Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  This is the natural landscape, variegated and full of life in the margins of wood and pasture. The gaps between the old droveways were starting to fill, as if colour were flooding into the outlines of a drawing. Sewn into this natural world is a layer of places named after what people had done to them. These names, of great simplicity, are thought to be early, part of the first colonisation of the wood and its margins. So there is a place south of Sissinghurst which is simply called Hemsted, meaning homestead, the first place there that anyone had made their home. It became one of the great houses of Kent, and it was from Hemsted’s Elizabethan halls that Lord Burleigh wrote in 1573 complaining of the disgustingness of Wealden roads. What is now called Sissinghurst village was until the nineteenth century known as Milkhouse or Milkhouse Street, a name older than it sounds, meaning a dairy settled around the old straight Roman road than ran through it. The farm called High Tilt, on the next ridge south from Sissinghurst, all tennis courts and gravel drives today, was originally called Tilgeseltha, which meant something like a collection of shacks by the tilled ground. (Tilt is the same as tilth.) And around High Tilt the soils are still good enough today for arable crops to be grown between the blocks of wood.

  Among the natural riches of the forest and its margins, there was a scattering of modest human life: small buildings; a cow or two; sheds and a patch of cultivated ground. This was no Roman invasion but work was going on. Staplehurst was a woody hill where stakes or staples were grown, cut and made. Both Ayleswade (on the old drove towards Little Chart) and Snoad (near Staplehurst) were woods enclosed from the pasture, and Copton (now called Copden), Sissinghurst’s nearest neighbour, which throughout the Middle Ages belonged to it, was a farm (a tun) where trees were pollarded or coppiced (copped – a word related to the French couper).

  Then the individuals come up out of the ground: places named simply after the people that settled there. Bubhurst – now a beautiful house near Frittenden just off the old drove to Headcorn – is the wood of a man called Bubba. Frittenden itself and Friezley near Cranbrook were both settled by someone called Frithi. Branden, next to Copden, was originally called Berryingden, meaning the pasture of Berry’s people. And at Bettenham there was a Betta or even a Betti, perhaps the first woman to own property here. The –ham element of the name – still pronounced as ‘–hamm’ not ‘–em’ – comes not from –ham, a farm, but from the Old Frisian for a flat meadow by a river, hamme. That is exactly where Bettenham is, on what are now arable fields but were until the nineteenth century a long string of lovely damp meadows by the Hammer Brook. The name of the stream itself may also be a memory, not of the much later ironworking hammers in Hammer Mill but of ancient meadows, the Hamme Brook, the name preserving almost uniquely the voiced second syllable of the Germanic – hamme. So Bettenham was Betty’s Meadow on the Meadow Brook: could anything be more alluring than that?

  A recognisable world seems to be ballooning up out of the names, as if a constancy and normality had survived the massive transformation of the intervening centuries. Already, in the very beginning, the generations were passing. Lovehurst down in the clay lands towards Staplehurst means ‘the hurst that was left to someone in a will’: Legacy Wood. Its near neighbour, Tolehurst, originally called Tunlafahirst, means something like Heir’s Farm Wood. Inheritance and all the implications it carried of legality and order were already fully at work in what had become the highly legalised world of the Anglo-Saxons.

  There is a final, surprising layer in this joint land-biography of a forgotten age: the place names around Sissinghurst are full of jokes and taunts, nicknames and insults thrown across the woods and fields by one set of neighbours at another. It is an element which brings the spark of life to this wood-margin-farming world. Out in the wet of the vale, where even now on a winter’s day the water lies dead in the ditches, there are two neighbouring places called Sinkhurst and Hungerden. They are low in the damp ground, never where you would have gone if you had the choice, and their names clearly reflect what everyone else must originally have thought of them. (Hungerden did well in the hop boom of the nineteenth century and its ancient Wealden house was replaced then with a fine Victorian farmhouse. Sinkhurst still has nothing much to show for itself beyond a few cottages.) Both look like places in which it would be easy enough to sink into hunger and despair. Just as damp and not far away, until the nineteenth century, was a farm called Noah’s Ark. By comparison, their near neighbours on slightly higher rising ground, Buckhurst and Maplehurst, glow with health and well-being.

  The nicknames of individuals struggling to get on in this early landscape still survive. Lashenden, on the drove to Little Chart, is a pasture apparently belonging to ‘a rival’; Biddenden belonged to a man who was always asking for things, a ‘bidder’; Wilsley, just west of Sissinghurst, originally Wivelsleah, was the woodland glade of a man thought to be a weevil; Brissenden, the farm next to Bettenham once owned by my grandmother, was ‘the den of a gadfly’; and its neighbour, now piously called Whitsunden, was originally Wichenden, the pasture farm of a witch or a wizard, now a lovely place, on a gentle rise above the lowest of the clays, divided between three families living in house, barn and oast.

  And Sissinghurst’s own place in this dense social network? Its name is among the most intriguing. It is a hurst, a wooded hill as seen from the open meadows along the Hammer Brook. Its second syllable –ing means ‘the people of’ or ‘followers of’. And the first syllable, which had become ‘Siss’ by the late sixteenth century, had begun life in the Anglo-Saxon centuries as ‘Seax’, which can mean any of three related things: a short sword, the seaxa, for which in Anglo-Saxon culture there was a reverence and cult, swords being handed down through the generations of a family; a man’s nickname, Seaxa, his strength, flexibility and beauty reminding people of a sword; or the people themselves, the Saxons, who were named collectively after the battle weapon they had originally borrowed from the Franks. So what was Sissinghurst? The wood of the men of the knife? The place belonging to a blade-like hero and his followers? Or the Saxon place? You can’t tell.

  There is one hint in another place name, just to the west of here on the edge of the forest. It is possible that Angley near Cranbrook was the glade of the Angles. And so in the early English wood, it may be that two ethnically distinct settlements named themselves after the homelands they had left behind across the North Sea. This too is the world of Beowulf, an English poem, written and declaimed in England, to English men and women in English halls, but telling nostalgic stories, across the sea in the countries from which they all knew they had come. Perhaps Sissinghurst begins like that, as a colony, a planted place, whose inhabitants brought other memories and habits with them.

  The name for me has always embraced the Dark Age world. It is not difficult, in the cold of an early winter evening, when the soil is cloddy and damp and the Hammer Brook is running thick and clotted with brown floodwater from rain on the hills to the south, to feel the presence of these people here: their timber hall, with the dark outside, a fire in the central hearth, the animals housed in the steading, shuffling in their straw or bracken beds, and in the light a tale being told, perhaps one of the great tales of Anglo-Saxon England, of our presence on earth being like the flight of a swallow through a winter hall, coming in from the night through one high window, spending a few airborne moments in the warmth and brilliance of the lit world, before flying out through the other end, back into the endless dark; or like the stories in Beowulf, of past heroes and blood, sea journeys and the monsters that stalk the night, in Seamus Heaney’s time-shrinking phrase, ‘as a kind of dog-breath in the dark’. That is what to imagine here: the Seaxingas drawn around their fires, alert to horror, held by stories which were intended to make their fears explicit, and to make more real their membership of the blood-band gathered beside them.

  It would have been a good place. Seaxinghyrst was no Hungerden. It had some lightish, sandy-silty soils, which could be cultivated without too much labour.
In the Park and in the Well Fields to the south of it, you can still see, in a low evening light, the shallow swellings and hollows of medieval strip cultivation on the light soils that modern agriculture no longer considers worth ploughing but which in the Dark Ages and the centuries that followed would have been invaluable. Even in what is now the wood, in the winter when the place is bare, you can see the rise and fall of what were clearly the boundaries of medieval fields. Sissinghurst was workable from the start, and it may be that these light soils were open and treeless then. But Sissinghurst also had its woods, for heating and buildings. It had streams of sweet fresh water coming down through those woods and many springs emerging in the hillside to the south. Even in the 1920s, the gentlemen farmers who then owned Sissinghurst, the Cheesemans, used to bottle up the water and take it to families living out in the clay vale, where the people would fall on it as something more drinkable than the murky water from their own wells. And Sissinghurst had, above all, the meadows by the Hammer Brook, wellwatered land that would grow grass early in the year, might even produce two hay crops in one summer and which, until the coming of modern agriculture, was the most valuable land you could have.

  By the time there are any documents describing this place, that first folk-settlement phase was over and parts of this wood-pasture world were being explicitly granted to the manors on the good land lying beyond it. That is the moment at which this chapter began. In 843 the King of Kent gave this whole stretch of country to his ‘faithful minister’ as an autumn pasture for his pigs. The king ordained that every year, for ever, Æthelmod’s pigs were to be driven up here from Little Chart (along the drove coming south-west to Sissinghurst) to fatten on the acorns from the Wealden oaks. Anyone who interfered with the pigs, the charter makes clear, would suffer ‘everlasting damnation’. The pigs were to stay for seven delicious and terminal weeks, from the equinox on 21 September, when by tradition the acorns begin to fall, until Martinmas on 11 November, the feast of St Martin, the patron saint of butchers, when they would be driven back to Æthelmod’s manor in Little Chart to be slaughtered and salted for the winter. Sissinghurst had become a Saxon grandee’s pig-fattening ground.

  Nobody quite knows how all this worked. Pigs don’t like being driven and tend to wander off at will. Would they really have been driven the fourteen miles from Little Chart and back again? Surely, the journey to Sissinghurst and back was likely to slim them down quite as much as they would have fattened up on the fruits of Sissinghurst’s forest? Nor is the situation on the ground at all clear. By the ninth century, the large early pieces of common, such as the original Cadaca hrygc, were being divided up into much smaller dens, each of them allocated to different manors. The ownership map of Sissinghurst and its neighbouring lands, along with almost everywhere else in the Weald, soon became intensely complicated and has yet to be unravelled. Sissinghurst became a mosaic of wood, field, pasture and meadow, but of many different landlords’ holdings. The manor of Little Chart, the archbishop’s manor of Westgate just outside Canterbury, the manors of Wye and Charing and the abbey at Battle in Sussex all had separate little dens of two or three hundred acres each within a mile or two of here. Some land, in what is still called Cranbrook Common, remained unallocated to any of the surrounding manors.

  Because of this dispersal of the ownership of the Weald, almost none of it appears in the Domesday Book. Whatever was at Sissinghurst in 1086 was counted, invisibly, as part of the archbishop’s manor of Westgate. So Sissinghurst enters the Middle Ages in a fog, unseen and unknowable. What was here? Surely more than a seasonal pig-camp. People must have been here all year round. This was not merely autumn swine-grazing. There must have been a cluster of small buildings, houses, cow sheds, stables, barns. By the eleventh century, Saxons had been at Sissinghurst for five hundred years. The practice of gavelkind meant that the original holding must have been divided many times over. There may have been a hamlet of small farms here, but of that there is no evidence, nothing written and nothing on the ground. There remains, in fact, very little evidence for anything for several centuries to come. One can guess at and feel one’s way towards the general condition of life in medieval Sissinghurst but it is difficult to pin down. Until the beginning of the sixteenth century, no more than tiny fragments hint at what happened here.

  Kent was certainly an increasingly busy place in the centuries before the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. The skeletal structure of the late Dark Age Weald was filling up. Many of the farms and hamlets surrounding Sissinghurst were occupied by incomers from the north of the county, squatting in the wastelands belonging to the great manors north of the Weald, or encouraged by the lords of those manors to bring the Weald into cultivation. The whole of the Weald had already been shared out, about five hundred dens belonging to 130 manors, with few fragments of common lying between them. Now, though, from the twelfth century onwards, slowly and piecemeal, the third phase began: the emergence of separate manors within the Weald itself, not dependent on lordships in north Kent, but acting as the centre of their own worlds. It is the point at which a visible identity for Sissinghurst begins at last to surface.

  The name of the place, which until the nineteenth century was always part of the parish of Cranbrook, first appears attached to a man, Stephen. He is called ‘Stephen de Saxingherste’. Fifty years later, his relation John de Saxenhurst is taxed for some lands in the parish of Cranbrook. These lands must have been the manor at Sissinghurst itself, and this John built himself a chapel here, dedicated to John the Baptist. A few years later, in 1242, a man who was perhaps John’s son, Galfridus de Saxinherst, appears in a document named as the friend of the head of a priory at Combewell, a few miles away near Goudhurst.

  It isn’t much to go on, but it is possible – just – to construct a world from these fragments: a manor, pious, refined, just starting to materialise out of the blurred background of wood and stream. Sissinghurst has come onstage occupied by its own family: the de Saxinghersts. If there had ever been a scattered hamlet of Seaxinga descendants, that moment was now over. This one family owned and dominated the place. It was a manor with its own ‘rents, services, escheats and heriots’ – in other words a place where these lords could charge others to live and farm, demand work from them, reclaim property if a tenant misbehaved or died without heirs, and charge death duties on the death of any tenant. The hierarchies and expectations of feudal Europe had arrived. The de Saxinghersts sat at the top of their own small pyramid, friends of the higher clergy, with their own chapel and lands elsewhere in the county.

  The family held an estate that had a central core at Sissinghurst itself, Copton, now called Copden, just over the ridge to the south, and a place called Stone, which has disappeared, but may be remembered either in Milestone Wood, which is just to the south of Copden, or may be the place near Cranbrook Common, recorded in the early eighteenth century when Sissinghurst still owned somewhere called ‘Milestone Fields in the manor of Stone’. Beyond that central clump, the de Saxinghersts also had some properties in ‘Melkhous’ – the old name for Sissinghurst village – and were the tenants in 1283 of two of the archbishop’s dens, Haselden just to the north of Milkhouse and Bletchenden in Headcorn, which their ancestor may have owned a hundred years before. ‘The heirs of Sissinghurst’ were also in possession of a place called Holred. They paid five shillings a year for the ‘game they take there’, easily the most rent paid to the archbishop by anyone in the Weald. Among the archbishop’s papers, there are records of Kentish partridges caught by hawks, only a few pheasants, and some rabbits, as well as geese and swans, with woodcock in the winter woods, where they still come today, lurking in the thorns of the hedges, seen in the headlights when you come back late.

  So the picture thickens: a small but high-quality estate distributed along the old grain of the country, the ancient droveways into the Weald from the north-east, with some good hunting attached, in what might perhaps have been a park near the house. Today, if I walk out of
the door at Sissinghurst, the possible site of Holred (a wood) is seven minutes away by foot; it takes me about a quarter of an hour to get to Copden (a house in a wood to the south); the same to the village; ten minutes beyond that to the site of Stone (many modern houses on small plots), which is next to Haselden (a medieval house). Bletchenden (now a wonderful half-moated medieval house and barns) is an hour and a half’s walk in the other direction, up the old drove towards Canterbury, past Brissenden and Bubhurst, on a track which for part of the way is now no more than sheep-mown grass between ancient hedges.

  It is one coherent world, a country of lands and manors cut out of the Weald. But what was it like? That is the repeated question. What did it feel like then? It does at least become possible in the fourteenth century to hear the people of Kent for the first time. It seems as if the Kentish men may have come originally from Holland, as they spoke something like a kind of old Frisian, halfway between English and Dutch, the consonants heavily voiced, with ‘v’ for ‘f’ and ‘z’ for ‘s’. Their vowels still smelled of the Low Countries: hond for hand, hong for hang, plont for plant and thonke for thanke, bocle for buckle, trost for trust, bres for brass, threll for thrall, melk for milk and pet for pit, keaf for calf, be-am for beam, dyad for dead, zennes for sins. Englishmen from the other end of the kingdom had no chance of understanding them, nor the people of Kent their visitors. A Yorkshireman landing on the north Kent coast in the late 1300s asked a farmer’s wife for some eggs. ‘I don’t speak French,’ she told him, and shut the door. Even as late as 1611, by now a joke, this was A wooing song of a yeomen of Kent’s sonne printed and sold in London.