Early History
In the opening centuries of the medieval period, the land around Leigh was a very different place from the fields and lanes we know today. Ken Witney's book, The Jutish Forest, explores this lost world, taking the story from roughly 500AD through to 1350AD. It is a story of woodland, pigs, pioneers and parish boundaries, and it explains much about why our corner of Kent looks the way it does.
The Jutes were one of the peoples who crossed the North Sea in the great migrations of the early medieval age. Towards the close of the 5th century they made their home in Kent, though their ambitions stretched further: they also established themselves on the Isle of Wight and along the Hampshire coast. Their ways were strikingly unlike those of their neighbours, the Angles and the Saxons, and nowhere was this clearer than in the position of the ordinary free Kentishman, who enjoyed a standing far above his counterparts elsewhere.
The origins of the Jutish kingdom are wrapped in legend and half-remembered history. Tradition tells that Hengest was engaged by the Britons as a mercenary, paid to defend them against Saxon raiders from the sea. Instead of merely guarding the coast, he seized control of the south-east for himself, and his death came in 488. The realm he left behind was known as Cantii, and under its rulers Kent developed its own distinctive institutions.
The most famous of these rulers was King Ethelbert, remembered as the first Christian king of the English. His baptism took place in 579, and his reign produced another landmark: an enormous codification of laws, among the earliest written down in this country. By this period Kent was a well-populated kingdom, home to approximately three thousand free families.
Kent was not governed as a single block. It was split into separate divisions called lathes, each one stretching from north to south, beginning at the Thames estuary and running down to the Weald. Within the Weald itself lay the dens — enclosures probably about half a mile square, which supplied timber and, crucially, autumn pasture for swine. The great forest of the Weald was at this time chiefly primeval woodland, dominated by oak, and it was here that pigs from the settled lands to the north were fattened each year on the acorns and mast.
The place-names of our district still carry the memory of these woodland pastures. Hollenden, Hilden, Haysden and Morden all belong to this family of names. Leigh itself did not exist as a village in the modern sense. It was a scatter of dens tied to surrounding manors, of which Ramhurst was one. The chief place of Leigh's district lay at Darenth, and the lathe to which Leigh belonged was known as Sutton-At-Hone. Along the Darenth valley, other manors such as Kemsing and Seal took their place in the same pattern of settlement.
The Jutes, it should be said, did not build compact villages. They preferred scattered farms and hamlets, and this pattern of dispersed living shaped the landscape for centuries. Nor were they the first people in the area: the evidence points to a considerable survival of Romano-British life here, long after the legions had gone. Contacts with the continent remained strong too, as 6th-century Kentish jewellery shows, bearing clear marks of Frankish influence in its design.
Movement between the settled north and the forest south followed well-worn tracks. Drove-roads ran roughly from north or northeast down towards the south and southwest, along which pigs were sent each autumn to the forest commons. At Leigh these droves ran alongside the river, and one of them covered a distance of some five miles between Leigh and Bough Beech. Rivers were crossed at fords in the usual way — there is no sign of bridge building until the 9th century — though there may once have been a Roman crossing at Chiddingstone.
By the time of Domesday Book, the dens belonging to Leigh were mainly grouped around Edenbridge. Change was already under way. Through the 12th century, pannage — the old practice of grazing pigs in the woods — steadily gave way to cultivation, as forest clearing became farmland.
Religion left its mark on this wooded landscape too. The earliest Kentish churches were built of timber, and only between the early 13th and the middle of the 14th century were these replaced by structures of stone. As for Leigh, no trace has ever been found of a Jutish church here.
The later medieval centuries brought conflict over the shrinking forest. The Lowy of Tonbridge was defined as the land lying within a five-mile radius of Tonbridge, and 13th-century perambulations — formal walkings of the boundaries — revealed how far the woodland had been eaten away by scattered settlement. A notable dispute erupted between the Clares of Tonbridge and the Archbishop, with contested places including Moorden, Charcott, Wickhurst and Dorkinhole. At the heart of the quarrel, places were argued over between the borgh of Hilden and the borgh of Cranstead, the latter lying in the Hundred of Somerden. Such wrangles were worth the effort: the collection of tithings was a profitable business, and in 1264 the holders of knights' fees were formally listed, a reminder of how carefully land and its dues were recorded.
Ken Witney's account thus traces a full arc: from primeval oak forest and autumn droves of pigs, through the rise of the Jutish kingdom and its distinctive laws, to a landscape of manors, stone churches and contested boundaries. The Jutish Forest reminds us that Leigh's history begins not with a village but with woodland clearings — and that the names on our map still echo those distant centuries.