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Cranbrook and its adjacent parishes are remarkably rich in
archives belonging to the latter half of the seventeenth
century, each of which reveals different aspects of the lives of
their inhabitants. This is particularly true of the Accounts of
the Overseers of the Poor, which have survived to a greater or
lesser extent from Biddenden, Cranbrook, Goudhurst and
Staplehurst.1 They reveal what appears to be a
genuine concern for the care of the most disadvantaged members
of parish society in the decades which followed the Restoration
of the Monarchy, and of the Church, in 1660. The Poor Laws
current at the time, based on the legislation of 1598 and 1601
and supplemented in 1662, provided for the treatment of
vagabonds and beggars and established a system for the relief of
the impotent poor of the parish. Vagabonds were to be whipped by
order of a justice of the peace or of the parish officers and
sent with a passport to their place of birth or settlement. In
this way parishes could lessen the burden on their available
funds.2
Biddenden, lying to the north-east of Cranbrook in
the Weald of Kent, had a population in the 1660s of a little
over 1,000 men, women and children; of these, 192 can be
identified as householders by comparing the hearth tax returns
with the reconstitution of the parish for the 1660s, which
utilises parish registers and other records to group those
living in the parish into their respective families and also
identifies most of those not living in family groups. We know
the occupation and status of 112 of these householders: 30 per
cent were engaged in farming, more pastoral than agricultural;
20 per cent were involved in the cloth industry; 20 per cent
were craftsmen or retailers; and the remaining 30 per cent
consisted of gentry, widows and those who do not easily fit
these categories. As many as 38 per cent of these householders
were sufficiently poor to be exempt from paying the hearth tax
(compared with 32 per cent for Kent as a whole). The Compton
Census shows that 13 per cent of the population were
nonconformists in 1676 (compared with 8 per cent across the
county and 4 per cent nationally).3
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