Medieval
Anyone who has walked past the school buildings in Tonbridge, or traced the old parish links between Tonbridge and the surrounding villages such as Leigh, will have come across the name of Sir Andrew Judde. His name is woven into the story of education in the town, and it is a story that cannot be separated from one of the great City of London companies: the Skinners. To understand how a London livery company came to shape schooling in a Kent market town, we have to begin long before Judde's time, with the birth of London itself.
The Romans arrived in Britain under Claudius in A.D. 43. One of their early acts was to establish London as a place where goods could be bought, sold and shipped. The settlement grew quickly, and within twenty years of the invasion there was already a busy, prosperous town on the Thames. For more than three and a half centuries this trading centre flourished at the edge of the Roman world. Then, in A.D. 410, the empire collapsed, and in that same year the imperial authorities stopped governing London. Yet Roman ways did not vanish overnight; their influence on the city can be traced for at least another fifty years. Indeed, Roman authority flickered on elsewhere too, for a pocket of Roman power survived near Soissons in northern France, holding out until close to the year 500.
It was into this landscape that new arrivals came. The Saxons, whose original homeland lay in the north-west of what is now Germany, chose not to crowd into the crumbling Roman city but to settle on its western side, along the line of what we now call Fleet Street. A church that still stands there, St Clement Danes, is physical evidence of that early settlement. The Saxons gave the place its own name, Lundenvic. The ending 'vic' was their word for a trading town, which is exactly what the settlement remained. When, in the ninth century, the old Roman town was reoccupied and brought back into use, the trading community by Fleet Street needed a new name to distinguish it, and so it became Aldwych.
Out of this trading world grew the institutions that would one day matter so much to Tonbridge. The very word 'guild' comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'geld', meaning money or payment — a root it shares with the modern German word for money. That etymology is a reminder of what guilds actually did: among other things, they levied taxes on goods entering and leaving, raising funds from the trade that passed through the city.
London itself was changing shape. King William I chose to set up his palace at Westminster, which at that time was a village quite separate from the city on the Thames. In the centuries that followed, the crown and the guilds drew ever closer together, though not always on equal terms. Edward III and Richard II both sold charters to the City guilds, and the purpose was a practical one: the money raised helped to pay for wars against the Scots and the French.
A turning point came with the plague. The Black Death swept through the country in the 1340s and killed roughly forty per cent of the population. For those who survived, the world was suddenly different: with so many neighbours gone, the living often found themselves considerably wealthier than before. Money, in turn, flowed into the guilds and strengthened the companies that held them.
By this stage the great livery companies of London had taken their familiar shape. Twelve of them stood above the rest: the Mercers, the Grocers, the Drapers, the Fishmongers, the Goldsmiths, the Merchant Taylors, the Skinners, the Haberdashers, the Salters, the Ironmongers, the Vintners and the Clothworkers. Beneath these great companies were no fewer than sixty-two minor livery companies, among them the Apothecaries, the Barbers and the Butchers. Together they organised nearly every trade and craft that kept the capital alive.
One of the twelve great companies concerned itself with furs. The Skinners dealt in this most valuable of commodities, and their standing in the City was recognised early. Their first charter was granted by Edward III in 1327, and a further charter followed from Henry VI in 1437. A company with two royal charters behind it was a body of real wealth, influence and permanence.
That permanence is the key to the Tonbridge story. A company built on the fur trade, enriched by the aftermath of plague and armed with royal charters, had the means to think beyond commerce — and it is through the Skinners that the name of Sir Andrew Judde is remembered in Tonbridge, and through the town's school that the connection extends outward to neighbouring parishes such as Leigh. The chain of inheritance runs unbroken from the traders of Roman London, through the Saxon merchants of Lundenvic, the guildsmen who paid their 'geld', and the chartered companies of the late medieval city, to the classrooms of a Kent town. Few threads in local history run so long or tie together places so far apart as this one does.