Georgian
A gap in a parish's records is always frustrating, but occasionally fortune steps in. When the village’s local history society staged its Church History Exhibition in 1985, held appropriately enough inside the church itself, two volumes of Churchwardens' Accounts had been borrowed from Kent Archives. The first of these runs from 1685 to 1736 and the second from 1790 to 1836, leaving a blank stretch of more than a century in between. Nothing, it seemed, had survived for the years 1737 to 1789.
Behind the exhibition, however, lay a good deal of patient work. A small team — Margaret Allison, Belinda Forster, Cecil Gravell and Diana Wood — met every Monday morning at the Woods to study the volumes. As well as combing through the accounts themselves, they traced the people who had once lived in a selection of Leigh houses, among them The Porcupine and Cinderhill, then Great Barnetts and Pauls Farm, with The Old Bakery and the Woods completing the set.
Then came a stroke of luck. A friend with an interest in the history of Speldhurst made contact and mentioned that the widow of a Mr Hinton still had old papers in her keeping. Among them were Churchwardens' Accounts covering exactly the missing years, 1737 to 1789. These were generously handed over, and the lost decades were lost no longer.
The newly acquired volume was not in good shape. Its vellum binding had decayed, though the pages inside remained quite readable. It is worth noting that the archive volumes themselves had been rebound back in the 1930s, that work having been paid for by the 2nd Lord Hollenden.
What do the accounts tell us? The parish's rateable values were set out under four headings: Leigh Green, Blackhoath and Charcott, Hollanden, and Haysden. There were also the "outbounders" — properties lying outside the parish boundary — which nonetheless contributed to the church rate. That rate was assessed at either 3d or 4d in the pound.
Each year brought the expense of the annual Visitation, presumably conducted by the Archdeacon. The minister received a dinner worth 5 shillings on that occasion, and remarkably this was his only benefit from the accounts in the whole year. Other entries record the costs of making up and signing the accounts themselves.
The notes on which this article draws were written by Lawrence Biddle and appeared in the Parish Magazine in March 1999. That piece promised a continuation which, sadly, never appeared — so these pages stand as the account of an account book.