Wormshill
Wormshill, historically Wormsell, is a small village and civil parish within the Borough of Maidstone, Kent, England. The parish is approximately south of the Swale and east of Maidstone. The village of Frinsted lies to the east and Bicknor to the north-west; while Hollingbourne is to the south-west. The village lies on an exposed high point of the North Downs, within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Archaeological and toponymic evidence of Wormshill's existence predates its appearance in the Domesday Book of 1086. The village contains a number of heritage-listed buildings, which include a Norman church, a public house and one of the oldest surviving post office buildings in the United Kingdom. The fields and woodland surrounding Wormshill have changed little in the past 500 years, and the village itself remains rural with a low population density compared to the national average. The population of 200 is a mixture of agricultural workers employed by local farms, and professional residents who commute to nearby towns.
History
Toponymy
Wormshill was listed under the name Godeselle in the Domesday Book of 1086. The village is thought to be much older, its name deriving from the Anglo-Saxon god Wōden and meaning "Woden's Hill". The area was also described in a paper in Archaeologia Cantiana, 1961, as "Wormshill, an ancient possession of the Kings of Kent, the hill where they worshipped the heathen Woden". The University of Nottingham's Institute for Name-Studies has offered the suggestion that the name means "shelter for a herd of pigs".The Latinised form, Wornesell, appears in the Kent Hundred Rolls of 1274-75 and in a mediaeval will recorded in September 1409. A corruption of the name, Wormsell, is mentioned as the birthplace of a Cistercian Abbot at the nearby Boxley Abbey in 1474; a further variant, Wormysell, is found in a will of 1487, and court papers concerning a land dispute in 1534 use the name Wormeshell.
Early history
A 1994 landscape survey identified woodland to the north of the village as having contained ancient flint tools and what appeared to be flint boundary markers, the latter apparently gathered from loose-lying surface flints. The area around the village features ancient deneholes, or agricultural chalk mines, some of which are pre-Roman. These holes, which may be up to deep, were often dug at the edges of fields, onto which the chalk marl would be spread. A Lower Palaeolithic hand axe was unearthed in the garden of Blacksmiths cottage in the village. In 1966, the remains of a U-shaped mediaeval pastoral enclosure for controlling the movement of stock were recorded in woodland to the north of the village. The extensive woodland in the parish also meant that it was one of several sources of wooden planking for the piers of Rochester Bridge from the early 11th century to appoint the parish priest. The first recorded patron of Wormshill was Robert de Gatton, who owned the Manor of Wormsell during the reign of Henry III. From the Gatton family, the village passed by marriage in the 13th century to Sir Simon de Northwood, whose coat of arms appears in the stained glass of St Giles, the village's only church, and whose name is given to the farm at the north of the village.Patronage of the parish subsequently transferred through a number of landholding families, vesting by the 17th century with the prominent Kent family of Sir Charles Sedley, which at times held the barony of Aylesford. During this period the Tylden family, believed to have had links to the Crusades of Richard I, were also significant landholders in the area in the early 17th century; a memorial to William Tylden, who died in 1613, rests in the north chancel of St Giles church. Around the same time in the late 16th century, recruits of Sir Francis Drake's navy may have used a track, now known as Drake Lane, in the south west of the parish or camped nearby as they marched from the Weald of Kent to the dockyards at Sheerness.
Patronage is believed to have lapsed from the Sedley family to the Archbishop of Canterbury and then to Sir Joseph Aylosse before being conveyed by gift from a Mr. Serjeant Moses to the charity of the president and governors of Christ's Hospital in London in gratitude for a University of Cambridge scholarship he had received. As late as 1798 the parish was still paying its traditional castle-guard rent to Dover Castle and retained a court baron; this fee was a substitute for a feudal obligation requiring the provision of knights to defend the castle.
Little information exists about the village's population or demographics before 1801; however evidence from the first census indicates that the village grew steadily, reaching a peak in 1871. A possible indication of the growth in the agricultural output of the village is the construction of two windmills marked at "Beddington" on Ordnance Survey drawings dated 1797 and an Ordnance Survey map published between 1819 and 1843. The mills stood north and south of each other and were approximately to the north-west of the church. House building continued during the mid-to-late 19th century, together with a post office and school. Like much of rural Kent during the time of the Swing Riots, Wormshill experienced a degree of civil unrest and Home Office records indicate that "a large body of men, numbering 50-100" assembled at Wormshill with the purpose of "intimidation and to enforce demands on farmers ... inducing other labourers to join them".
20th century
Records indicate that at least one former resident of the village fought as part of the Australian contingent in the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War. Private Frederick George Kite, born at Wormshill on 16 February 1894, and educated at Wormshill and Milstead, enlisted on 8 September 1915. Originally employed as a fireman, after training at Blackboy and Broadmeadows camps in Victoria, he sailed from Melbourne as part of the Australian Imperial Force, 16th Infantry Battalion aboard HMAT Ceramic A40 on 23 December 1914. He participated in the landing at Gallipoli and was wounded in the left arm and shoulder, ending his active service.During the Second World War, Wormshill joined a number of similar settlements in the region to form part of the anti-invasion network. On the outskirts of the village, near the hamlet of Ringlestone, there are the remains of a zero station, a secret underground communications relay post operated by Auxiliary Units of the British Home Guard. In the event of a German invasion the zero station was to be used by defending forces to receive and transmit coded messages between a series of similar stations in the area as well as to the operational command headquarters at Hannington Hall in Wiltshire. A concealed underground concrete bunker, it was designed to be invisible from the surface and is located in woodland about from the road. Although its primary purpose was a communications post, the zero station was also designed to hold ammunition and explosives and provide living quarters for the radio equipment operators. Anecdotal evidence also indicates that anti-aircraft guns were sited near the village and that a Bren gun emplacement was installed in the valley between Wormshill and Frinsted.
A Diver Battery was located to the southwest of the village. Forming part of the Kentish Gun Belt, designed to provide a defence to attacks by V-1 flying bombs or "doodlebugs", it was armed with eight mobile 3.7-inch guns, and manned by 424 Battery of 138 Regiment of the 40th Anti Aircraft Brigade. It was initially equipped with Predictor AA No.10 and No.3 Mark V radar, and was manned by 57 Brigade in July 1944. There are records of a V-1 being shot down by a Supermarine Spitfire to the west of the village. Flt Lt A. R. Cruikshank is reported as having "Sited a Diver north of Ashford and attacked from astern at 100 yards range. Saw strikes and Diver fell and exploded in a field".
Villagers resident during the war also recall a V-1 being shot down in orchards near Norwood Farm and a fighter aircraft crashing in fields to the south of Yew Tree Farm. Roadside checkpoints were set up on the main routes into the village to the north and south and Allied forces moving through the region camped overnight in the area, including a detachment of New Zealand troops in fields near Home Farm.
Following an initial decline in the population at the beginning of the 20th century, more houses were constructed between the Great War and the Second World War and again in the 1950s and 1960s, adding to the cluster of cottages from the 19th century and earlier.
Governance
At the time of the Kent Hundred Rolls in 1275, Wormshill was in the Hundred of Eyhorne, a regional sub-division used in the Middle Ages by feudal and crown officials to administer communities. Although the Hundred of Eyhorne still exists, it is a mediaeval anachronism and no longer has any practical or administrative significance. In the 19th century, the village was within the lathe of Aylesford, the Bearsted petty sessional division and the Hollingbourne Rural District. The village was also incorporated into the Hollingbourne Poor Law Union. The parish of Wormshill in part sits astride the West Kent and East Kent divide, a demarcation which until 1814 applied to an administrative boundary for the purposes of the law courts' Quarter Sessions. According to Edward Hasted : "northward of the church, including the borough of Bedmanton, is in the division of East Kent, but the rest of it, including the church and village, is in that of West Kent". This differs from the traditional distinction between Men of Kent and Kentish Men, which are separated by the River Medway, accordingly persons born in Wormshill would be Men of Kent.Since 1975, Wormshill has been administered within the North Downs ward and, together with surrounding communities, elects a representative councillor for the ward in the Borough of Maidstone. The incumbent councillor for the North Downs ward is Patrik Garten. The village forms the central focus of the civil and church parishes of Wormshill. The parish chairman is Simon Bass.
Wormshill is part of the parliamentary constituency of Faversham and Mid Kent, whose Member of Parliament is Helen Whately of the Conservative Party. Prior to Brexit in 2020, it was in the South East England constituency in the European Parliament.