Early History
Among the papers of the village's local history society is a study of the village's past written during the 1940s by Commander F N Stagg, who made his home at Ivy Hatch. His article carries the story of Leigh forward from its earliest beginnings as far as the time of Samuel Morley, and it remains a valuable piece of writing, particularly for the long stretch between 1250 and 1750, about which it has much of interest to say. Reading it today gives a sense of how a scattered settlement in the Weald gradually took on the shape of the parish we know.
Stagg begins with the forest. In early times Leigh lay within the great expanse of the Weald, a wooded country that shaped everything about the place. The Romans came here for its timber, which they burned in iron furnaces known as bloomeries, and the only site of this kind known within Leigh is at Cinderhill. Long before the Romans, the Jutes had also made use of the wealden forest, driving their pigs into the woods to feed on the acorns and beechmast. From this practice of woodland pannage grew the dens, or swine pastures, and their names have stayed with the village: Hollanden, Hayesden and Moorden all survive in Leigh today. Other places nearby carry the same story. Charcott once belonged to Royal Dartford, while Meopham Bank was formerly part of Meopham's land, and Ramhurst was a den attached to Kemsing. The dens themselves were grouped around Cransted, close to where the Bough Beech water lies in modern times.
Out of these scattered dens the parish of Leigh was eventually formed, an amalgamation of separate woodland clearings rather than a single planned settlement. The result was an unusual shape, for the parish included four detached portions lying apart from the main body, among them Hollanden and two separate places called Hayesdens. Even the name of the village speaks of its wooded origins: Leigh comes from the old word 'leah', meaning an unenclosed place in the forest. The last surviving piece of that ancient clearing is the village green, which Stagg regarded as the final remnant of the original leah.
The coming of the Normans brought Leigh into a new world of lordship. In 1066 a castle was raised at Tonbridge, and it was placed in the hands of Richard de Tonbridge, who was a half-brother of the Conqueror himself. From this Richard descended the Clare family, who were in time ennobled as Earls of Gloucester, and their influence over this corner of Kent was lasting. Notably, Leigh does not appear by name in Domesday Book, nor does it feature in the Textus Roffensis, which is exactly what one would expect of a settlement that was still a collection of woodland dens rather than a recognised manor.
What Richard did instead was to carve out for himself a district known as the Leuga, or Lowy, of Tonbridge, a liberty under his own control. Its extent was tested twice in the medieval period. King Henry III ordered a perambulation of the Lowy in 1258, and King Edward I called for a second in 1280. Between them, these surveys show that almost the whole of Leigh parish fell within the bounds of the Lowy, which placed the village's inhabitants under the lordship of Tonbridge rather than under the ordinary machinery of the county.
The perambulation records are fascinating because they name features that can still be matched to the landscape. Redleaf appears in both surveys as lying within the Lowy. A pond belonging to a man named Ralph Dorkynghole is mentioned, and this is probably the pond at Moorden, though the identification must remain a matter of judgement. There is also a place called Richette, which may well be the flat ground around Wickhurst Brook. Not everything was taken into the liberty: Coppings lies outside the Lowy altogether. The boundary itself was marked by recognisable landmarks. It ran past the house of Ralph Wykhurst and past the land of the Prior, and it followed the highway of Edinhurst for part of its course. A place called Newsole in the records is today's Nizels, showing how names change their shape over the centuries while staying recognisably the same.
One further landmark deserves mention. The surveys refer to the Quadrivium de Rithersden, which is the four-went way, a crossing of roads, at the foot of Riverhill. Riverhill is itself a place of great antiquity, for it lay along the old Castivene Way, a Roman route across the country. The presence of a Roman road so close to the village is a reminder that Leigh's story reaches back far beyond the medieval surveys, to the days when the timber of the Weald was being fed into the bloomery furnaces.
Stagg's article thus traces a clear arc: a forest used first by swine-herding Jutes, then by Roman ironmasters; a scatter of dens bearing the names of distant owners; a gradual coming together into a parish with its odd detached portions; and finally a settled community within the Lowy of Tonbridge, documented by the perambulations of the thirteenth century. For anyone wishing to understand why Leigh looks the way it does, with its green as the last echo of the ancient leah, his account remains the natural starting point for the village story.