The History of All Saints’ Tudeley

By Mary Neervoort-Moore

For over a thousand years, the church at Tudeley has been a centre of Christian worship and is one of the oldest churches in the Weald of Kent. Over the years, the church has experienced both peaceful times and more uncertain periods as the parish has reflected the wider changes and unrest of English society. The countryside around Tudeley was a place of pre-Roman industry,but now is one of rural tranquillity. The church building itself reflects many of these changes, with stonework on top of Saxon foundations, eighteenth-century brickwork on top of stonework and a Victorian north aisle extension. But no change is more striking than the reordering of 1966 and the installation of stained-glass windows by the renowned Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall. All Saints' Tudeley is the only church to have all of its windows created by Chagall. People from across the world now come to enjoy the beauty of the windows and the inspiration of a rural church steeped in history, a place of continuing Christian worship for the local community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784420604

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Church.

EARLY CENTURIES TO THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD

JUDGING BY EXTERNAL APPEARANCES anyone could be misled into thinking the history of All Saints’ Church, Tudeley, began in the eighteenth century as some guidebooks have suggested. Many events and influences have shaped village and Church century by century, and the history of the church and parish are so intertwined they cannot be separated.

Robert Furley, in his History of the Weald of Kent (1871), although scornful of Tudeley as a place of interest acknowledged that it was a place of antiquity – this can be largely attributed to the established working of iron ore which had been smelted locally long before the Roman occupation. The date of that early settlement is not known, although there are some who claim that the Phoenicians came up the River Medway in their galleys to trade here for iron. Certainly when the Romans came in AD 43 there was a great increase in the smelting of ironstone; ‘blooms’ of refined iron were exported to Rome until the end of Roman rule in Britain in AD 410.

Traces of a forge still exist 650 yards west of the church at the bottom of a deep escarpment through which a stream runs which was known as the Devil’s Gill. The stream still runs, though to local farmers it is now known only as the Gill.

Yet another indication of Tudeley’s antiquity comes from the beginning of the seventh century, the early days of Christianity in Britain when Kent was a Saxon kingdom. The Weald of Kent in the early seventh century was a vast and dense oak forest, reaching almost to the sea. At that time there were only four churches in the whole of the Weald – Hadlow, Tudeley, Benenden and Palster.

That there was already a settlement with a forge established in Tudeley may explain why it was one of the four places in which an early Saxon church was sited, although nothing remains of that earlier building.

View across the Medway valley from the churchyard of All Saints’, looking north-east.

It was during the late Saxon period that the first church was built on the present site of All Saints’. The building no longer stands, but the sandstone footings of the nave and tower of the present church are the foundations upon which the Saxon church was built.

At the end of the Saxon period, the Domesday Book (1086) recorded that ‘Eddeva held it of the king’ and that ‘it is and was always worth 15s TRE’. TRE refers