Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 97

This volume combines a scholarly edition (in English) of the 1460 rental and survey of the manor of Hadlow with a wide-ranging reconstruction of life in the parish in the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Dr Joan Thirsk has assembled a team of local historians – ‘local’ also in the sense that they know the locale from long residence – who have succeeded in locating and mapping the holdings and houses recorded in the manorial survey, as well as assembling a mass of historical detail on the landholding families of the parish in these centuries. It is an accessible and well-illustrated local study that should prove of interest both to local residents and to social and economic historians more generally.

Although the limitations of the single-parish study are well known, the authors of the present study are at pains to place the parish of Hadlow within a wider, regional context. Throughout, they relate Hadlow to the powerful lordship of Tonbridge and its aristocratic owners, who were the lords of Hadlow until the fall of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521. And they present the details of estate management and manorial courts at Hadlow in a scholarly and comparative fashion: the reader is always aware of how practice in the manor of Hadlow compares to what is known of seigneurial institutions elsewhere. In particular, this is a valuable study of how late medieval estate administration operated in an area of early enclosure. The manor of Hadlow was represented by both a manor court (the court baron) and the lowest level of civil court, the court leet. The authors conclude that, in comparison to a number of manors elsewhere, the Hadlow court ‘impinged less on everyday life’ and ‘represented not only the lord’s will but also that of the community’. Their account of what the tenants owed the lords of the manor of Hadlow is also fascinating. The survey reveals a fully differentiated structure of landholding in Hadlow. Holdings varied widely in size, and even the comparatively low customary rents varied from one holding to another. The survey records a bewildering array of dues and services that the tenants of 1460 owed the lord; but it remains uncertain to what extent these had been commuted to money payments, either in 1460 or even in the sixteenth century.

The portrait of daily life in late fifteenth and sixteenth-century Hadlow is equally fascinating: we learn about the importance of the rivers Medway and Bourne to the economic life of the parish; of the changing fortunes of North Frith Park whose woodland covered a large part of the parish of Hadlow at the time of the 1460 survey, but which had been heavily cleared by the late sixteenth century. We learn too that nearly half the land-holding families recorded in the 1460 survey were still resident in Hadlow in the 1580s, when the original survey was copied out and annotated.

This study shows that Hadlow’s inhabitants led anything but insular, enclosed lives: their links with the places and people of the wider region or pays were crucial to their everyday lives. This is an intriguing account of a Wealden parish at the end of the middle ages, which wears its scholarship lightly. It is also a fine example of what local historians are always being urged to do: study history on the ground!