The History of a View: Benenden Green
Most of us, when we recall the pretty Kentish village of Benenden, think of a large village green, the shape of an upturned “U,” with a church at the base of the U and the village street at the other end. From that street, we look south and up, across the Green, towards that church.
It is in a prominent position, at the summit of a low, west–east ridge, a high point just before the High Weald slopes down to marshes in the south and east. With few houses on either side, and only trees around it, the church is the centrepiece of an uncluttered, idyllic, pastoral scene — iconic Benenden. This article traces the history of that view which looks ancient but is actually a relatively recent invention. It largely dates from the early 19th century — in part deliberately created for aesthetic reasons, in part resulting from the settlement itself moving for economic reasons from the summit of the hill northwards to form the linear village Benenden is today.
[fg]jpg|Fig 1 – The north-end of what is today Benenden Green, covered with houses and gardens, c.1800s. (The Parish of Benenden, Kent, Francis Haslewood, 1889).|Image[/fg]
Although Benenden’s grey stone church of St George’s has a mainly Victorian interior, the structure is much older. The village is first mentioned in 1086 in the Domesday Book, when the manor of Benenden was one of only a handful in the Weald identified on its own, independent of the larger manors to the north which owned most of the others. In 1086, Benenden had some independent status.
At that time, Benenden consisted of half a sulung of arable land, (a Kentish land measurement) and its labour force included, apart from the lord of the manor, four villeins (feudal tenants attached to the manor) and nine bordars (smallholders or cottagers). It was held by Robert de Romenel (or Romney), and his overlord was Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, half-brother of William the Conqueror. These of course were relatively new landowners having taken over from their Saxon predecessors after the Conquest. Robert de Romenel had taken over from Osgeard, an important Saxon landowner under Edward the Confessor. The Domesday Book states that Benenden possessed silva, V porc, una eccla, that is to say, woods, five swine and a church (an interesting order of precedence). That early Saxon church was likely a simple rectangle, without aisles, and made either of wood or stone. It stood on the site of the current building which gives us a clue as to the position of Benenden’s original manor house because, in Saxon times, manors and churches were closely connected. We read in Gordon Ward’s Saxon Records of Tenterden, that “In the Saxon period the connection between the manor and the church was extremely close. The lord of the manor built the church and the possession of a church was one of the essentials for the rank of thane. He paid the salary of the officiating priest, the glebe was cut out of the lord’s demesne, and it is not to be imagined that the question of dedication could be settled without his approval. The parish church was in fact the private chapel of the lord of the manor.”[fn1]
If this is the case, then the house currently referred to as Benenden Manor, which lies about half a mile away from the church, is a later replacement for the original manor house. This article argues that an earlier manor house once stood close to, and east of, the church; that the original settlement clustered round that manor; and that the Green we know today, was not originally next to the church. The argument is based on field names, church architecture and records.[fn2]
Medieval manors were often moated and served as courts for the local population. Nearby field names often recall that earlier landscape. In Benenden we find, close to the village church, several fields named ‘Court Land’ as well as another named ‘Moat Field’. The Court Lands lie adjacent to the eastern end of the churchyard and to the glebe field, south and east of the vicarage. All are contiguous. We find this information in a 1777 map of the parish by Joshua Hodskinson (Fig 2) with an accompanying terrier.[fn3]
[fg]jpg|Fig 2 - 1777 Benenden Green. The approach to the church is via a foot-path to the north and running up the centre of the Green. (Terrier of the Parish of Benenden in the County of Kent, Joshsua Hodskinson)]|Image[/fg]
In that same terrier, we learn that a field formerly known as Moat Field once lay adjacent to the churchyard to the south. Now largely incorporated into the churchyard itself, that earlier Moat Field abutted the sudden rise in ground level which marked the southern boundary of the original church yard. The name could suggest that a manor house once stood near the church, perhaps with a dry moat round both church and manor house or, given that the word ‘moat’ derives from the French ‘motte’ and originally referred to the mound on which a building stood, it could refer to that steep raised bank, on which both church and manor stood and which is still clearly visible today.
From an early 1599 map (Fig 3) we can see a group of houses near the church, possibly the remnants of an early cluster settlement, the kind you still find in local villages such as Goudhurst or Smarden.[fn4] A trackway runs from the east, roughly parallel to the current west-east road through the village, known today as The Street and part of the B2086. It connects the village to Cranbrook to the west and Rolvenden to the east. The Street existed in 1599 and was clearly more important than the track (which survives today in the form of a footpath), yet this track, running close to the summit of the west-east ridge and running along Benenden church’s southern wall to reach its southern porch, is likely the older of the two west-east routes. It follows the drier ridge summit, the preferred course for ancient trackways. If the original Saxon manor house stood east of the church, then this track would have led to the original manor and onwards to the church’s southern porch. There is no track to the north side of the church, so the main entrance was from the south, suggesting that the main settlement was also to the south.
[fg]jpg|Fig 3 - 1599 Benenden Green (west is top of page). The church sits in a rectangular churchyard, west of the vicarage. The approach to the church is from a track to the south. (Suffolk Archives)|Image[/fg]
Benenden church has two porches, a late fifteenth century porch on the northern side and one probably dating from the thirteenth century to the south. The entrance porch today is the northern one but entrance to early churches was generally from the south, the side was associated with heavenly aspects such as warmth and light whereas the northern side was associated with the opposite, the northern door might be left open during a baptism to allow for the exit of evil spirits. In Benenden, the church’s holy water stoup, used by the congregation to cross themselves on entrance, lies by the southern entrance, not by the northern one. By the time the northern porch was built, Henry VIII had declared independence from Rome[fn5], the Reformation was underway, and crossing yourself with holy water had fallen out of favour.
Above the south porch, we find the older of the church’s two parvises. ‘Parvis’ is a French word. In France it generally describes the space in front of a church.[fn6] In medieval England it describes the space, or small room, above the front entrance porch to a church. This room could be used as living quarters for the curate and as a school room: it was associated with the front of any church. In Benenden, the south parvis is a sunny room with a good-sized lattice window overlooking the church yard to the south. It would have made an ideal school room or small residence for the curate. The northern parvis on the other hand, has only two narrow slots for windows, and is permanently dark. It was, and still is, a storeroom.
To corroborate the former importance of the south porch, early wills tell us that Benenden’s south porch once housed memorial tablets to local notables. For example, in 1487, a local farmer, John Sharpe, asked to be buried in the south porch with a brass memorial over his grave and left money for re-painting the porch.[fn7] There is no mention of gifts, memorials or re-painting in the north porch, which may either not have existed at the time of the Will, or, recently built and recently in use, it may not yet have been considered of sufficient importance for a family memorial, nor in need of re-painting.
Benenden Green is first referred to in the 1599 map (Fig 3). It is marked as lying in the northeast corner of today’s Green, on The Street and north of the vicarage. Even allowing for inaccuracies and omissions, this map shows that the village was tiny.[fn8] There is only one other house marked on the Street. It lies west of the Green. A cluster of buildings lie near the church - the vicarage, some cottages adjacent to the north side of the churchyard, and a group of buildings west of the church. This is the last map of Benenden where most houses appear near the church. In the Saxon parish, the manor had been the predominant economic force. Outlying farms had close ties with the lord of the manor and with the church and lanes led thither. Farmers owed service in labour and tithes. But as the economy evolved, the outside world grew in importance and communications along routes connecting the parish to others surpassed, in importance, the need for communication with the manor. The Street began to act as a magnet for house builders. Over succeeding centuries, the village shifted to such an extent that its shape changed from a cluster near the church to a linear settlement along the road.
The Green is marked again on Hodskinson’s 1777 map (Fig 2). It is considerably larger than suggested on the 1599 map, but still only about half the size that it is today. It lies on the Street but tapers off to the south, becoming a footpath which threads its way between land belonging to the vicarage and an adjacent property, to reach the church. Green and church are not next to each other. Edward Hasted, describing Benenden in around 1798, said ‘At a small distance southward from it (Benenden village) is the church and the vicarage; adjoining to the latter is a large green…’.[fn9] The Green adjoined vicarage land, not the church.
[fg]jpg|Fig 4 – Devey’s design for the exterior of the Bull Inn c 1860s (RIBA Library) Image reproduced with permission from Riba Collections.|Image[/fg]
The 18th century Green is very different from the one we see today. Apart from the properties to the south, there are other properties to the north which are also built on the Green itself. One stood on The Street in the centre of the Green while further buildings lie to the west of it. At the northeastern corner of the Green, though not on the Green itself, lies The Bull Inn, a pub which was likely as central a feature of the village in 1777 as it is today (Fig 4). It was, and is, well-positioned to take advantage of the traffic along a road which, as Hasted pointed out, had recently been greatly improved when designated a turnpike. Up to that moment the through-road in Benenden (unlike the drier track on the ridge) was so poor in winter, that mud sucked the shoes off horses' hooves. Only oxen could navigate such a water-logged route. As the Bull Inn rose to prominence, so an old ale-house close to the church declined. You can see this building in a lithograph by Edward Pocock[fn10] published in Francis Haslewood’s The Parish of Benenden, Kent 1889.[fn11] The pub has a sign hanging from its walls and sits on what is now the Green at the eastern end of the church. It is part of a cluster of buildings on a property also visible on Hodskinson’s map. There is no road connecting The Street with the church. Access to church is by footpath. It winds its way between the vicarage and its neighbouring property, past the pub and through a wooden gate into the church yard at its eastern end, suggesting that, although a northern porch was built, the access path took a route which may have pre-existed it.
We know little directly about activities on Benenden Green, but we know from what happened elsewhere, that maypoles were erected in summer, that dancing and wrestling probably took place and that many games were played which have long since ceased to be properly understood. Some of these were the forerunners of cricket which many centuries later, became a popular game on the Green.[fn12] ‘Cat and dog’ was played with two players holding staves or bats. ‘Stoolball' was possibly played with stools placed much as posts are placed today in a game of rounders. Benenden Green was occasionally referred to as the ‘playstool’ which may imply that it was a place for locals to play stoolball. Hasted mentions that bowling took place on the Green.
Games were not the green’s only raison d’être. The village stocks and lock-up stood at the bottom near the street, and the Green was the site of an annual livestock fair which took place every 15th May. These were large events and continued well into the 20th century. In 1927, Benenden’s Parish Magazine reported that a team from two local auction houses arrived on the Green to sell off six hundred sheep and two-hundred head of cattle.
[fg]jpg|Fig 5 - Map showing George Devey’s presence round the Green: The Bull Inn (exterior), the Vicarage (exterior), Church Cottage, the village school, (the map is prior to 1868, Ashlawn not shown). (Kent Archives)|Image[/fg]
The nineteenth century was critical in the development of Benenden’s Green because, by this time, ownership of most of the land in the parish had slipped from the family owning Benenden manor into the hands of those owning Benenden’s other manor, the manor of Hemsted. In the 14th century, John de Benynden, had been lord of the manor of Benenden but, by the following century, his line had died out and the manor fell, through marriage into the hands of the More family of Benenden (variously spelt Moore, atte More or de More) a family which had built Moore-Court in Benenden, and which became the current Benenden manor house, so by the 15th century, we can assume that any earlier Saxon Manor near the church had disappeared.
The Mores held Benenden till 1553, and a couple of centuries later, Benenden’s two manors were united. This was because, in 1718, Admiral Sir John Norris bought both the larger manor of Hemsted and the adjacent and smaller manor of Benenden.[fn13]The Norris’s sold the two manors to Thomas Hallet Hodges, and his son, Thomas Law Hodges[fn14], who began making important changes to the village Green. He wanted to create that expansive view which we enjoy today. Haslewood wrote, ‘The beauty of the green and church were enhanced in 1808 by the removal of an alehouse and some cottages which formerly existed close to the church’.[fn15]
[fg]jpg|Fig 6 - 1813 Northern end of Benenden Green: houses and gardens are gone and the approach to the church is from a path round edge of the Green. (An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Weald of Kent, Thomas Downes Wilmot Dearn)|Image[/fg]
An engraving published by Thomas Dearn (Fig 6) illustrated the new layout. For the first time, the Green stretches the whole length of the front of the village church from west to east, with no houses blocking the view. A track now ran round the edge of the Green, as it does today[fn16]. Hodges created the view. It was left to his successor at Hemsted, Gathorne Hardy[fn17], who bought Hemsted in 1857, to embellish the rustic scene and give it a distinctive Victorian-Tudor look. Undertaking major renovations to the church in 1862 using his chief architect, David Brandon[fn18], he used a man he referred to as his ‘Cottage architect’ George Devey[fn19], to re-create the heart of the village. Devey renovated and designed a handful of key buildings around the edge of the Green, completing the view that we have today.
Devey had undertaken, with great success, work for Lord de Lisle in Penshurst, where he designed cottages which can easily be mistaken for Tudor buildings. In Benenden, he re-designed the exterior of the Bull Inn at the foot of the Green in the Tudor style (Fig 4); he added a Tudor-style cottage to an existing cottage at the top of the Green; and, most importantly of all, he built a new village school, the gem of all his work in Benenden. It dominates the western side of the Green, with the Green serving as school playground. The building hints (misleadingly of course) at Norman antecedents. Its foundations are of rough-hewn stone giving the impression that this is a structure built on the ruins of something older. Its walls are brick and buttressed, and its entrance porch has massive round stone Norman arches with a black and white, timber and plaster tower above it.
[fg]jpg|Fig 7 - Benenden School as it is today on the west side of the Green.|Image[/fg]
The new school set the theme for later Devey designs around the Green. The Reverend Edward David Cree, vicar of Benenden from 1877 to 1887, hired him to re-design the vicarage with a twin black and white gabled front. The vicarage mirrored another Devey building, gabled Ashlawn, built for Jane and Sara Neve, on the other side to the Green. The finishing touch to the view you see today, is Devey’s buttressed stone wall which replaced the rustic wooden fence you can see in Dearn’s engraving and ran the length of the church yard. There we have it. Today’s view. An idealised, romantic Victorian construct of what a village green ought to look like. It satisfies to this day.
[fg]jpg|Fig 8 - Benenden Vicarage c. 1906. Devey’s twin black and white gables (private collection).|Image[/fg]
[fg]jpg|Fig 9 - The funeral procession for the Earl of Cranbrook passes Ashlawn, 3 October 1906. See Devey’s twin black and white gables. (Private collection)|Image[/fg]
Hazel Strouts is an author and historian, specialising in the period 1900 to 1918. Born on her grandfather’s farm in Benenden, Hazel is the third generation of her family to live in the village and was a former director of the Action Around Bethlehem Children with Disability humanitarian charity.
[fn]1|Archaelogia Cantiana, vol XLIX, Headley Brothers Invicta Press, Ashford 1938, p.241[/fn]
[fn]2|The idea was first put forward by the late Cecily Lebon M.A. Oxon, in an article, Medieval Holders of Benenden Manor in Benenden’s parish magazine, November 1963.[/fn]
[fn]3|Map and Terrier of the Parish of Benenden in the County of Kent by Joshsua Hodskinson 1777 Kent Archives.[/fn]
[fn]4|1599 Map of the Right Worshipful Sir Henry Guldeford’s Hemsted estate in Benenden and Cranbrook. Suffolk Archives.[/fn]
[fn]5|1534 Act of Supremacy declared that Henry VIII was Supreme Head of the Church, replacing the Pope.[/fn]
[fn]6|One of the most famous of all French parvises is Le Parvis de Notre Dames, Paris, the square in front of the great Cathedral.[/fn]
[fn]7|Testament Cantiana, A Series of Extracts from Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Wills relating to Church Buildings and Topography, East Kent, by Leyland L. Duncan, pp. 16,17, Mitchell Hughes and Clarke, London 8 The 1599 map illustrates the Benenden holdings of the Guldeford family which held Hemsted Manor, the second of the two manors in the parish, but this does mean it omitted all buildings not part of its estate. The vicarage the Green, the church for example, all belonged to Benenden Manor, though this map fails to show the new Benenden Manor House itself.[/fn]
[fn]8|The 1599 map illustrates the Benenden holdings of the Guldeford family which held Hemsted Manor, the second of the two manors in the parish, but this does not mean it omitted all buildings not part of its estate. The vicarage, the Green, the church for example, all belonged to Benenden Manor, though this map fails to show the new Benenden Manor House itself. [/fn]
[fn]9|History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, Vol. 7 by Edward Hasted, published c.1798 p.174-179, W. Bristow, Canterbury, 1798[/fn]
[fn]10|The lithograph by Edward Pocock predates Francis Haslewood’s book on Benenden. The book refers to the demolition of the houses portrayed in the picture so it is likely that Pocock’s image was a copy of an earlier picture probably in Haslewood’s possession. Haslewood and Edward Pocock were both residents in Ipswich in 1889.[/fn]
[fn]11|Francis Haslewood, (1840-1900) was born in Smarden, where his father was first curate and then rector, and had a lifelong association with Benenden which he knew not only as a boy but as a young priest when he served from 1868 to 1875 as the curate in St. George’s. He moved on from Benenden to become rector in St. Matthew’s, Ipswich in 1875. Haslewood was a keen antiquarian, wrote several books on local history, particularly on Kent and was a lifelong member of the Kent Archaeological Society.[/fn]
[fn]12|Edward Wenman, 1803-1879.[/fn]
[fn]13|The Past History of Benenden, a lecture given by the Right Honourable Viscount Cranbrook to members of St George’s Club, Benenden, 1883[/fn]
[fn]14|Thomas Law Hodges 1776-1857, inherited Hemsted from his father Thomas Hallet Hodges in 1801.[/fn]
[fn]15|Francis Haslewood, The Parish of Benenden, Kent, Ipswich 1889, p.xxv[/fn]
[fn]16|An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Weald of Kent,.Thomas Downes Wilmot Dearn, 1814, opposite p.18. The scene is entitled, Benenden Church and Parsonage, by M. Dubourg.[/fn]
[fn]17|Gathorne Hardy 1814-1906, purchased Hemsted in 1857. A prominent Victorian politician, he was made Earl of Cranbrook in 1892.[/fn]
[fn]18|David Brandon, architect (1813-1897)[/fn]
[fn]19|George Devey, architect (1820-1886)[/fn]