From: Paul Tritton, Hon. Press Officer
Email: paul.tritton@btinternet.com.
Tel: 01622 741198
ISSUED JANUARY 29 2015
Conference on ‘New directions in Kent history’
One of Kent’s most eminent local historians will be remembered at a conference in Canterbury in March.
Joan Thirsk CBE (pictured above), who lived at Hadlow Castle, Tonbridge, became a historian after working in the
Intelligence Service at Bletchley Park in WW2.
She was a past president of both the Tonbridge Historical Society and the Kent History Federation and
specialized in researching and publishing the history of farming, food production and life in rural Kent. One of
her last books, published a few years before she died in 2013, aged 91, was a history of Hadlow in 1450 - 1600.
The conference, ‘New directions in Kent history’, will review progress that has been made since Joan died into
subjects close to her heart during her time in Kent and before that in Oxford and Leicester, and will be hosted by
the Kent Archaeological Society, Canterbury Christ Church University’s Centre for Regional Kent History and
Agriculture, and the Historical Association.
The speakers and their subjects will be: Duncan Harrington (education in Faversham), Sandra Dunster (Chatham
Market), Dr Lorraine Flisher (clothiers of the Weald), Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh (‘an imaginary tour of Sir Peter
Buck’s house’, aka Eastgate House, Rochester), Dr Susan Pittman (deer poaching in Elizabethan and Jacobean
Kent), Dr Paula Simpson (Kent tithe disputes), Dr Claire Bartram (agricultural texts and authors) and Dr Andy
Kesson (‘Canterbury onstage and backstage at London playhouses’).
The conference will be held at the Old Sessions House, Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, on
Saturday 28 March. Admission: £18.
Tickets from Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh ( sheila.sweetinburgh@canterbury.ac.uk )
For further information visit the Events page at http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk
Note to editor: details of speakers and their subjects below.
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Duncan Harrington will discuss the early history of schooling in Faversham in a talk spanning several centuries
to the foundation of the Free Grammar School by Queen Elizabeth I.
‘We will see that once the town saw what it was to have such elementary education in the town, the authorities
would not rest until its loss, at the dissolution, had been restored’, he said.
Duncan has been researching Faversham Records for several years and his recent publications include ‘The Early
Town Books of Faversham c. 1251 to 1581’ (2008) and ‘Faversham Abbey: Collections towards a History’ (2014).
As editor of the Kent Records New Series he is currently completing the ‘Feet of Fines for Edward III’, part of
which is available on the KAS website together with Kent Feet of Fines for other reigns.
Dr Lorraine Flisher writes: ‘In the seventeenth century the market town of Cranbrook in Kent was the centre of
the Kentish broadcloth industry. Within the Wealden wood-pasture countryside, a capitalist clothier elite
supported a large, economically dependent rural labour force through the development of cloth manufacture
and agriculture. My paper will explore aspects of economic activity and religious pressure in the early
seventeenth century, which demanded an entrepreneurial response from Cranbrook’s inhabitants, and led
some to migrate to the New World in search of religious freedom and economic opportunities.
Lorraine (pictured above) graduated from Canterbury Christ Church University with a BA (Hons) 1st Class degree
in 1998. She went on to study for a PhD in History and completed her doctoral thesis on ‘Cranbrook, Kent and its
Neighbourhood area, 1570-1660’ in 2003. She has contributed to the publication of ‘Folkestone to 1500: A Town
Unearthed’ (2013) and published ‘The Demise of the Kent Broadcloth Industry in the Seventeenth Century:
England’s First De-Industrialisation’ in Archaeologia Cantiana (2009).
A sessional lecturer at CCCU, she is currently researching an article on ‘Radical Religion and Politics in Cranbrook,
Kent during the English Civil War’. Since 2003 she has also been employed as a civil servant and currently works
for the Competition and Markets Authority where she specialises in policy research for advocacy and market
investigations.
Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh writes: ‘My paper will draw on the detailed archaeological survey of Eastgate House
conducted by Rupert Austin of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, my documentary research into the house’s
history, and the works of scholars such as Dr Catherine Richardson and Dr Tara Hamling on the early modern
household and its furnishings.
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‘As the new home of Sir Peter Buck in the early 17th century, Eastgate House must have been well known within
the locality. By exploring how it may have been furnished and used it may be possible to gain insights into
domestic culture among the early modern gentry’.
Sheila (pictured above) is a Senior Research Fellow at Canterbury Christ Church University, and also an Associate
Lecturer there and at the University of Kent in the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She published
a monograph on English medieval hospitals a decade ago, has edited two collections of essays including ‘Later
Medieval Kent’ as part of the Kent History Project and has published numerous articles on medieval and early
modern social and cultural history, using Kentish case studies.
Apart from her other commitments, she is currently exploring the local taxation records for Hythe to investigate
household production and consumption in late medieval urban society.
Dr Susan Pittman B.A. (Hons), M.A., Ph.D.; writes: ‘My talk will be the first attempt to describe the role of the
deer-keeper, in particular concentrating on the dilemma he faced in enforcing elitist laws covering hunting, deer
and parks, which were widely unpopular. The deer-keeper faced challenges to his authority from the lowlier
strata in society and from those below the upper echelons, who were denied the right to hunt. I will discuss the
factors that were likely to encourage him to remain loyal to the park owner, and those which led him to give
way to local pressure’.
After early retirement Susan was awarded a M.A. in Medieval Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
During her lifelong interest in Kent she has focused since the 1970s on Crockenhill and Lullingstone, and on
landscape history, especially of deer parks, having published booklets on Lullingstone Park, Kent, and
Kerrybullock Park, Cornwall. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2011, covered Kentish deer parks from 1558 to
1625.
Dr Paula Simpson writes: ‘My paper will consider petty acts of resistance to the system of tithe payment in the
sixteenth century. Though these forms of resistance took many forms and occurred in many different arenas, I
will concentrate on resistance at harvest time’.
Paula completed her PhD at the University of Kent in 1997. She then worked as a Research Associate on the
Taxation Project at the University of Manchester and is currently employed by Trinity College, Cambridge on
their project to digitise and make publicly available the medieval manuscripts owned by the Wren Library. Her
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publications include ‘The Continuum of Resistance to Tithe, c. 1400-1600’ in Pieties in Transition; ‘E. Salter
Ashgate’ (2007); and ‘The Skin of the Unjust Judge: Negotiating the Political in Early Modern Canterbury’.
Dr Claire Bartram writes: ‘My paper revisits Joan Thirsk’s work on agricultural texts. She was among the first to
promote the rich potential of this kind of practical literature and it remains an understudied area of scholarship.
Taking Kent as its focus, my paper considers a number of Elizabethan print and manuscript works including
Barnabe Googe’s translation of Heresbach’s ‘Four Books of Husbandrie’ and Reginald Scot’s ‘Pefite Platforme of
a Hoppe Garden’. It explores what these works reveal about the book as a mechanism for social interaction in
provincial society and how these writings promoted spiritual and social reform at a local level that responded to
nationalist imperatives apparent in the period.
Claire (pictured below) is a Senior Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her
research focuses on book history and she is particularly interested in the role of texts and the place of the writer
in early modern provincial society. Her forthcoming edited collection of essays ‘Book Culture in Provincial Society: Texts, Authors and Communities in Kent c.1400-1700’ includes chapters on the literate practices of mariners,
strangers, monks and clergy daughters, and seeks to challenge and re-complicate the perception of the cultural
dominance of the gentry in the county.
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