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On this page we will have various resources to help you understand the records and early modern Maidstone. Each section can be expanded or contracted to make for easier browsing. Please help us by suggesting additions or corrections. Especially, please suggest links where the material is available online.
Buckley, Judy. For the Good of This Town: The Jurats of Maidstone, 1549-1660. Kent Archaeological Society, 2009. https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/papers/jurats-maidstone.
Bulteel, J. A.. Relation of the Troubles of the Three Forraigne Churches in Kent. London, 1645.
Cave-Browne, J. The History of the Parish Church of All Saints’, Maidstone. Bunyard, 1889.
Clark, Peter, Lyn Murfin, and Elizabeth Finn. The History of Maidstone: The Making of a Modern County Town. Allan Sutton, 1995.
Hilton, John Anthony. Maidstone - an Outline History.
- - ———. Memories of Maidstone. Maidstone Antiquarian Society. Kent County Library, 1987.
Maidstone Borough Council. Records of Maidstone: Being Selections from Documents in the Possession of the Corporation. Maidstone: Hobbs, 1926.
Leach, Avril. ‘Being One Body: Everyday Institutional Culture in Canterbury and Maidstone Corporations, 1600-1660’. PhD, University of Kent, 2019. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/80984/.
Morant, Valerie. ‘The Settlement of Protestant Refugees in Maidstone during the Sixteenth Century’. The Economic History Review 4, no. 2 (1951): 210–14. https://doi.org/10.2307/2599123.
Newton, William. The history and antiquities of Maidstone, the County-town of Kent. From the manuscript collections of William Newton, … 1741, 1741.
Poste, Beale, and C. J. Smith. The History of the College of All Saints, Maidstone. J. Smith Whittaker, 1847. Russell, J. M. The History of Maidstone. Vivish, 1881.
- ———. The History of Maidstone. J. Hallewell, 1978.
Streatfeild, Frank. An Account of the Grammar School in Maidstone in Kent. Oxford: Cowley St. John Press, 1915.
Swinnock, George. The Life and Death of Mr. Tho. Wilson, Minister of Maidstone, in the County of Kent, M.A., 1672.
Whichcord, John. The History and Antiquities of the Collegiate Church of All Saints, Maidstone, with the Illustrations of Its Architecture; London, J. Weale, 1845.
- Andrewes, Jane. ‘The Early Modern Period 1500-1700: Trade and Industry’. In Maritime Kent Through the Ages: Gateway to the Sea, edited by Elizabeth Edwards and Sheila Sweetinburgh, 235–52. Boydell Press, 2021.
- Clark, Peter. English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500-1640. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977.
- - ———. The Migrant in Kentish Towns 1580-1640’. In Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 Essays in Urban History, edited by Peter Clark and Paul Slack. Routledge, 2007.
- Clark, Peter, and Paul Slack. Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 Essays in Urban History. Routledge, 2007.
- - ———. English Towns in Transition 1500-1700. Oxford University Press, 1976.
- Lutton, Robert, and Elizabeth Salter, eds. Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c.1400–1640. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
- Sweetinburgh, Sheila. ‘Neighbours across the Religious Divide: Coping with Difference in Henrician Kent’. In The Experience of Neighbourhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 2022.
Arkell, T., Evans, N., and Goose, N., eds, When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Leopard’s Head Press, 2000). Excellent place to start research into wills, chapters explain the process of probate and look at the different documents generated by it: wills, inventories, probate accounts etc.
Houlbrooke, Ralph, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (OUP, 2000), espec. chapters 4 &5. Houlbrooke uses a large set of wills to explore the history of the family.
James, Susan E., Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Taylor & Francis, 2016). A study of a large set of women’s wills.
Wrightson, Keith, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague (Yale University Press, 2011). A microhistory focused on the activities of a scribe in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1636, a plague year – Tailor is called upon to write the wills of many plague victims, and these are used by Wrightson alongside other records.