The epic `History and Topographical Survey of Kent’ published in 12 volumes between 1778 and 1799 by the antiquarian Edward Hasted (1732-1812) remains one of the most thorough, and impressive, ever produced in any language for a specific place. The level of detail, not just from documentary study but also in terms of the physical layout of the country and its human and natural geography, marks the work out as unique. This is one example from that for the small village of Hunton near Maidstone:
`That part of this parish below the hill, from the nature of its deep clay soil, is very miry in wet weather, whilst, like the rest of the Weald, in hot and dry weather, it becomes a hard cakey or panny surface, which resists every impression; of course the opportunity for the tillage of it, whilst in an intermediate state, must not be neglected, left the possibility of a season be lost. It is very kindly for wheat, of which it produces, especially when manured with marle or chalk, which is brought from the further ridge of hills, at nine or ten miles distance, very good crops, of near three seams an acre; the whole of it abounds with broad hedge rows, in which are numbers of fine spreading oaks of a large size, which though very profitable to the owner, are exceeding prejudicial to the occupier and his crops of corn. To the sight this country is a beautiful prospect, but to the traveller and resident, it is in wet weather almost impassable, and in the drought of summer from the heat arising from the soil, the reflection of the sun beams, and the quantity of large buzzing flies which continually assault you from their haunts among the oak branches, it is most disagreeable and unpleasant to the extreme, the only exception being when you are stationary under the thick shade of a spreading oak.’ (`History and Topographical Survey of Kent’, Volume Five, Canterbury, 1798, 147. The full set of the Hasted work sells for upwards of £3000 today, but their text, well presented and edited, is available at the excellent British History online website, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/search/series/survey-kent)
For every conceivable place in the county, Hasted was able to supply this level of detail, showing that he had experienced these places in the flesh, rather than read and known about them from a distance.
Hasted’s family background was an affluent one. He was born in London, the son of Edward and Ann Tyler, who had estates at Sutton-at-Hone near Dartford. His maternal grandfather Joseph was chief painter at Chatham dockyards, but also a skilled financier, meaning that the family had inherited means. Hasted junior was educated at the King’s School, Rochester, and then at Eton. While he studied at Lincoln’s Inn, he did not enter the bar. Instead, on the death of his father in 1755 he moved back to Kent, and married Anne Dorman, the daughter of a neighbour. It was while living at the Knight’s Hospitaller Manor House of St John’s Jerusalem, a partially 13th century building which is today owned by the National Trust which Hasted had purchased the year of his marriage that he started writing his huge work. He moved to Canterbury in 1770 to a series of properties, most of which are no longer extant (see http://www.canterbury-archaeology.org.uk/hasted/4590809496 for a listing of these). It was here that his three sons attended the King’s School in the city.
Up to this point, his life on the surface epitomised the country gentleman of independent means. There were, however, clear darker undercurrents visible from early on. His mother had forcefully opposed his marriage and had not attended his wending. His purchase of the manor house and the refurbishments had led to his running up significant debts which resulted in his eventual bankruptcy in 1796. Perhaps most startling of all was his decision to leave his wife for another woman in 1790, and move to Northern France. Here he lived until the Napoleonic Wars forced his return to Britain in 1802. He spent his final years in poverty, until he was granted the mastership of Lady Hungerford’s Alms houses in Corsham, Wiltshire in 1807.
This is not the biography one would expect from the stolid, thick volumes of this work. But as the excerpt for the entry on Hunton quoted above shows,this work was more human than the somewhat intimidating image it projects. His is buried in an unmarked grave in Corsham.