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of Canterbury and Rochester; ancient Charters; the Cinque Ports; the
Ancient Castles of the County; Architecture, ecclesiastical and civil;
Ancient Bridges, Roads, etc.; Ancient Customs in the County; Ancient
Proverbs in the County; Ancient Traditions and Folk-Lore in the County;
Dialects and Provincialisms of the County; the history of Gavelkind and
its peculiarities; and any other subjects calculated to throw light on the
Topography and early history of the County." In the course of one
hundred years almost every one of these subjects has been touched upon,
and some have been treated exhaustively.
For himself and for the other contributors, Larking insisted
upon a high standard of scientific detachment and scholarship. "In an
antiquarian volume like ours," he wrote to Canon J. C. Robertson,
"we are bound to be as dry as Truth itself. If I give swing to the
imagination in dressing up an article to make it pretty. reading, and to
draw a pretty picture as it presents itself to my mind’s eye, the
occupation is charming . . . but recollect we may be not only beguiling
the reader by these imaginative paintings but may be actually misleading
historians and laying the foundations of a series of solemn
fictions." Writing at about the same time to Roach Smith, he says:
"We labour after Truth, not the triumph of an opinion. . . . I see no
cause of offence in a writer differing from me." Larking’s
tolerance on the latter point was by no means universal in archaeological
circles; Roach Smith
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himself had his need of impatience, but the thrust here was intended, I
think, for Beale Poste, some of whose "learned twaddle" Larking
had declined to publish.
Most of the early volumes reflect clearly the Editor’s
personal interests. The first few volumes include many of Larking’s own
papers, and a mass of record material translated by him. He had, for years,
been working on the Twysden papers (his wife was the eldest daughter of Sir
William Jervis Twysden, Bart.), and on the Surrenden collections, as well as
on the public records, and the fruits of this work appear in Volumes I to
VIII. Evidently Foss was critical of the quantity and nature of Larking’s
contributions to Volumes I and II, for Larking writes to him on 1st
January, 1861: "If more than half the volume is mine it is not my fault—I
inserted every single paper sent to me and was compelled to make up the
volume with my own rubbish." One of Foss’s objections was to the
publication of Feet of Fines and Inquisitions Post Mortem which appeared,
volume by volume, for the first ten years of the Society’s existence.
Although it is not so stated anywhere in Archaeologia Cantiana, these
were "worked out" (his own phrase) by Larking himself.
Scott Robertson, who acted as Editor from 1871 until 1892, was
equally insistent upon the necessity for painstaking scholarship. The papers
for inclusion in the volume, he enjoined, must "in all cases, be
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