trading in unmarked leather was 3s. 4d. Outside London, ‘hedd officers’ in ‘markett townes’ were to appoint two or more persons of the ‘best skylled men’ to search and view within the towns once a quarter, with a mark or seal for leather which is ‘sufficyent’. Failure to appoint these men carried a penalty of £20. Nevertheless, leather inspectors did not operate in Wrotham until 1578 when Walter Skynner and Thomas Burge were appointed and started earning their pennies. How Skynner and Burge came to be qualified searchers is unclear. Walter Skynner was an alehouse keeper in Wrotham all his life. Nothing else is known about Burge. Perhaps Burge knew the technicalities of the job and Skynner knew the people.
   The inspectors set to work immediately. In 1578 Robert Bryght of Wrotham and Richard West of Roughway together curried ‘a backe of sole leather’ and sold it before the inspectors had sealed it.⁹ They were each fined 6d. In the same year Edward Rootes and Robert Barrett of neighbouring Ightham, leather workers, were both found guilty of dressing and selling ‘a foote of backe leather’ against the terms of the statute and of selling it unsealed. Robert did the same thing two years later and was fined 2d. In 1582 Henry Welshe, tanner of Winfield, sold Edward Rootes crude leather ‘rawhides’ before they received the seal of approval and which were judged to be insufficiently tanned. Welshe was fined the full penalty of 3s. 4d. and Rootes was fined 12d. 
   Butchers also appeared in the hundred courts paying fines. In 1499 they outnumbered the tanners by six to one. The entry for three of them reads: ‘the jurors present that Richard Cooke (3d), Richard Chowne (2d), John Curde (2d) are butchers outside the borough, therefore they are in mercy 7d’. All three lived in the borough of Hale in houses that still exist, so ‘outside the borough’ must refer to where they traded. These butchers would be recognised today as ‘butchers and graziers’; they were not just killing beasts for the local shop but also for the London meat market. Herds were driven up to London from all parts of the country for slaughter, furnishing the numerous tanyards there with skins. Surplus skins were then transported back to tanning centres in the countryside. However, the Wrotham tanyards must have been adequately supplied from local slaughter and hides from London would have been sent to centres like Faversham or Maidstone using water transport.¹⁰

The Butchers and Graziers of Wrotham 

Local livestock was as important a resource for tanners as running water and oak bark. The two southern boroughs of Roughway and Hale were on the edge of the Weald which was renowned for cattle raising in its oak woodland pastures. The butchers of Wrotham were well placed to exploit this cattle economy. The Cookes were lessees of the manor of Shipbourne