Tudor & Stuart
Every family historian with roots in this corner of Kent eventually finds their way to the parish registers, and Leigh's are among the older sets in the county. The books recording baptisms, marriages and burials here begin in 1562, in the early years of Elizabeth I's reign. Today the volumes themselves are looked after by Kent Archives, which cares for them on behalf of the Parish, so the originals remain within reach of anyone wishing to consult them.
The registers are more than lists of names. From time to time a vicar with an enquiring mind leaves his own mark on the record, and Leigh was fortunate in this respect. The Reverend Joseph Carte served as Vicar here from 1662 until his incumbency ended in 1706, a span of more than forty years that carried the parish through the Restoration, the plague years, the Great Fire in nearby London and the turn of a new century. In the final decade of his time at Leigh, Carte took to noting down the occupations of the people he was baptising, marrying and burying.
Over those ten years he made roughly 250 such entries, and they paint a remarkably detailed picture of how the parish earned its living. The most striking figure is that 75 of the entries — nearly a third — were described simply as "poor", with no trade attached. Beyond them, farming dominated: 57 farmers appear in Carte's list, alongside 17 husbandmen and 18 labouring men. Building and craft trades follow: 14 masons, 10 millers, 8 carpenters, 4 thatchers and 3 tailors. There were 6 shewmakers and 6 palemakers, trades tied to the fencing and hurdles that a wooded, agricultural landscape demanded.
The long tail of the list is just as revealing. Two each of park keepers, carriers, basket makers, wheelwrights, sawyers, weavers, beggarmen and gentlemen appear, while single entries record a wheeler, a gardener, a dish-turner, a hemp-dresser, a smith, an apprentice, a servant, a servant maid, a butcher, a rich yeoman and a rich widow. Notably absent are the trades one might expect in a village centre: no baker, no draper and no grocer was represented at all. Leigh, it seems, was a community of farms and crafts rather than shops.
Carte's entries also hint at where the work was done. Quarries existed at Paul's Hill, Cooks Pit, Ashour Wood and Redleaf, supplying stone and presumably employment. A watermill stood on the Medway at Ramhurst, while a windmill at Watts Cross stood just outside the parish boundary — close enough to serve Leigh's farmers, even if it could not be counted within.
The Vicar's curiosity extended to place. From 1703 to 1706 he recorded the locations attached to baptisms and burials, and in doing so he referred to Leigh itself as Leighborough — a form of the name that has since fallen away. The figures he noted are instructive. Leighborough itself saw 7 burials and 17 baptisms in those years. Hildenborough, by contrast, recorded 18 burials and 13 baptisms, Somerden 4 burials and 5 baptisms, and Charket, in the Liberty of Somerden, 2 burials and 1 baptism. Washlingstone had 3 baptisms and no burials, Hollanden 2 burials and 1 baptism, and Leigh Green just 1 baptism with no burials.
These place-names need some explaining, because the map of 1703 was not the map of today. The parish of Hildenborough did not then exist; that area formed part of the parish of Tonbridge, which explains why so many of the period's burials and baptisms there found their way into Leigh's registers. Hollanden was a detached part of the parish of Leigh, an outlying fragment separated from the main body of the parish. The land south of the River Medway lay in the hundred of Washlingstone, and Upper Haysden was another detached portion of Leigh. The hundred of Somerden was a wider grouping still, taking in Penshurst, Chiddingstone, Hever, Cowden and Speldhurst as well as the places already named.
A different kind of document, compiled by the churchwardens, survives from two dates: 1579 and 1750. These were the fence-liability lists, which set out how much boundary fencing each property in the parish was responsible for maintaining. The earlier list covers 56 properties. The lengths of responsibility varied considerably: Great Barnetts owed 36 ft of boundary, while Well Place and Penshurst Park each carried 45 ft. Two farms at Charcott were each answerable for 40 ft, and Hall Place for 29 ft. Ramhurst Mill appears with 25 ft and Ramhurst itself with 24 ft in the 1579 list. A curiosity for local readers: Hadlow Place, named in these records, is now known as the Plough Inn.
By the time of the second list, in 1750, responsibilities had shifted. Ramhurst Mill was then liable for 35 ft, a noticeably heavier burden than the 25 ft of 171 years earlier, and Ramhurst was by then owned by Richard Children. Comparing the two lists shows how holdings changed hands and how duties were redistributed across the generations.
What emerges from all of this — the registers, Carte's occupation notes and the fence lists — is a portrait of a working agricultural parish: farmers and husbandmen in the fields, masons and millers at the quarries and mills, the poor never far from the record, and a web of hamlets and detached parcels whose boundaries have long since been redrawn.
This article draws on research by Lawrence Biddle, published in the Parish Magazine in August 1982, December 1982 and February 1983.