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too, minor industries such as charcoal-burning, the
charcoal finding a ready market for the drying of hops, and the supply of
bavins for the London bakers. Bavins provided a special sideline for the
small farmer and at one time several barges were plying from Dartford
Creek and Greenhithe in this trade;5 there was also a
reverse trade whereby dung from the London stables was brought down the
Thames for use by the local farmers. In the end, sea-coal from Newcastle
and cheap timber from the Baltic reduced the value of the woodlands,
whether burning or building wise.
Hops were grown commercially in Kent from the reign of Henry
VIII and sooner or later, perhaps later, became widely cultivated in Ash.
The parish’s windy heights are not ideal for the purpose and for that
and other reasons, hop-growing may not have proved an unmixed blessing. It
absorbed much labour and, the hop being a greedy feeder, much farmyard
manure that might often have been more profitably used elsewhere. Hops,
moreover, were especially prone to pests and diseases, notably the flea
beetle, the aphis and hop mould, a trio that accounted for the old
couplet:-
‘First the flea and then the
fly
Then the mould - and then
they die’.6 |
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Failure of a crop could bring a small farmer near
ruin, as might also a glut, but the farmer with a good crop in a bad year
was indeed a happy man.
The term ‘oast’ for a kiln was used in Kent long before
hops were grown there; as early as the reign of Edward I a limekiln
belonging to one of Ash’s neighbours was called in a deed ‘le Lymoste’.7
The purpose built hopkiln arrived in the county with, or soon after,
the cultivation of the hop and by 1544 an East Kent grower was extolling
the virtues of ‘such an oste as they dry their hoppes upon at Poppering’.
This type was long in use, but did not entirely meet the requirement that
hops must, as an eighteenth century writer put it, ‘be dried without
smoak, for doth the smoak annoye the hops’. The traditional oast-houses
as we know them, designed as were many others to circumvent this
difficulty, are circular in form with conical roofs and with white-painted
cowls slanting towards wind-vanes that keep to the wind the closed ends of
the cowls. Often they are built in clusters, with the cowls and vanes
leaning against the sky like |