Oasts in Kent and East Sussex, Part I

OASTS IN KENT AND EAST SUSSEX PART I ANTHONY CRONK, F.S.A., F.R.S.A. The oasts of Kent and East Sussex have long been characteristic of the local rural landscape, perhaps even more characteristic, because more numerous and widespread, than the medieval castles in which the area is also particularly rich. Artists have captured them; writers in prose and poetry have extolled them. In these lines penned by the Kentish poet Donald Maxwell in 1927 castles and oast kilns are associated, and the poem has become something of a period piece of the nineteentwenties. 1 0 people they come from far and wide With a Morris car and a shilling guide, And a man may reckon his time well spent Counting the castle walls of Kent. Dover, Rochester, so he reads, Tonbridge, Allington, Upnor, Leeds, These are the scenes of doughty deeds. And when he is looking round for these He notices, hidden among the trees Curious towers with conical tops, They're hundreds strong in the land of hops; 'What are they?' Surely a child can tell, These are the castles of Kent as well. The study of oasts and their development through the centuries provides an excursion into the realm of industrial archaeology which rather surprisingly has not hitherto engaged the attention of the Society. The round kilns which are a familiar sight today, the 'curious 1 From The Enchanted Road. 99 ANTHONY CRONK towers with conical tops', date only from the nineteenth century, the golden age of hop-growing, which I propose to deal with in Part II. The present article is confined to earlier evolutionary developments. DEFINITION It will be noticed that I have chosen to use the word 'oast' in the title of this article, in preference to 'oasthouse'. The latter expression first appeared in the eighteenth century when, we are told, it was pronounced 'wostus' in the local dialect. 2 The shorter term however is the one more often used by the hop-grower himself, 'oasthouse' being more the language of the lay outsider and the estate agent. 3 According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word 'oast' is derived from the Old Latin cestus, meaning 'heat'. As understood today, an oast is much more than a heat chamber, its purpose being to de-hydrate, not merely to bake. For the drying of any vegetable matter, it is essential that the application of heat is combined with air movement, to carry away the vaporized moisture. This fundamental requirement applies to hop-drying no less than to the drying of other crops, such as tobacco, tea and herbs of all kinds. Without a draught of air through the material being dried, the vapour would be re-condensed, with results disastrous to the quality of the product. It seems that the term 'oast' was originally applied to kilns used for drying malt, and that when hops were first grown in England they were sometimes dried on already-existing malt kilns. Reynolde Scot, member of a prominent Kent family, who in 1574 produced the first English book exclusively devoted to hop culture, 4 after giving detailed instructions for building 'such an Oste as they dry their Hops upon', mentions the fact that 'some use to dry their Hops upon a common Oste, but that way there can be no great speed in your work, nor small expence of your wood, besides danger of fire and ill success of your doings'. By this he implies that a 'common Oste', that is to say one used in tum for both malt and hops, would be less satisfactory than one designed specificalJy for the latter. In recent times the tenn oast has come to mean exclusively a building for the drying and packing of hops.5 It consists essentially of one or more kilns, where the actual drying takes place, and adjoining accommodation providing room for z W. MarshalJ, Rural Economy of the Sot1thern Counties, (1798), 260. 3 In the West Midland hop districts, the dialectic word 'kelJ' is the customary synonym. 4 A Perfect Platform of a Hop Garden. The author was a nephew of Sir Reynold Scott of Scott's Hall (see Arch. Cant., lxxiv (1960), 46). 5 A Cronk, English Hops Glossary (1959), 22. 100 OASTS IN KENT AND EAST SUSSEX cooling, packing and storing the product. The entire building is called an 'oast'. THE INTRODUCTION OF HOP-GROWING The history of oasts of Kent and Sussex can begin no earlier than the date of the introduction of commercial hop-growing into England, which seems to have taken place in the first half of the sixteenth century. Long before that, in fact since the twelfth century, the value of Humulus lupulus for flavouring and preservation of beer had been recognized in central Europe. Cultivation of the crop gradually spread to the Low Countries and elsewhere. The Flemish weavers who came to Kent in the reign of Edward III soon introduced the practice of using hops in beer, importing for the purpose hops grown and dried abroad. To the Englishman however, right up to the end of the fifteenth century, beer (that is to say hopped ale) was still considered the drink of foreigners. As William Caxton put it, 'Ale of England; Byre of Alemayne', However, as the taste for beer eventually became established here the Government of the day, as had been the case with weaving, brickmaking and other useful arts, encouraged experts to come over from Flanders to teach the English, and initially the Kentish, the technique of hop-growing. Legislation passed in 1549 seems to provide clear evidence that it was at that time a new industry on this side of the Channel, its introduction having probably started in the preceding decade. It was however an industry which was quickly taken up. William Harrison's Description of England, 1577, leaves us in no doubt that although hop-growing was still regarded as a recent introduction here, it was rapidly spreading. 'Of late years', he says, 'we have found and taken up a great trade in planting hops,. whereof our moorie and hitherto unprofitable grounds doo yield such plentie and increase, that there are few farmers in the countrie which have not gardens and hops growing of their owne, and these far better than doo come from Flanders unto us'. The statement that in 1577 there were few farmers in the country not growing their own hops has to be accepted with reserve, although planting was certainly widespread. A deed of transfer of land in the Vale of Conway, Caernarvonshire, in 1592, refers to hop-yards, showing that their cultivation had already spread to Wales. Harrison however was probably referring particularly to the south-eastern counties, where small-scale planting took place on most holdings. 101 ANTHONY CRONK MAKESHIFT DRYING To begin with, there were of course on most farms no oasts of any kind. 'Some use to dry their hops in a Garret', Reynolde Scot recorded in 1574, 'or upon the floor of a Loft or Chamber, in reproof whereof I must say that few men have room enough in their houses to contain a great quantity or multitude of hops, so that the dust that will arise shall empair them, the chinks, crevises and open joints of your lofts, being not close byrthed, will devour the seeds of them'. There is a risk, he says, that the hops 'will be utterly spoiled in colour, in scent and verdure'. Nevertheless, in case of necessity he concedes, 'if you have no Oste, dry them in a loft as open to the air as may be'. 6 For such a purpose, Scot advises, 'sweep, wash and rub the boards, and let your broom reach to the walls, and even to the roof of your loft, for I can teach you no way to divide the dust from your hops, but so to prevent the inconvenience thereof. Stop the holes and chinks of your floor, lay [the hops] not half a foot thick, and turn them once a day at least, by the space of two or three weeks. This being done, sweep them up into a corner of your loft, and there let them lye as long more, for yet there remaineth peril in packing them'. With even greater disapproval, Scot records that 'some lay their hops in the sun to dry, and this taketh away the state of the hops, contrary to the purpose of drying, which is very prejudicial to the brewer'.7 Scot's message to the novice hop-planters of England was that to achieve anything like satisfactory results they should provide themselves with a purpose-built hop-oast, 'such an Oste', he said, 'as they dry their bops upon at Poppering'. There is no doubt whatever that Reynolde Scot was thoroughly knowledgeable of his subject. He grew hops on his own farm at Smeeth in Kent, and was evidently familiar with hop-growing practices in Flanders, where the little town of Poperinge remains to this day a traditional centre of the industry. THE'SCOT'PATTERN His book gives detailed illustrated directions for the construction of what he calls 'a little house', timber-framed, 18 to 19 ft.-long and 8 ft.wide, divided into three rooms. The middle room was the kiln, 8 ft.square, with a honeycomb brickwork furnace on the ground floor. The drying floor above was constructed of wooden laths 'sawen very even 6 As to drying hops on a 'soller', see also Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (c. 1557), 193. 7 op. cir. 102 OASTS IN KENT AND EAST SUSSEX one inch square and laid one quarter of an inch asunder', placed 5 ft. above the ground. The fire was stoked through a hole in the wall of one of the end rooms, and in the same wall a door gave access to the lower part of the kiln, or as we call it, the plenum chamber. Openings were also provided between the upper part of the kiln and each of the end rooms. The basic layout was analogous to that of the most modern oast being built today, that is to say a room for receiving the green hops on one side of the kiln, and a cooling room to receive the dried hops on the other side. Dimensions and details have evolved during four hundred years, but not the fundamental layout. It will be noted that Scot gives no directions as to that part of the kiln above the hop-bed. He describes the drying floor and the furnace below, but says nothing about the roof structure, which probably did not differ from that of other buildings of the period. As to siting, Scot advised, 'place it near to your Garden, for the better expedition of your work, and somewhat distant from your house to avoid the danger of fire'. Oast fires are fairly common even today; in those days the risk was enormous. Consequently, surviving traces of those Elizabethan hop-oasts must be very rare, if indeed they exist at all. The oldest extant derivative of Scot's design is probably that at Little Golford, Cranbrook (Figs. 1 and 2). Although evidently purpose-built c. 1750 of re-used materials, and although it featured twin furnaces under a drying floor slightly larger than Scot's, this little oast possessed a number of characteristics which acknowledge its heritage from an earlier date, including a ground-floor cooling room, close-boarded internally to a height of about 4 ft. to contain the dried hops. The fuel used in Scot's day for hop-drying was wood, and must have had the disadvantage that all the smoke had to pass through the bed of hops being dried above, before escaping through openings in the walls and gaps between the roof-tiles. It was not long before charcoal was introduced, and being virtually smokeless this remained an important hop-drying fuel for centuries. Right up until the Second World War there were itinerant charcoal burners going from farm to farm in the hop-growing districts practising their mysterious art, converting great quantities of cordwood into fuel for the oasts. THE STUART PERIOD Througho:ut the seventeenth century many farms had their two or three acres of hops. It is difficult to say how many oasts of the Scot type were in use, but the importance of proper drying came to be widely 103 11 11 11 11 I I I I a 􀀁 - - - - - - - - - -- ----------- 􀀁 ANTHONY CRONK 0 I l. J ♦ $ (I h - - 􀀂 􀀃 ;􀀂 e - - 104 - lJ d