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in the Introduction to the first volume of the series which Council
decided should be known as Archaeologia Cantiana:
"If it be asked what is the scope and object of our design, we
shall best answer in the words of the philosopher which we have chosen
for the motto of our work. From the memory of things decayed and
forgotten, we propose to save and recover what we may, for the present
generation and for posterity, of the wrecks still floating on the ocean
of time, and preserve them with a religious and scrupulous diligence. We
propose to gather into one the neglected fragments and faint memorials
that remain to us of ages long gone by; to reclaim and preserve the
memories of men who, with common passions like ourselves, have stood and
laboured in this soil of Kent; to save from the submergence of oblivion
their manners and their traditions, their name~, their lineage, their
language, and their deeds. To reproduce the past in its full integrity
is perhaps impossible; yet for those who have hopes somewhat beyond the
present,—vision and affections somewhat more extended than the narrow
shoal of earth and time on which they stand,—it may be sufficient, if
we can collect some feeble and scanty remnants, which,
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failing to ensure a higher purpose, may help them in some degree to
link the present to the past, and serve as stepping-stones to bridge over
the broad chasm and torrent of time."
For a hundred years successive editors and contributors have
been constructing stepping-stones for our use in making the backward journey
through history. Our gratitude for their labours will best be shown by the
continuation of their work.
This present volume is numbered seventy in the series. Annual
publication was the original intention, but, because of lack of money, or
the printer’s tardiness, there were many occasions when it was not
achieved. The first four volumes appeared at yearly intervals, but then tame
a gap of two years, and then three, and even four. In the Society’s first
fifty years only twenty-seven volumes were published, although many of them
ran to as many as five or six hundred pages: since 1907, in spite of the
upsets caused by two world wars, and in spite of rising prices, forty-three
volumes have been issued. Since 1925 Archaeologia Cantiana has been
published every year. The volumes for 1941 to 1947 may lack the exterior
expansiveness and something of the grand spaciousness of the tomes which
Scott Robertson was editing with leisurely scholarship in the ‘80s and ‘90s,
but that publication continued at all during the alarms and dangers of
1939-45 in the county which stood closest to enemy-occupied Europe is an
encouraging demonstration that there were to be found Men of Kent and
Kentish Men who
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