Abbot's Weald

Abbot's Weald lies in the Weald of Kent, the poor, close clay country south of the chalk. The Weald made much of the realm's charcoal iron for some three centuries until the northern coal belts took the trade between 4402 and 4461, and what it kept was coppice, hop poles and charcoal. The village's name is taken locally to mean ground once held by an abbot, though no religious house stands near it now and none is recorded.

Its importance comes from one table. Justice's Clerk Anne Moyle keeps the clerk's table here, issues licences and writes to the Maidstone bench, and she has pinned forty local feast days beside it. The printed calendar has twenty-two, and a stranger who comes for a licence on one of the other eighteen is told to come back tomorrow. When the clay shuts the lanes, the village can go a month at a stretch seeing little of anyone else; what news arrives is brought by carriers, charcoal families, pole buyers and the incumbent.

In 4620 field-blight struck three parishes in the country about Ashenhurst, and by Michaelmas, as Moyle wrote to the bench, half the women in the Weald had been accused of something. One was guilty. The examiners found her within a week and spent the winter clearing the rest, which earned them no thanks. She was Judith Tolhurst, and she hanged for a working buried along the hedges of her neighbours. Moyle keeps the fullest account of those examinations, and the Maidstone bench now cites the case as its model.

Ask at the clerk's table which local days are kept before asking for anything else. Travel before the first frost or after the end of March, when loaded carts can use the lanes. If a village cries witch, the order is the priest first and the justice second, and the crowd never. In this country a stranger should not sleep in a house that has stood empty through the winter.