Sarah Stanley ACR, Service Manager, writes: During 2022 the Kent Archives service acquired, thanks to a generous grant from the FNL, a collection of Kent charters collected by Thomas Godfrey-Faussett, auditor to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury from 1866, who must have purchased them at one of the sales of Dering family muniments. The charters (U4283) once formed part of the vast collection assembled at the Derings’ seat of Surrenden, Pluckley, until it was split up and dispersed by auction from 1853 onwards. They bear the unmistakeable traces of the leading Kent MP, religious controversialist, and acquisitive antiquarian, Sir Edward Dering, 1st baronet (1598-1644).
Kent History and Library Centre (KHLC), formerly the Kent Archives Office (KAO), has collected both such archives of the Dering family as they retained into the 20th century, and as many as possible of those manuscripts which they had collected through their antiquarian interests. From the 1940s onwards the Historic Manuscripts Commission assisted the KAO to bring back together those dispersed groups which had not already found their way to national repositories. Individual items once within the collection were also donated, the charter of King Wihtred of Kent being the most famous.
The first group of 36 charters, obviously derived from the core of the Derings’ own family archive, record property transactions between 1290 and 1469 in the parishes of Pluckley and Little Chart, where they owned land. Their place and personal names are underlined in red ink, characteristic of Sir Edward Dering, and are endorsed with numerical references in violet ink indicating inclusion in the large sale of Dering documents at Puttick and Simpson on 13 July 1865; in this respect they resemble annotations on other Dering charters at KHLC, in (among others) collections U350 and U1823. A second group of 49 charters ranges into East Kent, particularly the parishes of Upper and Lower Hardres. More consciously ‘collected’, many of these bear Sir Edward’s characteristic notations on the reverse.
The collections at Surrenden acquired a legendary status for antiquarians. They were seen as holding special value for indicating how land was dispersed among the gentry and yeomanry of medieval Kent, and thus for wider insights into distinctive Kentish patterns of landholding and tenure. Their date range, on either side of the Black Death, might enable us to see its effects upon those landholding patterns. Before they were dispersed, the antiquarian Lambert Larking, a founder member of the Kent Archaeological Society, undertook transcriptions and notes from as much of the Surrenden collections as he could. These, now divided between the British Library and 15 volumes in the Maidstone Museum collection at KHLC (U1823/14) themselves attract the interest of professional genealogists today, seeking first-hand evidence to set aside doubtful theories about family descent and relationships within the landowning class. Yet even Larking’s industry was sufficient only to transcribe a fraction of the charters at Surrenden, so we are indebted to FNL for allowing us to restore a further part of the original Dering collection.
This accession formed a focal point in a conference about Sir Edward Dering planned with Dr David Rundle of the University of Kent that was held in May 2023.
Gorringe's (8 March, Lots 79 and 80).
