The Ancestral Villages of the Alchin Family

Aylesford

English history starts early here. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a 9th century record started by King Alfred the Great, tells how in AD 455 the Anglian warrior mercenaries Hengist and Horsa fought and defeated Vortigern, King of the Britons, at Aegelsthrep, as Aylesford was then called. Horsa was killed and Hengist and his son Aesc "received the kingdom". Their descendants were to be Kings of Kent for the next 400 years. Aegel’s threp or ford, was one of the earliest crossings over the River Medway. The Romans used it, and the ancient Britons before them, and it formed part of the ancient Pilgrim’s Way.

The Norman church of St Peter and St Paul stands on a steep, walled bank, and beneath it the jumbled rooftops of Aylesford stagger down the hillside towards a large medieval bridge spanning the Medway. The Vicar of Aylesford from 1902 to 1909 was the Reverend Arthur Thorndike. His daughter, Dame Sybil Thorndike became one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century. She was married at St Peter and St Paul in 1908.

A charter to hold a weekly market was granted to Aylesford in the 13th century, and what is now the Little Gem inn was probably built then - possibly as a market house. The 16th century Chequers Inn was built as a merchant’s house, and along the Rochester Road is a row of almshouses built in 1605.

On the Downs just north of the village are the standing-stone remains of Neolithic burial chambers, Kits Coty House and Little Kits Coty House. They are about 5500 years old. The names probably derive from Kid Coit, Celtic for "Tomb in the wood".

East Malling

The earliest known reference to East Malling occurs in the charter of a grant of land at neighbouring West Malling by King Edmund to the Bishop of Rochester (AD 942-946). In defining the bounds the charter mentions east mealinga gemaera ("the boundary of East Malling"). After this fleeting reference there is silence until 1086 and the Domesday survey.

Parish map of East Malling with places named in the 1410 rent roll in italics

The Domesday Book entry is brief, yet sufficiently informative to illustrate the development of the manor. Under the lands of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Lathe of Aylesford and the Hundred of Larksfield, is recorded:

"The Archbishop himself holds in Demesne Metlinges (East Malling). It defends itself for 2 sulungs. The land is for 7 ploughs. In demesne are 3 ploughs. And 38 villeins with 12 bordars have 5 ploughs. There is a church. And 5 serfs. And 2 mills at 10 shillings. And 21 acres of meadow. Woodland for 60 swine. In total value, in the time of King Edward it was worth 9 pounds. The same when received. And now as much. And yet it renders 15 pounds."

At what date the manor came into the possession of the Archbishop of Canterbury is now unknown. After the turmoil of the Danish invasions, and a decade in the hands of Odo of Bayeux (the Conqueror’s half-brother), the neighbouring manor of West Malling was restored to the Bishop of Rochester in 1076. Gundulph, who was Bishop from 1077 to 1108, founded the Benedictine abbey and convent there in the reign of William Rufus. Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, granted the manor of East Malling to the Abbess and nuns of West Malling with whom it remained until their dispossession under the Dissolution of Religious Houses in 1538 by Thomas Cromwell acting under the orders of Henry VIII.

The rental roll for the manor of East Malling dated 1410 still survives. There is no mention of the Alchin family, who at the time were probably living further south on the Kent / Sussex border. There is no doubt however that if the parish records for the next 200 years between 1410 and 1610 had survived then we would be able to trace our descent via the female line from at least one of the families recorded on the rental roll.

The introduction to the 1410 East Malling manor roll follows:

"Rental of Estmallying, except New Hythe, made and renewed in full Court held there on the day of Saint Katherine the Virgin in the twelfth year of the reign of Henry the Fourth since the Conquest of England. It is agreed between the Lady Isabel Ruton, Abbess of Westmallying and the Convent of the same place, and all the tenants there, that any acre written below as best land pays on the day of the Nativity of the Lord 1 penny halfpenny, and on the day of Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary 1 penny halfpenny. And any acre written below as medium land pays on the day of the Nativity of St John the Baptist 2 pennies. And any acre written below as poor land pays on the day of St Michael the Archangel 1 penny, Fealty Suit of Court. And any acre which has been relieved (inherited or the lease transferred) pays a fourth part of the sum of the annual rent. And it is finally agreed that the aforesaid tenants elect among themselves two tenants in the Court held there next after the Feast of St Michael the Archangel, of whom one, at the choice of the aforesaid Lady Abbess, will do the duties of Reeve for one whole year, the which Reeve will carry out all the orders of the Courts and the procurement for them as demands require……. And on whatever day the Court is held there he shall have a meal with the Steward, or two pence, at the choice of the Lady Abbess or her deputy. And that all other customary rents and the sum total are annulled for ever."

The East Malling parish register records that in 1757 there were 217 houses occupied by 249 families and the population of the village was therefore probably around 1000 people.

Views of East Malling

Leybourne

The Domesday Book records that the village was then called Leleburne. It was held by Adam from Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. The remains of a Norman castle still survive at Leybourne. The ruins of Leybourne Castle barely hint at the importance of the building and its owners in days long gone. Today, the remains are little more than a few walls onto which the manor house, behind the church, has been built. Yet Leybourne was a significant manor before the Normans arrived and 700 years ago the castle belonged to one of the most powerful families in Kent.

The manor came into the de Leybourne family during the reign of King Richard I (The Lionheart) and Sir Roger de Leybourne was one of the barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. That led to his being imprisoned in Rochester Castle, from where he was only released after he had paid a hefty fine. His son, another Sir Roger, was killed during one of the crusades and, following a custom of the time, his embalmed heart was returned to his family, who installed it in a unique (in Kent) heart shrine in Leybourne church. He left a son, yet another Roger, who fathered the Sir William de Leybourne who enhanced the family fortunes no end by marrying Juliana, daughter and wealthy heiress of Sir Henry de Sandwich.

It was that enhanced family fortune that enabled Sir William to play host to Edward I and Queen Eleanor at Leybourne Castle on St Crispin's Day (25th October) 1286. Two iron crowns in the church are believed by some historians to have been left as Royal mementoes of that visit, although it must be said others have found reason to doubt that. Sir William had two sons. One, Sir Henry, grew up to be one of the most violent and lawless men of his day and he was finally outlawed for felony and disinherited in 1329. This was during the turbulent events following the murder of Edward II and the minority of Edward III when civil war threatened to break out again in England.

The other son, Sir Thomas, died young, leaving his father to be the last baron to live at the castle. His grand-daughter, Sir Thomas' daughter, another Juliana, inherited so much property and was so rich that she became known as the Infanta (Princess) of Kent. But she was the last representative of the family into which she was born and from her the Leybourne estates passed to her husband, the Earl of Huntingdon, and later to the Crown. When she died, childless, in 1367, she was buried at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury and the family was extinct.

The castle became the property of an abbey and fell into ruin after the dissolution of the monasteries on the orders of King Henry VIII. It was sometime later that the house was built on part of the site. Leybourne church is, in fact, older than the castle. Parts of it are 900 years old, although it has been added to and altered over the years. One of its rectors, John Larke, was hanged, drawn and quartered in March 1544 for denying Henry VIII's new title of Supreme Head on Earth of the Church in England.

(Copyright John Haverson)

Rotherfield

See Part 1 - The Manor of Alchorne at Rotherfield

West Malling

West Malling is recorded in the Domesday Book as Metlinges and was held by the Bishop of Rochester. In 1090 Bishop Gundulph of Rochester granted the manor of West Malling to the Benedictine Order who founded a nunnery dedicated to Saint Mary the Virgin. Later the Nunnery was granted other lands including the neighbouring manor of East Malling.

There are two references in the West Malling parish register which occurred within ten days of each other and which are of interest. The first concerns a mass confirmation held there on 7th November 1712:

"There was a confirmation in this parish church of West Malling on Friday November the 7 1712 the Bishop of Killalor (?) and the Arch Deacon of Rochester being present with the Bishop. There were between two or three thousand people confirmed."

The second occurred ten days later on 17th November 1712 and led to considerable damage to the church of St Mary the Virgin:

"There happened a terrible and great tempest of thunder and lightning and sett afire the spire of this church broke down through the roofe and ceiling of the roofe of the church and through the belfry soon broke down the ..... of the clock melted the bottom  of the pendulum went through the head of the ...... and did a great deal of other damage especially to the spire on Monday morning about six o clock this 17 day of November 1712."

The old streets of West Malling

West Malling, which in the early 18th century was known as Town Malling, is famous for its early association with the game of cricket. The Kent cricket team of the 1830’s and 1840’s contained several of the early immortals of the game - men such as Alfred Mynn, Fuller Pilch, "Felix", William Hillyer and Edward Gower Wenham. Mynn and Felix first appeared for Kent in the same match in 1834 when the county put up a side after a lapse of five years. But the great days began in the following year when Fuller Pilch, the best bat in England, was induced for a salary of 100 pounds per year to come and live at Town Malling (West Malling) and take over the management of the ground.

Pilch managed Kent cricket off the ground as Wenham did on it. Pilch was responsible for the ground, and his care and supervision put Town Malling among the best cricket grounds in the country. On Pilch’s arrival the County headquarters shifted to Town Malling. Frederick Gale, in "Echoes from Old Cricket Fields" written in 1871, has left us a vivid description of the cricket scene in those far off days:

"Now in imagination, you must come with me to a grand match at Town Malling, the description of which town, if put on paper, would so strongly resemble Muggleton in "Pickwick", that I have an idea that the real scene of the match between Muggleton and Dingly Dell may have been drawn from Town Malling.

It is five o'clock in the morning, and after a restless night, from anxiety and excitement, we are off in a trap of some kind for a twenty mile's drive to the match; and, as we leave Rochester and get onto the Malling Road, we find no dearth of company ...

And what a sight is the town! All the inns are full of customers; and though it is only nine o'clock in the morning the horses are obliged to be stabled outside, with a canvas awning over them."

The first All England versus Kent match was played at Town Malling on 7 and 8 July 1834. All England won by 8 wickets. Town Malling remained the main Kent cricket ground until 1841 in which year the county cricket ground was moved to Canterbury.

Meopham

People have lived in Meopham since at least the Iron Age, as has been shown by the discovery of pottery from that period. The ancient North Downs Trackway, which runs from the Channel to Winchester, still provides Meopham with part of its southern boundary, and it must have been along this route that the earliest inhabitants reached the area. The Romans, too, were here, and part of the site of a 1st and 2nd Century farmstead has been excavated near the George, right in the centre of the village.

The first written record of the parish is in a deed of AD788 (King Offa's time), when some land was described as being bounded on the north by "Meapaham". There is no doubt that this means ham or home of a Saxon chieftain called Meapa but nothing more about him has been found. At least 40 different spellings have been used in a wide variety of old documents. The locality developed into a Saxon manor, with its manor house situated where Meopham Court still stands.

Many a village can trace its written history back no further than the Domesday Book, a register compiled by order of William the Conqueror in 1086, of the land and its value at that time. The village of Meopham is more fortunate because of the discovery of "Byrhtric's will" which was declared in 'Mepham'. The Manor was held in the 10th century by Byrhtric, a very rich man, and in his will, executed in Meopham, he bequeathed it to Christ Church, Canterbury. The will bore no date but can be fixed as being in the reign of Edmund or Edred, the grandsons of Alfred the Great, because one of the witnesses, Aelfstane, was the Bishop of Rochester between A.D. 955 and 995. Another of the witnesses to the will was the parish priest, Wina, showing that the church was founded well before the Norman invasion.

King Alfred divided the county into 'hundreds' which were united into 'Laths'. The Lath of Aylesford consisted of twelve hundreds including the hundred of Tollingtreu which held six different places: Northfleet, Meopham, Milton, Luddesdown, Gravesend and Nurstead. Of these, Northfleet and Meopham were Church property held by the Archbishop of Canterbury and his monks. The Manor of Meopham, would therefore be well looked after and well farmed. The demesne or private property would certainly contain the Church and the various manorial buildings that were connected with it and which occupy the present site of Meopham Court.

The houses of the grades of free men, with the mud cabins of the poorest workers, were partly, no doubt, on their various holdings and partly along the road now known as 'The Street'. Outside the carefully tended lands of the Lord's Demesne were waste and common pasturage and cultivated (arable) portions, not fields which were a fourteenth century introduction.

Map of Leybourne and the Mallings and the surrounding hamlets where the Alchin family was found

Old stone Saxon churches still exist in England, but it is impossible to say whether such a one, or one of wood, preceded the present Church at Meopham. There is no trace of Saxon stonework in it, as is sometimes found in country churches; equally there is nothing Norman about it. No mention is made of a mill, but it is hardly likely that none existed at that time; mills (both water - and wind) were valuable manorial property, and the people were not allowed to take their corn elsewhere to be ground.

One of the earliest of Meopham's famous residents was Simon de Meopham, who was born in the parish in 1272 and died in Mayfield in Sussex in 1332. He became in 1327, after a distinguished ecclesiastical career, Archbishop of Canterbury and it was during his incumbency that the church was first built. There were still several families named Meopham at Mayfield in the 19th century. The Parish Church is essentially a 13th to 14th century one and belongs to an early form of Gothic known as geometric. It was reconstructed between 1320 and 1328 and Simon de Meopham is credited with the work although proof of this has not been found; however, if this were so, he must have done it whilst serving as the Rector of Tunstall, as he only became Archbishop in 1327. Simon, as his name implies, had been born in Meopham, and his parents were buried here.

One Meopham family, the Tradescants, is remembered for its contribution to horticulture. The elder John Tradescant became gardener to Charles I's Queen, Henrietta Maria in 1629 and by that time had brought to England specimens of new trees, plants, birds and stones from Algiers and Russia. His son, who succeeded him as the Queen’s gardener, brought specimens from Virginia and it was after him that "tradescantia virginica" was named. He died in 1662, and left to Elias Ashmole his 'closest of rarities', that was to form the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Another ancient building is Nurstead Manor, formerly Nutstead, lying some three and a half miles south of Gravesend at the north of the Parish. In view of the numerous traces of Roman occupation in this part of Kent, it is possible that its fields were first cleared in the time of the Romans. Certainly it was a Saxon manor before the Conquest, held by one Ulfstan of Edward the Confessor (1042-1046). We also know that the manorial church existed in earlier Saxon times, which suggests that the manor became a self-contained unit well before Ulfstan became its lord.

We have no detailed knowledge of the buildings which housed Ulfstan and his eleventh century successors. We can deduce that considerations of defence took precedence over comfort or convenience and almost certainly the Saxon hall was of wood. The type of building which existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is less certain. All the general indications are that this, too, was of wood. Stone domestic buildings were rare before 1300 and they represented so large an investment that the completely new hall, built in about 1320, probably replaced a wooden building of the Saxon type. However, there are objections to such a view because of the discovery of massive stone foundations to the north of the present house, while the cellars which extend to the north could well have originated as the semi-basement storage vaults of a thirteenth century fortified manor.

What is certain is that early in the fourteenth century the then Lord of the Manor, Stephen de Gravesend, Bishop of London, built a new house in the form of an aisled hall, with defence as a secondary consideration. This hall survived intact until 1825 and half of it still stands today, so we know in some detail what it was like 650 years ago. Nurstead has always been largely in the ownership of the owners of Nurstead Court. There were many such owners from as far back as records begin, but the best known is the Edmeades family. Henry Edmeades came as a tenant, sometime before his death in 1610, and by careful conduct of their affairs, his successor was able to buy the estate in 1767. It is still in the family. The history of the house and church has been fully researched, and appears in "Nurstead Court" by C.A. Pryor.

Agriculture and its associated activities continued to be the main occupation of the village inhabitants for many centuries. The parish records show that the population of the parish on 10th March 1801 was 748 inhabitants. It was not until the conversion of the main road into a turnpike in 1825-27 that communication with the outside world became at all easy, a process much speeded up by the opening of Meopham station in May 1861.

The government of the parishes was, for centuries, in the hands of the Lords of the Manors. Their powers and duties, exercised from the respective Manor Houses, were gradually eroded and replaced by the vestry. This body, under the control of the incumbent, became responsible for such matters as parish highways, administration of Poor Relief and the parish workhouse, as well as purely ecclesiastical affairs. This continued until 1894, when the civil business was transferred to the newly formed Parish Council.

The church ownership prevented the formation of any vast estates in the ownership of titled families, and when the policy changed to letting out the land of a cash rental, it passed into a number of hands. The Camer estate was one of the largest and it was here that my ancestor William Alchin (1772 - 1829) worked in the first two decades of the 19th century. There had been a farmstead there at least from the 13th century, and it probably reached its greatest size in the 18th and 19th centuries under the ownership of the Smith-Masters family. Their lands covered properties in several parts of the parish. Another large estate was the Court estate.

By as early as 1735 cricket was well established in Meopham. There remains no documentary evidence to indicate the existence of any Inn named after the game of cricket before "The Eleven Cricketers" in Meopham in 1735. Prior to this it is believed to have been called the Swan. Although no longer in use as a public house the building remains and retains much of the atmosphere of an eighteenth century inn. The 'Cricketers' that stands by the green is very much linked to the old inn and the changeover probably took place in about 1799.

The oldest of the village inns is almost certainly "The George" which can be dated back to at least 1688 and has recently been refurbished and re-opened after a period of closure.

The first recorded school in Meopham is that established under the will of Thomas Copland a mercer, and the son of a former vicar. This started in the middle of the 18th century, and it is thought to have been held in part of what is now Well House opposite the Post Office. The will made provision for the payment of a master to teach 15 poor boys and five poor girls of the Parish for two years. An early private school made use of part of Weavers Cottage at the south end of Hook Green.

The Dean and Chapter of Canterbury bequeathed an area of land in 1841 for the purpose of erecting a school. Work began on the 13th September 1841 and covered the building of a Schoolmasters House, two schoolrooms and the provision of desks and forms. The total price was £354.19.0 .

The Meopham Windmill was built in 1801 by the three Killick brothers reputedly from old ships timbers purchased from Chatham Dockyard. It was built to a 'Smock' design similar to the brothers' other mill at Strood; the name derives from the similarity to the garment worn by agricultural workers in earlier times. The basic principle of a Smock Mill is that the body of the mill in which the machinery is housed is static and only the 'cap' and sails turn to face the wind. It is quite possible that William Alchin, my 4 x great grandfather, who was a carpenter assisted in the construction of the windmill.

The windmill at Meopham

The mill remained in the Killick family for nearly 90 years when it was sold to John Norton in 1889 and operated under that name until it was closed down in 1965. The cap (and therefore sails) of the mill is turned toward the wind by a series of gearwheels and a worm gear driven by the 'fantail' situated at the rear of the cap. The sails themselves followed a design by William Cobbett by which the effective area of the sail is automatically adjusted for any wind strength.

One of the many major features of present-day Meopham is the main A227 road along which much of the village lies. Meopham has in fact one of the longest village streets in England, at 7 miles in length.

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