While John Leland (1503-1552) is regarded as the founder of the tradition of local history in England, his work had a national range. The work of the slightly later William Lambarde (1536-1601) focussed on Kent and contained far more in detail, as well as a richer description of local customs. His own plans to use the model he had pioneered for Kent, deploying detailed descriptions of the history of a locality, and then adorning it with information about specific places, buildings, customs and people never expanded beyond this first volume. He had been dissuaded from this larger ambition because of William Camben’s `Brittannia’, commenced in 1577, of which the first part, in Latin, was published in 1586, which had set itself the task of doing precisely the same thing. `
Lambarde’s `Perambulations of Kent’ was produced in manuscript form in 1570 and then printed in 1576. It remains a precious document, not just because of what it says about the social, political and physical status of the county in the midst of the Tudor era, but because of the lively and engaged way in which it is written. It can also be cited as important evidence of the establishment, or reinforcement, of stories or narratives about Kentish history and their connection to national, and English, identity. In the introductory `The Estate of Kent’ he comments this narrativization, talking of `Kent which we have in hand, was the first inhabited part of all this our iland’ (Lambarde, `Perambulations’ Adams and Dart, Bath, 1970 edition, 10). On the connection with the continent, he says, `there was an istmus (or bridge of lande) by which there was passage on foote to and fro between Fraunce and us, although the sea hath silence freeted the same in sunder’ (11). Here one can find the same story that is found in Gildas’s sixth century, highly contested manuscript, `The Ruin of Britain’ – of `Vortiger, their king.. compelled to invite for aide the Saxons, Jutes and Angles, three sorts of Germane nation’ who `instead of doing that which they came for, and of delivering the Britaines from their former oppression, joyned with their enemies… and brought upon them a more grevevous calamity and conquest, subduing the people, suppressing religion, and departing (in manner) the whole land among themselves’ (12).
This history is now written differently, simply because of the wealth of archaeological detail that has been uncovered, particularly in the last half a century. In her superb history of the collapse of the Roman rule over Britain from the start of the fifth century and the rise of the separate kingdoms from the sixth, Robin Fleming talks of the material record in well settled and studied places like Canterbury showing severe economic decline before their slow regeneration. `By 420,’ she writes, `Britain’s villas had been abandoned. Its towns were mostly empty, its organized industries dead, its connections with the larger Roman world severed; and all with hardly an Angle or a Saxon in sight’ (`Britain After Rome 400-1070’, Allen Lane, London, 2010, 29). Her picture of the piecemeal and confusing domestic and external migration patterns during what came subsequently to be called the `Dark Ages’ lacks the dramatic neatness of the more traditional story conveyed by Lambarde and others of conquest and settlement by those from the European mainland. Even so, albeit in utterly different ways, she, Lambarde and Gildas do testify to a period of trauma, one that has left a long and haunting memory stain till today – and which poses questions about what happened, to whom, and how, over this much discussed and persistently elusive period.
Lambarde writes that in Kent the `yeomanrie, or common people… is no where more free, and jolly, then in this shyre for they themselves say in a clayme… that the communitie of Kent was never vanquished by the Conqueror, but yeelded itself by composition’ (7). This is a neat way to talk of tactical surrender! In talking of Romney Marsh (as `Rumney’) he refers to the way in which work farming there leads to wealth but in an unideal physical environment – `good grasse under foot..[no] wholesome Aire above the head.’ Kent, it seems, has three ways of living: `the first… offreth Wealth without health; the second giveth both Wealth and health; and the thirde affoordeth Health onely, and little or no Wealth’ (181).
Lambarde was a native of London. His father was a draper, and served as the master of the Drapers Company in the city. After entering Lincolns Inn in 1556 to study law, he lived for a while at the Manor of St Clere in Ightam, before settling in Greenwich. Initially buried in the parish church there, his body was later re-interred in the family burial place at St Nicholas, Sevenoaks.