Ashford
Ashford can be found nestling within the heart of the Garden of England and despite its rural location it is one of the fastest growing towns in the South East. This is in part due to an excellent railway and motorway network ensuring that Europe’s major cities are close at hand via Eurostar, with London a mere 40 minutes away. Although essentially a modern town with three contemporary shopping centres; at its heart can be found reminders of its earlier life as a rural market town. Half timbered medieval buildings surround the church and line the well named Middle Row.
The little settlement of Ashford evolved on the fringes of a dense oak and beech forest known as Andredswald by the Saxons and Anderida by the Romans. This huge dense forest covered much of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey just touching Hampshire. Despite the fact that the Romans managed to make some inroads through the woodland it was a dangerous place to be!
The Venerable Bede, writing in 731, spoke of a range of wildlife that inhabited the forest from wildcats to wolves and bears. Many of the ships built in Deptford were made of oak from woodland around Forest Hill in London all of which were at one time part of the forest of Andredswald.
The original Jutish settlers tended to live in small farmsteads and this settlement was probably an offshoot from the much larger Great Chart. The settlers would have made good use of the forest, feeding their pigs on acorns which littered the floor to the wood which was used to build their homes and as fuel for fires. The name of Ashford or “Essetesford” as it was once known is thought to mean “ash trees growing near a ford” in old English.” Eshe or Eshet “was the old name for the tributary of the River Stour over which the ford crossed.
It must have grown quite rapidly because it is listed in the Domesday Book, compiled during the reign of William the Conqueror, as having a church and two mills with a high taxable value. By the 13th century Ashford had become a small market town. A town in those days need permission to hold a market as they were very lucrative and Ashford was granted its charter in 1243. In 1348 the charter was renewed and the town of Ashford was granted the additional rights for two fairs. It was around this time that two subjects of major significance for the country as a whole evolved, one being Lollardism and the other the Wars of the Roses, the later lasted for one hundred years but Lollardism although it went far beyond the teachings of the Anglican Church accepted by Elizabeth I still reflected some of its values.
For their time Lollards were thought to be heretical but if you look at what they believed a lot would seem common sense nowadays!
- The pope shouldn’t be involved in worldly affairs
- The Bible should be available to everyone in their own language
- As human beings we are all brothers or sisters!
These beliefs seem quite mundane now but back then they were considered anarchistic. The church was particularly upset because Lollards believed that it should give up its wealth and all of the advantages that it had acquired. Lollardism was also seen as a threat to the social order but that didn’t stop several members of the nobility from joining the cause. Amongst these were Sir William Neville, Sir John Montague, Sir William Beauchamp and the “Fair Maid of Kent” Joan, wife of the Black Prince. All of the nobles were protected from the church by the Black Prince, the heir of Edward III and John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son and eventual guardian of Richard II.
Lollardism was the creation of John Wycliffe, both he and his followers were to become the first critics of the church since its arrival on these shores with Augustine in the 6th century. Their name was derived from the medieval Dutch words meaning 'to mutter,' which was their way of worship! The term was first used by a Cistercian monk, Henry Crumpe. The majority of Lollards lived in the south of the country, in Kent, Essex, London, Bristol and East Anglia but there were groups as far north as Newcastle.
The tolerance shown by King Edward’s sons didn’t continue after their deaths and a number were burnt at the stake, even in Ashford a man named John Brown was martyred in 1517. This Lollard martyr was followed during the reign of Queen Mary by five Protestant men from Ashford and two from Tenterden, all burnt for their beliefs
John Wycliffe’s movement was to fail because of several factors, the most important being the limited literacy of the population in the 14th century.
Despite the martyrs and all of the religious upheaval Ashford continued to thrive as a market town and as a result of its financial success a Grammar School was founded in 1635.
copyright© Wendy Stevenson 2011
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