Otham

Otham is a small parish of the Len valley a short way from Maidstone, one of the Len parishes served by Vicar Stephen Otham. Little of its earlier history has been written down, and until 4613 it was a quiet place of farms and cottages whose people took their produce to Maidstone market and whose name meant nothing outside the valley.

In March 4613 deaths began in the parish, and two days after the first of them the Grey Nails arrived. The vicar never learned who had sent for them: he had written to nobody and neither had the churchwardens. The party was civil throughout, told him nothing, and was, he recorded, right about the ground. It ended by burning the house of an old woman who sold charms; the fire spread to the byre beside it and a store of winter fodder, and she was cropped and turned out of the parish. The deaths went on for two more months and then stopped for reasons nobody has established. The Earl of Wye met her costs without ever saying why, and the order has never spoken of the matter.

The only written account by a witness is Joan Harrietsham's, who had lived next door for thirty years and said afterwards that the woman was seventy-one and that nobody had asked her a single question. That account is now with the bishop's examiner at Canterbury, Mary Swanton, who has twice written to the Grey Nails asking who led the party, and the house at Wye cites the burning in private as proof that a fire destroys the evidence a working needs. Since Otham the order's name has been mixed in Kent, and the Maidstone bench now offers the Ashenhurst examinations, held in 4620, as the model for how to proceed. Stephen Otham has twice drafted a proposal for a county fund to pay for proper workings and has twice been told it would be taken for an attack on the order. The ruined cottage and byre at the edge of the village have never been rebuilt.

A company in Otham should go to the vicar first and speak of the burning only if he raises it. A band that answers a call from the Grey Nails will not be asked to hold a bound for the Brethren, and the county will take note of which it chose.