Tenterden District History Society

The Tenterden & District Local History Society was formed in 1955 and currently has 170 members. Each year we offer our members seven live illustrated talks, two newsletters with unique updates on the town’s history and people, two coffee mornings and several summer outings (which cost varies). Visitors are welcome at all events, with an entrance fee of £2 or £3. Anyone may book a fun guided Tour of Tenterden High Street with its picturesque buildings and fascinating history – contact the Secretary [email protected] for a time and cost.

Our extensive local history library is housed at the Museum. Every year our genealogist and researchers answer around 60 enquiries – not only locally but also from all over the UK and abroad. These might be about Tenterden family histories, or our town buildings, or to identify old drawings/photographs etc.  Individual projects have included conserving a unique needlework of St Mildred’s Church, sewn by Admiral Lord Nelson’s daughter; local signage marking the WW2 route of PLUTO (pipeline under the ocean). For our current projects we’re producing for the town a Family Fun Trail with lots of lovely activities, and collecting a history of every building in the High Street – as far as we can!

A favourite Tenterden character has to be Doctor Jeremiah Cliff (1678 – 1742), who medically attended the Town for decades. During this time he compiled a notebook – Memento Mori – with the morbid details of every local death: 1,245 people in total. It’s a unique, nationally valuable document about historical causes of death. Tenterden parishioners died of ague, apoplexy, asthma, bloody flux with thrush, breast cancer, cancer of the navel, colds and coughs, colic, convulsions, drink, erysipelas, fits, French pox, gangrene, gout in the stomach, gravel, green sickness, harelip, imposthumus, internal bleeding, jaundice, measles, mortification, palsy, pleurisy, rheumatism, scabies, St Anthony’s Fire, tumour of the knees, ulcers in the side and bladder, vomiting, whooping cough and worm-fever. There were six suicides; in 1722 Dr Cliff’s own maid a Mrs Parton, perhaps not helped by her gruesome surroundings, hanged herself in his attic at No. 22 High Street.

Dr Cliff is also known as “The Tenterden Aesop”: he bought a 1708 edition of the famous fables, and proceeded to illustrate it himself.  The resulting satirical cartoons with their highly entertaining religious and political commentary form another national resource, held at the Victoria & Albert Museum. This cultured and well-educated apothecary also attended the poorest inmates of the Tenterden Workhouse, although if these perhaps knew of his morbid obsession, they may not have been delighted to see him coming! The good doctor himself is buried in St Mildred’s churchyard.

A place to find out more about the T&DLHS is via the website: www.tenterdenhistory.co.uk or contact the Secretary Mrs Jane Mills: [email protected]

Mrs Jane Mills, Secretary of the Tenterden History Society

For all the latest Tenterden news, you can read and subscribe to Tenterden CommunityAd magazine. Read more about Kate, a local Tenterden farmer who is dedicated to Keeping Tenterden Green.

Acknowledgements

Romney Marsh: Environmental Change and Human Occupation in a Coastal Lowland (ed. J. Eddison, M. Gardiner and A. Long), OUCA Monograph 46, 1998, 166-181 10. Death and Disease in the Romney Marsh Area in the 17th to 19th Centuries Mary J. Dobson

https://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/tenterden-aesop

http://kentarchaeology.org.uk/research/archaeologia-cantiana/mementomori

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