History
Holy Cross Church is located on Church Lane to the south of the green. A fair used to be held here on Holy Cross Day, an ancient festival traced back to 335 AD when the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in Jerusalem. The dedication to Holy Cross appears to have been a relatively popular one for pre-Conquest foundations. It is a Grade I listed building. Its stone arch is partially Saxon, embedded with later work. On three corners of the tower are stone beasts. Many books on Kent describe the animals on the tower as bears, and say these represent the name of the village.
Hasted‟s History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent: Volume 5 (1798) reveals that the Anglo-Saxon name for the settlement was “Bergestede”, meaning “place on the hill/barrow”; other accounts refer to its earlier names as “Berghamstyde” and “Berghstede”. If the “Bergh” element does refer to a barrow (burial mound), this may be indicative of a church being sited on a previously revered site, in accordance with the advice of Pope Gregory to St. Augustine in 601 AD, which raises the possibility of this being a particularly early church site. It is possible that Bearsted is the “Berghamstyde” at which King Wihtred of Kent held a Council in 696AD and where he issued laws which are amongst the earliest of the Saxon written law codes.
The Green was known as the Hothe and used as common land and from the 15th to 17th centuries, a number of the buildings which provide The Green‟s historical character were built.
Read more about this topic: Bearsted
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)