Reclamation and social history of Walland Marsh before 1530

Last year the Trust made a grant to Gill Draper and Jill Eddison to investigate the reclamation and social history of Kete Marsh before 1540. Kete consists of some 500 acres of Walland Marsh lying south of Fairfield. It lies outside the great medieval sea wall there, which is believed to have been the embankment which finally withstood the widespread inundations of the late l 3'h century, after other defences had failed. Kete would thus have been over-run by the sea at that time, and reclaimed some time later (the earliest maps show that it was enclosed by the J 590s). As Kete belonged to Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, there was good hope of finding enough documentary material in the cathedral archives to make sense of the story of how it was regained from the sea, and to find out something about the organisation and individuals concerned.

It turned out, however, that very little relevant documentary evidence had survived. We can only say that Kete had certainly been enclosed by a wall some time before 1477, from which date a series of detailed accounts survives. We therefore decided to carry out a wider evaluation of the nature and range of the Walland Marsh material available before c. 1530, to put Kete Marsh in context.

We also carried out some detailed work. We examined a series of demesne accounts of Fairfield which ran in an almost unbroken sequence from 1307-1339, and now have an idea of the amount that was being spent by the priory on sea defences and on the essential work of clearing out the sewers and ditches (although we cannot provide an accurate picture of where these were!).

We very much need to know which places, fields and ditches the documents were referring to, and this is often very difficult, sometimes well-nigh impossible - because many of the medieval names went out of use before any maps were made, probably as a result of depopulation after the Black Death. Thus many early place-names are "lost". To this end we analysed a Rental of Christ Church land in the manor of Appledore dated 1503, and came up with some surprising results as to where that land lay: to say that it was "scattered all over the marsh" would be not far wrong. From this record we also obtained a few names of walls and ditches, and of roads, to help fill in a small part of the jig-saw.

We also examined in detail the parish boundaries as shown on the tithe maps. Although these maps date from c. I 840, it is believed that most of the parish boundaries have not altered since the medieval period - except to include additional land as it was newly enclosed. The object here too was to assist topographical identification, as places are often located by parish in the source-documents.

Finally, we made a card index of all place-names in Fairfield manor, and in parts of Appledore manor between 1477 and 1524. A report has been written, explaining this work in greater detail.

Jill Eddison