Weald - History

History

Some of the following notes in the early part of this section are taken from the High Weald website.

Prehistoric evidence suggests that, following after the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, the Neolithic inhabitants had turned to farming, with the resultant clearance of the forest. With the Iron Age came the first use of the Weald as an industrial area. Wealden sandstones contain ironstone, and with the additional presence of large amounts of timber for making charcoal for fuel, the area was the centre of the Wealden iron industry from then, through the Roman times, until the last forge was closed in 1813. The index to the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain lists 33 iron mines; 67 per cent of these are in the Weald.

The entire Weald was originally heavily forested. According to the ninth century Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the Weald measured 120 mi (193 km) or longer by 30 mi (48 km) in the Saxon era, stretching from Lympne, near Romney Marsh in Kent, to the Forest of Bere or even the New Forest in Hampshire. The area was sparsely inhabited and inhospitable, being used mainly as a resource by people living on its fringes, much as in other places in Britain such as Dartmoor, the Fens and the Forest of Arden. The Weald was used for centuries, possibly since the Iron Age, for transhumance of animals along droveways in the summer months. Over the centuries deforestation for the shipbuilding, charcoal, forest glass, and brickmaking industries has left the Low Weald with only remnants of that woodland cover.

While most of the Weald was used for transhumance by communities at the edge of the Weald, several parts of the forest on the higher ridges in the interior seem to have been used for hunting by the kings of Sussex. The pattern of droveways which occurs across the rest of the Weald is absent from these areas. These areas include St Leonard's Forest, Worth Forest, Ashdown Forest and Dallington Forest.

The forests of the Weald were often used as a place of refuge and sanctuary. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates events during the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Sussex when the native Britons (whom the Anglo-Saxons called Welsh) were driven from the coastal towns into the recesses of the forest for sanctuary, viz;

"A.D. 477. This year came Ælle to Britain, with his three sons, Cymen, and Wlenking, and Cissa, in three ships; landing at a place that is called Cymenshore. There they slew many of the Welsh; and some in flight they drove into the wood that is called Andred'sley."

Until the Late Middle Ages the forest was a notorious hiding place for bandits, highwaymen and outlaws.

Settlements on the Weald are widely scattered. Villages evolved from small settlements in the woods, typically four to five miles apart; close enough to be an easy walk but not so close as to encourage unnecessary intrusion. Few of the settlements are mentioned in the Domesday Book however Goudhurst's church dates from the early 12th Century or before and Wadhurst was of a sufficient size by the mid thirteenth century to be granted a royal charter permitting a market to be held. Before this time, the Weald was used as summer grazing land, particularly for pannage by communities living in the surrounding areas. Many places within the Weald have retained names from this time, linking them to the original communities by the addition of the suffix "-den" – for example Tenterden was the area used by the people of Thanet. Permanent settlements in much of the Weald developed much later than in other parts of lowland Britain, although there were as many as one hundred furnaces and forges operating by the later 16th century, employing large numbers of people.

In the first edition of On The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin used an estimate for the erosion of the chalk, sandstone and clay strata of the Weald in his theory of natural selection. Charles Darwin was a follower of Lyell's theory of uniformitarianism and decided to expand upon Lyell’s theory with a quantitative estimate to determine if there was enough time in the history of the earth to uphold his principles of evolution. He assumed the rate of erosion was around 0.5-inch (13 mm) per century and calculated the age of the Weald at around 300 million years. Were that true, he reasoned, the earth itself must be much older. In 1862, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) published a paper 'On the age of the sun's heat' in which, unaware of the process of solar fusion, he calculated the sun had been burning for less than a million years, and put the outside limit of the age of the earth at 200 million years. Based on these estimates he denounced Darwin's geological estimates as imprecise. Darwin saw Lord Kelvin's calculation as one of the most serious criticisms to his theory and removed his calculations on the Weald from the third edition of On the Origin of Species.

Modern methods show the Weald to be between 20 and 30 million years old, with the earth at about 4,600 million years.