Forthcoming Publications

Shoreham, past and present by Joy Saynor and Peter Batley.

A new publication by Shoreham and District Historical Society. 200 years of Shoreham’s history through the medium of prints, watercolours and old photographs set against the present day scenes. With an historical introduction and a final section about some of the people who helped to create today’s community. Copies price £4.99 + 66p post and packing from the Secretary of the Shoreham & District Historical Society, The Coach House, Shoreham, TN14 7TU. Cheques made payable to S.& D.H. S.

Romney Marsh - survival on a frontier.

Written by Jill Eddison with a forward by Barry Cunliffe. £14.99 from Bookshops. ISBN 07524 1486 0 148 pages, 75 black and white illustrations, 31 colour plates.

The book reflects the work of the Romney Marsh Research Group founded in 1983 by Professor Barry Cunliffe and Jill Eddison. It brings together the recent work of archaeologists, historians and geographers and presents an up to date interpretation of the area.

Jill Eddison, a long time member of the society is uniquely placed as the author of this book, having been the secretary of the Research Group, the supporting charitable trust and joint editor of the three specialist publications about Romney Marsh.

An Edward Hasted Bicentenary

1801 marked the completion of the publication of Edward Hasted’s magisterial History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent. With the publication in 2001 of the first full-scale biography of the historian we have an opportunity to celebrate this bicentenary.

In A Scholar and a Gentleman: Edward Hasted, the Historian of Kent, Dr. Shirley Burgoyne Black has drawn the portrait of someone who was indeed both gentleman and scholar; gentleman by birth and nature, and scholar by education and subsequent inclination. Edward Hasted has frequently been under-estimated in both respects. Detailed research shows that the place he occupied in society was no more than was his due in the eighteenth century - and was required by him in terms of the local administrative duties he performed in the county. That he had the scholarship necessary for the task he undertook is certain - and proved by the work he was given to do late in life by another historian.

This major study throws a great deal of fresh light on Hasted’s development as a historian, as well as on his private life, including his relationships with the members of his family and with his many friends. We see him as a young man, irritably rebuilding St John’s Jerusalem at Sutton-at-Hone (now owned by the National Trust), at work in his many voluntary posts, among them those of justice of the peace, turnpike trustee and commissioner of sewers, and then, with typical impulsiveness, whisking his family off for a season in the depths of the country which threatened to be far from idyllic. Increasing financial worries seem to have been the cause of the move to Canterbury, where life - and work on the History - jogged on together for some years in relative calm, until this was shattered by a series of totally unexpected complications: the historian’s inability to break out of a tightening circle of debt, ill-health, and estrangement from his wife. A new relationship was begun with a young girl, and total disaster held at bay by an escape to France, but the onset of the French Revolution and the outbreak of war were to force Hasted back to England and the squalor and tedium of a debtor’s prison.

Edward Hasted undertook his History of Kent at the persuasion of friends, and could not foresee that it was, in all, to occupy forty years of his life. Nevertheless, once it had been advertised and promised to the county he felt bound in honour to fulfil that promise, despite the turmoil of the final decade. The first edition came out in four folio volumes between 1778 and 1799, the second edition, in twelve smaller volumes which were to prove far more ‘user-friendly,’ between 1797 and 1801.

A Scholar and a Gentleman contains much new material relating to the last twenty years of Hasted’s life, his imprisonment for debt, and the revised issue of the Hasted estates. It is satisfying to find that although by now in reduced circumstances, as the master of an almshouse, the historian’s final years were passed in relative comfort and serenity. The whole Hasted story is introduced by an account of the rise of the family from working class origins in the seventeenth century to gentility at the beginning of the eighteenth, and it concludes with the death in 1855 of the historian’s last surviving son, the Revd. Edward Hasted.

A Scholar and a Gentleman: Edward Hasted, the Historian of Kent will be published by subscription by Darenth Valley Publications, 33 Tudor Drive, Otford, Sevenoaks, Kent TN14 5QF; in the Spring 2001, at a price of £15.00, including postage. Subscriber’s names will be listed in the book.