Old Kent roads
JOHN WOODFORDE
A Perambulation of Kent William Lam- barde (Adams and Dart 70s)
This new version of Lambarde's book on Kent, originally published in 1570, is a facsimile reprint of the edition of 1826—an edition which appears, from the style, to follow closely that of the sixteenth century. Robustly produced on good paper, it makes a chunky volume in which students of history will find plenty of usable material.
William Lambarde was a lawyer and like John Donne, a colleague of his, he had a gift for writing; despite the convention of his time for elaborate prose construction, what he wrote down in the early years of Elizabeth I remains easy to follow. He was an early exponent, as Richard Church observes in his introduction, of the 'august art-cum-science known as History'. He was prepared to pause by the roadside to look and count, and to question people met there; he also went out of his way to collect in- numerable sober facts for descriptions of the 'severall Regiments, Bishops Sees, Lasts . . . Castles, Religious Houses, and Schools; the Portes, Havens, Rivers, Waters and Bridges'.
People acquainted with Kent will go first for the index, here called 'The Table', where numerous familiar towns and villages appear in unfamiliar spellings like 'Maydstone' and 'Dee'. For most, though, the list will have curious omissions. And why is there no men- tion of Boughton Malherbe, the village, still intact today, of which Lambarde's patron, Sir Thomas Wotton, was the squire? But probably he had a reason. for leaving it out (discouraging tourism?) and a reason, too, for including, as entry number one, 'Adulterie, how punished, 202' in an index which otherwise scarcely touches on anything but proper names.
But this nicely freshened-up Lam- barde—with a delightful old map of Kent as a dust-jacket—is more than a book of travel- guide curiosities and of source material for the historian. It could give lasting service as a bedside book—especially, of course, in the guest rooms of those who live in Kent: Lambarde's prose and the passage of exactly four centuries have invested much of the book with a pleasantly soporific quality. The present reviewer recommends a section called 'Customes of Kent' and another about the inhabitants which begins: 'The people of this countrie, consisteth chiefly (as in other countries also) of the gentrie, and the yeorrianrie, of which the first be for the most parte governors, and the other altogether governed In our review of Glick O'Connor's 'Bren- dan Behan' last week the price was mis- quoted as 50s, instead of 42s.
Previous page
