hastingleigh - Brian Berrys Book - Hastingleigh.com

Along with the title came a set of rights and hereditaments, together with a
booklet purporting to describe the history of the Lordship. A brief inspection
revealed that this was a novel written by an eager assistant with limited
historical knowledge and research skills that clearly were suspect. There was
need for something better. Thus began this effort to craft of a product that
would help the community understand its heritage and me to understand the
Lordship. Only as the research progressed did I learn that the de Couens and
Hautes, who held the Lordship in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
were my wife Janet’s ancestors some 20 generations back (Appendix 1)!
Fate plays strange tricks. In a sense, the title had returned home, and I
could tell a different story about why I acquired the Lordship.
The starting point in my research was the brief entry for Hastingleigh in
Edward Hasted’s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent
(1779). I then came upon Mary W. Harwood’s Kentish Village.
Hastingleigh (1952), an account of the history of St. Mary’s church. A visit
to the parish clearly was in order. A quick scan of the web came up with a
B&B at Crabtree Farm. A fine conversation with the proprietor, Roz
Bacon, who, like me, teaches geography, and who also has a strong interest
in local history, led her to send me Arthur Marsh’s A Time to Remember.
Some Recollections of a Kentish Village (1985), which yielded many
additional insights.
With these works as a beginning, I was off and running. F.G. Parsons’
three-volume History of St. Thomas’s Hospital (1932) provided other leads.
I discovered that most of the hospital’s records and a mass of ancient deeds
had been deposited in the London Metropolitan Archives. Other repositories
of original materials were at the British Library, the Essex County Archives,
the Centre for Kentish Studies in Maidstone, and the archives in Canterbury.
In the United States, the LDS (Mormon) Library in Salt Lake City had
microfilm of the Parish Registers and the Archdeacon’s reports, Land Tax
Assessments, nineteenth century censuses, and Frank W. Tyler’s voluminous
genealogical notes on Kentish families. I ordered photocopies or
transcriptions of all the original records that were available, save only the
Manorial Court Roll (0/517/1), which the London Metropolitan Archives
said was “unfit for production.” It had been rescued from a solicitor’s office
by the British Records Association but was in very poor condition and I