Early History
As the year 1000 approached, we cannot say for certain that Leigh existed at all. No documents from the parish have come down to us from that era, and no archaeology survives either, so any picture of our village at the last Millennium must be painted from what we know of Kent as a whole. The Domesday Book, our great survey of that age, covered Kent poorly, which leaves the county unusually shadowy.
What can be said is that west Kent was a wealthy part of England. Its people lived from a mixed rural economy, with farming at its heart and the keeping of sheep among its activities. Goods moved along Watling Street, the old road running from Dover through Rochester towards London, and trade with France travelled this route. Canterbury and Rochester were both busy, flourishing towns. There are hints, too, that iron was dug in the county, though this is far from certain.
The people of Kent saw themselves as different from their neighbours. They called themselves Jutes, a people apart from the Angles and the Saxons, and the Earls of Kent traced their family line back to Hengist, a figure of the fifth century. Quite what being a Jute meant is still argued over by scholars today. Kent certainly stood apart in other ways: it had its own tongue, and its own body of law, echoes of which could still be found in the nineteenth century.
Yet the closing years of the old era were troubled ones. King Ethelred, remembered by the nickname 'the Unready', which really means 'Badly Advised', faced raids on the English coast by Viking forces. In the summer of 999 one such force landed at Rochester, beat the Kentish militia in open battle, and laid waste to the whole of west Kent. These were dangerous times for Anglo-Saxon England.
Nor did everyone even agree on when the Millennium fell. Some counted the year from Christmas, others from Easter, the Annunciation or the first of January. Comets seen in 988 and 1002 frightened the superstitious, and greater attention was paid to a thousand years since the Crucifixion than to any change of year.