Aspects of Kentish Local History

The lower part of the above deposit is inclined to be clean and loose in composition but soon alters to a dark stiff earth which dries very hard. From the blocks of chalk, pieces of Folkestone Stone and broken tiles there is some evidence of buildings. A layer of tiles in one place seemed to indicate a paved floor, but no walling has as yet been exposed. The soil is full of decayed material, animal bones, shells of oyster, whelk, periwinkle, mussel and cockle (the first two far the most plentiful) although some handfuls of periwinkles at one spot showed the discarded remains of a feast. With these are wall plaster, ashes, charcoal and burnt flints, worn pot-sherds which had been lying about, and cleanly broken sherds of cooking pots and various coloured and decorated glazed wares. This material and other finds are referred to more fully later.
   Proof of the Roman occupation of Stonor seems clear by the recovery of various fragments of brick and tile, Niedermendig-lava querns, a 4 in. section of a white marble shaft, 3 in. in dia., with a drilled hole , and a part of a turned Purbeck-marble bowl. It seems unlikely that these scraps were carted from the Roman site at Richborough, especially as the 6 in. Ordnance Survey marks site of Roman remains round and about Stonar House.
   From the occurrence of the course of bricks and of sherds of stoneware, the deposit which lies above the medieval layer, seems to be of sixteenth and early seventeenth century date, but with the little that has been

found so far and the evidence that has been adduced the place must have been deserted. It was certainly not a profitable cure for a parson, few of whom from the fifteenth century are likely to have been resident.
   From the high class of much of the pottery in use at Stonar (it has been considered that the polychrome ware was "the finest of the period and acquired for the tables of the great")¹ we may gather that people of some wealth dwelt there in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but like so many near sea-level settlements on the south-east and south coasts it suffered through the instability of the coast line (see Pt. II of this paper, LIV, 55). This was inclined to decrease its value as a port and in the Calendar of Miscellaneous Inquisitions, quoted by Miss Murray under the date 1280² it is declared "that the King would lose nothing if Stonar were submerged or destroyed; five ships were owned by the Barons of the Head Port of Sandwich, and they alone were responsible in case of default." Rather later, apparently of the closing years of this century, we have a full rental of Stonar.³ The list includes
   ¹ Fox and Radford. "Kidwilly Castle, Carmarthenshire, and Polychrome Pottery found in Britain," Archaeologia, Vol. 83 (1933), p. 115.
   ²  Miss K. M. E. Murray. The Constitutional History of the Cinque Ports, 1935, p. 50.
   ³  "The Black Book" Register of St. Augustine's Abbey. British Academy Records, Vol. 2, Pt. I (1915), p. 17.