KENT

WILLIAM Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1576, new edn R. Church, 1970), is the earliest published history of any English county and is still of some value. Two centuries later, Edward Hasted, A History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, was a four-volume work, issued in 1778–99, and much revised for the second edition in twelve volumes, 1797–1801 (reprinted 1972). It is a mine of information and the bedrock of subsequent Kentish studies. It also stifled subsequent historical research.

The Victoria County History for Kent has never progressed beyond three early volumes (1908–32) and no further volumes are planned. A multi-volume history of Kent has been promised by the Kent History Project, established in 1989, but only one title, on the seventeenth century, has yet seen the light of day. In the meantime, F. Jessup, A History of Kent (1974) and C. Wright, Kent Through the Years (1975), provide brief surveys, while P. Brandon and B. Short, The South-East from A.D. 1000 (1990), cover London south of the Thames as well as Kent, Surrey, and Sussex. Kent has no record society, adding to the problems awaiting the recorder(s) of its historical development, but the archive repository at Maidstone is a particularly rich one which has published the series Kentish Sources. They are subsequent to Kent Bibliography by G. Bennett (1977) and its Supplement of 1981.