The sea creeks, on which Appledore once stood, brought invaders as well as the trade which made it prosper. Danish Vikings, dislodged by King Alfred after five years fighting, made their base here.
The men of Appledore joined the great Peasants' Revolt in 1381 when Horne's Place, just outside the village, was sacked by Wat Tyler's men. Jack Cade's army marched through the street in 1450, Appledore men in its ranks.
Where the street now is, in front of the church, is the site of the market where the fair, authorised by Edward III, was held until the end of the nineteenth century. The market cross and the stalls stood on the greens, the last remnant of the property of the Prior, and later the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, who once owned most of the parish.
To repel the attack threatened by Napoleon, the Royal Military Canal was built in 1804 and re-fortified when Hitler planned his assault in the last war.
Many ancient houses remain in the street, some dating back to the fifteenth century. The oldest building in the village, apart from the church, is Horne's Place chapel.
In 1997 two men from Hastings came with metal detectors and made the find of the century according to the British Museum . While working in a field near Horne's Place they discovered a hoard of nearly 500 Anglo-Saxon coins minted at 36 different places from York to New Romney, covering the entire period of Danish and Saxon rule from Canute in 1016 to Edward the Confessor 1042 – 1066. It was declared a Treasure Trove and is now in the British Museum .
In 1988 to commemorate the 800 years since the first recorded Rector came to the parish, three ladies in the village designed and worked the impressive Appledore Tapestry showing scenes from the history of the village. This can be seen in the church and is much admired by all our visitors.
Appledore welcomed the Millennium with due celebration and a new village sign, and now the 21 st century stretches ahead with more house-building and cars. Over the years we have lost many of the shops in the village but we still have a Post Office and Stores, two pubs (one at the station which is over a mile from the village), a Tea Room and two antique businesses. Farming and other businesses continue to contribute to the over-all economy.
This attractive village has seen many changes but it is to be hoped that the charm which it holds for so many will remain undimmed.

Like so many other Wealden villages and small towns, Cranbrook’s development in the Anglo-Saxon period began with the ‘dens’ to which pig drovers from the developed eastern parts of the county came each autumn. No record of the town’s name survives prior to the eleventh century.
Yet, perhaps astonishingly, by the end of the sixteenth century, Cranbrook, although well behind Canterbury, was Kent’s second or third largest town, with a population of some 3,000. Most of its growth, like the physical growth of its ‘Cathedral of the Weald, had been financed by the great broadcloth industry, encouraged in its early stages by Edward III, making fortunes for its clothiers who exported to the Netherlands and elsewhere. The many surviving Tudor buildings in the modern town centre are evidence of the town’s wealth.
Subsequently the broadcloth industry fell into steady decline; the town became poor and population temporarily fell. Quiet recovery occurred in the eighteenth century, as the small market town was more or less economically self-sustaining before railways brought in more goods from elsewhere. Agriculture provided most jobs, including those in the hop fields which by mid-nineteenth century made Cranbrook well known again. Its attractions led to the residence of the Victorian ‘Cranbrook Colony’ of artists, including Thomas Webster and Frederick Hardy, whose paintings of a gradually disappearing (and somewhat sentimentalised) rural society were hugely popular and widely reproduced.
Cranbrook has grown again, quite considerably, since the second world war, though without too much detriment to its fine town centre. With its enduring rural characteristics, its great smock mill, its splendidly run local museum and its very many listed buildings including the great St Dunstan’s church, it reminds us constantly of its unusual history.

Peter Allen. 15 March 2010

Frittenden is not specifically recorded in the Domesday Book (1086), though it is recorded in a Saxon Charter of 804. The den element of the name indicates that it was an area providing temporary pasture, probably from the 6th century, on an annual basis for swine driven down from a place in north Kent. This pasture would have been recorded as a possession of that place in Domesday.  The name may come from the name of the man or ‘free coerl’ who used the den, possibly one named Frith. Two Romano-British urns were discovered close to Roman road from Rochester to Hastings in 1857. 
Cole Farm, c1400, is the oldest complete building in the parish and is only one of a number of quality medieval listed buildings in the parish.  The 1806 and 1839 tithe maps show that the village consisted of two main nuclei, the first grouped near the church and the other around the Bell Inn and the forge. Since then these nuclei have been linked by new building.
The church is first recorded in the White Book of St Augustine’s c1200. It was almost totally rebuilt by the Revd. Edward Moore and rededicated in 1848. Edward Moore, together with his wife Harriet, had a major impact on the village and indeed how it looks today. 
Farming in the parish has normally been a mixture of pastoral and arable, though the balance has changed considerably over time, notably in the depression following the Napoleonic War when there was a significant movement into arable. This resulted in a longer and deeper depression than might otherwise have been the case. Hops, always a risky crop, became a major crop during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, but no hops are grown in the parish today. 

Phil Betts. 15 March 2010

A small cache of Bronze Age palstaves found in a ditch close to the Cranbrook road in 1855 is the earliest indication of life at Goudhurst.
Although Goudhurst is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, its parish church of St Mary the Virgin is referred to in the Domesday Monachorum of a similar date, indicating that there was a settlement here from at least Saxon times. The place-name Goudhurst is derived from its location on top of a hill in the former forest of Andresweald, the “hurst” element referring to the wooded hill on which it stands.
As regards commercial activity, in 1309 Edward II granted a licence for a weekly market and two annual fairs to be held. By the late 16 th century there were at least two iron furnaces in Goudhurst, and the one situated at Bedgebury is said to have supplied some of the cannons used to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588. Thanks to its proximity to Cranbrook, Goudhurst became involved in the cloth-making industry centred on that parish during the 17 th century, and there were still a few looms in Goudhurst until the early 1700s.
In 1747 the notorious group of local smugglers known as the Hawkhurst Gang were firmly beaten in a battle between them and a group of local inhabitants led by William Sturt, who later became master of the Goudhurst workhouse.
Overall, however, Goudhurst remained an agricultural parish in which, as the cloth and iron industries declined and the 19th century dawned, hops, apples, plums and pears joined the more traditionally grown cereal crops. Until more recent times Goudhurst would have been entirely self-sufficient, with its own mix of trades and craftsmen from blacksmiths to wheelwrights, and bakers to butchers. Even today the village still has a good selection of shops.

Gill Joye. 30th June 2010