Maidstone corporation

The self-selecting corporation of the county town: a mayor chosen yearly from aldermen who hold for life, and an elected common council. It controls the town, its markets and tolls, bridges, paving, watch, quay and river navigation, two charities and the grammar school, and its market by-laws affect every parish in Kent.

The borough corporation of Maidstone, which owns the market where Kent's hops, fruit and wool are priced, so its by-laws are read in every parish. It pays well for hired work and is where clients, courts and paperwork are.

Named with it

• Mayor Robert Aylesford · mayor, second term
• Town Clerk Miles Boxley · town clerk
• Alderman Ralph Loose · alderman

Ties

• precedence quarrel with the Pikes of Wye
• entangled in the river navigation company's quarrel with the mills
• precedence quarrel with the Pikes of Wye since the county meeting of 4187
• disputes with mill owners over the river navigation
• sits alongside the quarter sessions, the assize and the militia
• runs the Maidstone grammar school

In the chronicle

• 4187 · The county meeting of 4187

At the table

For work where a silted-port corporation offers eleven pounds, Maidstone pays something like eighteen. Since the meeting of 4187 it and the Pikes of Wye have disputed precedence at the county meeting, that is, which of the two is called first and takes the first seat; neither has ever given way, and the quarrel, purely ceremonial though it is, is fought in perfect earnest. Within the week it hears of any band that misbehaves. From the river navigation it has inherited an unending quarrel with the mill owners. For three centuries its books have recorded, in most decades, a payment for clearing a certain reach of the river, and never once say what was cleared. It cannot put mounted men on the road as Wye can. Of the four authorities in Maidstone it has the best building and the least reach: its watch is two elderly constables to a ward, neither of them armed. It keeps four hundred years of open records, among them the admissions of freemen, in which the refusals that nobody explains fall in clusters. Three locked and closed burial grounds it maintains, booking their cost as repairs, and it has never applied to the chapter to have them attended. Its minutes for the Market Fall were lost, and from that loss comes Kent's habit of posting every decision in public.