Stories from the ledger stones
For anyone interested in researching their family history, the heraldic ledger stones found in Kent’s churches can be an abundant source of information.
The ledger stones were often favoured by middle-class families who wanted to bury their dead beneath church floors, near the more grandiose memorials erected by their wealthier fellow parishioners.
The practice peaked in the 18th century and ceased in the 1850s when burials within churches, except in existing family vaults, were banned.
In Kent, a typical ledger stone is cut from bluish-black Belgian limestone and often decorated with the deceased’s coat of arms carved into a roundel above an epitaph detailing the date of death, age, spouse, children, occupation and other information of vital interest to today’s family history enthusiasts and professional genealogists.
Unfortunately, over the decades the footfall from thousands of churchgoers walking over them has often worn away the inscriptions, making them illegible.
Others have been damaged during restoration work or become inaccessible under new pews or flooring.
Fortunately, earlier researchers surveyed many of the stones when they were still in good condition, and members of the Kent Archaeological Society (KAS) have now come to the rescue by gathering their findings and putting details online for easy public access and to ensure their preservation.
The project includes information from hundreds of ledger stones across the county, including those in Rochester and Canterbury cathedrals, in All Saints Maidstone, All Saints Hollingbourne, St Lawrence Hawkhurst, St Peter’s Pembury, St Mildred’s Tenterden, St Mary’s West Malling and St Dunstan’s West Peckham.
Among the more unusual stones recorded was one to Daniel Skynner, grandfather of Samuel Pepys’s mistress Mary Skinner.
One of the oldest was to Richard Watts, the Rochester philanthropist who died in 1579 after establishing the almshouses there that were later to feature in Dickens’s short story The Seven Poor Travellers. In 1979, they were opened as a museum.
The KAS researchers, who included Ted Connell, Ann Pinder and Pat Tritton from Loose, used surveys carried out by pioneer antiquarians, including records more than 250 years old, dating from 1756, when the Rev Bryan Faussett became curate of St Giles, Kingston, near Canterbury.
Faussett’s own life was interesting in itself. Before he was ordained in 1746, he was accused while a student at Oxford of “not being a person of a chaste and virtuous life”.
In particular he was found “having criminal intercourse with a strumpet” and of “harbouring a prostitute in his chambers”.
Faussett later gave up the wild life for archaeology, amassing what was then the world’s greatest collection of Anglo-Saxon jewellery and antiquities.
He spent four years recording the inscriptions on hundreds of ledger stones in four leather-bound volumes that he deposited at the Society of Antiquaries in London.
His own resting place is marked by a ledger stone inside St Mary’s Church, Nackington, near Canterbury.
One of the stones featured belongs to Margaret Greenhill and it can be seen in the floor of St George’s Tower, Canterbury.
The tower is all that remains of the medieval parish church of St George the Martyr, gutted by fire during the Blitz in 1942.
Margaret died in January 1753, aged 93, and in her will asked to be “decently interred in the parish church of St George... as near as conveniently may be to the grave where my late husband lies buried, and that a handsome marble stone of the price of £10 (about £2,000 in today’s money) be laid over my grave.”
To see the KAS research free of charge, visit tinyurl.com/ LedgerStones