Aspects of Kentish Local History

   In 1699 Deal obtained a Charter of Incorporation. With its growing importance it had been long chaffing under the overlordship of Sandwich which conducted all official business through a Deputy (v. p. 30). Even the vested interests of the Rector (his church was over a mile away) had to acknowledge the altered circumstances, and had to allow that a Chapel of Ease in Lower Deal was a necessity. Such a project became a public and mayoral question in 1706. However, there were many setbacks, of which finance was not the least, till the Corporation in 1712 obtained an Act "for completing a Chapel of Ease in the Lower Town of Deal, in the County of Kent, by a Deputy on Water-bron Coals to be brought into the said Town". This empowered the collection of a duty of 2s. a ton on such coals. (Full details are given in Laker's History of Deal, 1917, pp. 258-63.) The duty was to remain in force for 15 years but 1s. 6d. is still collected, although not for the benefit of the edifice or of the parish. The Chapel was completed in 1716, and dedicated and consecrated on June 16th by the Archbishop, Dr. Wake, as a "Chapel dependent upon the Parish Church of Deal".
   The first "Perpetual Curate" (since 1852 St. George's has been a separate parish with its own vicar) was a William Squire. He resigned in March 1718 on collation to Reculver but must have been non-resident for some little time before as the earliest entry in the Register of Marriages and Burials (the latter only from 1737) records in the handwriting of his successor Carter that

"Henry Alexander Primrose & Margarett Bowles both of Deal were married May ye 5th, 1717 (Licence)."¹  However, the interest of this quarto vellum-bound Register is in the following use. While on one cover appears "Deal Chapel Registers" on the other is the word "Briefs", and inside on the first leaf is written in a copy-bound hand "A Register Book for Briefs published in ye Chapel at Deal in the County of Kent; bough August ye 1st 1717 [? 1716] by
   Joseph Lane     }
   Anthony Glover}    Chapel-Wardens
                                           Nicholas Carter, Minister.

    Nicolas Carter, his son-in-law Thomas Pennington, or others who eased his duties towards the end of his life—he was a pluralist—enter every Brief with the date of collection, and sign them, but when the entry states that nothing was "collected in ye Chapel because to be collected from House to House by Minister & Churchwardens of the Parish", the amounts only appear in seven early entries. At Cranbrook on the other hand we find this information invariably given.
  ¹ A Thomas Daniel Primrose, D.L. of St. John's College, Oxford, was instituted Rector of South Warnborough, Hants, on March 27th, 1728, and inducted May 3rd by John Guensay, Vicar of Froyle. He was buried at St. George's in 1761, and his wife Susanna, aged 64, in 1773. In 1729 Henry Alexander owned a Brewhouse in Deal on which, with his house, he was assessed 17s. 4d. In 1732 his wife was paid £1 16s. for beer supplied to the Poor House. He was alive in 1734.