A Short History of the Village
By Joy Saynor
By Joy Saynor
For more than a thousand years, the names of our village and river have reminded us of the two groups of peoples who created the settlement at this position in the valley. It was the Celts who named the river Derwen, still the modern Welsh word for oak tree, as oaks grew thickly on its banks. The Romans Latinised it to Derventio and the succeeding English tribes to Darent. The fifth century English farmers, as they surveyed the high slopes to the east and west, called their new settlement “Scorham”, or “settlement at the steep slope”.
Today it appears that the four centuries of Roman occupation from AD 43 to 410 left only a fragmentary bath block in a field near Mill House, the Darent having washed away the rest of the villa many years ago, but the house church in the Lullingstone villa and Chi Rho monograms at Otford mark the beginning of continual Christian worship in our area. It is considered that, even during the age of pagan English conquest, belief continued. For when St Augustine sent missionaries from Canterbury to west Kent in the early seventh century, he established them at Preston, the “priest’s homestead”, to the north of Shoreham.
From Preston, 34 parishes – from Bexley to the banks of the Medway – were converted and a Deanery of Shoreham came into being. Close by, what is the earliest part of our churchyard was consecrated, some years before the first wooden church was built.
Shoreham cannot be found in the great Domesday Survey of 1086: it was part of the large manor of Otford, gifted to successive archbishops two centuries before. So until 1537, when Archbishop Cranmer was “persuaded” by Henry VIII to surrender it to him, monies from Shoreham’s profitable agriculture were dispatched to Canterbury. But towards the end of the Middle Ages local farmers were beginning to prosper. At Filston, a fashionable moat was constructed; Preston was becoming a gentry seat; while Castle Farm, for centuries to come, was referred to as “the manor of Castle Farm”. The village itself had begun to build Wealden hall houses for its wealthier peasants, such as Ivy Cottage, April Cottage and Holly Place, and the church threw out a large south aisle.
From the 15th century, our gentry families have come from outside our immediate area: first the Polhills from Detling, living at Preston for 200 years; then two London lawyers, the second of whom, John Borrett, built his “elegant Palladian villa” on the Shoreham Place site; and then the unsympathetic Sir Walter Stirling. Best remembered, for bringing Shoreham into the modern era, were four generations of the Mildmay family, whose main estate was at Flete in Devon.
The 19th century population grew from 828 to more than 2,000, aided by the growing paper mill, for whose workers Crown Road was constructed. But workers on the farms suffered in two agricultural depressions. Several Shoreham men were accused of rick-burning in the parish in 1830, at the time when Samuel Palmer was creating his visionary paintings of rural peace and plenty.
Agriculture was changing – now more hops and fruit were added to the variety of crops grown – and the arrival of the railway in the 1860s ended the isolation of the village. Yet life and work remained much as it had for a thousand years. Only after 1945 did the old pattern come to an end, as tractors took over from horses and Shoreham ceased to be an estate village with the death of the last Lord Mildmay in 1950.
At least 33 men from Shoreham died in the 1914-18 War, and the great chalk Cross was cut into the western hill in 1920 to commemorate them. In the Second World War, large numbers of munitions were dropped on and around the village by German planes travelling to and from London, causing civilian deaths, while “flying bombs” caused further damage. Shoreham was described by the BBC as “the most heavily bombed parish in a rural area” anywhere in Britain.
The detailed records we have of that time tell of a community surviving stronger and less socially stratified than before. This local spirit of determination was still alive more than 30 years later when villagers took on road planners over the route of the M25 motorway. Its course could not be stopped but a concerted campaign led to it being modified, and the village’s sense of “cosy, quiet antiquity” known to Samuel Palmer in the 1820s and 1830s was in large measure preserved.
Joy Saynor (1926-2014) was President of the Shoreham and District Historical Society and co-author, with Malcolm White, of the book “Shoreham: A Village in Kent”.