A Brief History of the Water Mill, Elizabethan Barn and Local Area
Though the Mill was first recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086 AD, it existed several hundred years before in Roman times and continued in daily use right up until 1948. The Atherfold family were millers here from 1602 till the mid 1880s and George Atherfold’s tombstone is in the local church grounds. The Barker family then ran the Mill till the wheels finally stopped turning in 1948. The Old Elizabethan Miller’s Barn was built around 1500 and was constructed out of local Green Oak. Originally, it was a Threshing or Winnowing Barn, where the wheat and corn was brought and then beaten against the flag stone floor. It was constructed with side doors of the building facing the wind and when they were opened, the prevailing wind blew through the barn and was used to help separate the grain from the chaff, which blew out through the open, rear doors. It was then used to store the grain before it was milled in the grinding stones of the Water Mill.
The Old Elizabethan Miller’s Barn and Water Mill are situated about 1 mile north of Hartfield Church, which was rebuilt of stone circa 1263 on the site of a much earlier Saxon Church. To the west of the Mill about 600 yards, is a Roman road that runs alongside Bolebroke Castle, which was built circa 1300.
This quiet, sleepy part of England has seen a mixed history. Having defeated a superior Viking army on the East coast just days before the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the whole of the English army was forced to march from East Anglia via London and on to the South coast through Sussex. They arrived exhausted but ready to engage in battle with the Norman invaders. The Normans remained in England for the next 200 years, during which time the peasant population was increasingly taxed into starvation and then ravaged by the arrival of the plague from 1348 on. In 1381 John Ball, assisted by Watt Tyler started what became known as the ‘Peasant Rebellion’. They united the serfs, but the rebellion was stopped by the interception of Richard II.
The country was in turmoil once more with the outbreak of the first Civil War in 1640 -46 swiftly followed by a second Civil War. Then came the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which finally bestowed equal rights for both Protestants and Catholics. Nonetheless, counter plots still continued.
By 1690, smuggling was rife from London to all round the Kent and Sussex coast as far as Portsmouth. In the 1840s, in an attempt to stop the pitched battles between hundreds of smugglers, customs officers and the Military, many import and export duties were reduced.
Hartfield, Groombridge, Withyham, Goudhurst and Rotherfield all had their local heroes or ‘midnight gentlemen’, such as Robert Pope of Hartfield’s ‘Pope Cottage’, who was hanged in 1739. Another was Old Joll, a relative of the Atherfolds and a member of the ‘Mayfield Gang’, who was tried for smuggling and murder and transported for life in 1749, but returned in 1755 and died in 1781. Smuggling continued up until the First World War, after which it persisted to a much lesser degree, although it still carries on even to this day.