part of the county was much less densely populated
than the east, a contrast only partly accounted for by the lower
proportion of easily tilled land west of the Medway.
The subsidy throws little light on the comparative size
of Kentish towns in the early fourteenth century. It has been
noticed that Sandwich, Dover, Hythe and New Romney were not included
in the assessment, and the first two at least were urban centres of
importance. With 267 persons assessed to the tenth Canterbury was by
far the largest of the remaining towns. Rochester, with sixty-one
people assessed to a tenth and sixty-nine to a fifteenth, was likely
to have been less than half its size. Among the ports only the
inhabitants of Folkestone (30) and Faversham (56) as members of the
Cinque Port of Dover may be distinguished from the taxpayers of the
surrounding countryside within their respective hundreds. No
evidence can be found for possible inland towns, such as Ashford,
Cranbrook, Sevenoaks or Tonbridge, as they all lay within hundreds
covering a large surrounding rural area : only in Maidstone hundred
was the population so much higher than that of the surrounding
hundreds as to suggest an urban population of possibly as much as
one thousand people.
THE SUBSIDY AS A
SOURCE FOR THE
DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH
On account of the large size of the county the
total tax assessment for Kent was almost the highest among all
English counties, being second only to that of Norfolk.1 On |
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the
other hand, in proportion to its size its wealth was not
outstanding. In this respect, Kent, with an average assessment per
thousand acres of 39s., came well below a group of Midland counties,
including Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Rutland, and
Norfolk, with average figures between 45s. and 60s. Considering the
unique position of the county, lying across the principal trade
route from London to the Continent, and the consequent early
development of a money economy in the county; this fact is at first
sight surprising. The extensive undeveloped forest lands in the
Weald was undoubtedly one cause: another was the considerable area
of poorer land in other parts of Kent, especially along the downland
ridge. In fact the distribution of wealth within the county was
clearly related to the quality of the soil. On the clay and sand of
the Weald, where the soil is often both infertile and difficult to
work, the average amount paid by the taxpayer, 2s. l1d., was low. On
the western half of the sandstone ridge and in the vale of
Holmesdale to the north, where the soil is very variable, being very
barren on the top of the ridge and fertile in parts of the valley
the average payment, 2s. l1½d., was almost the same. The regions
with the richest lands had also,
1 W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R.
Finberg, Devonshire Studies (London, 1952), p. 215. In the
Wealth of Medieval Devon " the 1334 subsidy totals for the
rural divisions and boroughs are used to study the distribution of
wealth in the county. |