Ich am my my vathers eldest zonne,
My mother eke doth love me well,
For ich can bravely clout my shoone
And ich full well can ring a bell.
Across the centuries, you can hear them like long-lost cousins, deeply foreign, Germanic but, what is miraculous to me, knowing this place better than I do.
In return for protection and as a means of dominance, the de Saxinghersts would have imposed duties on the peasants who worked the land for them. It was a life of unremitting labour for the poor. They had to thresh the corn and cart the manure to the fields, maintain the lord’s buildings, collect the straw, deliver wood, provide men for the bakehouse, the kitchens and the brewhouse, make hazel hurdles for the sheepfold and then supervise the sheep when in it, fence off the young coppice woods from any marauding animals, mow, spread and lift the hay in the lord’s meadows, carry his letters, drive animals to other manors if required, drive pigs to the autumn pannage, collect the hens due from tenants, collect and carry the eggs, put their sheep into the lord’s fold by which the sheep manured the arable ground in the lord’s demesne, from which of course the lord would derive the benefit in the years to come.
The woods had shifted in purpose. In an increasingly populated world, the acorns and beechmast for pigs had become less valuable than timber and wood for people. The long story of coppice-with-standards, which came to dominate the Weald and the Sissinghurst woods, was in operation by the fourteenth century. The long-growing standard oaks provided the structural timber for buildings; the coppiced underwood the heating and fencing, faggots and tool handles, reinforcements for river banks and even beds for the poor. Woodland was worth about the same per acre as good arable ground, not as much as meadow, and over a coppice cycle, the value was not in the standard trees but in the repeated cropping of the underwood. It was a wood world: wooden shoes, wooden tools and instruments, wooden wheels and cogs for mills, wooden vehicles, wooden furniture, wooden houses, wooden heat, wooden shutters, wooden fencing, wooden hurdles. As late as the 1950s, the families who came from London to pick the Sissinghurst hops were given beds in their huts made of straw palliasses placed on an underlayer of hazel faggots from the wood. Mary Stearns has a wonderful photograph of her son James driving a trailer-load of them up the lane.
The great trees, which had originally been the source of the acorns and were often pollarded when young to produce a big head of acorn-bearing boughs, continued to belong to the landlords as a source of timber, even when the ground below the trees had been let to the tenants. The archbishop’s bailiffs were fiercely defensive of the trees their master owned, prosecuting the tenants of Bettenham and seven other dens in the early fourteenth century for cutting down an extraordinary six hundred oaks and beeches, forty of them at Bettenham. This was one of the longest-lasting customs of the Weald. Even in the leases drawn up for my grandmother in the twentieth century, that ancient practice continued. When the farm was let to Captain Beale in 1936, he agreed ‘to keep all hedges properly slashed laid and trimmed in a workmanlike manner according to the best practice known in the district and to use no wire or dead thorns for repairing any quick hedges’. All ‘timber and timberlike trees sellers and saplings’ were to remain Vita’s property and Captain Beale was to pay her five pounds for every tree or sapling he cut down.
In case this was still unclear, he agreed ‘to preserve all timber and other trees pollards and saplings underwood and live fences from injury and not to lop top or crop any of the timber timberlike trees or saplings likely to become timber’. Unknown to either of them, it was a form of agreement that was at least seven hundred years old when they made it.
Among the woods, in the fields, or at least on the drier ground at the top of the farm, the Kentish men and women living here, speaking in their strange half-Dutch, would have striven for survival. Medieval England had no root crops. It was a world without potatoes, turnips, swedes or parsnips. Instead, on the light land, they might have grown barley for brewing and as the staple for bread. On the best demesne lands wheat was grown for sale in markets (Cranbrook had one from 1289), but it is unlikely they would have grown it here. Instead, on the damp and heavy land they could have grown rye, which is drought-resistant and survives in dry years, and oats for animal fodder, which can tolerate wet and heavy soils. By the mid-thirteenth century, even here, legumes were being introduced: peas, beans and vetches to renew and refresh the soil, fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere as we now know, but then thought at least to be an improved version of a fallow, with the added benefit that stock could be turned into the pea or bean fields when they were ready. The yields were pitiful: for wheat you might harvest three grains for every one sown, spring barley 2.5 to one, oats maybe 3.5 to one. These figures meant that hunger stalked them. As the population grew and the poor soils were driven harder, they sank ever deeper into a fertility trap: not enough goodness going back into the soil, too much land going into feeding the draught animals on whose muscle power they depended, declining yields, more people, fewer nutrients per person. By the early fourteenth century, famine and chronic malnutrition prevailed across the whole of Europe. The Black Death arrived in the 1340s at a landscape and a population that were ready to welcome it.
In this system, nothing would have been more important than the draught animals. On the archbishop’s manor at Bexley in north Kent, there were 312 farmed acres, a little bigger than Sissinghurst, and on better land, but broadly comparable. There were two hundred ewes, all-purpose animals, from which milk, lambs, wool and skins for parchment could all be had. The sheep was the mainstay of mixed farming. Bexley also had twelve cows and a bull, but what is most surprising is the number of working animals, the tractors of the medieval enterprise: twenty plough animals, both oxen and horses, driven in teams of eight, often mixed, with one or two horses leading the ranks of oxen behind them, and sixteen draught oxen on top of that. They needed feeding, and of Bexley’s farmed area, very nearly a third, ninety-six acres, was devoted to meadow, to the grass on which these animals could survive.
Oxen were valuable: in 1264 four were sold at Bethersden for 7s 6d each. But meadows were more valuable still. They were richly treasured by the archbishop’s estate managers, and it seems as if archiepiscopal farms were focused entirely on the availability of meadowland. On the archbishop’s riverside estates at Westgate itself, outside Canterbury, at Otford, Maidstone and Charing, and even at the outlying den of Bettenham, which was still attached to Westgate, meadow looms large in the accounts. Rent for a well-watered meadow per acre was double the rent on arable land and perhaps three or four times as much as on ordinary pasture. Meadows meant riches: more hay, which allowed you to keep more stock, including more oxen and so more animal power to plough and harrow the land, more manure with which to enrich it, more cereal crops, more grains and more food. The meadow was the route to well-being.
The meadows at Sissinghurst had gone by the late nineteenth century but they continue to have a flickering ghost existence near by. The neighbouring meadows upstream have belonged to the Halls at Hammer Mill since the early twentieth century, but they certainly belonged to Sissinghurst in the Middle Ages and right up until 1903, or at least to its subsidiary manor of Copden in the wood beside them. They are there as a kind of reproach, still grassy, damp, alluring on a morning heavy with summer wetness, or in the dank and dusk of a winter evening when the mist drifts up out of them and the smell of the wind-blown apples in Mrs Hall’s orchard comes into your nostrils, musty and sweet. I have often been for late walks there, secretly, while the owls hoot in Floodgate Wood, beyond the banked leat that fringes the grass, and the lights in Hammer Mill Farm glow as yellow as apricots. If you can feel a lust for a kind of land, I feel it for those meadows, wanting more than anything else to return the Sissinghurst margins of the Hammer Brook to that condition. Instead, where our meadows once were, we have, at the moment, a dead and dreary arable field, which has suffered one cereal crop after another without br
eak for years, where the soil itself is heavily compacted, and where in the winter the rain doesn’t soak into a delicious, light, open soil structure but lies on its surface in sad-eyed pools. Only the name of the field recalls what it once was: Frogmead, a damp and froggy place, along the banks of the meadow brook, a name redolent of everything a Wealden John Clare would have loved here, a kind of thick-pelted richness, with secrets buried inside it.
Frogmead is something of a test of Sissinghurst’s condition. It was once a marshland, a wet willow and alder wood. There are some heavy willow pollards and giant alder stools here by the stream, eight or nine feet across. The alders must be centuries old. Every year, they throw out vigorous, purple-budded seedlings into the edges of the arable crops, which survive until the summer when the combine shears them off an inch or two above the soil and the power harrow mashes their roots. Without that annual destruction, this would be a wet wood within a decade. The first settlers would have loved the prospect of lush meadowland and would have cleared the alder wood for the grass as soon as they arrived. Alder scarcely burns (I have tried: even after a year in the shed it moulders and hisses in the fireplace, giving out more damp smoke than any heat) but it looks good as furniture, and they could have turned cups and plates from it. Frogmead would then have remained an endlessly self-renewing meadow for centuries, perhaps even for thousands of years. It may have gone back to wet woodland at the end of the Roman period but the early English would have cleared it again, and hay crops would have been taken here throughout the Middle Ages and on until the nineteenth century. The hay for the great brick barns built at Sissinghurst in the sixteenth century would have come from these meadows, but in the 1860s the feeder channels bringing water into the meadowland were bridged over and filled in and a hop garden planted here. When the hops were abandoned in 1968, Frogmead became an arable field, which it has remained ever since. No hay comes off it any more and the barns remain empty from one year to the next. Frogmead’s story is Sissinghurst’s biography in miniature: after the Ice Age about eighty centuries of wild marsh, twenty of meadow to sustain this place, one of hops for the London thirst, and approaching half a century of subsidised cereals for a global market. Only in the wettest depths of the winter, when the Hammer Brook floods, and brown rivers of clay-thick water leak out over the fields, do you see again the old multiple beds of the meadow watercourses very lightly creased into the land, invisible when dry, but made apparent when the Hammer Brook once again reclaims its own. Knowing this and seeing this, on the maps and in the floods, I determined to persuade the Trust to restore the meadows that had been here for so long.
At the centre of the interlocked medieval world was the manor house and the high-gentry family to whom it all belonged. Judging by others that have survived, it would have been a timber-framed building, with a hall and a chapel, a private wing for the family and a cluster of service buildings around it. At some time towards the end of the thirteenth century, the line of the de Saxinghersts failed and they disappear from history. Their place was taken by the de Berhams, a family with other holdings in Kent, perhaps related to the de Saxinghersts by marriage and of great distinction. With them Sissinghurst achieved its late medieval flowering. They made this their principal seat and through them something of the quality of late medieval life can be felt here. It was still as remote a place as England knew. In 1260, Cranbrook church was described as being ‘in a wooded and desert part of the diocese through which the Archbishop has to pass and where no lodging can be found during a long day’s journey’. Even in midsummer, the roads were not clear. When the great warrior king Edward I came through the Weald in June 1299 (as he had two years before and would again almost at the end of his life in 1305), the royal exchequer issued ‘money paid by order of the King to seventeen guides leading the King when going on his journey’. He had been at Canterbury, had gone down to Dover, come back up to the great manor house at Wye and from there went on to the archbishop’s palace at Charing. He had with him his son, the fifteen-year-old Edward, soon to be Prince of Wales, and his grandson, the eight-year-old Gilbert de Clare, as well as the knights William de Bromfield and Nicholas de Chilham. It was a busy royal cavalcade, distributing four shillings a day in alms to the poor, accompanied by messengers sent off each evening on royal business. Edward had his cook and sauce-maker with him, as well as William de Rude, the King’s Foxhunter, and two helpers, all dressed in English russet, along with John de Bikenorre, keeper of the king’s hawks. Greyhounds, deerhounds, harriers and beagles accompanied the horsemen. It was a court on the road, all conducted in Norman French, buying parchments at twelve pence a dozen on which to draw up official documents, and paying wherever they went for horse fodder and harness, faggots and charcoal, as well as mountains of oxen, pigs, sheep, wine, swans, peacocks and ‘little trout’. In the middle of June, this busy and impressive party came down the old drove road from Charing, through Little Chart, past Smarden, and on the evening of 19 June 1299 arrived to spend the night at Sissinghurst.
Can one say what the king and his companions found there? Certainly a pious family of high status. The name has survived of the de Berhams’ bailiff, the man who oversaw the running of the manor: Manger, the son of Elie Monmatre de Petham, whose high-class Norman-French name stands out from the Jutish-Frisian world in which they moved. One of the de Berhams was a major official of the archbishop’s office in Canterbury. Another was knighted. A third, Richard, became sheriff of Kent, the county’s chief law enforcement officer, married a Cranbrook girl, Constance Gibbon, and was one of the knights charged with command of the local militia. As well as Sissinghurst, he gathered estates on the Chart Hills, up the droveways in Charing and Pluckley, and was worth forty pounds a year.
A higher, finer version of the medieval world begins to emerge among the woods and fields. Among the de Berhams’ neighbours are people called Nicolas and Petronilla, Bertram and Benedicta. From the tiny Trinitarian friary at Mottenden near Headcorn (now a farm called Moatenden) they had two friars to celebrate mass in the Sissinghurst chapel, an arrangement made decades earlier by the de Saxinghersts. One or two manuscript books survive in the Bodleian in Oxford from the Mottenden Priory library – works on medieval logic and grammar – and it is not unreasonable to imagine that the visiting friars may have brought them here too. The friars assisted the chaplain, an employee of the family’s.
There is one document above all which for the first time brings to Sissinghurst a sense of the interiors and even of interior life. It is a will made by Elisia de Berham in April 1381, now in the National Archives. She was the mother of Richard, who was to become sheriff of Kent, and was clearly a cultivated woman of fine sensibilities and deep piety. She asked to be buried in Cranbrook church and left money for prayers to be said for her soul. The vicars of other churches on the edges of Romney Marsh received legacies from her, as did her chaplain at Sissinghurst, Robert Couert, the friars in Canterbury, and the Carmelite friars at a small friary at Lossenham near Newenden, which is now a farm. The friars and master at Mottenden, who would have known her well, all received money.
Once she had catered for her soul, Elisia Berham attended to those near her, perhaps those who had looked after her. For the first time, ordinary people living at Sissinghurst acquire their names. Robert Goldyng, Simon Addcock, Thomas Herth, Alice Addcock: small legacies of 6s 8d to each of them. Then the precious objects in her life:
To Johan Herst my daughter 10 marcs one of the best towels and a napkin. To Alice Creyse a blue bed and a saddle. To the wife of Thomas Hardregh a towel with napkin. To Elisia Addcok 10 marcs and a bed in which I lye with one ‘curtyn’ and over-cover and a casket with little garments (parvis velaminibus) within.
This is not a world of high luxury but one in which the lady of the house gives something she cherishes to the women with whom she has lived. Finally, and poignantly, to her son:
To Richard my son 10 marcs and a white bed complete and my Matins book and six silver spoons and one b
roken piece of silver, a good towel and napkin.
Here, then, is medieval Sissinghurst, a place not of riches but of great dignity, with precious beds in various rooms, some silver objects but not so many that a broken piece is not valued. This is a place both deeply engaged with the sanctified life of pre-Reformation England and somewhere that exudes its own kind of gracefulness and clarity. ‘A casket with little garments’ is a measure of its delicacy; ‘a white bed complete’ – with all its white hangings and white linen – a symbol of its virtue. Most striking of all is the phrase ‘my Matins book’. It means a Book of Hours, and a whole culture-world pours into Sissinghurst in the wake of those words.
The Book of Hours, also called ‘Our Lady’s Matins’, a primer or, as Elisia Berham terms it in her will, a matins book, was a selection of psalms, hymns and prayers, many dedicated to the Virgin, designed for intense and highly personal, often private, devotion. These books were precious objects, often the most valuable thing a person owned, finely bound, with illuminations painted in, closed with gold or silver clasps, sometimes enamelled, sometimes with their own protective ‘chemise’, to be handed down through the generations of a family, as here. They could be carried in a sleeve or tucked into a belt and were used most often in the privacy of a closet, or even a curtained bed. They were an aspect of what Eamon Duffy has called ‘the devout interiority’ of medieval religion, not in rivalry to the public devotions of the church, but complementary to them. The matins book is the religious equivalent of the lay world brought to mind by Elisia’s ‘white bed complete’ and ‘casket with little garments’, objects from a Sissinghurst suddenly awash with medieval purity.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 14
