Early History
Long before Leigh appeared in any written record, the land we now know as the village lay deep within a vast tract of woodland. This was Andreaswald, the great forest that we today call the Weald, and it shaped everything about how people moved through, used and eventually settled this corner of Kent.
The story of human activity here begins remarkably early. Hunters of the Mesolithic period, the middle stone age, made their way through the forest canopy, and the paths they trod were the first trackways in the landscape. Many thousands of years later, people of the Iron Age followed the same habit, threading routes through the trees to link their settlements and strongholds. One of these ancient ways ran from Oldbury hill fort, near Borough Green, while another made its way towards Dryhill near Marsh Green, a spot that sits close by the boundary between Kent and Surrey. Yet another Iron Age route headed for Castle Hill, the high ground above Tonbridge. These were not roads in the modern sense, but worn paths through the trees, following the driest ground and the easiest crossings.
When the Romans arrived, they were practical people, and rather than cutting entirely new routes through the Weald they took advantage of what already existed. They used the old trackways and upgraded them into proper engineered roads. One such road ran between London and Lewes, and it is possible that in doing so it reused an even older trackway leading from the hill fort at Squerries, at Westerham. A document known as the Kent Feet of Fines, recording a transaction in 1231, mentions a 'stane street' — a stone road — which is generally taken to refer to this Roman route. Exactly where it ran through Leigh parish, however, is not clear, and remains one of the puzzles of our local history.
The forest was not only a barrier to be crossed; it was also a place of industry. At Cinderhill, within Leigh parish, there was a bloomery — a site where iron ore was smelted in small furnaces. The evidence from Cinderhill shows that iron was being worked here in the Roman period, and it is possible that the practice began even earlier, in the Iron Age. Either way, it is a reminder that this quiet corner of the Weald was once a centre of one of the ancient world's most important industries.
The next great change came with the arrival of the Jutes, who settled in Kent and began to exploit the forest in a new way. They created dens — areas of woodland cleared and fenced to serve as pig pastures. Among the dens in our area were Hollanden, Haysden and Moorden. These dens did not stand alone: they originally belonged to manors up on the drier ground to the north, some of them royal estates. Medieval charters concerning Leigh parish preserve a mention of 'Kyngelond', a name that hints at this royal connection.
The name of the village itself tells its own story. 'Leah', or 'ley', is an old word meaning a glade in the forest — an opening where the trees give way to open ground. Such leys tended to occur where boggy ground interrupted the forest cover, and it is to one of these natural clearings that Leigh owes both its name and its situation. The village stands beside the River Medway, a river notoriously prone to flooding, which helps explain why the settlement kept to the drier ground of the clearing. Once open, these forest clearings could be put to use as pasture for stock — cattle, sheep or goats grazing where pigs had rooted before.
The links between the upland manors and their woodland dens took physical form as droveways — the tracks along which animals were driven between summer pasture and home farm. Jutish droveways came down from the northern manors, and those serving the dens belonging to Kemsing and Seal were linked together by these routes. A lateral trackway also ran between Leigh and Bough Beech, part of the same web of paths that bound the Weald together.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, minster churches were founded across Kent, and from these centres daughter churches were planted in the surrounding countryside. It may be that St Mary's at Leigh began life as just such a daughter church of Kemsing. The historian Everitt, in his book 'Continuity and Colonisation', explored how these patterns of settlement and church life took shape. Kent is notable for the high proportion of its churches dedicated to female saints, and the most frequent dedication of all in the county is to St Mary the Virgin. It is therefore quite possible that a church dedicated to St Mary stood at Leigh before the Norman Conquest. If so, it would almost certainly have been a simple timber building — the stone church came later.
The old parish boundaries preserve echoes of this early world. Leigh parish included detached portions — outlying pieces of land separated from the main body of the parish — at Hollanden, at the two Haysdens, and by Hale Oak. These scattered fragments correspond to the old dens, the very pig pastures carved out of Andreaswald more than a thousand years earlier, and they show how the medieval parish inherited the shape of the Jutish forest economy.
Scholars such as Margary, in 'Roman Ways in the Weald', and Witney, in 'The Jutish Forest', have done much to piece this story together. What emerges is a picture of continuity: Mesolithic hunters, Iron Age travellers, Roman road builders, Jute swineherds and Saxon churchmen all leaving their mark on the same landscape, layer upon layer, in the forest that became Leigh.