Victorian
Imagine standing on Leigh Green on a spring morning in 1840. The air smells of woodsmoke and ploughed earth, and almost everything you can see from the lane ends is farmland. That is the picture John Parfitt, the first chair of the village's local history society, painted when he reflected on the village at that date. Farming here, he suggested, had barely moved on since the Middle Ages. Horses and oxen still pulled the ploughs, harvest was gathered by hand, and the rhythm of the year was dictated by the seasons rather than by any machine.
Yet change was coming, and one of the best windows we have onto that moment is the great survey of parish land taken at the time. Under the Commutation of Tithes Act, passed in 1836, the old system of paying tithes — contributions owed for the upkeep of the church — was overhauled. Instead of handing over a share of the actual produce, the "kind" of earlier centuries, landowners now had to pay in cash. The Act set in motion a detailed assessment of every parcel of land in the parish, and the tithe map that resulted is dated 1841. A copy of it survives today.
The process behind the map was not entirely straightforward. Commissioners were sent to check that the acreages landowners reported matched what the map actually showed, and their scrutiny proved worthwhile. Woodlands, which were exempt from tithes altogether, turned out to have been over-estimated in the first returns — hardly a surprise, since exaggerating them reduced the bill. Meanwhile arable land, orchards and hop fields had all been under-estimated, which had the convenient effect of lowering payments on the most heavily charged categories, since orchards and hop fields attracted a higher tithe than arable or grass ground.
What did the finished map reveal about how Leigh earned its living? Thanks to a land use survey carried out in 1982, we can compare the parish of 1841 with the parish of living memory. In 1841, crops — wheat, barley, oats and hops — covered 47 per cent of the land. By 1982, arable and hops together accounted for just 26.5 per cent. Woods had grown rather than shrunk, rising from 11 per cent to 18 per cent over the same period, and grass had expanded too, from 36.5 per cent to 44.5 per cent. Hops, once such a familiar sight, had all but vanished by 1982, and the total acreage given over to orchards had fallen by a third by the 1980s.
The shape of farming changed as well as its balance. Average arable fields, a modest 6.2 acres in 1841, had grown to 12 acres a century and more later, as hedges were removed to suit larger machinery. Orchards followed the same pattern, increasing from an average of 1.4 acres to 4.4 acres. The number of separate farms and smallholdings tells perhaps the starkest story: 35 in 1841 had become only 15 by 1982. Steam-powered ploughs and threshing machines arrived only late in the 19th century, but once they did, the old small-scale pattern of cultivation was living on borrowed time. In a letter to Ann Whitehouse, Lord de Lisle noted that by the 1800s subsistence farming had vanished from West Kent; and once the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, cheap imported grain flowed in and reshaped English agriculture for good.
Transport was changing too. In 1842 the railway reached Penshurst and Tonbridge, and a service from Penshurst to London began the same year. The journey to the capital took 1 hour 45 minutes — a connection that would have seemed like magic to Leigh's grandparents. Lawrence Biddle, who wrote a book on Leigh, captured much of this story of a village on the edge of transformation.
The census of 1841 gives us the people behind the fields. Leigh's population stood at 1,036, and among them were 124 temporary residents — the men building the railway, lodging in the parish while they worked. Their presence was a sign of what was coming. Brickmaking was already established at Lower Green, and at Chiddingstone Causeway there was a factory making cricket balls, so not everyone in and around the village depended on the land.
Home life was crowded by modern standards. Most dwellings had only two rooms upstairs and two down, and there were on average six people living in each house. The 1841 census also recorded 32 people with no proper home at all, living in barns, tents and out in the open air. Over the following 130 years things loosened considerably: the number of people per dwelling fell to just under 3, dwellings rose from 193 in 1841 to 500 in 1971, and the permanent population grew by 60 per cent between 1841 and 1971. Even so, the parish kept much of its rural character — non-agricultural uses rose only from 4 per cent to 11 per cent of the land.
Children in the village had somewhere to learn. A charity school stood on the Green in 1841, and there was also a national school along Powder Mill Lane. For families who could afford it, Tonbridge School existed nearby, its reputation already long established.
So what might you have been doing in Leigh in 1840? Quite possibly working a smallholding of a few acres, growing hops or grain by methods your medieval predecessors would have recognised. You might have been walking to the charity school on the Green, or watching the navvies arrive to cut the railway. Within a generation, cash tithes, steam engines, cheap corn from abroad and a train to London would sweep much of the old world away. The 1841 tithe map, preserved in the local history archive, catches Leigh at the very last moment before that transformation began.