school under the terms of his will proved in 1592. In 1640, however, Edmund Parbo, a London lawyer who had settled in Sandwich, left an annuity of £4 as an augmentation of the master's salary and of £5 to Lincoln College, Oxford, for the increase of the stipends of the scholars sent there from Sandwich School, though this bequest seems never to have been incorporated into the endowment of the school.4 1 PCC 32 Lyon 1570 ; PP 1819, X-A, 213 ; Boys, Sandwich, 201-202, 842. Thomas Manwood and his brother John were the principal local supporters of the school founded by their brother. 2 PCC2Holney 1570 ; PP 1819, X-A, 137, 213 ; Boys, Sandwich, 206, 208, 223, 252. All traces of this estate, of which Sir Roger was executor, have been lost, but it seems probable that it became merged in the general endowment of the school. 3 For a full acoount of the statutes, vide Boys, Sandwich, 222-232. 4 K.A.O. : PRO, A. 1484 (70/130), 1640 ; PP 1819, X-A, 138 ; Boys.SnHrfit-ic/i, 204-206, 251-252. The bequests seem to have been withheld by the heirs. Parbo also left £1 p.a. for the annual entertainment of the mayor and jurats, £39 6s. for the relief of the poor of the town, £20 towards the building of St. Peter's steeple, £10 for new pipes for the town's water supply, and £10 for a loan fund for linen and woollen drapers and tailors. 79 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 The school at Biddenden was founded by a gentle family of the community, the Maynes, who had been seated there as lords of the manor since the reign of Edward III. It is possible that a school was begun in the town by William Mayne in 1522, but if so neither building nor endowment survived when in 1566 John Mayne by will provided the grounds and approximately £100 for the building of a suitable schoolhouse. He named twenty substantial parishioners as trustees and vested in them rents with a capital value of £400 which were to be employed for the payment of a salary of £13 6s. 8d. to a master and £6 13s. 4d. to an usher. The curriculum was to be that appropriate to a grammar school, the master being enjoined to speak only Latin to his students, while tuition was to remain free for the youth of the parish. At the same time, provision was made for the reception of twelve boarding students from the surrounding countryside, who were to be charged no more than modest and appropriate fees.1 At Cranbrook, as at Maidstone and several other Kentish communities, the founding and endowment of a school required many years before the aspirations of the original benefactor could be carried into full effect. In 1518 John Blewbury, Yeoman of the King's Armoury, died leaving his " chief mansion place " to his wife during her lifetime and then to the unborn child of his daughter " yf it be a man childe ". If, as was apparently to be the case, his grandchild was a girl, Blewbury left his mansion house and the residue of his lands to William Lynch, as executor, " to founde a frescole howse for all the pour children of the towne of Cranbroke " on the death of his widow.2 William Lynch died in 1539,3 presumably before Blewbury's widow, leaving as his heir a son, Simon Lynch, to whom the Blewbury bequest passed at an uncertain date. In 1564 Lynch conveyed to trustees for the endowment of the school certain houses and 160 acres of lands, most of which, it seems certain, had originally been part of the Blewbury bequest. A decade later, in 1576, the school was at last founded as a free grammar school whose administration, under the terms of the letters patent, was vested in the vicar of the parish and from six to twelve freeholders of the community. Lynch, who though a native of Cranbrook was a London grocer, in 1577 by deed conveyed land in 1 PCC 26 Crymes 1566 ; PP 1819, X-A, 86 ; PP 1908, LXXVIII, 16 ; Kilburne, Richard, A Topographic of Kent (L., 1659), 27 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 131, 139, 210 ; Harleian MSS., 368, 15. 3 PCC 6 Ayloffe 1517 ; Arch. Cant., XXXVI (1923), 127. Blewbury was living in Cranbrook in 1507 and was probably one of several of Henry VII's servants exempted from Henry VIII's general pardon in 1509. He was imprisoned for a short time " for misdemeanours in the late reign ", but won back favour, since his name appears as " Clerke of the King's Armoury " at Greenwich from 1511 to 1513. He was likewise employed as an agent for the purchase of military supplies in Antwerp in 1511. 3 PCC 34 Dyngeley 1539. 80 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Cranbrook, valued at £44, which it seems reasonably certain was employed by the trustees as the site of the school. The early financial history of the institution is difficult to reconstruct, but it is likely that the endowments available to it in 1580 were of the order of £900 capital value.1 The classical curriculum proposed for the new grammar school apparently did not seem to at least one inhabitant of Cranbrook sufficient for the whole of the educational needs of the community. We have already commented on the substantial and certainly imaginative provisions made by Alexander Dence in 1574 for an almshouse in the parish as well as for the furtherance of various interesting municipal improvements. At the same time, Dence arranged for the perpetuation of an English writing school which he had built in the churchyard for the teaching of the poor children of Cranbrook town and parish "in reading, writing, and common arithmetic ". Dence left property valued at £160 as endowment for the school, constituting the churchwardens as trustees. The institution was carried on successfully, complementing the work of the grammar school, until 1877, when its assets, and functions, were merged with those of the slightly older grammar school.2 Just two years after Dence's foundation at Cranbrook, a grammar school was established in Dartford by three local citizens, two of whom were gentry of the community. In 1576 William Vaughan, Edward Gwyn, and William Death, who had built a corn market for the use of the town, conveyed certain property to twenty-eight substantial men of the parish as trustees to constitute an endowment for a school, to be kept in a large room over the corn market. Somewhat later these properties appear to have possessed a capital value of about £415. Some years later a yeoman of the parish, William Stanley, left £5 for the repair of the school and the market house. The school was successfully and continuously held for about a century, though in 1678 a commission of enquiry was necessary to recover the endowments and to ensure the continuance of a school which had never gained really sufficient support.3 The first period of foundations ends with the establishment of the Dartford School in 1576. Very great progress had been made in the 1 PCC 23, 46 Rutland 1588 ; PP 1819, X-A, 94-95 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 108. 2 Vide ante, 39, 61-62. 3 PP 1819, X-B, 21 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 492 ; Dunkin, Dartford, 220, 300, 410 ; Hasted, Kent, II, 308, 318 ; Keyes, Dartford, I, 247, II, 161 ; Thorpe, Custumale, 53. Vaughan, a Gentleman of the Wardrobe to Henry VIII, had in 1536 obtained a grant of the manor of Bignors. Gwyn was a London mercer. Death was lord of the manor of Charles in Dartford and built a new mansion house in High Street, Dartford. Vaughan in 1569 had given a new house and grounds, valued at £105, to the town, the income to be distributed to the poor by the overseers at their discretion. 81 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 creation of a system of endowed secondary education by that date. There were now fifteen endowed schools available for ambitious boys in all parts of Kent, most of which, it is important to note, had facilities as well for boarding students from the county at large. Eight of these foundations had been given in the generation since the Reformation, while four of the older schools had in this same period received important augmentations of their earlier and inadequate resources. There followed a breathing space, as it were, of a full generation, in which only four schools were established. During these years, as we have noted, the interest of the county was principally in the needs of the poor and in that remarkable concentration on the building and endowing of almshouses which resulted in the founding of sixteen of these institutions in all parts of Kent during the relatively brief interval, 1572-1605. A small school was, however, built and an endowment provided by Sir Thomas Sondes of Throwley in 1592. Sondes' will stipulated that a house should be made available for the residence of the master by his executor and charged his estate with a rent of £6 p.a. for the free instruction of poor youths of the community.1 The free school in Gravesend and Milton seems to have been established just two years later when an almshouse, given to the town in 1580 by Anne and Edward Lawrence, was converted into a schoolhouse and a master appointed to teach the children of that place. No endowment, so far as our records go, was attracted to this institution during the course of our period, but it seems to have been continued and maintained by direct taxation.2 A much more substantial foundation was provided for the parish of Benenden in 1602 by Edward Gibbon, a member of a family of rich clothiers long seated in that parish. Gibbon built a school some years before his death at a charge of about £50 and presumably paid the master's stipend until his gift secured the endowment in 1602. By indenture, Gibbon conveyed to feoffees lands and woods in the parish comprising in all sixty acres and valued at approximately £350, the income of which was to be employed in perpetuity for the payment of a schoolmaster and the maintenance of the free school.3 As we have already noted, an extraordinarily interesting foundation was created at New Romney in 1610 by John Southland, which com- 1 PCC 12 Novell 1592 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 451, 457. Vide post, 108, 113. Sondes was the eldest son of Anthony Sondes, Esq., and Joan, daughter of the great lawyer, Sir John Fineux. He left as well £100 for funeral sermons, two each year, to be preached for twelve years ; £6 for church repairs ; and £39 for doles to the poor of Throwley and thirteen other parishes, including two in Middlesex and two in Surrey. 2 Cruden, Gravesend, 222. The son of John Chandler, " minister and school master of the Free School of Milton ", died in 1643 (Pocock, Gravesend, 109). 3 PP 1819, X-A, 85 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 181, 187 ; Jessup, Kent, 96. 82 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS bined an almshouse and a free English school for poor children, to be taught by a schoolmaster of impressive qualifications.1 These small foundations appear to constitute the whole of the additions made during a generation to the schools of the county, though most substantial capital was provided for older institutions and, as we shall observe, three schools were founded with Kentish funds in other counties. In 1626 the second great period of foundations began with the provision in the will of John Proude, a yeoman of Ash (next Sandwich), that his executors should erect a building suitable for use as a schoolhouse and a place for the laying up of stores for the poor. No endowment was supplied for this school, though Proude left an annuity to pay for the distribution of one chaldron of coal each year to the poor of the parish. There was, however, lively local enthusiasm for the educational aspirations that had moved Proude, since in 1629 pressure was brought to bear on his son and executor to carry forward the provisions of the father's will.2 More careful arrangements were made in 1632 by Francis Tresse, a gentleman of West Mailing, for the school he wished to found in that parish. He named as trustees the local clergyman and four principal freeholders, to whom he conveyed land valued at £10 as the site for a schoolhouse and £40 for the building of a free school, together with a small annuity of 13s. 4d. to ensure its proper maintenance. In this case, too, no endowment was provided, the charges being met presumably by student fees and possibly by local taxation.3 A former merchant and mayor of Canterbury, Thomas Paramore. who had retired to his manor of Downe Barton in St. Nicholas at Wade, which he had purchased in about 1632, founded a school for that parish, as well as for nearby Monkton, under the terms of his will proved in 1636. A house was provided for the school and the residence of the master, together with an annuity of £6 for his salary, and additional •capital valued in all at about £80 was vested as endowment. The master was required to take ten poor boys from the two favoured parishes for instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, while additional students might be admitted under terms to be arranged with the trustees of the institution.4 The generous and enlightened Sedley family, a few years later 1 Vide ante, 47. 2 Home Counties Magazine, IV (1902), 60 ; Planche, J. R., Ash-neat-Sandwich (L., 1864), 127 ; Hasted, Kent, IX, 219. 3 PCC 95 Audley 1632 ; PP 1819, X-A, 130 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 373 ; PP 1908, LXXVIII, 182 ; Hasted, Kent, IV, 527. The date of this foundation is 1632, though certain of the sources cited give it variously as 1623, 1625, and 1693. 4 PP 1819, X-A, 131 ; PP 1837, XXIII , 273 ; Hasted, Kent, X, 239, 242, 287, XI, 201. Paramore also left £100 to the mayor and aldermen of Canterbury to be used as a fund for loans to poor shopkeepers. 83 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 (1638), provided an adequately endowed school for Southfieet, as well as founding a grammar school at Wymondham, Leicestershire.1 Sir John Sedley by his will proved in 1638 directed that his wife and executrix should employ £400 from his personal estate for establishing a school for the inhabitants of Southfieet.2 Sedley's daughter, Elizabeth, died in the next year, leaving a bequest of £500 " to the setting up of a school which her father gave a legacy towards ", but it seems probable that only £100 of this amount was employed for the erection of the building and that no more than a total of £400 was in fact laid out for the purchase of lands, then yielding £27 15s. p.a., which were settled as endowment on the trustees of the institution.3 Dame Elizabeth Sedley, the widow of the founder, on her death in 1649 left an additional £100 towards the endowment of the school and an equal amount for the augmentation of the capital of the school in Wymondham. 4 Another old and well-known gentle family of the county, the Knatchbulls, established an equally well-endowed grammar school at Ashford in the same year. Sir Norton Knatchbull had during his lifetime built a schoolhouse and other buildings in a convenient situation in Ashford and had as early as 1636 employed a master to begin instruction at his personal charge. His nephew and heir, of the same name, in 1638, in accordance with Sir Norton's will, conveyed by deed to trustees not only the school premises but lands with a presumed value of £30 p.a. for the support of the master and the maintenance of the school, to which he many years later added more lands in order to ensure an income of this amount.5 Probably in this same year (1638) a meagrely endowed school was founded at Yalding with legacies totalling £200 left to the town by Julian Kenward0 and two brothers of Kingston-upon-Thames (Surrey), Thomas and John Tiffin. Half this endowment was to be employed for the relief of poor persons of the parish not then requiring 1 The latter school was founded by Sir John Sedley in 1637 with an endowment of £400 (PP 1839, XV, 456). This bequest is not included in the grammarschool totals for Kent. 2 PCC 130 Lee 1638 ; Burke, Extinct Baronetcies, 482 ; PP 1819, X-B, 26. Sir John was the son of William Sedley (vide ante, 24 n., and post, 96). His mother was Elizabeth, daughter of Stephen Darrell, Esq., and widow of Henry, Lord Abergavenny. 3 PCC 154 Harvev 1639. 4 PCC 146 Fairfax 1649 ; PP 1819, X-B, 26-27. She was the daughter and heir of Sir Henry Savile, the founder of the professorships at Oxford. A greatgrandson, Sir Charles, in 1727 left an additional £400 to the endowments of the schools at Southfieet and Wymondham. 6 PP 1819, X-A, 81 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 538, 596 ; Pearman, A. J., History of Ashford (Ashford, 1868), 71 ; DNB. Sir Norton was a descendant of Richard Knatchbull, who had purchased a manor in Mersham in the late fifteenth century. The nephew served in Parliament for his county and was accounted a man of great ability and considerable learning. 8 Vide ante, 25. 84 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS alms, and the remainder, yielding only £5 p.a., was to be used to employ a teacher to give instruction to poor children in reading, writing, and accounts. Land was purchased with these funds in 1641, when proper arrangements were made for the trusteeship, but it seems probable that the institution had been begun about 1638.1 The outbreak of the Civil War by no means lessened the interest of benefactors in the foundation of grammar schools, though in several instances their intentions were either frustrated or delayed because of the political and economic dislocations of the period of the Puritan Revolution. Thus in 1643 a merchant and jurat of Dover, Daniel Porten, bequeathed £10 to the town for the building of a free school, though there is no evidence that any action was taken in this regard prior to 1660.2 In 1643 also a London merchant, John Roan, devised, subject to two lives, extensive properties in East Greenwich, which some years later possessed a capital value of £1,900, to the vicar, churchwardens, and overseers of the poor of East Greenwich upon trust. The trustees were required to found a school in which townborn poor children should receive free instruction, each student to have as well an allowance of £2 p.a. towards his clothing, so far as the income of the trust would permit. The estate fell in to the trustees at an uncertain date and was augmented by the gift of £100 by Sir William Hooker, a London grocer, for the building of the free school. There was delay, however, until long after our period, when in 1677 a commission of charitable uses ordered the trust put into full effect by the feoffees.3 A school was provided for Staplehurst in 1651 under the will of Lancelot Bathurst, Esq., who left to trustees £150 as an endowment for a school in which the poor children of the parish might be taught reading and writing and be instructed in " their duty towards God and man ". A few years later (1656) a subscription was taken by which an additional £40 was raised in the parish as endowment, the whole of the income being used for the salary of the schoolmaster.4 Several earlier dates for the foundation of the grammar school at Lewisham have been advanced, but its opening in 1652 under the firm hand of that imperious yet generous clergyman, Abraham Colfe, who was to endow it so splendidly, may be taken as the most reliable. One of Colfe's Elizabethan predecessors as Vicar of Lewisham, John Glyn, had almost a century earlier (1568) bequeathed £100 " for the findinge and maintenance of a free scole in Lewsham for the profitte and bringing 1 Hasted, Kent, V, 168 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 403 ; PCC 95 Lee (Thomas Tiffin) ; PCC 1040, will [not reg'd] pr. January 30, 1639/1640 (John Tiffin). The Tiffins made almost precisely similar provisions for Kingston by their wills. 2 K.A.O. : CCC 306, 1643. 3 PCC 50 Rivers 1645 ; PP 1819, X-A, 112 ; Kimbell, Greenwich Legacies, 74 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 411. 4 PCC 70 Grey 1651 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 127 ; PP 1819, X-A, 145 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 400. 85 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1060 uppe in learninge of the children of the saide parishe ", and in 1574 an attempt was made to carry out the terms of the legacy when a royal charter was obtained for the founding of a free grammar school. Twenty governors, including Sir Roger Manwood, were appointed and an elaborate constitution was provided, but the slender endowment in hand, £11 lis. 8d. of which had been consumed in procuring the charter, proved quite insufficient to the need. There was evidently considerable interest in the undertaking, since John Kenworth of Lewisham left £1 towards the building of the school in 1574, while in 1581 a London saddler, David ap Thomas, bequeathed £5 to the still halting enterprise. In 1613 only one of the original governors was still alive, and he perpetuated the charter and feoffment by naming nineteen additional governors, including Abraham Colfe, with the clear indication that the school was at that date no more than a legal fiction.1 Colfe, whose remarkable charitable contributions have already, been discussed, began to exhibit great interest in the need for the school in about 1629, when he commenced to purchase lands from his meagre income as the nucleus for the endowment of his charitable trust. One of his parishioners, George Edmonds, in 1640 left £25 to Colfe and his churchwardens to be employed as endowment towards the free teaching of the sons of the poorest men of the parish.2 But Colfe's plans were delayed by the slow accumulation of the endowment which he was constituting with the Leathersellers' Company from his own savings and speculative profits. In 1650, however, he proceeded with the building of an elementary reading and writing school on a site near the parish church and of a grammar school designed to serve the entire hundred of Blackheath, on common lands just outside the town. The schools were opened in 1652, just a few years before the death of their indomitable founder on December 5th, 1657. Colfe's design for his school was extraordinarily well considered and, as the Leathersellers were to discover, capacious in relation to the endowment provided. The grammar school was to offer free tuition to thirty-one boys chosen from the various parishes of Blackheath Hundred, all being sons of poor men " and of good wit and capacity, and apt to learn ". In addition, sons of yeomen were to be admitted at a charge of 8s. a quarter, whereas sons of gentlemen were to be charged 10s. The master might also admit twenty-six boarders in the house provided for his lodging. The master, whose stipend was to be £30 p.a., with £3 p.a. for supplies, must be a learned scholar able to offer instruction in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew and to prepare boys for the university. The usher, whose salary was set at £20 p.a., 1 Duncan, Colfe's Grammar School, 26-36 ; (Glyn) PCC 2 Sheffeld 1568 ; (Kenworth) PCC 1 Pyckering 1574 ; (ap Thomas) PCC 11 Darcy 1581. 2 Thorpe, Custumale, 57 : Duncan, Colfe's Grammar School, 40. 86 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS should be proficient in Latin and Greek and also competent to instruct boys in arithmetic and bookkeeping. Finally, a writing master should be employed, with a salary of £11 p.a., to teach writing and train in the keeping of mercantile accounts those boys not destined for the university. Lilly's Latin grammar and Camden's Greek grammar were to be used and instruction was to follow the tested methods of Westminster, St. Paul's, Eton, and the Merchant Taylors' School. Colfe's will further provided for a library in his grammar school, open to the community, to which he left £5 outright and the proceeds of the sale of his own books, as well as £1 p.a. for the purchase of " one or two books in folio " and 12s. p.a. for the chaining and care of the books and for the costs of heating. Finally, Colfe's will provided £70 p.a. for the founding of seven exhibitions at either Oxford or Cambridge with an indicated preference for poor boys from Lewisham, and, that failing, from the Leathersellers' Company, from Christchurch parish in Canterbury, or from Christ's Hospital, London. In all, the endowments required for the two schools amounted to a capital worth of £1,312, this obligation having been honoured by the Leathersellers as trustees despite the fact that the estate did not prove to be sufficient. The exhibitions themselves likewise required a capital of at least £1,400, an extremely generous outlay which was in point of fact simply unsupported by Colfe's estate, though they too were borne by the Leathersellers, at least in part, until 1757. But though this admirable man may have strained the resources of his painfully won fortune, he had by no means taxed the limitless resources of his charity. One has, even three centuries removed, the feeling of nobility and greatness in this man and all his works.1 Another clergyman, John Smith of Wickhambreaux, having been moved by the sight of a book entitled Vox populi,2 in 1656 built a school and established its endowment. Some years earlier, in 1633, he had given evidence of his deep interest in education by endowing a scholarship at Lincoln College, Oxford.3 In the deed of gift establishing his school, Smith indicates that he had previously built the schoolhouse on his own land, which he conveyed to feoffees together with a dwelling for the master and certain other properties, worth not more than £30, for the maintenance of the institution. No provision was made for the endowment of the school, which was to offer free instruction to poor youths of the parish, but the institution carried on its work until well into the nineteenth century, doubtless supported by income gifts and 1 Vide ante, 30, 53. 2 This must refer to Thomas Scot's violently anti-Catholic tract published in 1620. Scot, one of the ablest of all propagandists, levied a sustained and a remarkably successful campaign, employing every device known to modern propaganda, against the Spanish marriage policy of James I. 3 Vide post, 94. 87 7 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 fees.1 Still another clergyman, of unalloyed Calvinistic persuasion, founded a school at Smarden in the next year. Freegift Tilden, " preacher of the worde of God " and minister to a Calvinistic Baptist church, in 1657 vested in ten trustees of his faith lands with a capital worth of £600 for the endowment of a writing school for children of the congregation, and, if Hasted is not in error, he also founded another with an endowment of £20 p.a. in the nearby parish of High Halden.2 In addition to the long list of schools founded in Kent, we must mention at least briefly a number of grammar schools established in other counties either by Kentish wealth or by men who may be regarded as of the county at the time of their death. We have already had occasion to note the founding by the Sedleys of a school in Leicestershire, in so many ways identical with their school in Southfieet.3 With some hesitation we have likewise included Archbishop Grindal's foundation of a grammar school at his birthplace, St. Bees, in Cumberland, on which he had expended £100 and to which he left £600 for endowment in 1583.4 Sir William Selby, of Ightham Mote, on his death in 1612 provided that a messuage and garden in Berwick-upon-Tweed, valued at £100, should be conveyed to the mayor and bailiffs of that place to be used as a free school, though there were legal and other difficulties which prevented its establishment prior to 1634.5 A few years later Sir William's nephew and heir, of the same name, died, leaving to Berwick-upon-Tweed the remainder of a pension due from the Crown, which he estimated as worth £4,000, for the building of a church and for the endowment of the school, of which not more than £1,500 was ever applied towards the school to whose foundation the Selbys had set themselves so tenaciously.6 Towards the close of our period Sir Francis Nethersole, by an indenture dated 1655, founded a 1 PP 1819, X-A, App., 247 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 225, 280, 320 ; Alum, oxon., IV, 1374 ; Wood, Antony (John Gutch, ed.), History of the Colleges and Halls in Oxford (Oxford, 1786), 240. 2 PCC 91 Laud 1662 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 225, 479. Hasted suggests that both schools were functioning as late as his time. He also says that there was still in the late eighteenth century a Calvinistic Baptist church at Smarden, though, somewhat typically of this most formidable sect, the clergyman and his congregation were at variance. 3 Vide ante, 84. 4 PCC 39 Rowe 1583 ; DNB ; Strype, John, Life and Acts of Edmund Grindal (Oxford, 1821), 420-422, 427. Possibly illogically, the other great charities of the archbishops of our period, and this means in effect Warham, Parker, Whitgift, and Abbot, have been credited in Kent only if the charity was vested there, since all these men retained or developed strong local roots, a fact which suggests that their benefactions should be counted in the county where the " specific gravity " of their attachment seemed to be. Archbishops, like nobles, are difficult to fit into any statistical framework. 6 PCC 18 Fenner 1612 ; Misc. gen. et her., I (1868), 15 ,- Hasted, Kent, V, 42 ; Scott, John, Berwick-upon-Tweed (L., 1888), 392 ; PP 1830, XII, 507. 6 PCC 15 Lee 1638 ; Misc. gen. ether., I (1868), 21 ; Arch. Cant., XXVII (1905), 30 ; Harrison, E. W., Ightham Church ([Ightham], 1932), 8, 29. Vide post, 121. 88 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS school at Polesworth, Warwickshire, his wife's birthplace, which he endowed with a capital sum of atleast£700. He had earlier erected a large stone school building there, at a cost of about £150, and now stipulated that a schoolmaster, with a salary of £20 p.a., and a schoolmistress, with £10 p.a., should be employed to teach both boys and girls. The boys were first to be taught to read and write English and the girls to read and work with needles, while both were to be instructed in the principles of Christianity. A curriculum in Greek and Latin was to be provided for the more advanced students, but not for more than six at any one time. The governors were enjoined to offer free instruction to all qualified students from the parishes of Polesworth and Warton.1 There were towards the close of our period at least thirty-one schools in Kent, only three of which did not by 1660 have at least a modest endowment. Of the total number, twenty-eight had been founded and endowed between 1480 and 1660. At the same time the three medieval foundations had either been reorganized or the endowments substantially augmented.2 It is, then, fair to say that the whole structure of secondary education in Kent was the creation of this remarkable period. In all, the great sum of £28,308 18s. had been provided by private charity for the foundation, the endowment, and the support of this great undertaking whereby widespread and cheap education was made available for any gifted and enterprising boy in the county. The group of thirty-one schools which we have treated in some little detail had been vested with endowments totalling £18,478 lis., it being recalled that the expropriated capital of £4,600 with which the King's School at Canterbury was endowed has not been included in this sum. In addition, the substantial sum of £3,450 was provided for foundations in other parts of the realm by Kentish donors who were evangelical in their enthusiasm. The remaining £6,380 7s. was given for the erection and maintenance of buildings, the augmentation of existing endowments, for schools which never got themselves established because the initial gift or legacy was too small, or for the direct support of existing schools as gifts to income. The schools of Kent at the close of our period were remarkably well scattered across the face of the county and most of them by tradition, if not always by the terms of the deeds of gift, admitted students from the surrounding countryside. The magnitude of the accomplish- 1 PCC 22 Laud 1662 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, IX (1937), 178 ; PP 1835, XXI, ii, 1126; DNB. Nethersole, a fellow and tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge, was knighted in 1619. He was a zealous supporter of the Electress Elizabeth, whose secretary he had been. Nethersole took no active part in the civil wars, being best remembered for several political pamphlets in which he advocated peace. He died in 1659. 2 Tie chantry school at Higham had not survived. 89 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 ment of the benefactors of our period is suggested when we reflect that in 1660 there was a school to every fifty square miles of area in the county of Kent, as compared, for example, with one to every seventythree square miles in the likewise prosperous and forward-looking county of Norfolk. Save for a region with Folkestone as a centre, there was no point in the county more than nine miles distant from a grammar school or a writing school. And, fittingly enough, it so happened that Folkestone's most distinguished son, the great Dr. William Harvey, on his death in 1657 left £200 to the town, which was to be employed not many years later (1674), with certain other funds, for the foundation and endowment of a grammar school for that somewhat neglected corner of Kent.1 These foundations were of all sorts, and they ranged in size from the struggling and unendowed institutions we have noted to the great foundations at Canterbury, Tonbridge, and Lewisham. Ten of them possessed really comfortable endowments of £800 or more, while another ten, or just possibly eleven, in relation to their size and communities, were likewise probably adequately endowed for the tasks in hand. No considerable market town in the county was without a school at the close of our period, and, as we have observed, more than a third of these foundations were situated in thinly populated rural areas where they afforded opportunity and hope to regions which might all too easily have become culturally derelict. This great accomplishment was the work of many men and attests to the generosity of all classes of the society save the very lowest. Restricting our analysis to these thirty-one Kentish schools and to the £18,478 lis. poured into their endowments, we can perhaps discover the socially and culturally dominant classes of the period and assess the origins of the dynamic forces which were moulding not only Kent but England as well. The founders, as well as the benefactors who added substantially to older and insufficient endowments, were, with few exceptions, drawn either from the merchant aristocracy or from the gentry. In all, fourteen of these men were merchants, seven of the lower gentry, and three of the upper gentry. Five in all, it is pleasant to note, were members of the lower clergy. The Crown was responsible for the substantial endowment of two schools ; a municipality, employing the taxing power, for one ; a yeoman for another ; and the professional classes for two. When these foundations are analysed in terms of the ultimate sanction of the amount of the contribution, very interesting conclusions are at once apparent. The merchant founders and donors gave in all £9,754 towards these endowments, or nearly half the total. But almost the whole of this large amount, the exact sum being £8,534, was the gift of London merchants. It is 1 PCC 270 Pell 1659 ; Hasted, Kent, VIII, 177 ; PP 1819, X-A, 106, App., 159. 90 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS here that we find the mainspring of the powerful and beneficent force which was creating a new culture in Kent. The total contribution of the gentry, of whom at least three, it should be observed, were only a generation removed from the wharves and trading counters of London, totalled £3,111 ; that of the lower clergy just slightly more, £3,202. The remaining £2,411 lis.1 was the gift of all the other classes of men who had joined in this noble and enduring effort. Nor was the foundation and the endowment of these numerous schools by any means the whole of Kent's contribution to the advancement of education in the course of our period. In all, benefactors of the county gave the very large total of £10,648 13s. for scholarships and fellowships, in most cases vested in the universities, but with an indicated preference for or restriction to scholars from the schools of the county. This sum represents 4-23 per cent, of all the charities of the county and is in absolute amount at least slightly larger than the funds given for this purpose in any of the other counties included in this study save Yorkshire and, of course, London. Since almost the whole (98 • 26 per cent.) of this generous total was in the form of endowments, something like £523 3s. 4d. p.a. must have been available for the various exhibitions created by benefactors in our period. In fact, we may say that the donors had specified that these stipends were to be available for sixty-eight scholars or fellows, the range of the emoluments being from £2 13s. 4d. p.a. to £20 p.a. We have regarded it as appropriate to deal with a number of these foundations in the course of discussing the schools to which they were so frequently attached by the deed of gift. The whole structure of these endowments was conceived as strengthening the schools of the county and providing avenues to secure the future education of boys of great promise in the schools and afterwards in the universities. But others remain which should be at least briefly noted. Thus in 1530 John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, founded, with Kentish properties as endowment, four fellowships, two scholarships, and twenty-four trentals each year with stipends of 10s. each for poor scholars, all for the benefit of St. John's College, Cambridge. This great benefaction was endowed with funds valued at £1,200, but, it should be noted, by the terms of the deed of gift only one of the holders must be from Kent.2 We should comment more fully on the interesting foundation made in 1568 by Joan Trappes, the widow of a London goldsmith, a benefactor who was very possibly influenced by the professional eloquence 1 The Canterbury endowment is wholly excluded from this and all other calculations. 2 Lewis, John (T. H. Turner, ed.), Life of John Fisher (L., 1855, 2 vols.), II, 46, 272, 287-290, 296-297, 301-302. Fisher's benefactions to his university will be noted in later pages (vide post, 95). A portion of this endowment was confiscated after Fisher's execution. 91 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 of her executor, Sir Roger Manwood. Two foundations were created from the residue of her estate, each with a capital value of £227. The first was vested in Lincoln College, Oxford, for the creation of four scholarships in that college, two to be chosen by the rector and fellows at will and the other two to be selected by the governors of Manwood's grammar school at Sandwich, each scholar to be paid a stipend of £2 13s. 4d. p.a. The second foundation was made in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, for four poor scholars with like stipends, while the residue of 13s. 4d. p.a. was directed to the general uses of the college.1 A much smaller bequest, typical of more than a score which space will not permit us to treat, may likewise be mentioned. In 1574 Elizabeth Dennis, widow of Sir Maurice Dennis of Sutton-at- Hone, left £66 13s. 4d. to be distributed to needy students in the universities. 2 Though most of Archbishop Parker's great charities were vested in Norfolk and in Lancashire, we have recorded in Kent his foundation of scholarships in Benet College, Trinity College, and Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, which were endowed with capital of £1,160 and two of which were specifically designated for Kentish boys chosen from the King's School in Canterbury.3 A gentleman of Woodchurch, Martin Harlakenden, some years later, in 1585, provided by will £100 in scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge for students who intended to become clergymen, as well as other benefactions totalling £155.4 The interest of benefactors of the county in these endowments was 1 PCC 4 Stevenson 1563 ; Boys, Sandwich, 200-203 ; Baker, Sandwich, 82 j Wood, Colleges and Halls in Oxford (Guteh, ed.), I, 240 ; Venn, John, Gonville and Caius College (Cambridge, 1897-1912, 4 vols.), I l l , 227-228, IV, ii, 85. Vide ante, 78. This benefactor's daughter, Joyce Frankland, was also a generous donor to the universities (vide Jordan, Charities of London, 228-229, 257, 263, 264, 402). Sir Roger Manwood's reputation for rapacity is to a degree confirmed in his handling of this bequest. Caius College maintained that the benefactor had no school preference in mind. Manwood delayed for years in carrying out the terms of the bequest, and then Caius complained, " No lands he will let us have except we would take such barre racked pilled and leasyd land of his owne as he lyst to geve us upon the burned downes in Kent, gayninge and wynning by the bargayne, and suttley deluding us ". But that was by no means all. Manwood further extracted from the college an agreement that the scholars were to be selected alternately by the college and himself, and after his death alternately by the college and Sandwich School. Hence the college complained that Manwood had " diverted to Kent what she meant for all England, as all learned men in both laws, common and civil, do say " (Venn, Gonville and Caius, III, 227-228). 2 PCC 4 Martyn 1574. Dame Elizabeth likewise left gowns for 120 poor at Is. per yard, £25 for church repair in Sutton-at-Hone and London, £5 in doles for the poor, £9 for prisoners in London and Southwark, and £20 to Christ's Hospital. 3 PCC 39 Pyckering 1575 ; Strype, John, Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (L., 1711), App., 186 ; Woodruff, King's School, 357 ; DNB. 4 PCC 18 Brudenell 1585. Harlakenden left £35 to the clergy of his parish, an endowment of £100 for the relief of the poor of his community, £10 to London hospitals, and £10 to prisoners there. His was one of the oldest of the gentle families of Kent. 92 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS by no means confined to the ranks of the rich and the great. Thus in 1593 a Tonbridge yeoman, Thomas Lampard, left property valued at £60 for the support of an exhibition of £2 13s. 4d. p.a. to be held for terms of five years by the poorest scholar preferred out of Tonbridge Grammar School to either university on the nomination of the headmaster but with appointment by the vicar and churchwardens.1 A former usher of the King's School in Canterbury, Robert Rose, not only left £100 for the support of poor children in his native city and the residue of his estate, valued at about £200, for general charitable uses, but in 1618 by an indenture conveyed to trustees properties then valued at upwards of £480 for the founding of four scholarships in the school with an annual value of £6 each. The awards were to be made to four of the scholars on the foundation (King's Scholars), who had been so designated for at least two years and who were " fit both for their learning and manners ", to help maintain them in either university. Preference was to be shown by his trustees, who included Sir Peter Manwood, four prebendaries of the cathedral clergy, and five aldermen, for boys who had been bom in or near Canterbury.2 We have previously commented on Robert Gunsley's somewhat similar provision for scholars from the grammar schools of Maidstone and Rochester, established in 1618 with a capital value of £1,200.3 A retired London leatherseller, Robert Holmden, who was a native of Sevenoaks, by the terms of his will, proved in 1620, established a scholarship of £4 p.a. for a student from the Sevenoaks school or, that failing, from Tonbridge, to be used in either university, as well as providing £2 p.a. for the poor of his native town, the same amount for the poor of Edenbridge, £36 in doles for the poor of the thirteen parishes in Kent and Sussex in which he owned land, £2 p.a. for church repairs at Sevenoaks, and £3 p.a. for the same purpose in Edenbridge.4 A few years later, in 1624, a gentleman of Canterbury, William Heyman, conveyed to trustees by indenture land with an estimated worth of £300 with the provision that five-sixths of the annual income be used for the maintenance of two scholars in the King's School, Canterbury, with an indicated preference for his own relations or boys bearing 1 Rivington, Tonbridge School, 44 ; PP 1837, XXI I I , 506 ; Thorpe, Custumale, 55. Lampard also left to the churchwardens as trustees properties then worth about £60, the income to be distributed for poor relief twice annually. 2 PP 1837, XXIII, 220, 282 ; Woodruff, King's School, 90, 358 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 207 ; Alum, cantab., I, iii, 487. Rose had himself been a King's Scholar at Canterbury and had matriculated at St. John's, Cambridge, in 1567. He was lower master of the King's School from 1572 to 1585. He resided at Bishopsbourne in the later years of his life, where in 1600 he witnessed the will of Richard Hooker. He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral in 1620. 3 Vide ante, 73. 4 PCC 5 Soame 1620 ; PP 1819, X-A, 142, App., 221 ; PP 1824, XI I I , 256. Holmden likewise left substantial benefactions in London. 93 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 his surname. If no such applicant appeared, then the scholars were to be appointed to the King's School from among poor boys of the parish of Sellinge, they to be aged eight years or more, the tenure to run for a term of nine years with an additional tenure of seven years if a scholar should be admitted to a college at Cambridge and still another term of three years if he should enter holy orders.1 A determined Puritan clergyman of Wickhambreaux, who was later to found a grammar school in that town, in 1633 created by deed of gift a particularly generous and carefully devised scholarship endowment. John Smith vested in trustees, who included two clergymen, property then possessing a capital value of about £300, the income of which should be used for the maintenance of one scholar in Lincoln College, Oxford, with an annual stipend of £14, as well as £1 p.a. for the general uses of the college. The term of the award was established as eight years, with the provision that the scholarship should be vacated if the holder left college or gained a benefice worth £30 p.a. or more. In this event, the trustees should assemble in the cathedral church of Canterbury to nominate the successor.2 Another clergyman, Walter Richards of Dover, by his will proved in 1642 bequeathed to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, lands in and near Dover for the support of two scholars. The income from this endowment, valued at its creation at £380, was to be divided equally and might be held for a term of seven years, with an indicated preference for the donor's kin, sons of members of the Salters' Company, and those educated at Christ's Hospital in London.3 And, finally, we should notice the foundation in 1643 by Henry Robinson, a retired Canterbury merchant, of an endowment of approximately £340 in St. John's College, Cambridge, for two scholarships and two fellowships for natives of the Isle of Thanet who had been prepared for the university at the King's School, Canterbury, or, in default of suitable nominees, natives of the county of Kent at large. It being found that the income was insufficient to support so ambitious a design, a decree of the Court of Chancery 1 Woodruff, King's School, 359 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 222, 431 ; Alum, cantab., I, i, 364. The remainder of the income, the sixth part, was to be employed for the support of three householders in the parishes of Sellinge and Lympne, the trustees to choose two from the parish most burdened with poor at the time of the selection. Heyman sought to arrange his trust in such wise that no relief would be given which would lessen the responsibility of substantial men of the two parishes for the relief and maintenance of the poor. 2 Vide ante, 87. Smith in 1638 created a trust with a then capital worth of £100 to provide sermons to be preached in each quarter session before prisoners about to be presented, for their instruction and repentance. 3 K.A.O. : CCC 246, 1642 ; Arch. Cant., XXXII (1917), 33-35 ; Cooper, Memorials of Cambridge, II, 363 ; Alum, cantab., I, iii, 450. Richards was graduated from Emmanuel College in 1593. He held a number of livings in and near Dover during his long ministry (1602-1642) and accumulated a considerable estate. 94 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS in 1652 ordered the establishment of four scholarships, the other provisions of the deed of gift remaining undisturbed.1 The scholarship resources of the county, accumulated slowly during the whole course of our period, constituted at its close a strong and immensely fruitful complement to the remarkable structure of grammarschool foundations which private benefactions had created. The great contribution made by Kent to the whole process of education was completed by the substantial amounts given for the augmentation of the endowments and the general uses of the universities during the age under review. In total, £19,097 5s. was provided for this purpose by donors of the age, of which almost the whole amount (99 • 70 per cent.) was in the form of capital gifts. This sum, representing 7-59 per cent, of all the charities of our period, ranks very well indeed with the amount, if not the proportion, afforded for these purposes in the other counties included in this study.2 In 1512 Sir Thomas Bourchier of Boxley, in fulfilment of a bequest of bis late uncle, Archbishop Thomas Bourchier, gave £100 each to the two universities for their general uses. At Cambridge this endowment was apparently employed as a loan fund, a master being permitted to borrow £3, a bachelor £1, and a scholar one mark, on proper security.3 John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, whose great scholarship benefaction has already been discussed,4 was, of course, the founder of St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1511 and gave largely to its endowment, almost wholly from Kentish properties. His total contribution to its funds possessed, in 1545, an annual value of about £124 3s. 8d., or a capital worth of about £2,483, of which, however, only £1,400 has been credited as a charitable benefaction of our period, the remainder being constituted of various parcels from the endowments of dissolved monastic establishments granted by the Crown to Fisher 1 Howard, H. F., An Account of Finances of the College of St. John the Evangelist (Cambridge, 1935), 81, 229, 289 ; Alum, cantab., I, iii, 469 ; Woodruff, King's School, 362 ; PP 1837, XXI I I, 274, 531. Robinson also left £100 to the municipal authorities of Canterbury to be lent at 5 per cent., the income being annually employed to help a young man who had just completed his apprenticeship. He left as well to trustees property then worth £130, for the support of four poor widows of more than sixty years of age. 2 The proportions and amounts are as follows for the several counties : £ s. °/ £ s. % Bristol 3 0 — London 154,591 5 8-18 Buckinghamshire 6,886 0 7-81 Norfolk 9,408 18 5-29 Hampshire 8,642 0 9-93 Somerset 16,495 12 14-16 Kent 19,097 5 7-59 Worcestershire 40 1 0-08 Lancashire 3,637 10 3-51 Yorkshire 12,393 19 5-09 3 PCC 15 Fetiplace 1512 ; Nicolas, N. H., Testamenta Vetusta (L., 1826, 2 vols.), II, 525 ; Clark, J. W., ed., Endowments of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1904), 556. 4 Vide ante, 91. 95 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 for the purposes of this foundation.1 A few years later, in 1524, the great humanist physician, Thomas Linacre, probably a native of Canterbury, where he had received his early education, vested in trustees Kentish properties for the foundation of three lectureships in medicine, two at Oxford and one at Cambridge. The trustees, who included Sir Thomas More and Bishop Tunstall, for reasons not wholly clear were delayed a full generation in vesting the endowments and then, instead of creating university foundations, assigned the lectureships to Merton College, Oxford, and to St. John's, Cambridge. The original worth of the endowments was £30 p.a., though the stipend assigned to St. John's was imprudently managed and apparently lost.2 Archbishop Warham was a steady and an important benefactor of Oxford during the last two decades of his life, expending upwards of £2,000 on the completion of St. Mary's church and the Divinity School as well as leaving valuable books and manuscripts to All Souls and to New College at the time of his death.3 Passing to the early seventeenth century and to the lay donors so typical of that later era, we should note the well-considered educational benefaction of Sir William Sedley, a member of one of the most enlightened and responsible families of the county, which, as we have seen, had already founded a great almshouse in the parish of Aylesford.4 Sedley by his will proved in 1619 left £100 each to the university libraries at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as providing an endowment of £2,000 for a new lectureship in natural philosophy at Oxford.5 1 Howard, Finances of St. John's, 6, 287-301 ; Lewis, Fisher, I, 53, 160, II, 289, 307-319 ; Ducarel, Repertory, 134 ; Cooper, Memorials of Cambridge, II, 31, 74, 92 ; DNB. 2 PCC 36 Bodfelde 1525 ; DNB ; Johnson, J . N. (Robert Graves, ed.), Life of Thomas Linacre (L., 1835), 272-277, 330-333. 3 PCC 18 Thower 1532 ; Nichols, J. G., and John Bruce, eds., Wills from Doctors' Commons (L., 1863), 21 ; Hasted, Kent, XII, 439 ; Wood, Oxford Colleges (Gutch, ed.), 184, 191, 197, 282 ; DNB. We have not regarded as a charitable outlay the £30,000 which Warham said he had expended on the building of his palace at Otford, on his house at Knole, and on the repair on other residences belonging to the see. " . . . Et quoniam multis inauditis quaesitisque coloribus bona defunctorum episcoporum contra voluntates ipsorum episcoporum minus juste auferuntur, atque legata in eis tam ad pias quam ad alias causas non solvuntur, sed testatores per eorum suecessores pro dilapidaoionibus recompensaciones vendicantes voluntate sua damnabiliter fraudantur, igitur executores meos infranominatos requiro ut successori mei in Archiepiscopatu Cantuariensi, cujuscunque status honoris vel dignitatis extiterit, declarent quantas pecuniarum summas super resarcitis maneriis et domibus meis exposui, quandoquidem in consciencia mea nihil pro dilapidaoionibus debeo. Nam in maneriis et domibus meis jure ecclesiae meae ad me pertinentibus jam de novo edificatis, constructis, reparatis et resarcitis ad triginta millia librarum sterlingorum sicut me Deus adjuvet, cujus misericordiam et spero et expecto, citra tempus illud quo primo sedi in sede archiepiseopatus Cantuariensis exposui, et pro dilapidaoionibus in temporibus predecessorum meorum factis ne minime quidem virtutem accepi," 4 Vide ante, 24, 47, 84. * PCC 29 Parker 1619. 96 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS Sedley's son had in 1613 married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Henry Savile. And it was Sir Henry Savile who in 1619, the same year as Sedley's foundation, established in Oxford the two professorships in geometry and astronomy which bear his name with an original endowment of £320 p.a., of which, however, only the capital worth of £800, being the value of an estate called Norlands in the parish of Ebony, has been credited to Kent.1 An even greater scholar, the historian William Camden, in 1622 devised the manor of Bexley in Kent to Oxford University for the foundation of a professorship of history. The rents of the manor were at that time valued at £400 and were under the terms of the deed of gift settled on William Heather and his heirs for a term of ninety-nine years ; Heather, the renowned composer, founded with his own funds a lectureship in music at Oxford. For the ninety-nine-year term specified by Camden, £140 p.a. was to be paid out of the estate for the professorship, and then the manor was to be wholly vested in the university.2 The pattern of these very large endowments for chairs in the universities, so important and so common during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, was well maintained by Sir Edwin Sandys of Northbourne, Kent, under the terms of his will proved in 1629. A son of Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, Sandys had enjoyed a truly remarkable career as a traveller, author, politician, prisoner of state, speculator, and colonial undertaker. In his most interesting will Sandys confessed that his estate had been weakened by debts, bis manor of Stoneham being particularly heavily mortgaged. This estate was to be reserved and its income hypothecated for a term of years in order to pay all his just debts. Quite characteristically, Sandys ordered £500 to be risked on each of three East Indian voyages in order to provide competences for his three daughters, while £160 from his Yorkshire leases was to be employed for the support of his three younger sons. From the residue of his estate, £1,500 should be used to purchase lands to be conveyed to Oxford for the endowment of a lectureship in metaphysical philosophy, and £1,000 was to be given to Cambridge for the same purpose, the lectureship to be named in honour of Francis Mecham, a deceased friend.3 1 PCC 44 Savile 1622 ; DNB ; Brodrick, G. O, Memorials of Merton College (Oxford, 1885), 166-167. The bulk of the huge benefactions of this great scholar and philanthropist has been credited to Yorkshire, the county of his birth and in which his family was so long and so prominently seated. 2 PCC 111 Swann 1623 ; Hasted, Kent, II, 165 ; DNB ; Ireland, Kent, IV, 533. 3 PCC 84 Ridley 1629 ; Alum, oxon., IV, 1309 ; DNB ; Virginia Magazine, XXIX (1921), 235 ; Arch. Cant., XXIV (1900), 105. These bequests failed, apparently because Sandys' estates were straitened beyond his somewhat sangume assumption. In 1619 he had persuaded the Virginia Company to set aside 10,000 acres for the founding of a college at Henrico, a plan later abandoned. 97 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 We may conclude with the benefaction of Thomas Nevile, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Dean of Canterbury. Nevile, on his death in 1615, left a substantial bequest to Eastbridge Hospital in Canterbury, but his great concern was with the completion of the quadrangle of his college. During a period of seven years he was said to have lent £3,000 towards this work, while from his own purse he laid out approximately £1,000 towards building the second court of the college as well as contributing manuscripts and books to its library.1 E. Religion. The first region in England to be well and permanently organized as Christian, Kent was maturely gathered into a parochial system long before the beginning of our period. Divided for administrative purposes between Canterbury and Rochester, it likewise benefited from the nearness to two powerful and interested prelates, with the result that the visitations of its churches and religious houses were more effectively and continuously carried forward than in any other county in England. Moreover, its parochial clergy were on the whole more consistently protected from the spoliation of monastic and lay proprietors than was the case in most dioceses, and they very probably enjoyed larger average stipends than those to be found in any other rural diocese in the realm. But, at the same time, Kent had been from the Lollard days a notable centre of heresy and was very early indeed to have many Protestant sympathizers. Several large and wellorganized Protestant groups from abroad obtained sanctuary in Kent during the Elizabethan age, which were in their turn to become centres, if not of dissent, of a most lively and influential religious life outside the bounds of the Establishment. Puritanism and later dissent became firmly rooted in Kent in the late sixteenth century, particularly in Canterbury and the market towns, embracing as well a considerable and an increasing number of the rural gentry and yeomanry. The parochial structure of the county seems to have been quite mature as early as the Domesday Inquest, which named as many as 360 settled places in the county and which listed about half as many churches. Somewhat more than two centuries later, in 1291, an official Taxatio lists 353 churches and chapels in the county, 243 being in the diocese of Canterbury and 110 in Rochester, which of course means that even then the great task of building the church fabric of the shire must have been well advanced.2 Strong efforts were in fact made in 1 PCC 118 Rudd 1616 ; DNB ; Alum, cantab., I, iii, 244 ; Fuller, Worthies, II, 185 ; Cooper, Memorials of Cambridge, II, 264 ; Hasted, Kent, XII, 10. Nevile was graduated from Pembroke College in 1569. He was Master of Magdalene from 1582 to 1593 and of Trinity from 1693 until his death. He was Dean of Canterbury, where he was buried, from 1597 to 1615. 2 VCH, Kent, II, 50. 98 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS the course of the fourteenth century to protect existing churches and parishes by preventing the further fractionation of the parochial system, a return for 1563 listing 367 churches and chapels in the county, showing an actual decline of nineteen in the diocese of Rochester.1 Our own records reveal bequests in a total of 395 distinct communities in the course of a period of almost two centuries, a figure which we shall use for statistical purposes, though it is doubtful that there were ever quite this number of parishes at any given date.2 Kent's benefactors, as we should expect, were to give very generously indeed to the religious needs of the county and its already hallowed institutions. In all, the large total of £67,389 10s. was provided for the various religious uses during the course of our period, or somewhat more than a fourth of all the charitable benefactions of the age.3 Yet, generous as this total was, it amounted to no more than a large fraction of the £102,519 7s. given for the several forms of poor relief and not a great deal more than the £58,255 16s. provided for the educational needs of the county. Also, it is most important and Tevealing to note that of the great sum given for religious purposes the amazing total of £45,519 12s. was provided during the relatively short interval prior to the Reformation. In this period, slightly more than 60 per cent, of all charitable benefactions were designated for one or another religious use in a great outpouring from all classes of men, which suggests to us how very different the temper of even late medieval men was from that of their sons and grandsons. Of this great total, well over a third was given for the chantries and masses which were so shortly to become at first distrusted and then extra-legal. The sum of £16,725 5s. was provided by the pious for this purpose, an amount exceeding by far that for any other specifically religious use, save for the £14,415 15s. given for the care of the magnificent ecclesiastical fabric which Kent had inherited from the earlier Middle Ages. In fact, of the great total of £74,494 10s. given for all charitable purposes during these years, almost 42 per cent, was dedicated to two ends, the repose of the souls of the donors in the world to come and the care of the fabric of the visible church which men had inherited from their forefathers. In the course of the next period, when the great Reformation con- 1 Harleian MSS., 594, f. 63. 2 There were, for example, only 350 parishes in 1603. 3 This proportion may be compared with the percentages given for religious uses in the other counties comprised in this study : % °/ BBuricsktoinl ghamshire 13-18 London 19-50 Hampshire Kent Lancashire 13-45 18-46 26-77 31-94 Norfolk Somerset Worcestershire Yorkshire 23-01 27-35 17-94 28-07 99 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 troversies were at their most bitter, the gifts made for religious purposes, as we should expect, fell dramatically. The total of contributions for all church uses amounted to no more that £3,669 3s., a proportion (31 • 16 per cent.) only scantily more than half that for the preceding age. Quite surprisingly, the essential conservatism of the countryside is suggested by the fact that almost a third (£1,139 3s.) of this amount was provided for masses, while not quite so much (£1,061 8s.) was given for the always prudent purpose of church repair. I t is in the Elizabethan era that the full significance of the great revolution that had occurred so swiftly and so permanently in the structure of men's aspirations became boldly evident. In this long and prosperous age, only £3,908 17s. was given for all the religious needs, an amount representing only 8 • 65 per cent, of the charities of these two generations. The unbelievable smallness of this amount, as compared with the past, is suggested when we assess it against almost three times as much given in these years for education, six times as much for the care of the poor, and a roughly equal amount for various experiments in social rehabilitation. Further, it is important to observe, very nearly three-fourths of the really tiny amount given for religious uses was designated either for church building or repair, a form of philanthropy as often as not civic rather than religious in its motivation. Nor was there any improvement of consequence in the early Stuart period, despite the friendlier concern of the Crown and, towards its close, the frantic efforts of the Laudian clergy. Though this was the period when the great welling-up of Kentish charitable giving was to occur, only £9,504 16s. was given for religious purposes, or just slightly more than 10 per cent, of the whole. Once again, the care of the fabric rather more than the care of souls seems to have interested donors, since substantially more than half the total was concerned with church building or repairs. There was, it must be noted, a sharp percentage increase in gifts for religious uses during the revolutionary era, when the total of £4,787 2s. provided represents 18-17 per cent, of the whole of the charitable funds given during these two decades,1 though it remains very clear indeed that the whole structure of men's aspirations had become predominantly secular about the time of Elizabeth's accession and, save for minor shifts, was to remain so with remarkable and convinced persistence. I t seems probable that the gifts and bequests made for the general needs of the church constitute the best single criterion of the interest and dedication of a society to the necessities of rehgion—the truest measure of men's estimate of its importance in their lives and aspira- 1 It must be noted that there is a degree of statistical distortion here, since £1,483 18s. of contributions of an uncertain date have for convenience been inoluded in the total for this interval. 100 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS tions. We have included a wide variety of gifts under the head of " church general" : gifts for lights, for the support of the service, for altars and images, and for undesignated church uses. For a long time past in Kent, as in other English counties, such gifts, particularly in the form of bequests, had become customary in all classes of society and were almost automatically included in wills when drawn even by the simplest persons, in part, it must be supposed, because the parish priest so often either drafted or witnessed the will. A glance at the bequests in any Kentish parish before 1560 will suggest how important a source of general revenue these legacies were in meeting the expenses for the conduct of the services and discharging the multifarious spiritual responsibilities that had come to be connected with parochial life. For the whole of our period, gifts for the general uses of the church totalled £5,672 2s., or 2-25 per cent, of the charitable funds of the county. Though most of the gifts comprising this sum were very small indeed, it may be remarked that a substantial proportion of the whole (87-34 per cent.) were made as capital additions to funds held by the parish officers, though not uncommonly in the hazardous form of cattle, sheep, or fowl, which, it was hoped, might reproduce themselves in parish hands in perpetuity. During the long interval that preceded the Reformation, the flow of gifts and bequests for this important purpose continued without particularly significant interruption until the final decade. A total of £3,200 6s. was provided for the general services of the church in this era, an amount very probably sufficient to care for the needs not financed by tithe revenues and, not infrequently, by the generosity of the priest himself. But it is significant that slightly more than 56 per cent, of all benefactions for this purpose were made in the period just prior to the Reformation. There was no drastic slackening of these gifts during the Reformation era itself, when slightly more than £300 was provided in each decade, but a cataclysm of indifference marks in a very precise fashion the accession of the great Queen. During the whole course of this long reign the total given by men and women of the county for the general uses of the church amounted to no more than £297 3s., and, if the next decade (1601-1610) may be added, to £329 9s. This means, in the ultimately important parish terms, that over a period of a half-century no more than 16s. 8d. was given on the average to each church in the county for the support of its ministrations. This is a secularism so complete as to be almost paralysing in its impact and in its significance for the history of the society and it was, as we shall see, a secularism equally apparent over the whole range of the continuing needs of the church. There was at least a slight improvement in giving for general church purposes during the early Stuart period, when a total of £1,043 3s. was provided. But the improvement, even in the two decades marked by 101 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 the dedicated efforts of Archbishop Laud, must be assessed as very slight indeed when we bear in mind the immense outpouring of charitable funds during these years. For example, it is true that £453 was given for church needs between 1621 and 1630, but in this same interval the great total of £24,875 9s. was provided for all charitable causes, which of course means that the tiny proportion of 1 • 82 per cent, of all benefactions was disposed for this particular use. Further, it will be noted, during the era of religious and political uncertainty with which our study closes, the amounts given for the general needs of the church dropped back to the austere levels of Elizabethan giving.1 Laud's most earnest efforts had had no more than a slight and certainly a temporary effect in altering the now established patterns of men's aspirations. The revolutionary shift in sentiments and interests that was under way may perhaps best be documented by a brief but more precise analysis of the structure of giving for the general uses of the church. In the decade 1501-1510, for example, £550 was provided for this purpose by 503 donors of the county. There happened to be one substantial gift of lands and quit-rents with an estimated capital value of £180 for the general uses of Great Chart church in the decade, which should perhaps be excluded as wholly untypical and hence distorting our average. This means, therefore, that 502 benefactors in this decade gave in all £370 for this most important purpose, or an average of 14s. 9d. for each donor. These gifts were very broadly based, ranging in amount from many of Id. and 2d. to eleven of £5 or more. What is perhaps even more important, such gifts have been noted in a total of 331 parishes of the county, which may have been close indeed to the whole number in this period. In contrast, just two generations later (1561-1570) the total of gifts made for this charitable use in the whole of Kent amounted to no more than £72 19s. There were for this decade only twenty-one gifts or bequests rendered for the general uses of the church, of which, again, one valued at £42 accounts for a large proportion of the whole. Nine of these gifts were in amounts of Is. or less, eight were in the range of Is. Id. to £1 ; while four were more than £1 in amount. This suggests that popular support for the general needs of the church was almost at an end ; that the customary legacies were disappearing, having been replaced by small doles left for the relief of the poor ; and that an all but complete realignment of men's basic aspirations for their society and its needs had taken place. 1 We must again mention the fact that £400 15s. of gifts for the general uses of the church are of an unluiown date and are somewhat improperly included for statistical purposes within this period. A large proportion of these gifts was certainly made prior to 1560. 102 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS In view of these facts, it is remarkable indeed that Kentish donors were so devoutly interested in the founding of chantries and in securing arrangements in their wills for at least simple offices for the repose of their souls. As we have noted, in many parts of England such foundations, when more than nominal in amount or for quite precisely appointed masses, were suspect long before the Reformation. But this was not so evidently the case in Kent, save for the elaborate safeguards which quite commonly sought to secure the terms of the trust and which reflect the sorry record of chantry trusts in the county prior to the Reformation. In all, the large total of £17,864 8s. was provided for prayers in the years prior to the accession of Elizabeth, or 7-10 per cent, of all charitable benefactions in our whole period, a proportion very high indeed among the counties included in this study.1 This total accounts for well over a third of all gifts made for religious purposes in the decades before Elizabeth's coming to the throne and rivals the amount given for such purposes as church repairs and university endowments during the whole course of our period. Most of these legacies were of course small bequests for a trental of masses or for prayers on anniversary days, but a very heavy proportion was in the form of endowments for permanent chantries or to secure prayers for a term of twenty years or more. In all, the substantial sum of £14,961 18s. was capitalized to secure the services of stipendiary priests, which suggests that, at the rates prevailing for such clergymen in Kent, something like 107 priests may have gained the whole or most of their support from these foundations. One cannot help reflecting, since these endowments were either lost by maladministration or expropriated by the Crown, how greatly the church in Kent would have been strengthened had this considerable augmentation of revenues been disposed for the support of the parochial clergy. Chantry foundations were, of course, within the means of relatively few men, particularly if a chapel as well as the endowment for a priest was provided by the donor. We have noted in all twenty-two endowed chantry foundations in the period 1480-1560, of which three were made by members of the upper gentry and five by the lower clergy. Seven in all were founded by members of the clergy, two being bishops, while three were established by lawyers and public officials. Three were the creation of members of the mercantile aristocracy, while one was established by a widow of uncertain social status. 1 The amounts and the proportions given for prayers in the various counties were as follows: Bristol Buckinghamshire Hampshire Kent Lancashire £ 4,461 708 1,019 17,864 5,843 s. 11 3 10 8 7 0/ 4-/8o 5 0-80 1-17 7-10 5-63 London Norfolk Somerset Worcestershire Yorkshire £ s. 69,353 18 11,328 14 10,818 12 2,689 18 25,568 10 /o 3-67 6-37 9-28 5-11 10-49 103 8 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 The relative religious conservatism of Kent is quite as amply documented by the substantial and the continuing benefactions by men of the county to its monasteries. In total, £4,782 9s. was provided for various monastic needs in the course of our period. Under Queen Mary, a forlorn effort was made to revive at least a few of the earlier foundations, the Queen herself giving £620 of the total of £680 bestowed on Kentish monasteries during her reign.1 Excluding the gifts made later than 1540, the total represents the relatively impressive proportion of 5-51 per cent, of all charitable bequests made during the pre- Reformation decades and 9-01 per cent, of all the gifts made in this period for the various religious purposes.2 This was not, of course, a considerable total when we take into account the numerous and the very old monastic foundations of the county, which, under the usually vigilant eye of Canterbury, were probably better administered than were monasteries in most parts of England. The monasteries of Kent ranked fifth in their wealth in the whole of England at the time of their dissolution, possessing revenues of £6,897 8s. 2d. p.a., or a capital worth of possibly £137,948, which, it may be noted, is only slightly more than half the whole amount provided during our entire period for the charitable needs of the county. Great as may have been the contribution of these foundations in the medieval past, it is evident that they had all but disavowed their charitable responsibilities by the beginning of our period. The monasteries of Kent, just prior to the Dissolution, were dispensing under trusts no more than £115 10s. p.a. in alms, which in terms of their income means that only 1 • 67 per cent, was being employed for the care of the poor, the halt, and the rejected.3 I t can scarcely be said that the dissolution of the monasteries in the county created any particularly grave social vacuum, whatever the 1 It should be noted that in Kent as in other counties only gifts made to Kentish monasteries, whether by local or out-of-county donors, are included in our totals. This is made necessary by the fact that the support of monasteries was less parochial than any other form of charity, save gifts to the universities, and only by this convention could confusing duplications be avoided. It should also be remarked that Table I includes under Religion no head for monastic gifts, which were relatively small in most counties and which persisted for only a short portion of our period. The " gathered gifts " to monasteries are being treated as an entity in the present discussion, but for other purposes are distributed to four great heads : church general, clergy, church building and repairs, and prayers. 2 Comparisons with the other counties included in this study can perhaps be most meaningful if presented in the totals actually given for monastic uses : £ s. £ s. Bristol 1,139 6 London 41,883 12 Buckinghamshire 182 0 Norfolk 2,008 1 Hampshire 208 18 Somerset 1,792 14 Kent 4,782 9 Worcestershire 375 19 Lancashire 794 13 Yorkshire 3,625 1 3 Savine, Alexander, English monasteries on the eve of the Dissolution (Oxford, 1909), 236, 274-275. 104 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS spiritual effects may have been. Private endowments for the care of the poor in the two decades of the Reformation created resources providing well over twice as much as the relatively insignificant sum distributed in alms by all monasteries of the county. Moreover, it should be observed that the £4,782 9s. given for various monastic uses during a period of two full generations represents an increase of no more than 3 -46 per cent, in the capital resources presumably available to the monastic foundations of the county in 1480. This would mean a rate of augmentation quite insufficient to maintain the elaborate fabric of the establishment, to meet the considerable erosion of fire and decay, and to replace the capital losses so steadily being incurred by monastic maladministration. The contribution made by the county to its monasteries was the gift of 271 individual donors, of whom approximately half made their gifts in the first two decades of our period. These gifts and bequests range from seventy which were for amounts less than 10s.-—a healthy indication of continuing support among the poorer classes—to ten in amounts of £100 or more. The largest of all the individual benefactions, as we have mentioned, was the gift of £620 made by Queen Mary for re-establishing the order of Dominican nuns at Dartford and the restoration of the building of the Observant Friars at Greenwich. The largest aggregate amount, £1,960 17s., was provided by pious donors for the general support of the monastic clergy of the county. A total of £982 7s. was given for undesignated purposes, while a slightly smaller sum, £970 6s., was vested in the monasteries of the county to secure endowments of prayers of various sorts. The repair of the fabric and further building commanded £868 19s. from benefactors of the period. I t has been possible to establish the social status of 184 of the donors to monastic needs. Since the eighty-seven benefactors whose social identity is unknown numbered almost one-third of the donors, yet gave only about a tenth of the whole of the funds provided, it is clear that these benefactors were on balance drawn principally from the ranks of the lower social groups and, since they were almost entirely rural donors, this would probably mean that they were yeomen and husbandmen. By far the largest total contribution to Kentish monasteries was made by the Crown, in five grants by three sovereigns, with a total of £1,235 12s., or slightly less than a fourth of the entire amount. There was one gift from the nobility, in the trifling amount of £3 7s. The upper gentry of the county contributed £666 12s. to monastic requirements in gifts from thirteen individuals, ranging in amount from 5s. to £267, the median gift being £9 13s. The Crown aside, the lower gentry of the county were the largest contributors, thirty-five of this class having given a total of £785 3s. in amounts ranging from 2s. to £157, the median gift being exactly £5. The 105 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 certainly identified yeomen, twenty-one in number, gave a total of £124 12s. to monastic needs, in amounts ranging from Is. to £80, the median gift being £1 2s. We have recorded gifts from seven husbandmen totalling £1 12s., though it seems certain that many additional gifts, in very small sums, principally to local foundations, were made by unidentified members of the class. Three members of the upper clergy gave in all £110 13s. to Kentish monasteries, but it ought perhaps to be mentioned that there were large benefactions made by the class to monasteries in other parts of the realm. The lower clergy gave in all £507 18s. in twenty-eight separate gifts ranging from Is. to £290, the median benefaction being £4 7s., and comparing very closely with the pattern of giving of the lower gentry. The merchants of the county, eleven in number, mostly residing in Canterbury and giving to its great establishments, gave the surprisingly large total of £630, in amounts that ranged from £1 to £320, with a very high median gift of £23 16s. There were thirteen men and women donors of the somewhat ambiguously defined burgher class, who gave £51 l is. in all, while twentyfour tradesmen gave a total of £83 6s. in sums ranging from 3s. to £50. And finally, it is interesting to observe that twenty-eight artisans gave a total of £31 9s., save for two cases always to local foundations, in sums ranging from 3d. to £4 7s. The plight of the monasteries and their comparative neglect by donors of the county was, in terms of the basic needs of the church, by no means so serious as the plight of the parochial clergy, particularly after the Reformation. When compared with the clergy in most other essentially rural counties, as we have remarked earlier, the parish clergy of Kent had been reasonably well protected against both monastic and lay despoilers of their revenues. But with their almost universal practice of marriage after 1558, the disappearance of the regular clergy, the ever-rising costs of living, the drying up of the customary gifts and bequests for the uses of the church, and the loss of the steady flow of chantry bequests, the clergy of the county found themselves subjected to the same severe strains that beset their brethren throughout the realm during the Elizabethan period. Quite sporadic efforts were made by troubled and pious benefactors to remedy this deplorable situation by outright bequests to named clergymen and, more importantly, by the creation of endowments designed to secure the augmentation of clerical income in particular parishes. In the whole course of our period £8,718 17s. was provided for the clergy, of which £7,188 6s. (82-45 per cent.) was in the form of endowments of one sort or another. Well over a third of this considerable sum, which amounted to 3-46 per cent, of all charities in the county, was given in the pre-Reformation period, when £2,944 3s. was provided for the support of the clergy. But, most unfortunately, 106 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS the greater part of this amount was given specifically for the better maintenance of the regular clergy, and the whole of these endowments, together with the £14,961 18s. of capital given in the same interval for the support of the stipendiary clergy, disappeared in the maw of the Reformation settlement. During the Reformation period £758 13s. was given for maintenance, but of this considerable amount £620 is represented by Queen Mary's ill-fated effort to re-establish the regular clergy in the county. The intense secularism of English life after 1558 is again most dramatically demonstrated by the fact that in the long interval from 1561 to 1600 the total provided for the maintenance of the clergy of Kent was no more than £598 15s. This means that, in a period when the clergy were subject to an unrelieved and steadily worsening financial strain, in average terms not more than £1 10s. 3d. was given in each parish of the county for the augmentation of clerical stipends. There was in Kent, as elsewhere, at least a relative betterment in the early Stuart period, when a total of £2,295 5s. was given for this purpose, which considerably improved the clergyman's lot in six parishes and at least afforded some capital augmentation in fourteen others. This movement continued and was in fact most substantially strengthened during the era of civil disturbance, when in two brief decades the most impressive total of £2,122 Is., of which all save £37 7s. 4d. was in capital, was provided for the bettering of clerical stipends. At least a few of the larger of the benefactions for this eminently worthy purpose may be briefly described, though a number have been noted in earlier connections. In 1481 Sir Thomas Bryan, of Cheddington, Buckinghamshire, gave extensive properties worth £267 for the support of the impoverished Dominican nuns of Dartford.1 A merchant of Faversham, Richard Colwell, probably about 1525, gave to the abbey there land with a capital worth of approximately £320 for the better support of the monastic clergy.2 These are perhaps typical of the numerous gifts designed to strengthen the ministrations of the regular clergy. But for exactly a half-century, 1541 to 1591, there was no benefaction made in an amount as great as £100 for the support of the parochial clergy. Such gifts and bequests as were made consisted chiefly of small outright legacies for a named minister or small endowments for an annual sermon of remembrance. Thus in 1561 Thomas Tarboke of St. Paul's Cray, himself a clergyman, left one red heifer with a white face and two houses with a total worth of £41 for an annual sermon in the parish church, to be preached by his successor.3 George 1 PCC 13 Moone 1600 ; VCH, Kent, II, 185. 2 Lewis, Faversham, 39, 83 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 278, 280 ; Jacob, Faversham, 120. Colwell was Mayor of Faversham in 1534. 3 PCC 9 Loftes 1561 ; Duncan, L. L., and Arthur Hussey, eds., Testatnenta Gantiana (L., 1907), i, 15. 107 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 Usmer, a gentleman of East Sutton, tried at least to secure the services of a resident curate for that place in 1566 when he devised lands with an estimated value of £70, the income to be employed for his maintenance, or, if this condition were not met, for church repairs.1 A member of Parliament for Rochester, Thomas Page, in 1569 gave a tenement in Shorne, with an estimated capital value of £30, to be held in trust as a residence for the vicar of that parish.2 Sir Thomas Sondes, whose foundation of a school in Throwley has already been mentioned, in 1592 left £100 to be distributed over a period of twelve years for two funeral sermons each year, a considerable, if limited, betterment of a clergyman's income.3 But the first large and wellconceived benefaction of this kind did not occur until the close of this half-century of almost complete disinterest in the needs of the clergy when, as we have already observed, Sir Roger Manwood in 1592 augmented the stipend of the clergyman at Hackington with an income conservatively valued at £12 p.a., as well as providing an annuity of 13s. 4d. for an annual sermon.4 There was, as we have suggested, at least relative improvement in the efforts to secure more appropriate remuneration for the clergy of the county after 1610, though the instances of really significant augmentations are very few indeed. In 1620 the Puritan knight, Sir Robert Brett, charged his estate in Gloucestershire with the maintenance of a weekly lecture which he had been supporting at West Mailing, setting aside £26 p.a. of income for the payment of the lecturer at the rate of 10s. each week. In addition, he provided £10 p.a. as an augmentation of the living of the clergyman of the parish, or a total capital ou'tlay of perhaps £720 for what must have been a most efficacious remedying of the needs of at least one community.5 An interesting effort was made by Thomas Stanley, lord of the manor of Hamptons, to secure regular services and a resident curate for the community lying about the village of Plaxtol, itself upwards of three miles from the parish church at Wrotham. Stanley in 1638 conveyed to the redoubtable Sir Henry Vane and four other feoffees real property, then valued at £7 p.a., for the maintenance of a curate provided that the inhabitants of the neighbourhood should within a reasonable time raise an additional £8 p.a. An ordinance of Parliament in 1647 separated the district into a parish distinct from Wrotham, and 1 PP 1837, XXIII, 395, 397 ; Hasted, Kent, V, 381 ; vide ante, 20. 2 Smith, Rochester in Parliament, 97. 3 Vide ante, 82, wad post, 113. 4 Vide ante, 42-43, and post, 120. 6 PCC 85 Soame 1620 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 372 ; Hasted, Kent, IV, 511, 528 ; Ducarel, Repertory, 190-191. Brett also left a large annuity of £26 for the complete support of twenty poor of the parish. Brett, who was lord of the manor, was descended from an old Somersetshire family. His wife was the only daughter of Sir Thomas Fane. 108 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS in 1648 a chapel was erected from funds secured in the county and from a collection taken throughout England. With the Restoration the community was reunited for spiritual purposes with Wrotham despite the violent objection of the inhabitants, though Stanley's stipend was saved when after legal action the Vicar of Wrotham ceded £20 p.a. for the augmentation of the curate's stipend.1 In 1658 an ejected Anglican divine, John Stanley, who had inherited a considerable fortune from his father, a Canterbury merchant, in a most interesting will devised to charitable purposes a total of £921, of which £217 was for poor relief, £224 for the support of almshouses, and £480 for the assistance of needy clergymen. Stanley left £20 each to twenty-four named clergymen, all of whom had probably been deprived, an amount which, as it was to turn out, may well have been sufficient to secure their support until the Restoration.2 In 1660, probably just after the Restoration, a Canterbury spinster, Anne Line, presumably by purchase of the lease from the Archdeacon of Canterbury, secured an augmentation of £8 p.a. for the curate of the chapel at Iwade, then dependent on the the parish church of Teynham.3 These rather feeble and certainly sporadic efforts to augment the livings of clergymen in the county cannot and perhaps should not be too cleanly separated from the efforts of donors with Puritan leanings to establish more vigorous and godly preaching in the region. Gifts and bequests for this purpose began in a modest way in the mid-Elizabethan period and continued in every successive decade. Despite the strong Puritan sentiment in the county, a surprisingly small total of £1,724 14s. was provided for this purpose, amounting to only 0-69 per cent, of the whole of the charities of the county. Almost half this total was given in the one decade 1611-1620, when £733 7s. was vested for lectureships. It is rather surprising, too, that only slightly more than half (56-51 per cent.) of the whole amount given for lectureships was in the form of capital amounts, these donors evidently, and correctly, fearing ecclesiastical or governmental intervention and endeavouring to accomplish then- ends by annual and hence more flexibly controlled stipends. 1 Hasted, Kent, V, 24, 60 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 375. 8 PCC 285 Wootton 1658 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 249. Stanley was graduated from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in 1627. He was chaplain of Magdalene College from 1630 to 1647, when he was ejected, and was Rector of Kirkby Overblow, Yorkshire, from 1646 to 1648 (Alum, cantab., I, iv, 147). The charities mentioned in the text included £12 10s. p.a. for four years for clothing ten poor of Hullavington, Wiltshire ; £12 10s. p.a. for two years for clothing ten poor of St. Paul's, Canterbury ; £10 p.a. for two years for the same purpose in Northgate, Canterbury ; £15 for one year for twelve poor of St. George, Canterbury ; £12 10s. p.a. for eight years for clothing ten poor of St. Mildred's, Canterbury. £7 was left to the poor of Heme and the whole of the £224 for almshouses was given to Canterbury institutions. 3 Ducarel, Repertory, 69 ; Hasted, Kent, VI, 205. 109 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 In no respect was the profoundly important shift in men's aspirations from religious to secular preoccupations more dramatically apparent than in the amounts provided by private charity for the care of the fabric of the churches of the county. Under this head we have included not only benefactions made for the normal repair of church structures, but an almost infinite variety of gifts that were made for the ornamentation of churches, objects used in the service, vestments worn by the clergy, and, indeed, the whole rich complex of paraphernalia with which men of piety love to adorn their church and its ritual. Over the whole course of our period the substantial total of £19,138 9s. was provided by Kentish donors for these uses. This sum, somewhat larger than that given for the support of the universities, amounted to 7 -6 per cent, of all charitable benefactions in the county and to well over a fourth (28-4 per cent.) of the total of funds provided for all religious causes. In fact, Kentish donors designated substantially more for this use, so closely linked with civic pride as well as piety, than did donors in any other county studied, London of course aside.1 But the staggering fact is that of this great total £14,415 15s. was given during the six decades prior to the Reformation, which amounts to almost exactly three-fourths of the whole of the funds given during our entire period for the care of the fabric of the churches of the county. In other words, on the average the substantial total of £36 9s. l id. was provided for the care of each church in the county and the adornment of its ritual in the two generations extending from 1480 to 1540. In the four generations following, however, the broad and almost certainly adequate base of this support was all but destroyed as the cold winds of secularism swept over England. From 1541 to 1660 only £4,722 14s. was given for church repairs in the entire county, which would mean, again in average terms, that slightly less than £11 19s. Id. was given for this chronic need in a very long interval, an amount wholly inadequate for even the essential repairs required by any edifice built by the hands of men. The withdrawal of this support was as decisive as it was abrupt with the accession of Queen Elizabeth. During the whole of her age no more than £1,155 lis. was given for this use, or in average terms only £2 18s. 6d. for each church in this shire. Through a full century (1561-1660) there was in fact a total contribution for this purpose equal to as much as £1 for each church in only one decade. 1 The amount given in each of the several counties to church repairs and its proportion to the total charities for each county is as follows : Bristol Buckinghamshire Hampshire Kent Lancashire £ 872 2,958 2,967 19,138 5,802 s. 7 4 0 9 4 to 0-95 3-35 3-41 7-60 5-69 London Norfolk Somerset Worcestershire Yorkshire £ s. 33,601 12 13,004 13 4,265 0 1,806 6 6,774 0 /o 1-78 7-31 3-66 3-43 2-78 110 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS These facts provide all too eloquent documentation for the constant complaints in the early seventeenth century that the magnificent architectural heritage of the county was in serious and nearly universal decay. They provide equally convincing evidence that very few men cared, since even the strident remonstrations of Archbishop Laud and his followers were without effect in Kent. We may most accurately assess the immensely significant shift in men's aspirations by comparing their contributions for church maintenance in a late medieval decade with a similar period just a century later at the close of the Elizabethan age. In the brief period 1491-1500 the relatively great total of £7,361 l is. was provided by pious men and women for the care of the churches of the county, or an average of almost £19 for each church in all of Kent. This great sum, by far the most to be given in any decade for this use, it should be remarked, was constituted from 461 individual gifts and legacies. Thus the average gift was relatively high, being almost £16, but this is misleading, since the benefactions of sixteen large donors account for upwards of £1,800 of the whole sum and six churches of the county were provided with rood lofts in this decade at a fairly tightly estimated total cost of £180.l The significant fact is the great breadth of the interest of all men in the county in the care of their parish churches, to which almost every testator, doubtless under the firm tuition of his priest, left at least a nominal amount. In all, there were 241 donors whose bequests amounted to less than 5s. during this interval, indicating the extent of the support which had made possible not only the building but the preservation of the medieval ecclesiastical fabric. It is noteworthy, too, that at least something has been recorded as bequeathed or given for church repairs in 306 of the parishes of the county in this extraordinary decade. Space will perhaps permit the recording of at least a few of the many smaller and more typical bequests which betoken the strength and the universality of the interest of men in this pious need just a generation before the advent of the Reformation in England. In 1491 a widow of Hawkhurst, Elinora Barnes, left £2 for the repair of her parish church,2 while Joan Belser left a stained rood cloth of 3s. value as well as a saucer to St. Dunstan's in Canterbury.3 Probably in the same year a husbandman of Deptford, Richard Blake, left 3s. 4d. to 1 The county was unusually late in providing rood lofts, which were placed in most English churches much earlier in the fifteenth century. We have counted benefactions or gifts for forty-two rood lofts in Kent in the period 1481-1540, with a heavy concentration in the third decade of the sixteenth century. We have noted only the contributions of known amounts made for this purpose, many of which were of course insufficient for the completion of the work. The total given for this purpose was £617 4s. 2 Test. Cant., ii, 166. 3 Arch. Cant., XVI (1886), 313, 315. I l l SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 church repairs in that parish,1 and Henry Bucldand gave 4d. to " the painting of St. Christopher " at Hythe.2 A burgher of Faversham, James Buckland, bequeathed £1 to the repair of Stone church, among other and larger charitable bequests3 ; James Burmond of Canterbury provided £1 4s. for a cross in St. Margaret's church4 ; while John Cayser [Keyser] of East Peckham, probably a wool grower, left a relatively large sum of £8 6s. for such purposes as opening or repairing windows, providing a chalice, repairing a crucifix, and painting and repairing images and crosses in that parish church.5 A fisherman of Hythe, Thomas Chandler, left £1 7s. for church works, together with more substantial secular charities6 ; William Church of Eastry provided 3s. 4d.7 ; and John Coke of Sandwich gave an estimated £1 for the lead required in the " regeying of Our Lady Chancel " in St. Peter's church there.8 A substantial bequest of £12 for church repairs and decorations at Kingston was provided by the will of Thomas Denne in this same year9 ; Philip Dodington left 3s. 4d. for similar purposes in Hythe10 ; while Robert Estxlon of St. Peter Extra gave £1 6s. 8d. for painting and mending the high cross and 13s. 4d. to make a holy water stoup.11 Wifiiam Godfrey of Southfieet left £6 13s. 4d. for the repair of vestments, copes, and altar cloths in his church,12 while the impecunious Vicar of Hackington, Simon Hoggis, left Is. 8d. for the maintenance of his church.13 To conclude our recording of but a few of the representative bequests for church repairs and decorations left in the single year 1491, we may mention the £3 6s. 8d. left by Alice Malin to the chapel of St. Leonard, Hythe, for a chalice and other necessary works,14 the 13s. 4d. left by William Messinger of Bapchild for the shingling of his church,15 the £1 given for general maintenance needs by a donor named Nickeless [Nicholas] of Margate,16 and the relatively large bequest of £12 made by John Page of Shorne, of which £2 was designated for painting the rood loft and £10 for a new bell.17 1 Drake, H. H., ed., Hasted's history of Kent (L., 1886), 36. 2 Arch. Cant., XLIX (1938), 169. 3 Test. Cant., ii, 323-324. 4 Ibid., ii, 53, 67. 6 PCC 46 Milles 1491 ; Cook, A. R., A manor through four centuries (L., 1938), 24 ; St. Paul's Ecclesiological Society Transactions, III (1895), 282. 6 Arch. Cant., XLIX (1938), 143. 7 Ibid., XXXVIII (1926), 178. 8 Test. Cant., ii, 289, 291. 9 Kent Records, XI I (1936), 170. 13 Arch. Cant., XLIX (1938), 149. 11 Ibid., XXXI (1916), 34. 12 Test. Cant., i, 71 ; Thorpe, Oustmmale, 43. 13 Test. Cant., ii, 144. 14 Arch. Cant., L (1939), 115. 16 Test. Cant., ii, 10-11. 10 Mockett, John, Journal (Canterbury, 1836), 172. " St. Paul's Eccles. Soc, III (1895), 287-288 ; Test. Cant., i, 69. 112 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS In the most pronounced contrast stands the record of a decade just a century later (1591-1600), towards the close of Elizabeth's reign. During this great decade a total of £12,683 8s. was provided by Kentish donors for all charitable purposes, of which, however, only £208 8s. was given for church repairs and decoration. This amount represents but 1 • 64 per cent, of all charitable benefactions for the interval, compared with the 37 per cent, of their gifts which men a century earlier had designated for this particular use. It is likewise important to observe that this need, which was by all accounts now desperate, attracted the charitable interest of only forty-four donors during the entire decade and that, so far as our research indicates, some repairs or renovations were undertaken in only 38 of the 395 churches in the whole of the county, at least with resources provided by private charity. Among the gifts and bequests made for this purpose in the decade under review at least a few may be mentioned. Ralph Finch, a gentleman of Kingsdown, left £4 for church repairs and the purchase of needed books in 1591,1 while Elizabeth Lovelace of Bethersden, also of a gentle family, gave 5s. towards mending the lead on her parish church.2 Richard Austen, a yeoman of Adisham, in 1592 gave a communion cup for the use of his parish,3 while Sir Thomas Sondes of Throwley in the same year, among other and larger bequests, provided £6 for the maintenance of his parish church.4 Nicholas Annesley of Lee in 1593 gave a paten to his church worth approximately £4 5s.,5 while Henry Ellis, a citizen and ironmonger of London, whose family had been long resident in Chislehurst, bequeathed £2 to the churchwardens of that parish for the erection of two new pews,6 and John Roberts of Brenchley left his church £2 for necessary repairs.7 Thomas Allen, a gentleman of Dover, gave £1 to the repair of St. Mary's church in that town in 15948 ; Nicholas Heard of High Halstow provided a rentcharge of 10s. p.a. for needed repairs on his parish church9 ; Anthony Calthorpe of Bromley, among other charitable benefactions totalling £179 6s., left 6s. for the repair of his church10 ; while a yeoman of West Farleigh, Thomas Taylor, in the same year provided £8 for needed maintenance in that church.11 To conclude this review of representative 1 PCC 44 Sainberbe 1591 ; Arch. Cant., XII I (1880), 336. 2 Ibid., X (1876), 204. 3 Misc. gen. et her., ser., 5, V (1925), 334. 4 Vide ante, 82, 108. 6 Arch. Cant., XVI (1886), 378. 0 PCC 69 Novell 1593 ; Webb, E. A., et al„ History of Chislehurst, (L., 1899), 265, 390. ' Essex Institute Historical Collections [Salem, Massachusetts], XLIII (1907), 319-320. 8 PCC 38 Dixy, 1594 ; Waters -Withington MSS. 0 PP 1837, XXIII, 367. 13 PCC 68 Dixy 1594. 11 PCC 54 Dixy 1694. 113 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 gifts made to the needs of the fabric of Kentish churches during this decade, we might mention the bequest, also in 1594, by Peter Manwood, which was the largest benefaction for this purpose during the interval. Manwood left to the church at Hackington plate of an estimated value of £11, together with two small tenements and a half-acre of land, with a total value of about £30, the income of which was to be employed for church repairs.1 In Kent, as in most other counties, the curve of giving by private donors for church building parallels very closely that which we have just traced out for church repairs and ornamentation. During the course of our period a total of £14,271 was given for new building or major renovation in the county, a substantially larger amount, London again aside, than that recorded for any other county examined.2 This considerable sum, representing 5-67 per cent, of the whole of Kentish charitable funds, was somewhat less than the amount provided in a much shorter period for prayers, only half as much as was given for grammar schools, and somewhat greater than the total given for the various charitable uses we have grouped under the head of Social rehabilitation. But the interest of men of the county in the enlargement or the replacement of the religious facilities which they had inherited was, as was the case with church repairs, heavily concentrated in the decades just prior to the Reformation. The large total of £8,234 3s. was given for church building during these six decades, an amount, it should be remarked, accounting for 57 • 7 per cent, of the whole sum devoted to this purpose during our entire period. Church building of any kind was all but ended during the period of the Reformation, when not more than £100 seems to have been expended for the purpose. During the Elizabethan era a total of £1,678 15s. was given for church building of various kinds, about half of this amount being concentrated in one of the four decades of the period. This sum amounted to about 3-7 per cent, of all charitable funds given during these years, as contrasted with slightly more than 11 per cent, which had been devoted to church ' construction in the years prior to the Reformation. There was a marked increase in the amount being expended by private benefactors on new building during the early Stuart period, when a total of 1 Hasted, Kent, IX, 50 ; Arch. Cant., XVI (1886), 381. 2 It should be indicated, though, that in the more significant terms of its relation to the total funds given for charity, this amount given to church building places Kent rather low in the group of counties studied : 0/ 0/ Bristol 2-67 London 8-68 Buckinghamshire 6-39 Norfolk 3-15 Hampshire 7-74 Somerset 9-54 Kent 5-67 Worcestershire 6-34 Lancashire • 11-55 Yorkshire 4-53 114 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS £3,658 2s. was provided for this purpose, with a particularly heavy accumulation in the third decade (1621-1630), in which £2,558 2s. was given for the building of new edifices or the substantial betterment of older structures. But this revival of concern was very brief indeed, beginning to fall away in the Laudian decade (1631-1640) and dropping back to Elizabethan proportions during our closing interval. There was considerable interest in Kent in the building of chapels in various existing churches during the earlier years of our period. We have noted such additions of these facilities in twenty-one churches of the county, not including the numerous chantry chapels. With data permitting a considerably closer estimate than has been the case in most counties, we would suggest that something like £1,613 was expended on these chapels, twenty of which were completed prior to 1541. Among these may be mentioned the chapel provided in 1480 in Pluckley church by a gentleman of that parish, Richard Dering, at a probable cost of about £5§.1 The Lady Chapel in Rochester Cathedral was lengthened a few years later at a charge of £30,2 while two chapels were provided by unknown donors at Crayford in ca. 1500.3 Two chapels were likewise built in Strood church between 1501 and 1518 at a probable total cost of £120, towards which a considerable number of small benefactions have been noted.4 A chapel was being built in Boxley Abbey, at a quite uncertain cost, in 1503 when John Sweham of Maidstone left 3s. 4d. towards its completion,5 while a chapel was provided at about the same date at Charing, at a cost of perhaps £40, where a new bell tower was likewise under construction.6 William Heede of Hunton in 1513 gave £20 for the making of a chapel in that church and the same amount for a new church porch, as well as founding a chantry in his chapel with an endowment of £7 p.a.,7 while three years later William Jones left a bequest towards the building of a new chapel at Dartford.8 A more elaborate chapel was under construction at Smallhythe (in Tenterden parish) from 1516 to 1519, to which John Donett seems to have been the principal contributor.9 1 K.A.O.: PRO, A. 3/332, 1480 ; Dearn, Kent, 207 ; Test. Cant., ii, 247-248 : Arch. Cant., X (1876), 343. In the next year, Christyn Dreyland, who was buried in the south porch of Pluckley church, left £6 13s. 4d. " to the further building of Our Lady Chapel ", suggesting that it had not been completed (Test. Cant., ii, 248). 2 Smith, Rochester, 276. 3 Arch. Cant., XXVI (1904), 61. 4 As for example the £2 given by John Williams in 1501, Is. provided by Nicholas Noone in 1517, 6s. 8d. by Walter Noone, in 1518, and the same sum given by John Wales, a butcher, also in 1518 (Test. Cant., i, 76). 6 PCC 31 Blamyr 1503 ; Test. Oant., ii, 32. 0 Ibid., ii, 71-74. 7 PCC 18 Fetiplace 1613 ; Test. Cant., i, 42 ; Arch. Cant., XXIII (1898), 142-143. 8 PCC 18 Holder 1516 ; Test. Cant., i, 19. 9 Ibid., ii 310 : Arch. Cant., XXX (1914), 133. 115 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 The great Prior Goldstone of Christchurch monastery, Canterbury, who died in 1517, rebuilt the prior's chapel there as well as the chapel in the prior's mansion house at Bekesbourne, at a probable cost of £163, in addition to bis extensive building on the priory church.1 At about the same date (1518) Nicholas Boughton wished to be buried in the chapel " that I lately caused to be made in the p'isshe churche " of Woolwich, where he likewise arranged for prayers for twenty years with an annual stipend of £6 13s. 4d.2 A chapel was built in West Mailing church probably in the same year.3 At about the same date a chapel was provided at Shoreham,4 while a few years later, probably in 1522, a chapel was completed at Dover at an estimated cost of £80, this being the contribution of many small donors. In 1522 Sir John Peche of Lullingstone left to his wife gold chains valued at £220 with which " my chapell at Lullingstone . . . shalbe made vpp and fynyshid of ray costes as I haue shewid vnto my frendes ", while at the same time providing for a perpetual chantry in his chapel with an income of £7 13s. 4d. p.a.5 A chapel of quite uncertain cost was built at Lydd in ca. 1521,6 while Sir John Wilshire in 1526 left £30 for the construction of a chapel at Dartford.7 This closed, almost abruptly, the age of 1 Arch. Cant., VII (1868), 68, 170, XIV (1882) 288 ; Goodsall, R. H., Canterbury (Canterbury, 1930), 45 ; Woodruff, C. E., and William Danks, Memorials of Canterbury Cathedral (L., 1912), 210-214 ,- Legg, J. W., and W. H. St. J. Hope, eds., Inventories of Christchurch Canterbury (L., 1902), 122, 129-131, 138, 149, 174, 203, 237 ; Hasted, Kent, XI, 457 ; Wharton, Henry, Anglia sacra (L., 1691, 2 vols.), I ,146. Thomas Goldstone, prior from 1495 to 1517, was a friend of Henry VIII and was used by him on diplomatic missions. He raised the great central tower of the church, rebuilt the deanery, replaced old vestments and what might perhaps be called the religious facilities of the priory with new and much more elaborate articles, as well as repairing many of the manor houses belonging to the priory. These building costs have not, however, been reckoned as charitable benefactions, since they were drawn principally from priory income. 2 PCC 15 Ayloffe 1518 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 3, I (1896), 67 n.; St. Paul's Eccles. Soc, I I I (1895), 296 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 449, I I , 202. The manor of Woolwich was acquired by this family in the reign of Edward IV and its holdings were greatly enlarged by Nicholas Boughton's son, Sir Edward, who acquired extensive monastic properties in Plumstead. 3 Waters-Withington MSS. 4 Kilburne, Topographic, 248. 6 PCC 25 Maynwaryng 1522 ; Arch. Cant., XVI (1886), 102-104, 107, 227-240 ,- Hasted, Kent, II, 542 ; PP 1822, IX, 267 ; Kent Records, XIV (1936), 75-76. Peche was a large benefactor, his charitable dispositions totalling £892 3s. In addition to the bequests mentioned above, he left £230 to the general uses of three Kentish churches, £10 for church repairs, and stipulated also that a fund of £500 vested with the Grocers' Company prior to his death should be disbursed in such wise as to employ £104 of the capital for poor relief, £103 for the clergy, and £293 for general charitable purposes. He was the son of Sir William Peche, Sheriff of Kent in the reign oi Edward IV. Sir John was sheriff in 1496, when he rallied the county against those who would have supported Perkin Warbeck. The family was originally of merchant beginnings, John Peche, an alderman of London, having purchased the manor in 1368. 0 Arch. Cant., XXXI (1915), 29-30 ; Test. Cant., ii, 202. 7 PCC 16 Porch 1526 ,- St. Paul's Eccles. Soc, III (1895), 291. 116 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS chapel building in Kent, though a gentleman of Tudeley, Richard Fane, built a chapel there in about 1540 at an estimated cost of £60,x and very much later indeed (1627) Sir John Baker of Cranbrook rebuilt and rededicated in that church a chapel built at a charge of perhaps £120.2 No county in England was exempt from the enthusiasm which in the fifteenth century adorned earlier churches with steeples and towers. This interesting architectural development, which carried over well into the sixteenth century in many counties, was quite as much secular as religious in its aspirations, there clearly having been intense local pride in the benefactions with which these towers were built ; such donors were perhaps animated even more by the height or massive girth of the steeple in the next parish as by any late Gothic reaching after God. In Kent twenty-eight such towers or steeples seem to have been built wholly or in part from private benefactions during the course of our period, assisted by charitable gifts for this purpose totalling £1,897 19s. Of this number, all but four were completed or well under way prior to 1541, this form of architectural expression having exhausted itself in Kent, as in most of England, by the time of the Reformation. Among these building undertakings may be mentioned the construction of the tower at Lewisham, for which many small gifts and bequests are recorded from 1480 to 1510, with a particularly heavy concentration in the earlier years of this period.3 A steeple was being built in Deptford as early as 1483,4 while that at Faversham was being completed about a decade later, when Edward Tomson, a former mayor, left £60 towards its building.5 Richard Cromer of Chartham left 13s. 4d. for beginning a steeple in that parish in 1495,6 while among numerous bequests for the building of the steeple of St. Augustine's in Canterbury we might mention that of a grocer, John Underdowne, who provided £2 13s. 4d.7 John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, commenced the building of the tower of Lyminge church in 1 PCC 26 Alenger 1540 ; St. Paul's Eccles. Soc, III (1895), 294. 2 Dearn, Kent, 80 ; Waters-Withington MSS. 3 These were principally quite small amounts, it having very evidently become a fairly fixed tradition that some bequest should be left for the purpose. Thus in 1483 John Almayn, a husbandman, bequeathed Is. to the new steeple, John Newman gave £2, and another husbandman, Simon Bate, left 10s. for the same purpose, while in the next year a yeoman, Richard Combe, left nine bushels of corn for the building and a bushel for the bason light (Test. Cant., i, 46-47 ; Hasted-Drake, Kent, 273). These are but a few of the examples which might be cited. 4 Test. Cant., i, 21. 3 Arch. Cant., XVIII (1889), 106, 113. Tomson also left 3s. 4d. to an anchorite for prayers and £20 for the repair of " foul ways ". 0 Ibid., XXXI (1915), 27. ' Ibid., XXXI (1915), 45. 117 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 14921 and laid out from his own funds something like £300 towards the building of the middle tower of the cathedral church.2 The steeple of the church at Wittersham was built in the early years of the sixteenth century,3 while the tower of the church of St. Mary Magdalene in Canterbury was completed about 1503 at a charge of not less than £130.4 Repairs were made on an early tower at Aldington during the first decades of the sixteenth century, and construction of a fine new tower at the west end of the church was commenced in about 1528, gifts and bequests being made for this purpose until 1547.5 The building of the new tower at Edenbridge was under way as early as 1502,6 while John Mills of Chevening left £2 towards the building of a steeple on his parish church in 1506.7 Work had begun on the steeple at West Wickham in 1509, when a yeoman, John Cawston, bequeathed £3 6s. 8d. towards carrying the work forward.8 To mention a few more of these building undertakings in the years nearer to the Reformation, we may note that work was under way on the steeple at Leigh in 1525, when Roger Lewknor, a member of a well-known family of that neighbourhood, left £4 13s. 4d. for its continuation.9 The tower of Stoke church, begun in the late fifteenth century, was not to be completed until 1550, but much of the work and most of the contributions were concentrated in the years 1520- 1539, when upwards of £60 was left to advance its building.10 Building had apparently begun on the steeple at St. George's, Gravesend (the chapel),11 Godmersham,12 and East Langdon13 in about 1534, while 1 Davis, A. W., History of Lyminge ([Canterbury], 1933), 14 ; Mackie, Folkestone, 223. This tower was completed in 1527, with the help of Archbishop Warham. 2 PCC 10 Moone 1500 ; Hasted, Kent, XII, 434 ; Dart, John, History of Canterbury Cathedral (L., 1726), 165 ; DNB. 3 Test. Cant., ii, 370, and various wills. 4 Ibid., i, 57-58, and various wills. 6 Ibid., App. B, 386 ,- Arch. Cant., XLI (1929), 143. 0 Test. Cant., i, 22. 7 PCC 13 Adeane 1506 ; Test. Cant., i, 11. 8 Ibid., i, 81. 9 Ibid., i, 45-46. 10 A few of the many bequests may perhaps be mentioned. A yeoman of Burham, Richard Ware, who also left £38 3s. for prayers, in 1511 gave 10s. towards the cost of construction (K.A.O. : CCR 6/307a) ; James Barnes, Vicar of Hoo AUhallows, bequeathed 3s. 4d. for the tower in 1512 (K.A.O. : CCR 6/323b), while a husbandman, Thomas Stephen of Stoke, left a cow for the same purpose in 1623 (K.A.O. : CCR 7/293b). Larger benefactions were provided by two members of the gentry of the region, Giles Palmer, who in 1533 gave £10 towards the building costs (K.A.O. : CCR 9/100a), and John Mott, who in 1534 provided £4 13s. 4d. (K.A.O. : CCR 9/142b). John Ferror, probably a husbandman, gave 6s. 8d. in 1538 (K.A.O. : CCR 9/272[2]a), while John Seethe of Milton provided £3 6s. 8d. for the same use in 1540 (K.A.O. : PRO, A. 21/184). 11 Test. Cant., i, 30. 12 Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, I I I (1919), 47. 13 Test. Cant., ii, 184-185. 118 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS similar edifices were approaching their completion at Charing1 and Great Chart.2 To conclude, we have noted contributions towards the building of only four steeples in the county after 1560, all of which were in point of fact for the rebuilding of earlier structures which had been destroyed by lightning or by structural collapse. Almost half the total amount which we have included under church building was given by benefactors for the enlargement of existing structures or for carrying out major renovations on older buildings. In all, we have noted gifts for such purposes totalling £6,672 9s., in several instances clearly supplementing additional amounts raised by rates or other non-charitable means. It is significant that of the thirty-two churches in the county which received such major rehabilitation, with the help of private donors at least, all save ten were assisted in the period prior to the Reformation, while most of the remainder were improved during the Laudian era. Very early in our period, quite extensive repairs were undertaken on the church at Aldington,3 while at about the same time a new reredos and a large window were provided for the church at East Peckham.4 Extensive work was carried forward in ca. 1491 on the fabric of St. Nicholas' church, Deptford, at an estimated cost of £40, which church, it might here be noted, was enlarged about 1630 by the building of a north aisle, to which the East India Company made the principal contribution.5 An aumbry was provided for the ancient church of St. Martin, Canterbury, towards the close of the fifteenth century,6 while at about the same date the north aisle of the church at Plumstead was built, apparently at a cost of about £80.7 John Pympe, a gentleman of Nettlestead, defrayed the cost of very extensive renovations on the church of that community in 1496.8 At about the same time, John Marshall, a native of Crayford who had prospered in London, added an aisle to the church of his birthplace at an expense of about £60,9 while a few years later the north aisle and arcades at Eynsford were constructed.10 We have likewise included, somewhat doubtfully, as from private charity the great works which brought to completion the fabric of Canterbury Cathedral in the years 1486-1503, which 1 Ireland, Kent, III, 172. 2 Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, III (1919), 164. 3 Test. Cant., App. B, 386. 4 Cook, Manor through four centuries, 22 [plate]. 5 Royal Commission on Historial Monuments, An inventory of the historical monuments in London (L., 1924-1930, 5 vols.), V, 16-17 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 367 ; Dews, Nathan, History of Deptford (L., 1884), 60. 0 Arch. Cant., XIV (1882), 109. ' Royal Comm. on Hist. Mon., An inventory, V, 102. 8 PCC 2 Home 1496 ; St. Paul's Eccles. Soc, III (1895), 281 ; Arch. Cant.. XXVIII (1909), 275-276. Ireland (Kent, III, 470) suggests a later date. 9 PCC'28 Home 1498 ; Kent Records, XIV (1936), 40-41. 10 Arch. Cant., XLVI (1934), 173. 119 o SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 included inserting two doors and raising the great central tower. It is known that the monastery spent upwards of £4,000 on the completion of the tower alone, which, while certainly the fruit of earlier and pious charity, included relatively few gifts made for the purpose during our era.1 The church of Cranbrook was considerably enlarged and rehabilitated between 1520 and 1530 when the middle aisle was built at a total charge of £366 17s. In all there were seventy-eight known contributions to this undertaking in amounts ranging from Henry Thristo's gift of Is. 4d. and Thomas Cooper's donation of £2 13s. 4d. to Stephen Drayner's gift of £40 and the benefaction of a wealthy clothier, Robert Brickenden, who gave £100 for this purpose.2 A new aisle was likewise built at Biddenden at about the same time at a cost of perhaps £110,3 while a porch was added to the church at Hunton with the funds received from gifts and bequests from 1513 to 1532.4 These are the principal of the major enlargements undertaken by private benefactors on the churches of the county prior to the Reformation. During the Elizabethan period works of this sort were almost wholly neglected by private donors, who were evidently no more interested in the needed enlargement of existing churches than they were in maintaining the deteriorating fabric. Sir Roger Manwood did, probably about 1590, build an aisle in St. Stephen's church, Hackington, for which he also provided other renovations, all at an estimated cost of £200.5 The church at Charing was gutted by fire in 1590, but Elizabethan donors did no more than restore the roof of the nave in 1592, the chancel remaining uncovered for another generation.6 Sir Thomas Watson in 1609 carried out repairs and enlargements on the church at Halstead, at a cost of about £280, which very nearly amounted to a rebuilding of the structure.7 A new porch was provided, probably by private benefactors, for the church at Ashurst in 1621,8 while in the same year Oliver Stile, a London merchant who had retired to his estates in Kent, considerably enlarged the church at Beckenham 1 Woodruff, Memorials of Canterbury, 207-208 ; Arch. Cant., XIV (1882), 287-288 ; [Burnby, John], The Church of Christ, Canterbury (L., 1783), 61-64. 2 Tarbutt, William, Annals of Cranbrook (Cranbrook, 1870-1875, 3 parts), i, 8-9, 50 ; Test. Cant., ii, 90. 3 Bagshaw, Samuel, History of Kent (Sheffield, 1847, 2 vols.), II, 612. 4 Test. Cant., i, 42 ; Fielding, C. H., ed., Records of Rochester (Dartford, 1910), 147. 6 Vide ante, 42-43, 108. 6 Arch. Cant, XVI (1886), 263. 7 PCC 3 Savile 1622 ; Hasted, Kent., Ill, 15 ; Stow, John, Annales of England (L., 1615), 910 ; Harris, Kent, 141. Watson had purchased the manor with London capital in 1685. 8 Glynne, S. R., Notes on the churches of Kent (L., 1877), 180. 120 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS by building two aisles and vaults at a cost of £438 Is. lOd.1 A bequest of £10 was left towards the building of a gallery in Tenterden church in 1628,2 and the gallery in Sellinge church was completed just two years later by a benefactor at a probable charge of £40.3 Sir William Russell, Treasurer of the Navy and an astute speculator, was the principal contributor to the funds raised in ca. 1631 for the enlargement and embellishment of the chancel of the church at Deptford,4 while Sir William Selby of Ightham some years earlier had built a gallery in the church at that place.5 The church at Charlton (near Greenwich) was all but rebuilt under the terms of the will of Sir Adam Newton, a Jacobean courtier, his executors shortly after 1630 greatly enlarging the church and providing a new steeple, at an estimated charge of £350.6 At about the same time, 1638, the church of Stone St. Mary (near Dartford) was badly damaged by fire. Extensive alterations as well as repairs were undertaken in 1640 when the groined roof was taken down, the walls lowered and in part rebuilt, and changes made in the fenestration of the structure. But, since it seems at least probable that the considerable charges incurred were raised from non-charitable sources, no entry has been made for this, the last church to be substantially enlarged or re-edified during the course of our period.7 When we turn to a consideration of the churches built or rebuilt during the course of our long period, we have even more dramatic evidence of the growing secularization of men's interests and aspirations. I t is true that the county was remarkably mature in its parochial system by the close of the fifteenth century, but it was growing steadily during the decades under study and significant shifts in population were taking place in the late sixteenth century. Moreover, there is clear evidence that upwards of thirty parish churches were destroyed by fire or the slower ruin of neglect during our period. There were, however, fewer parish churches in Kent at the close of our period than at its beginning, since it appears that only sixteen churches were built 1 PCC 62 Savile 1622 ; Beaven, Aldermen of London, II, 46, 175 ; Borrowman, Robert, Beckenham (Beckenham, 1910), 99, 260, 268. A London grocer, Stile had been sheriff in 1605. He was prominently associated with the East India Company. 2 Arch. Cant., XXXI (1915), 261. 3 Harris, Kent, 276. 4 Hasted, Kent, I, 367. 6 Vide ante, 88. 0 PCC 112 Scroope 1630 ; Hasted-Drake, Kent, 120. 130 ; Royal Comm. on Hist. Mon., An inventory, V, 17-18. Newton had purchased the manor of Charlton in 1607 for £4,500. He had begun his mteresting career in 1599 when he was appomted tutor to Prince Henry with a stipend of £200 p.a. for life. After the death of the prince he was made tutor to the future Charles I. In 1611 he was granted the rich offices of Secretary to the Principality of Wales and Clerk of the Council. He was created a baronet in 1620. 7 Arch. Cant., I l l (1860), 109-110. 121 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 or rebuilt during this interval of almost two centuries. In all, we have recorded charitable contributions for such building in the amount of £4,087 12s., of which, it must be emphasized, a fair proportion is no more than roughly estimated from quite inadequate data. The church at Ashford was wholly rebuilt by Sir John Fogge, a privy councillor in the reign of Edward IV, some years prior to his death in 1490, the donor also founding in the precincts a college for which he left property sufficient to provide a very small endowment.1 At about the same time, the Order of Observants (Grey Friars) were building a church at Greenwich as part of the monastic establishment they had founded there with the active aid of Edward IV. The church was begun in 1482 and was completed in ca. 1492, at an estimated cost of £500, but towards which charitable gifts or bequests of no more than £109 4s. have been recorded.2 The church at Gravesend, St. Mary's, was destroyed by fire early in the sixteenth century and was rebuilt on a modest scale beginning in 1504.3 The church at Lee, which was reported derelict two generations later, was apparently built by private benefactors early in the reign of Henry VIII.4 St. Mary's church at Chilham was either built or rebuilt, in about 1534, largely at the expense of the various owners of Chilham Castle,5 while the church at Wingham was rebuilt between 1536 and 1562 at an approximate charge of £400, much of which was supplied by a great number of relatively small gifts and bequests.8 As we have suggested, almost the whole of church-building activity in Kent after 1540 was confined to replacing at least a fraction of the buildings which had been destroyed by fire or structural decay. In 1565 the church at Kenardington, which had been lost by fire in 1559, was being rebuilt by local donors,7 while a few years later something 1 K.A.O. : CCC 3/280, 1490 ; Kent Records, XIV (1936), 6-8 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 533, 537, 542 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 410 ; Parsons, Philip, Monuments of Churches in Eastern Kent ([Canterbury], 1794), 44. Fogge was a favourite of Edward IV and was on several occasions Sheriff of Kent. He was attainted under Richard III but escaped execution and was restored to his estates on Henry VII's accession. 2 Archaeological Journal, LXXX (1923), 81 ; Hasted, Kent, I, 408 ; Cotton, Charles, Grey Friars of Canterbury (Manchester, 1924), 49. It may be remarked that Henry VII by will left £200 to these friars for closing their garden and orchard with a wall. 3 Test. Cant., i, 28 ; Bagshaw, Kent, I, 351 ; and various wills. 4 Test. Cant., i, 45 ; and various wills. 6 Igglesden, Saunters, I, 32 ; Cross, Rambles round Canterbury, 132. 6 Thus William Kenton, a yeoman, gave £1 in 1536 ; another yeoman, Thomas King, provided £2 in 1541 ; John Pierce, of a Canterbury merchant family, gave £4 towards the roof in 1542, while a yeoman, Henry Pender, left £2 for the carrying forward of the work as late as 1559. In 1662 a bequest was left for making new pews and a window, indicating that the edifice was all but complete by that date. (Arch. Cant., XL [1928], 132-133 ; Test. Cant., ii, 367-368.) 7 In that year Henry Home, Esq., gave £6 13s. 4d. towards the cost (Arch. Cant., XXXI [1915], 29). 122 THE STRUCTURE OF ASPIRATIONS like £200 was raised for the rebuilding of the small church at Ebony.1 The tiny church at Ifield was rebuilt in 1596 at an estimated cost of £250, principally with the aid of Nicholas Child, lord of the manor.2 The church of St. Alphage in Greenwich was burned in 1614, but it was rebuilt about 1617 by unknown donors.3 Similarly the church at Hothfield, which was burned at about the same time, was rebuilt prior to 1624 by Sir John Tufton, whose principal seat was in this parish.4 Neglect as well as fire could take its toll, as is suggested by the fact that St. Nicholas' parish church in Rochester, built as recently as 1423, was in a ruinous state in 1620 and had to be razed. The church was rebuilt during the next four years by unknown donors at a very roughly estimated cost of £450.5 The decayed chapel at Groombridge (Sussex), in the parish of Speldhurst, was wholly rebuilt by John Packer in 1625 at a cost of about £240 and dedicated to public worship out of gratitude for the safe return of Prince Charles from the feckless mission which he and Buckingham had undertaken to Spain. At the same time, Packer endowed the chapelry most generously with a stipend of £30 p.a. for the maintenance of the service and the sustenance of the chaplain.6 The church at Chiddingstone was severely damaged by fire in this same period, being rebuilt by unknown donors in 1629.7 Similarly, the small church at Farnborough was rebuilt about a decade later at an approximate cost of £200.8 And, finally, a chapel was built at Plaxtol in 1649 with collections taken through the country, when, as we have noted, Thomas Stanley had attempted to relieve the inhabitants by arranging for an 1 Thus in 1569 Henry Goulding of Appledore gave £20 for this purpose (Test. Cant., ii, 5 ; Misc. gen. et her., ser. 5, IV [1922], 248). 2 Miller, William, Jottings of Kent (Gravesend, 1864), 84 ; Ireland, Kent, IV, 301. 3 Fielding, Records of Rochester, 120. 4 PCC 29 Byrde 1624 ; Complete baronetage, I, 70 ; PP 1837, XXIII, 420 ; Hasted, Kent, VII, 517. Tufton was the son and heir of John Tufton, who was in 1562 Sheriff of Kent. He succeeded to the estate in 1567, was Sheriff of Kent in 1575, and was knighted in 1603. Tufton was created a baronet in 1611. He also left an endowment of £60, the income of which was to be used for the relief of the poor of the parish. 5 Hasted, Kent, IV, 158-159 ; Miller, Jottings, 39. 6 PCC 153 Fairfax 1649 ; DNB ,- Hasted, Kent, II, 291 ,- Glynne, Churches of Kent, 181 ; St. Paul's Eccles. Soc, III (1895), 290 ; Dearn, Kent, 221. Packer (1570?-1649) was educated at both universities. He became a favourite at court, in 1604 obtaining the reversion of the clerkship of the Privy Seal. He served both Somerset and Buckingham as secretary and was rewarded in 1617 by an annual pension of £115. He purchased the manor o£ Groombridge from Lord Dorset and in 1625 was given the manor of Shillingford in Berkshire by Charles I as a mark of his favour. Packer's political sentiments underwent a change, however, after his serving in Parliament in 1628, possibly as a consequence of his friendship with Eliot, and in 1640 he not only declined to advance money to the King but allied himself with Parliament. 7 Fielding, Records of Rochester, 57. 8 Glynne, Churches of Kent, 303. 123 SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS IN KENT, 1480-1660 endowed curacy which would permit the separation of this rural community from the parish of Wrotham.1 I t would seem very evident indeed that the chronic episcopal lamentations regarding the state of the church fabric of the county in the later sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century were well founded. Private benefactors were far more charitably disposed than they had ever been before, but their interests had been transformed into a deep and enlightened concern with the more immediate and tangible needs of mankind. The churches of Kent were not well or adequately maintained during our period and on balance must have been in a decayed condition indeed at its close. There had been, as well, very little church building aside from the replacement of a few of the structures which had suffered from time and fire. It will likewise be observed that such building or major renovations as were carried forward were in a surprising number of cases at the charge of the more recent additions to the upper gentry of the county and more particularly of families enriched and then endowed with the respectability of lands at the court of the early Stuarts. One is led to wonder whether these new men of Kent were so much aspiring after God as seeking status and acceptance in a rural society far more cautiously conservative than the court that had spawned them. 1 Vide ante, 108-109. 124