Folklore of Kent

INTRODUCTION

'Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women’, Mr Jingle says memorably in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, a novel with a partly Kentish setting where Maidstone features as ‘Muggletown’ and Cob Tree Manor as ‘Dingley Dell’. The Pickwickians and their host Mr Wardle like their food and a ‘Kentish stomach’ is traditionally a strong one. The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser also comments favourably on the women – ‘Lythe as Lass of Kent’ – and the traditional culture of fruit growing and hop picking is celebrated. What does Mr Jingle omit? Well, the plethora of Kent’s indigenous saints and its former greatness as the most famous pilgrimage centre in Britain; the richness of its folk drama and rituals; and its maritime heritage of fishing, trade and smuggling to name but a few.

Kent is bounded on three sides by sea and has the longest coastline of any English county which, according to Parish and Shaw’s Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect, contributed to the growth of a highly individualistic culture and in-breeding – hence the derogatory phrase ‘Kentish Cousins’:

This county being two-thirds of it bounded by the sea and the river, the inhabitants thereof are kept at home more than they are in inland counties. This confinement naturally produces intermarriages amongst themselves.

Far from being insular, the maritime communities of Kent used the sea and rivers as mediums of travel and the Kentish ports thrived, not just as fishing communities rich in sea-produce (and sea-lore), but as trading centres with considerable traffic in people and goods and of significance in war as well as peace since Kent was usually the prime target for planned invasions. The Cinque Ports (four of which – Sandwich, Dover, New Romney and Hythe – are in Kent) had the responsibility under various charters of providing either fighting vessels or transports in times of war from late Anglo-Saxon times to the seventeenth century. This could be up to fifty-two ships for fourteen days in any one year in return for extensive privileges. Beyond the specified number of ships and days, an agreed payment was made.

These privileges included ‘Den and Strond’ – the right to haul boats onto the shore and to dry nets on the strand or beach – and exemption or reduction of certain import and export duties. The post of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (usually combined with the office of Constable of Dover Castle) was created to safeguard the rights of these ports and to reflect their influence in government circles. Remaining privileges today include holding Courts of Brotherhood and Guestling once a year and rights of attendance at coronations.

Since medieval times Sandwich has had a Mayor Deputy in each of its ‘limbs’ who send representatives annually for the ceremony of Confirmation of Deputies. For the privilege of links with Sandwich and its Cinque Port status, the towns are levied annual ‘Ship Money’ – 10s from Brightlingsea; 3s 4d from Fordwich; and 1s 8d from Sarre, which for many years has pleaded inability to pay at the ceremony for diverse ingenious reasons!

Proverbially Kentish miles were extra long, perhaps because of the vast breadth of the county (which seems to have been originally two distinct kingdoms and administrative areas surviving as East and West Kent, each with its bishopric) that gave rise to the proverb ‘Essex stiles, Kentish miles, Norfolk wiles, many men beguiles’. Early division may have a bearing over the long controversy about the distinction between ‘Men of Kent’ and ‘Kentish Men’, neatly summed up by Alan Major in his A New Dictionary of Kent Dialect:

Formerly ‘A Man of Kent’ was a man born between the Kentish Stour and the sea, all others being ‘Kentish Men’. Another version said that a ‘Kentish Man’ was one born in Kent, but not of Kentish parents, while a ‘Man of Kent’ was one whose parents and ancestors were Kentish. A more common version is that a ‘Man of Kent’ is one born east of the river Medway, while a ‘Kentish Man’ is one born west of the Medway.

Despite these apparent differences between East and West Kent, and affinities between West Kent and East Sussex (particularly with regard to folk songs and customs and smuggling and hop-picking traditions) there are distinctive features in Kent folklore, perhaps partly due to insularity caused by the bad roads through the rich and fertile Wealden clay, which gave rise to the proverb ‘Bad for the Rider, Good for the Abider!’

Kent has always been important and wealthy; Julius Caesar commented on how civilised the Britons were in the south-east and the wealth of Kent is cited in early proverbs:

A Gentleman of Wales, with a Knight of Cales*

And a Lord of the North Countrie,

A Yeoman of Kent upon a rack’s Rent

Will buy them out all three.

*A knight made by the Earl of Essex on his Cadiz expedition (1596)

Another proverb connects wealth and poverty to healthy and less healthy terrain in Kent:

Rye, Romney and Hythe, for wealth without health;

The Downs for health with poverty;

But you shall find both health and wealth

From Foreland Heath to Knole and Lee.

The first line refers to the area of Romney Marshe, the ‘sixth continent’, infamous for ‘Kentish Ague’, a kind of marsh fever. The marsh is one of several distinctive areas of Kent with their own economic, social and cultural traditions and terminology (such as the ‘Romney Looker’ meaning a shepherd). The Isle of Thanet is another and perhaps also are those former parts of Kent now sadly captured by Greater London (but which we shall nevertheless include in this book).

William Lambarde writes in his Perambulation of Kent that:

The yeomanrie, or common people… is no where more free, and jolly, than in this shyre: for besides that they themselves say in a clayme (made by them in the time of king Edwarde the First) that the communaltie of Kent was never vanquished by the Conqueror, but yeelded itself by composition.

Lambarde and other early chroniclers cite the traditional story that by their threatened armed resistance the people of Kent persuaded William the Conqueror to allow them to continue with their ancient customs, one of which was inheritance under the Gavelkind system, which legally remained as the Common law of Kent until the twentieth century. Lambarde says that:

Copyhold tenure is rare in Kent, and tenant right not heard of at all. But in place of these, the custome of Gavelkind prevailing every where every man is a freeholder, and hath some part of his own to live upon.

Alan Major defines Gavelkind as:

An ancient Saxon custom distributing an equal division of the lands of the parent among his sons or children. From the Anglo-Saxon gafol, a tribute, although it has been suggested gavelkind is a corruption of the German gieb alle kind (give all to the children).

As Percy Maylam pointed out in his detailed pamphlet on the subject in 1913, Gavelkind remained the usual system of inheritance throughout the kingdom until at least the reign of Henry III, so we need to look for another reason for its long survival in Kent; Percy Maylam suggests this might be ‘The small number of tenures in Kent held by knight service’, that is military service as opposed to the ‘non-military tenure of ‘free scotage’ or agricultural or monetary services.’

One of the advantages of Gavelkind was that if the father was executed for treason or other crimes, only his goods and chattels but not his land were forfeit to the crown, hence the Kent proverb:

The Father to the Bough, [the gallows]

And the son to the Plough

Earlier versions of this had ‘logh’ (meaning ‘place’) instead of ‘plough’. Another distinct feature of Gavelkind rehearsed in a Kentish proverb was that the widow of a tenant was allowed to keep the estate if they were childless or their children under age. If any of the children were of age, the widow kept half the estate during her lifetime. The relevant proverb, found in its earliest form in the Queenborough Statute Book, runs: ‘Si that is wedewe, si is levedi (She that is a widow, she is the lady).

Kent has had its fair share of political, religious and socio-economic rebellions and disturbances, with their own rich folklore and proverbial terms and sayings. ‘Kentish Fire’ for example was a term given to the continuous cheering common to the Protestant meetings held in Kent in 1828 and 1829 opposing the Catholic Relief Bill. The following proverb is a pithy reference to the social injustice of enclosures:

It is a fault in man or woman

To steal a goose from off a common.

But it admits of less excuse

To steal a common from a goose.

Kent’s rich folklore has been inseparable from its traditional culture – its economic, social and religious way of life – which has included saints and smugglers, hoodeners and hop-pickers. Evolving patterns of life still affect living and developing folklore; for example for people standing in the middle of West Malling: ‘If you can hear a train it’s going to rain’. Will Kent folklore and customs ever cease to fascinate patriots and friends of this remarkable and historic county? ‘It won’t happen till the moon comes down in Calverley Road’ as they say of impossibilities in Tunbridge Wells!

This book was originally written in 2003 and published by Tempus. The History Press then republished it in 2009 and reprinted it twice; this new edition for 2024 has a few additions, particularly enhancing the lesser known lore of East Kent (where the authors now live). We are grateful for the interest the book has stimulated over 20 years.

1

SPRING & SUMMER

CUSTOMS

Traditionally, spring begins on St Valentine’s Day (14 February) when the birds mate – ‘the Birds’ Wedding Day’ as it was called in neighbouring Sussex. Geoffrey Chaucer, a poet with strong Kent connections, uses this tradition in his dream-vision poem ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ from around 1382:

For this was on seynt Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make,

Of every kynde that men thynke may

That sexual pairing on this day extended to human beings, at least symbolically and traditionally, is shown by the final verse of the folksong ‘Dame Durden’, found extensively in the south of England including Kent and Sussex:

Twas on the morn of Valentine

When birds began to prate,

Dame Durden and her maids and men

They altogether mate

CHORUS

Twas Moll and Bet and Doll and Kit

And Dorothy Draggletail;

It was Tom and Dick and Joe and Jack

And Humphrey with his flail.

Then Tom kissed Molly

And Dick kissed Betty

And Joe kissed Dolly

And Jack kissed Kitty

And Humphrey with his flail

And Kitty she was a charming girl

To carry the milking pail

In Sussex the Copper family version bowdlerises the sexual word ‘mate’ to ‘meet’.

In the seventeenth century there was a custom (operating among the middle classes at least) that the first man to greet a lady on St Valentine’s Day would be her Valentine; husbands apparently didn’t count! This involved the man buying the lady a present, such as a pair of gloves and some harmless social contact later in the day (such as sitting next to each other at a Valentine’s Day feast); probably a kiss was also permitted. That the lady had to ‘accept’ the first comer, and therefore contrived to ensure the man was acceptable, is shown by the reference in Samuel Pepys’ Diary for St Valentine’s Day 1662:

Valentine’s day. I did this day purposely shun to be seen at Sir W. Battens – because I would not have his daughter to be my Valentine, as she was the last year, there being no great friendship between us now as formerly. This morning in comes W. Bowyer, who was my wife’s Valentine, she having (at which I made good sport to myself) held her hands all the morning, that she might not see the paynters that were at work in gilding my chimney-piece and pictures in my dining-room.

Originally gifts were sent to one’s Valentine; there are records of this happening in Roman society at this time of year and the festival, named after an early Christian martyr, may have absorbed features of some earlier celebration or ritual connected with springtime courtship. Love notes and cards became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shakespeare has a hero called Valentine who serenades his love outside her bedroom window in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and in East Anglia there are records of children singing love songs outside houses on Valentine’s Morn to collect pennies, which might be the remnants of an adult custom.

Shrovetide

Shrovetide is a moveable spring festival; the name derives from two Anglo-Saxon words meaning ‘the time to be shriven’ – to confess one’s sins before the forty-day Lenten fast during which the consuming of meat, milk, eggs, butter and cheese were forbidden on weekdays. The ‘shriving bell’ (later known as the ‘pancake bell’ at Maidstone) summoned people to church in pre-Reformation days. After the service and shrivings there was the consumption of food forbidden in Lent incorporated into traditional pancakes to be used up and then the playing of rough sports such as street football and cock-fighting which were also frowned upon in Lent. The pancakes and violent sports survived the Reformation and there is a reference to the ringing of the pancake bell in Maidstone to encourage the wives to begin the repast. Taylor’s ‘Jack-a-Lent’ (1630) includes a recipe:

There is a thing called wheaten flowre, which the cookes doe mingle with water, eggs, spice and other tragicall, magicall inchantments, and they put it by little into a frying pan of boyling suet where it makes a confused dismall hissing (like the Learnean snakes in the reeds of Acheron, Stix, or Phlegeton), untill, at last by the skill of the Cooke, it is transformed into the forme of a Flap-jack, cal’d a pancake, which ominous incantation the ignorant people doe devoure very greedily.

At Olney in Buckinghamshire there is a famous Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race for the housewives, who toss pancakes in saucepans as they race, which has recently been copied by a local ladies’ society in Tunbridge Wells. Shrovetide afternoon continued as a half-day holiday for schools into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the tradition of ‘barring out’ the teacher, who was only admitted to the classroom on condition that he or she agreed to a half day holiday. Consequently all sorts of strange customs and sports are recorded on Shrove Tuesday afternoon such as this one, reported to the Gentleman’s Magazine ‘as occurring in an unspecified East Kent village’ in 1779:

I found an odd sort of sport going forward: the girls, from 18 to 5 or 6 years old, were assembled in a crowd, and burning an uncouth effigy, which they called an Holly-Boy, and which it seems they had stolen from the boys, who, in another part of the village, were assembled together, and burning what they called an Ivy-Girl, which they had stolen from the girls; all this ceremony was accompanied with loud huzzah, noise and acclamations. What it all means I cannot tell, although I inquired of several of the oldest people in the place, who could only answer that it had always been a sport at this season of the year.

Easter

Because of the significance of the Last Supper and the Maundy traditions (based on Christ’s commands to his disciples to assist the poor), Easter was a favourite time for bequests giving annual doles to the poor. Kent’s most famous Easter tradition, the Biddenden Dole, is covered in chapter 10. Egg rolling derives traditionally from north-west England, but in Tunbridge Wells eggs have been rolled on Easter Monday in the Calverley Gardens since the 1970s.

May Garlands

The first of May celebrates the beginning of summer in the traditional calendar with maypoles, may garlands and Jack-in-the-Greens. May Day was an unofficial bank holiday for many years and in the morning children used to carry May garlands from door to door, sometimes with a doll therein representing the May Queen, singing a song which included requests for the customary tribute and inappropriate religious reminders of man’s mortality. The Whitstable May Song is typical in this bizarre mixture of celebration, begging and gnomic