Georgian
Among the floor of Leigh Church, set into the centre of the nave, lies a marble ledger stone that commemorates two members of a family whose roots in this corner of Kent reach back to the Tudor period. It marks the grave of Richard Streatfeild, dead in 1794, and of Sarah his wife, who outlived him by fifteen years, until her own death in 1809.
Richard's standing in the village is reflected in where he was buried. To be laid to rest in so prominent a spot within the nave was an honour, and it matched the esteem in which his farm was held. Richard had taken on the tenancy of Great Barnetts around 1767 and worked there for the rest of his life. The churchwardens of the day reckoned Great Barnetts to be the most valuable property in the village, and when the 1750 Churchwardens' list set out which farm occupants were liable for maintaining the Churchyard Wall, the tenant of Great Barnetts was charged with the longest stretch of wall in the whole Parish.
The farm itself was extensive. Its land ran south of the village round as far as Green Lane, and it also took in marshland stretching down to the river. In later years a railway embankment cut across the way down to those marshes, interrupting the access the farm had once enjoyed.
After Richard's death the farm passed to his son Nicholas, who continued to work Great Barnetts until 1820, so the family's connection with Leigh spanned more than half a century.
The Streatfeilds themselves were an old Chiddingstone family, established there through fourteen generations. Their earliest home in the village was High Street House, but in the early nineteenth century the High Street at Chiddingstone was diverted, taking a new course northwards to the west of the Church. High Street House was afterwards converted into a mock castle, standing in grounds of its own. Today the family live at Hoath House, in Chiddingstone Hoath, where Mervyn Streatfeild resides; Mervyn was instrumental in helping to establish the link between the family and this parish.
That link goes back a long way. A Richard Streatfeild lived in Chiddingstone from 1514 to 1549 and left two sons. The elder, Henry, was the ancestor of those fourteen generations of Chiddingstone Streatfeilds. The younger son, also named Richard, founded a line that first settled at Chested in Chiddingstone, later moved to Ford Place in Penshurst, and then to Otford. It was at Otford that the Richard of our ledger stone was baptized, and he remained there until he took over the Great Barnetts farm. So the tie between Leigh and the Chiddingstone Streatfeilds dates to the sixteenth century.
The family's story is not entirely closed. Mr Perry, who lives in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, is a direct descendant of both Richard and Nicholas, a living thread connecting the marble in the nave to the present day.
This article was written by Lawrence Biddle and first appeared in the Parish Magazine in April 1998.