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, Friesians 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 Kardarker Ridge 1500 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 Kardarker 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 ey 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, nowhere more than in these woods and fields. 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 that 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 pushing 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 this there is nothing to say. But there is another level at which these questions can be asked, and here one is suddenly faced with a richness of detail, human and geographical, strange and immediate, which reveals the life here between 1500 and a thousand years ago. The place names become the key, and through them individual lives suddenly come up out of the landscape like bodies standing in their graves at the General Resurrection. Everywhere around Sissinghurst, as in most of Kent, the names of individual farms, woods, streams and hills portray the country just as it was first encountered by the colonising English.
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 named settlement or this scattering of detailed continuity. It is a sign of the nature of Kentish individualism: no clustering; no early villages; little sense of community; a very early fragmentation into separate places, governed by the custom of gavelkind, by which a man divided his property between his children so that families spread into the corners of their holdings.
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 a landscape 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 and divided by gavelkind. 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 this landscape: 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.
Sissinghurst, despite its modern fame and the hundreds of thousands of visitors, is at root one of these places too. It is the landscape of its own privacy, continuous with its past, holding the secrets of what happened here in the marks and burrowings that cover its surface. 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 Cadaca 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 Kardarker 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 Middle 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.
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 Burghley 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 that 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, well-watered 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.
The sequence by which the Kentish Weald was settled remains obscure. It is a story filled with conjecture and speculation, but in broad outline you can say that in the early centuries after the Romans left and the English arrived from Europe, people made their way down the old droveways into the relatively empty land of the Weald. That word itself is traditionally translated as ‘Wood’, but in medieval Europe it meant something more. A Weald, as understood by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks and Friesians, was very nearly the same as a wood-pasture, a place where animals would come to feed, not only on the acorns and beechmast but on the leaves themselves and on the grazing within the glades and margins of a wood. Throughout much of Germanic Europe, the word Wald still means not only the wood but the leaves of the trees in the wood. In medieval Kent, it meant above all a place that was not cultivated, in the way that the fertile loams at the foot of the Downs always had been. A Weald was not a closed oaken wilderness but a half-open woodland, with dens, hursts and leahs, where your animals could thrive.
By the time there are any documents describing this place, though, 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 manorial waste 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; 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 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 thank, 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.
Ich am my vathers eldest zonne,
My mother eke doth love me well,
For ich can bravely clout my shoone
And ich full well can ring a bell.
Across the centuries, you can hear them like long-lost cousins, deeply foreign, Germanic but, what is miraculous to me, knowing this place better than I do.
In return for protection and as a means of dominance, the de Saxinghersts would have imposed duties on the peasants who worked the land for them. It was a life of unremitting labour for the poor. They had to thresh the corn and cart the manure to the fields, maintain the lord’s buildings, collect the straw, deliver wood, provide men for the bakehouse, the kitchens and the brewhouse, make hazel hurdles for the sheepfold and then supervise the sheep when in it, fence off the young coppice woods from any marauding animals, mow, spread and lift the hay in the lord’s meadows, carry his letters, drive animals to other manors if required, drive pigs to the autumn pannage, collect the hens due from tenants, collect and carry the eggs, put their sheep into the lord’s fold by which the sheep manured the arable ground in the lord’s demesne, from which of course the lord would derive the benefit in the years to come.
The woods had shifted in purpose. In an increasingly populated world, the acorns and beechmast for pigs had become less valuable than timber and wood for people. The long story of coppice-with-standards, which came to dominate the Weald and the Sissinghurst woods, was in operation by the fourteenth century. The long-growing standard oaks provided the structural timber for buildings; the coppiced underwood the heating and fencing, faggots and tool handles, reinforcements for river banks and even beds for the poor. Woodland was worth about the same per acre as good arable ground, not as much as meadow, and over a coppice cycle, the value was not in the standard trees but in the repeated cropping of the underwood. It was a wood world: wooden shoes, wooden tools and instruments, wooden wheels and cogs for mills, wooden vehicles, wooden furniture, wooden houses, wooden heat, wooden shutters, wooden fencing, wooden hurdles. As late as the 1950s, the families who came from London to pick the Sissinghurst hops were given beds in their huts made of straw palliasses placed on an underlayer of hazel faggots from the wood. Mary Stearns has a wonderful photograph of her son James driving a trailer-load of them up the lane.
The great trees, which had originally been the source of the acorns and were often pollarded when young to produce a big head of acorn-bearing boughs, continued to belong to the landlords as a source of timber, even when the ground below the trees had been let to the tenants. The archbishop’s bailiffs were fiercely defensive of the trees their master owned, prosecuting the tenants of Bettenham and seven other dens in the early fourteenth century for cutting down an extraordinary six hundred oaks and beeches, forty of them at Bettenham. This was one of the longest-lasting customs of the Weald. Even in the leases drawn up for my grandmother in the twentieth century, that ancient practice continued. When the farm was let to Captain Beale in 1936, he agreed ‘to keep all hedges properly slashed laid and trimmed in a workmanlike manner according to the best practice known in the district and to use no wire or dead thorns for repairing any quick hedges’. All ‘timber and timberlike trees sellers and saplings’ were to remain Vita’s property and Captain Beale was to pay her five pounds for every tree or sapling he cut down.
In case this was still unclear, he agreed ‘to preserve all timber and other trees pollards and saplings underwood and live fences from injury and not to lop top or crop any of the timber timberlike trees or saplings likely to become timber’. Unknown to either of them, it was a form of agreement that was at least seven hundred years old when they made it.
Among the woods, in the fields, or at least on the drier ground at the top of the farm, the Kentish men and women living here, speaking in their strange half-Dutch, would have striven for survival. Medieval England had no root crops. It was a world without potatoes, turnips, swedes or parsnips. Instead, on the light land, they might have grown barley for brewing and as the staple for bread. On the best demesne lands wheat was grown for sale in markets (Cranbrook had one from 1289), but it is unlikely they would have grown it here. Instead, on the damp and heavy land they could have grown rye, which is drought-resistant and survives in dry years, and oats for animal fodder, which can tolerate wet and heavy soils. By the mid-thirteenth century, even here, legumes were being introduced: peas, beans and vetches to renew and refresh the soil, fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere as we now know, but then thought at least to be an improved version of a fallow, with the added benefit that stock could be turned into the pea or bean fields when they were ready. The yields were pitiful: for wheat you might harvest three grains for every one sown, spring barley 2.5 to one, oats maybe 3.5 to one. These figures meant that hunger stalked them. As the population grew and the poor soils were driven harder, they sank ever deeper into a fertility trap: not enough goodness going back into the soil, too much land going into feeding the draught animals on whose muscle power they depended, declining yields, more people, fewer nutrients per person. By the early fourteenth century, famine and chronic malnutrition prevailed across the whole of Europe. The Black Death arrived in the 1340s at a landscape and a population that were ready to welcome it.
In this system, nothing would have been more important than the draught animals. On the archbishop’s manor at Bexley in north Kent, there were 312 farmed acres, a little bigger than Sissinghurst, and on better land, but broadly comparable. There were two hundred ewes, all-purpose animals, from which milk, lambs, wool and skins for parchment could all be had. The sheep was the mainstay of mixed farming. Bexley also had twelve cows and a bull, but what is most surprising is the number of working animals, the tractors of the medieval enterprise: twenty plough animals, both oxen and horses, driven in teams of eight, often mixed, with one or two horses leading the ranks of oxen behind them, and sixteen draught oxen on top of that. They needed feeding, and of Bexley’s farmed area, very nearly a third, ninety-six acres, was devoted to meadow, to the grass on which these animals could survive.
Oxen were valuable: in 1264 four were sold at Bethersden for 7s 6d each. But meadows were more valuable still. They were richly treasured by the archbishop’s estate managers, and it seems as if archiepiscopal farms were focused entirely on the availability of meadowland. On the archbishop’s riverside estates at Westgate itself, outside Canterbury, at Otford, Maidstone and Charing, and even at the outlying den of Bettenham, which was still attached to Westgate, meadow looms large in the accounts. Rent for a well-watered meadow per acre was double the rent on arable land and perhaps three or four times as much as on ordinary pasture. Meadows meant riches: more hay, which allowed you to keep more stock, including more oxen and so more animal power to plough and harrow the land, more manure with which to enrich it, more cereal crops, more grains and more food. The meadow was the route to well-being.
The meadows at Sissinghurst have gone now but they continue to have a flickering ghost existence near by. The neighbouring meadows upstream have belonged to the Halls at Hammer Mill since the early twentieth century, but they certainly belonged to Sissinghurst in the Middle Ages and right up until 1903, or at least to its subsidiary manor of Copden in the wood beside them. They are there as a kind of reproach, still grassy, damp, alluring on a morning heavy with summer wetness, or in the dank and dusk of a winter evening when the mist drifts up out of them and the smell of the wind-blown apples in Mrs Hall’s orchard comes into your nostrils, musty and sweet. I have often been for late walks there, secretly, while the owls hoot in Floodgate Wood, beyond the banked leat that fringes the grass, and the lights in Hammer Mill Farm glow as yellow as apricots. If you can feel a lust for a kind of land, I feel it for those meadows, wanting more than anything else to return the Sissinghurst margins of the Hammer Brook to that condition. Instead, where our meadows once were, we have, at the moment, a dead and dreary arable field, which has suffered one cereal crop after another without break for years, where the soil itself is heavily compacted, and where in the winter the rain doesn’t soak into a delicious, light, open soil structure but lies on its surface in sad-eyed pools. Only the name of the field recalls what it once was: Frogmead, a damp and froggy place, along the banks of the meadow brook, a name redolent of everything a Wealden John Clare would have loved here, a kind of thick-pelted richness, with secrets buried inside it.
Frogmead is something of a test of Sissinghurst’s condition. It was once a marshland, a wet willow and alder wood. There are some heavy willow pollards and giant alder stools here by the stream, eight or nine feet across. The alders must be centuries old. Every year, they throw out vigorous, purple-budded seedlings into the edges of the arable crops, which survive until the summer when the combine shears them off an inch or two above the soil and the power harrow mashes their roots. Without that annual destruction, this would be a wet wood within a decade. The first settlers would have loved the prospect of lush meadowland and would have cleared the alder wood for the grass as soon as they arrived. Alder scarcely burns (I have tried: even after a year in the shed it moulders and hisses in the fireplace, giving out more damp smoke than any heat) but it looks good as furniture, and they could have turned cups and plates from it. Frogmead would then have remained an endlessly self-renewing meadow for centuries, perhaps even for thousands of years. It may have gone back to wet woodland at the end of the Roman period but the early English would have cleared it again, and hay crops would have been taken here throughout the Middle Ages and on until the nineteenth century. The hay for the great brick barns built at Sissinghurst in the sixteenth century would have come from these meadows, but in the 1860s the feeder channels bringing water into the meadowland were bridged over and filled in and a hop garden planted here. When the hops were abandoned in 1968, Frogmead became an arable field, which it has remained ever since. No hay comes off it any more and the barns remain empty from one year to the next. Frogmead’s story is Sissinghurst’s biography in miniature: after the Ice Age about eighty centuries of wild marsh, twenty of meadow to sustain this place, one of hops for the London thirst, and approaching half a century of subsidised cereals for a global market. Only in the wettest depths of the winter, when the Hammer Brook floods, and brown rivers of clay-thick water leak out over the fields, do you see again the old multiple beds of the meadow watercourses very lightly creased into the land, invisible when dry, but made apparent when the Hammer Brook once again reclaims its own. Knowing this and seeing this, on the maps and in the floods, I determined to persuade the Trust to restore the meadows that had been here for so long.
At the centre of the interlocked medieval world was the manor house and the high-gentry family to whom it all belonged. At some time towards the end of the thirteenth century, the line of the de Saxinghersts failed and they disappear from history. Their place was taken by the de Berhams, a family with other holdings in Kent, perhaps related to the de Saxinghersts by marriage and of great distinction. With them Sissinghurst achieved its late medieval flowering. They made this their principal seat and through them something of the quality of late medieval life can be felt here. It was still as remote a place as England knew. In 1260, Cranbrook church was described as being ‘in a wooded and desert part of the diocese through which the Archbishop has to pass and where no lodging can be found during a long day’s journey’. Even in midsummer, the roads were not clear. When the great warrior king Edward I came through the Weald in June 1299 (as he had two years before and would again almost at the end of his life in 1305), the royal exchequer issued ‘money paid by order of the King to seventeen guides leading the King when going on his journey’. He had been at Canterbury, had gone down to Dover, come back up to the great manor house at Wye and from there went on to the archbishop’s palace at Charing. He had with him his son, the fifteen-year-old Edward, soon to be Prince of Wales, and his grandson, the eight-year-old Gilbert de Clare, as well as the knights William de Bromfield and Nicholas de Chilham. It was a busy royal cavalcade, distributing four shillings a day in alms to the poor, accompanied by messengers sent off each evening on royal business. Edward had his cook and sauce-maker with him, as well as William de Rude, the King’s Foxhunter, and two helpers, all dressed in English russet, along with John de Bikenorre, keeper of the king’s hawks. Greyhounds, deerhounds, harriers and beagles accompanied the horsemen. It was a court on the road, all conducted in Norman French, buying parchments at twelve pence a dozen on which to draw up official documents, and paying wherever they went for horse fodder and harness, faggots and charcoal, as well as mountains of oxen, pigs, sheep, wine, swans, peacocks and ‘little trout’. In the middle of June, this busy and impressive party came down the old drove road from Charing, through Little Chart, past Smarden, and on the evening of 19 June 1299 arrived to spend the night at Sissinghurst.
Can one say what the king and his companions found there? Certainly a pious family of high status. The name of the bailiff employed by the de Berhams has survived: a man called Manger, the son of Elie Monmatre de Petham, whose high-class Norman-French name stands out from the Jutish-Friesian world in which they moved. One of the de Berhams was a major official of the archbishop’s office in Canterbury. Another was knighted. A third, Richard, became sheriff of Kent, the county’s chief law enforcement officer, married a Cranbrook girl, Constance Gibbon, and was one of the knights charged with command of the local militia. As well as Sissinghurst, he gathered estates on the Chart Hills, up the droveways in Charing and Pluckley, and was worth forty pounds a year.
A higher, finer version of the medieval world begins to emerge among the woods and fields. Among the de Berhams’ neighbours are people called Nicolas and Petronilla, Bertram and Benedicta. From the tiny Trinitarian friary at Mottenden near Headcorn (now a farm called Moatenden) they had two friars to celebrate mass in the Sissinghurst chapel, an arrangement made decades earlier by the de Saxinghersts. One or two manuscript books survive in the Bodleian in Oxford from the Mottenden Priory library – works on medieval logic and grammar – and it is not unreasonable to imagine that the visiting friars may have brought them here too. The friars assisted the chaplain, an employee of the family’s.
There is one document above all which for the first time brings to Sissinghurst a sense of the interiors and even of interior life. It is a will made by Elisia de Berham in April 1381, now in the National Archives. She was the mother of Richard, who was to become sheriff of Kent, and was clearly a cultivated woman of fine sensibilities and deep piety. She asked to be buried in Cranbrook church and left money for prayers to be said for her soul. The vicars of other churches on the edges of Romney Marsh received legacies from her, as did her chaplain at Sissinghurst, Robert Couert, the friars in Canterbury, and the Carmelite friars at a small friary at Lossenham near Newenden, which is now a farm. The friars and master at Mottenden, who would have known her well, all received money.
Once she had catered for her soul, Elisia Berham attended to those near her, perhaps those who had looked after her. For the first time, ordinary people living at Sissinghurst acquire their names. Robert Goldyng, Simon Addcock, Thomas Herth, Alice Addcok: small legacies of 6s 8d to each of them. Then the precious objects in her life:
To Johan Herst my daughter 10 marcs one of the best towels and a napkin. To Alice Creyse a blue bed and a saddle. To the wife of Thomas Hardregh a towel with napkin. To Elisia Addcok 10 marcs and a bed in which I lye with one ‘curtyn’ and over-cover and a casket with little garments (parvis velaminibus) within.
This is not a world of high luxury but one in which the lady of the house gives something she cherishes to the women with whom she has lived. Finally, and poignantly, to her son:
To Richard my son 10 marcs and a white bed complete and my Matins book and six silver spoons and one broken piece of silver, a good towel and napkin.
Here, then, is medieval Sissinghurst, a place not of riches but of great dignity, with precious beds in various rooms, some silver objects but not so many that a broken piece is not valued. This is a place both deeply engaged with the sanctified life of pre-Reformation England and somewhere that exudes its own kind of gracefulness and clarity. ‘A casket with little garments’ is a measure of its delicacy; ‘a white bed complete’ – with all its white hangings and white linen – a symbol of its virtue. Most striking of all is the phrase ‘my Matins book’. It means a Book of Hours, and a whole culture-world pours into Sissinghurst in the wake of those words.
The Book of Hours, also called ‘Our Lady’s Matins’, a primer or, as Elisia Berham terms it in her will, a matins book, was a selection of psalms, hymns and prayers, many dedicated to the Virgin, designed for intense and highly personal, often private, devotion. These books were precious objects, often the most valuable thing a person owned, finely bound, with illuminations painted in, closed with gold or silver clasps, sometimes enamelled, sometimes with their own protective ‘chemise’, to be handed down through the generations of a family, as here. They could be carried in a sleeve or tucked into a belt and were used most often in the privacy of a closet, or even a curtained bed. They were an aspect of what Eamon Duffy has called ‘the devout interiority’ of medieval religion, not in rivalry to the public devotions of the church, but complementary to them. The matins book is the religious equivalent of the lay world brought to mind by Elisia’s ‘white bed complete’ and ‘casket with little garments’, objects from a Sissinghurst suddenly awash with medieval purity.
The de Berhams certainly contributed to the beautification of Cranbrook church. Their arms, along with those of the archbishop and the de Bettenhams, are on the west face of the church tower. What this means, intriguingly, is that the wonderful distilled lucidity and simplicity of Elisia Berham’s will, its delicacy and distance, are almost exactly contemporary with the wild-green-men bosses in that church, which the de Berhams almost certainly helped pay for. But does that grinning, snake-mouthed wood god, and the dense mystery of the half-hidden wood bird, connect with ‘the white bed complete’ and Elisia’s treasured Book of Hours? Is that the combination which reveals the nature of medieval Sissinghurst, a refined world richly and deeply connected to the earlier and earthier presence which surrounded and enveloped it? I like to think so.
Nothing much survived from that moment. The two friaries were dissolved, Mottenden in 1536 and Lossenham in 1538. Their vestments, a chalice or two, the bells, the kitchen equipment and some of the friars’ hay was sold off and the land leased out. At Sissinghurst itself, the de Berhams lasted probably until the 1530s, when they sold up, no one knows why. It has often been written that they sold Sissinghurst in the 1490s but I can find no evidence of that. Only in 1533 did a newly rich family, the Bakers of Cranbrook, buy from them the manor of Sissinghurst and its lands, and with the Bakers Sissinghurst entered a new and dramatically different phase of its existence.
Almost nothing remains from the de Saxingherst – de Berham years beyond their beautiful memory. The moat, which now defines two sides of the orchard, is likely to be medieval in origin, even if adapted later. On an autumn day, its ‘black mirror of quiet water’, as Vita described it, is another of the places into which the acorns steadily fall. There is nothing to be seen above ground of the medieval house. The stone lip of a drain possibly connected to the well in the court of that house can still be found in the wall of the Moat Walk. That well, just outside the South Cottage, was excavated by George Neve, the farmer and amateur antiquarian, to a depth of thirty-five feet in the nineteenth century, when human remains were found in it. It has now disappeared, but instead Peter Rumley, a Kent archaeologist and building historian, has made a new suggestion: the timbered buildings visible in a drawing made by one of the officers guarding French prisoners here in the 1760s might in fact be the de Berhams’ medieval house, or at least an Elizabethan adaptation of it.
Big brick Elizabethan chimneys have been added to the timber frame, but the fretted bargeboards on the gables, the jettied-out upper storeys and the sense of accretion, of parts being added and adapted, as well as the close-studded oak timbers in the façades, all hint at this being a medieval building. In the washy pen and ink of a certain Captain Francis Grose, with the sentry boxes of the Hampshire militia in the foreground, this is probably as near as we can ever get to Sissinghurst before the Renaissance and its money changed it.