Kent

In May 1641, the justices of the peace in Kent were forced to undertake extensive repairs to the shire house at Pickenden Heath, the venue for county elections. As Sir Roger Twysden* recorded, ‘there having been two elections of knights of the shire to serve in Parliament, 1640, the shire house at Pickenden Heath was much in decay in respect the concourse had been far greater than at former elections and that both coming to poll many had broke down the walls of it to put through the names of the freeholders for their friends to be written down’. Cent. Kent Stud. U47/47/O1, p.

Maidstone had been a small manorial market town dominated by the archbishopric of Canterbury until the sixteenth century, but a century later it was one of the most important towns in Kent. W. Lambard, Perambulation of Kent (1656), 229; P. Clark and L. Murfin, Hist. Maidstone (Stroud, 1996), 1-2, 20-39. Maidstone evidently made an impression upon visitors.

Queenborough was a minor settlement dominated by a once-important castle, situated at the western tip of the Isle of Sheppey, a region ‘more celebrated for the fertility of the soil than the salubrity of air, which is gross and thick, causing aguish infirmities’. T. Philipott, Villare Cantianum (1659), 379. The site of a Saxon fort, Queenborough was effectively founded by Edward III, who named it in honour of his consort, Philippa of Hainault. Edward’s castle, built by William of Wyckham, was finished in 1367.

Situated on the River Rother, New Romney was an ancient trading town, albeit one which, like so many southern ports, had long since decayed, and had little or no access to the sea. Although its population had probably declined – there were 230 individuals of communicable age in 1676 – it had residual importance in the mid-seventeenth century because of its role as the venue for the Guestling, the assembly of the Cinque Ports.

Visitors to Rochester – a city dominated by its Norman castle, cathedral and 11 arch stone bridge over the Medway – agreed that it was an impressive town which had seen better days. The poet and traveller John Taylor described it as ‘a fine neat city’, although ‘oftentimes spoiled’. J. Taylor, Honourable and Memorable Foundations (1636), sig. B. Thomas Philipott noted that the city was

As was the case with many ports on England’s south coast in the early modern period, Hythe’s importance had been undermined by the forces of nature: by the late sixteenth century the shingle deposits by which it was affected reduced it to little more than a local fishing harbour. K.M.E. Murray, Const. Hist. of the Cinque Ports (1935), 208-9. As its mercantile base withered, so too did its population, and the Compton Census recorded only 300 inhabitants of communicable age.

The largest of the ancient ports in the south east of England, and the one with the most direct route to the continent, by the early seventeenth century Dover was the only Cinque Port which retained mercantile prominence, and the wealth which went with it. In 1634 it was required to pay £260 towards the county’s Ship Money assessment, a sum exceeded only by Canterbury and Maidstone. E. Kent RO, Do/AAm2, f.