But in Kent it would appear that if some investigator as careful as Vancouver had at a somewhat earlier date reported on the agriculture of Kent, he would have found some remains of arable common fields in the far eastern corner of the county. William Lambarde, in the “Perambulation of Kent,” 1570, says: “The soile is for the most part bountifull, consisting indifferently of arable, pasture, meadow and woodland. Howbeit of these wood occupieth the greatest portion even to this day except it be towards the east, which coast is more champaigne than the residue” (p. 3).
More than a hundred years later, Celia Fiennes says: “Canterbury to Dover was a good road and a sort of Champion Country” (p. 103). It was open, it was mainly arable land, but it differed in some respect from the Champain of the Midlands; and again, a hundred years later, William Marshall writes in 1798 of the Isle of Thanet: “The whole country lies open, excepting in the immediate environs of villages.... The present productions, if we cut off the marsh lands, may be said to be arable crops” (“Southern District,” Vol. II., p. 6).
This was written, it will be noticed, just after Boys had written his statement that there were no common fields in Kent. We can reconcile the two statements if we suppose that by the disuse of rights of common, and by the consolidation of scattered properties and holdings by mutual exchanges, the characteristics of common field had been abolished, while in consequence of there never having arisen any tendency to convert the arable land into pasture, no necessity for the expensive labour of making hedges arose. But I have no evidence to show at what date the open arable land ceased to be common field.
The question arises whether the common-field system of the ordinary English type ever existed in this part of Kent; and here again there is no decisive evidence that I know of by which to answer the question. The fact that the similar question for Essex is answered in the affirmative by the Colchester common fields perhaps counts for something; and that the Surrey common fields come at Croydon close to the county boundary, for a little more. At Eltham there is an old charity called the Fifteen Penny Lands; only a few acres remain in the form of land, the rest having been sold and the proceeds invested; but there still remains an acre described as “Land in East Field, Dockland’s Shot.” In 1578 a member of the Roper family, perhaps Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, or her husband, bequeathed to Eltham “a parcel of ground containing by estimation four acres, in the common field, called East Field.”[102] Eltham was a royal manor, hence likely to preserve old customs to a later date than other manors, and the arrangement of ancient common fields, particularly towards Eltham Common, seems clearly traceable. In Addington, an ecclesiastical manor, it seems easy to trace the signs of ancient common, commonable meadow, and common fields.
- [102] Geo. Rathbone, “History of the Eltham Charities,” p. 5.
The Weald.
The whole of the Weald of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex appears never to have passed through the common-field system. This is indicated in the first place by the fact that there have been no Enclosure Acts for enclosing common fields. Secondly, we have what may be termed the expert evidence of William Marshall, the shrewdest of all the eighteenth-century agricultural writers, and the only one really interested in the origin and early history of the common-field system. He says of the Maidstone district, “the entire district appears to have been inclosed from the forest or pasture state. I observed not a trace of common-field lands” ([“Southern District,” Vol. I.], p. 21). Of the Weald of Kent, “The whole is in a state of inclosure, and mostly divided by wide woodland belts, into well sized fields” ([Ibid.], p. 345). Of the Weald of Sussex, “... there being, I believe, no trace at present, of common fields having ever gained an establishment” (Vol. II., p. 100). “The whole of the district (between Pulborough and Midhurst) under view is in a state of Inclosure; except a few small heathlets and commons; and except a small remnant of common field in the Maam soil.” The Maam soil, he says, is a vein of land of peculiar nature at the foot of the chalk hills, to be identified, presumably, with the Gault formation.
In 1649, seeing that a considerable amount of common field survived in the part of Surrey north of the North Downs, until the time of Parliamentary enclosure, and some in Sussex south of the South Downs, and in spite of this, Blith speaks of Surrey and Sussex as enclosed counties, enclosure must at least have predominated in the Weald.
Celia Fiennes adds a confirmation. Sussex, she says, is “much in blind, dark lanes” (p. 32). This implies narrow roads, with well-grown hedges, that is, ancient enclosure. For roads are everywhere broad in proportion as the industrial state at which enclosure takes place is advanced. Again, from Calvery to Branklye, “the way is thro’ lanes, being an Enclosed Country for the most part, as is much of Sussex which joyns to Kent” (p. 112). And the view from Boxhill was that of “a fruitfull vale, full of inclosures and woods” (p. 32).