I could feel myself being educated by this process. My previous experience of organisations had been either at the top or at the bottom. As a journalist, I merely did my best to provide what the paper wanted. A reporter is only a tool in the proprietor’s hands; he certainly does not run the machine. And when I had run the small publishing company with my cousin Robert Sackville-West or helped my wife Sarah run her Garden and Cookery School, we had made the simple decisions ourselves, with small staffs and with clear, single purposes to fulfil. Sissinghurst could not have been more different: viscous, anxious, convoluted, not entirely articulate about its needs, slow to respond, occasionally crabby. At other times warm, friendly, receptive, nurturing and generous. It was, in other words, rather old in the way it did things and that oldness and embeddedness, its maturity, had to be understood. New oldness: that was the goal.
SIX
Occupation
From out in the clay vale, a mile or two away, Sissinghurst appears as a low, wooded ridge on the southern horizon. It looks, perhaps, like anywhere in the distance or on a map, full of promise and intrigue, a place, if you were given the chance, you might like to occupy.
That is exactly how Sissinghurst first appears in a written record: as a ridge, with some slightly alien qualities to it, distant, not quite part of the homelands. This record, which is an Anglo-Saxon charter, takes its view from the north, from the world of property and government to which Sissinghurst has always been marginal. The charter is still in the archbishop’s library in Canterbury Cathedral. Its clear and beautifully drawn Latin words were written by a Canterbury scribe on a large vellum sheet at the end of May 843. He was in a royal hunting lodge in Mereworth, with the king, near the great royal woods on the Greensand Hills, about twelve miles to the north-west of here. Æthelwulf, ‘king of the West Saxons and also of the Men of Kent’ – he was a Wessex warrior who had conquered Kent and was now distributing it among his favourites – was staying there, perhaps for some springtime hunting. While there, he gave several stretches of land to his ‘faithful minister’, Æthelmod, as autumn pastures for his pigs. One was called Cadaca hrygc: the second element of that name meaning back, spine or ridge; the first, in which every ‘a’ is pronounced long and thick – Cardarker – meaning ‘of the jackdaws’.
Jackdaw Ridge: the name is perhaps three hundred years older than the charter that records it, and it marks the beginning of Sissinghurst – a stretch of mixed oak woodland on a long, lowish rise above the clays of the Low Weald, so far beyond the habits and knowledge of cultivated country that it could only be named after the small, pale-eyed crows to be found there. Their Saxon name – the da is the same as daw, the ca the same as caw – was an echo of their kark-kark call, and from that beginning over the centuries Cardarker Ridge drifted on men’s lips through Karckeregge, Karkredge, Carkeregg, Harkeregge and Hokeregge to the Hawkridge, Hocker Edge and Hartridge of today, three rather swish and well-appointed country houses in the woods and dells a couple of miles to the west of Sissinghurst. But the name in the past, right up to the seventeenth century, was also attached to the land immediately to the west and south of Sissinghurst, covering much of modern Sissinghurst village, its neighbouring farmland and the house, garden and farm of Sissinghurst itself. It seems inescapable that Cadaca hrygc was the original and earliest English name of the whole block of country of which Sissinghurst is now a part.
It would be difficult to think of a set of syllables farther from the sibilance and ease of Sissinghurst, but Cadacaridge comes from the deepest levels of the knowable past here. It summons a distant world. The Roman road pushing south from Rochester to the Wealden ironworks would have continued in use even after the collapse of Roman administration and government in the fifth century AD. Little else, perhaps, was going on here. Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes from different parts of Germanic Europe were crossing the narrow seas and taking control of the large, ex-Roman estates in northern Kent, many of them hinged to another Roman road, called Watling Street by the English, now the A2. But Sissinghurst was well south of that zone of continuous occupation on the good soils. The Wealden ironworkings had been abandoned. All that was left at Lower Farningham Farm was cinders and cold slag. The gold-ring life of Celtic Bettenham might also have gone back for a while. Brambles and then trees would have recolonised abandoned fields. The meadows by the Hammer Brook would have reverted to marsh. Alder carr thickened over the bog. With the wild grazing herds now depleted by thousands of years of hunting, the great forest of the Weald might have begun to assume something of a dense and closed appearance.
There are places in the Sissinghurst woods which looked like that when I was a boy: huge oaks collapsed into dark, anoxic bogs where the streams had leaked outside their banks; if you walked into the wet, the mud would suck itself up over the top of your boots and fill the air with rot; streamers of green-leaved honeysuckle were the only sign of life in the decaying, mineralising wood; what had been living and vegetable was now falling apart, biology going back to its chemical constituents. The blackened and slimed timbers, whose fibres you could pull apart with your fingers, lay in the strangest and most exotic of pools, red, metal-stained, where groundwater seeping out through the nodules in the clay had taken on a rich, tomato-soup brilliance from the buried iron, but clearly poisonous, with swirls on the surface, slicked up and bleared, as if diesel had been dropped in the water.
That is how I think of the world of Cardarker Ridge 1,500 years ago: damp, dark and disintegrating. There may be something in the name itself which hints at that marginality. The old English word cadac or cadaw and its equivalents throughout Europe were always used as a metaphor for a pilferer or petty thief. Jackdaws are little avian foxes. Like their cousins the magpies, they steal any bright, glittery thing. So perhaps this was the meaning of Cardarker Ridge. At the place where the crumbling Roman road began its climb into the wooded folds of the Weald – I pass it every day taking my daughters to the station on the way to school – there among the trees, in the fifth century, a band of outlaw, jackdaw pickpockets preyed on anyone who dared to come this way. Perhaps that was Sissinghurst then, named like a place in a western: Thief Ridge?
Maybe. It would fit with the early days of the post-Roman Weald, when the officials and functionaries of the Roman fleet had withdrawn and the authority of any early English overlord in the north of the county scarcely stretched this far into the forest. But if it was a moment of disintegration and lawlessness, it was also the start of the great medieval movement which would transform the Weald.
The end of Roman authority allowed a new, expansive and even entrepreneurial culture to flourish in Kent. Like other heavily wooded parts of England, an independent culture grew up here of men and women reliant on themselves, on their axes and ploughs, owing few duties to any feudal superior, able to own property and sell it, capable of leaving it to whoever they liked in their wills and looking for their well-being not to some lord but to their own struggles with the soils around them, a struggle that over many generations they succeeded in winning. It was a way of life treasured by Kentish people and here it was called ‘the custom of Kent’.
Beginning probably in the fifth century, the first of the English were coming to settle this part of the Weald. They walked or rode in from the north-east, down the sinuous droves, across the chalk and then over the Chart Hills, the routes that people and animals had already been using for thousands of years: down Sand Lane and Blackberry Lane, or along the track past Three Chimneys, which is still in part hedged well back from the road, wide enough to accommodate a driven herd or flock.
How did they arrive? Who were they? How did they establish themselves? How were these places made? In some ways the history of that settlement is particularly opaque. It seems that each drove led people from different parts of the periphery into the ancient forest. Around each drove, large, separate commons developed, a slice of Wealden lands, each common arranged to converge like the segments of a tangerine and each pushi
ng in towards the centre of the Weald from a great manor on its northern boundary. To the north of Sissinghurst one large common led in from the manor of Hollingbourne through Sutton Valence and on to Staplehurst. To the east, another came in from the manor of Wye through Smarden and Biddenden. Converging on Sissinghurst itself from the north-east were two commons based on the manors of Faversham, coming down through Headcorn and Frittenden, and Sturry, following the line of the Hammer Brook from the direction of the Chart Hills, whose level brow is the horizon seen from Sissinghurst to the north-east.
That is the administrative picture – and it remains full of queries. How was it decided who should go where? Were people told to go? Or invited? On all of that there is nothing to say. But there is another level at which these questions can be asked and the place names are the key to it.
There are a million acres in Kent. Scattered across them are more than eight thousand names marking places that have been occupied for more than a thousand years. No other part of England has anything equivalent to this density of ancient nomenclature and that is because a thousand years ago and more, this was the landscape of individualism: no clustering; no early villages; little sense of community; a very early fragmentation into separate places, families spreading into all corners of the Weald. It is the landscape of private ownership.
This detailed gazetteer of anonymous lives is distributed across Kent at a density of one to every 125 acres, in effect a name per farm. It makes for a country of private and secluded places, as if each place has a taproot diving into the past. The big villages are no older than the hamlets, the hamlets no older than the farms, the farms no older than the name of a wood or a stream. It is country alive with detailed memory. Each tiny place is more significant to itself than to the parish or village of which it is a part. From the sandy hill between Sissinghurst and Bettenham, I can look across the neighbouring farms: Bettenham itself, Brissenden, Whitsunden and the manor farm at Frittenden. Just beyond the woods, obscured only by the trees, are Copden, Branden, a farm called High Tilt, others called Comenden and Camden, perhaps originally part of one place. The far side of Hocker Edge, Hawkridge and Hartridge (three thirds of one holding?) are Tolehurst, Lovehurst and Snoad, Friezley, Buckhurst, Wilsley and Angley, Flishinghurst and Glassenbury.
These small places are the foundation of the Weald: I love them for the rounded angularity of their names, as Wealden as the timber-framed buildings still to be found on them, and as pure a litany of Wealden Kentishness as could ever be written. None is famous beyond itself. All have conducted their private lives across the centuries, wringing a living from difficult soils, all of them an interfolded mixture of wood and coppice, meadow and stream, all of them bedded into the sands and clays that underlie them.
This is the world in which Sissinghurst and its name also have their origin. Like all those other places, Sissinghurst is the landscape of its own privacy, continuous with its past. It is a place, like everywhere else around it, that is worn and used, as Edward Thomas once described a stretch of country he knew and loved, ‘like a schoolboy’s desk that has blunted a hundred ingenious knives’.
Beyond that general understanding, though, and using the research done before the last war by J. K. Wallenberg, a Swedish etymologist from the University of Uppsala, one can start to read in these farm names the contours of a lived past. They record the phase after the bleakness of Cardarker Ridge, and represent a moment when once again the landscape became humanised and settled.
The twenty-five square miles around Sissinghurst cross the boundary between the clays to the north and east and the higher sandier ridges of the High Weald to the west and south. Within this little local province, five miles square, with nowhere more than three miles from Sissinghurst, there are, remarkably, seventy-four places that acquired their names at least a thousand years ago. What is here now, for all the roundabouts and golf clubs, the prison and crayfish lagoons, the public schools and the carpeted pubs, is in essence a depiction of what was here in the millennium before last.
The names of more than a third of Sissinghurst’s neighbours (twenty-six of them in the twenty-five square miles) end in the suffix –den. Dens surround Sissinghurst on all sides. The name means ‘a pasture for pigs’, and so this, deep down, is swine country, which is one of the reasons I am so keen to have some pigs back at Sissinghurst. That does not mean that it was exclusively woodland. Pigs were and are the key ingredient of peasant farming throughout northern Europe. They breed quickly; they are omnivorous and, although certainly hungry for acorns and beechmast, cannot live on them alone. Pigs fed only with that kind of tree-nut sicken and die. They need the worms and beetles and greenery they get from rootling around in a multiple and diverse environment if they are to thrive. They like the waste from kitchens. They are rather good to be with. Their meat can be preserved by smoking and salting (there were giant salt works on the north Kent marshes throughout the Middle Ages). They are the great generalists, relishing the acorns they would have got from the Wealden oaks but needing a mixed landscape. Of all farm animals, they are the natural companions for anyone deciding to make their way into new country.
Alongside the swine pastures are sixteen –hursts, from hyrst, meaning a wood, probably on a hill, perhaps enclosed. The hurst is the natural companion of the den, the surviving fragment of woodland, perhaps coppiced for firewood, alongside the open, treed pastures in which the pigs (cattle, horses, oxen, chickens, goats and sheep) are grazing. The existence of a place known as a wood can only mean that much of the landscape was not wooded around it. Most of the hursts are to the north and east of Sissinghurst, away from the great blocks of forest to the south, standing out in the largely cleared land of the Low Weald.
The third element, of which there are nine examples here, most of them concentrated to the south-west of Sissinghurst, on the high, light soils going towards Cranbrook, are places ending in –ley, a rubbed-down version of the Old English word leah. Its etymology is connected to ‘light’, a clearing, and the name is a sign of country made up of ‘woodland with glades’, perhaps the fragmentary edges of the forest, where corridors of pasture led into the thicker woods to the south.
Even at this most generalised level, it is an intriguing picture from the Dark Ages. These place names describe almost exactly what you would expect from the descendants of Frans Vera’s open, browsed woodland: some pasture, perhaps cleared; knots of slightly denser wood; and passages of country, particularly on the lighter land to the south-west, that mark the transition between the two, the Kentish park-like savannah.
These names are the hyphen between now and then. Hurst, den and ley make for a human landscape, one in which the atmosphere of Cardarker Ridge has been left far behind. A subtle, interfolded life was being lived here. Undoubtedly, the Germanic English coming into the Weald were expert carpenters. In the absence of many arable crops for thatching straw, they would have made oak shingles for the roofs of their large, rectangular timber houses, in which smoke rose from a central hearth to the height of an open hall. They could turn cups from blocks of applewood and field maple. Archaeologists have found Dark Age flutes made of hawthorn. The first Wealdsmen had hammers, adzes, drill-bits, gouges, planes, draw-knives, saws and wedges with which to transform timber into their houses and furniture – all of these have been found. But this was also the world of Beowulf, and in both landscape and poem it was the axe which was the instrument of destiny, for felling trees, lopping and topping the trunks and perhaps occasionally for imposing violence and asserting will. The axe was followed by the heavy plough, the team of oxen and the dogged ploughman behind it, described in one Old English poem as ‘harholtes feond’ – the grey enemy of the wood. Here, on a kind of internal frontier, the expansive and acquisitive culture of the early Middle Ages was taking in the forest.
They would have hunted too, especially perhaps in the ley lands, the glades leading into the heart of the forest, some of which, around Angley near Cranbrook, were later in the Mi
ddle Ages to be converted by the archbishop into a park reserved for his hunting. In Saxon hunts, hounds were used to drive the wild boar on to the points of spears and javelins held by men standing in its path. Both roe and red deer were hunted through the English woods and wolves pursued, often into specially dug pits, where they could be killed and skinned, for the most glamorous coats known to Anglo-Saxon England. These perhaps were the higher-status hunts, of the sort Æthelwulf and Æthelmod were enjoying at Mereworth, but even here, you can be sure, foxes, beavers, otters, hares, wildcats and martens were all hunted through the valleys and over the ridges.
The place names are a guide to this landscape and one can chase them down to another level of detail. There are variations, flickerings of happiness and failure, of individual enterprise and fiercely staked identity, the cast of an ancient epic still distributed across the fields and woods. At their simplest, the names do no more than describe the places as the new arrivals found them. There is a Hartley the other side of Cranbrook, which means the glade of the deer. Two Buckhursts, one on either side of Sissinghurst, look as though they might also be deer woods, but they are in fact a corruption of Boc-hyrst, meaning beechwood. The modern owners of one of the Buckhursts have planted a beech avenue as an act of vegetable memory. There’s a Maplehurst – a beautiful wood on a little hill which still does have maples in it – an Exhurst (ash – no wood at all there now), a Hazelden, an Iden (yew) and an Ibornden, which is a swine pasture by a stream with a yew. Others are simpler still. Hareplain near Bettenham is what it says it is. Rogley, on the edge of Hemsted Forest to the south, is a rough leah. Wadd, now a large and beautifully timbered fifteenth-century house on the way to Staplehurst, is the same word as Weald, meaning something like wood or perhaps wood-pasture, and it does indeed have a large hornbeam coppice next to it. Two Chittendens, one towards Benenden, the other near Staplehurst, were pastures where growth sprang up, the same word we now use for chitting potatoes, and The Freight, a luxurious house outside Cranbrook, where lawns spread and roses tumble between the yew hedges, comes from an old English word that means the furzy growth on what had been cleared land.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 12