I hope you will enjoy reading this lovely article from our dear Barbara. Its with a lot of plesure to I may publish it here!
‘The Dutch ones on the windy hill’: Jerome Nicholas Vlieland the Younger in Stalisfield ‘The Dutch ones’, the locals called their new vicar when he arrived on the North Downs with his wife and children in 1858. With his strong Norfolk accent and broad Dutch face, he must have seemed like something from another planet, but by his death was so beloved that the parish erected two memorial windows in St Mary’s Church. We know that Jerome arrived in Stalisfield a disappointed and unhappy man. After a stellar university career, he had expected to do well in the Anglican Church. His first curacy was in the Essex village of Great Ilford, 8 miles from London, notable only for its fishing fleet and the Roman remains found in Uphall Camp. Then, in 1854, he was appointed to the coveted vicarage of Christ Church, Turnham Green, on the River Thames. The suburb was part of the fashionable expansion of west London after 1830, and its middle-class residents demanded a young, charismatic and eloquent priest. Jerome was in his 20s, but he was bereft by the stillborn death of his eldest son and offered slow, pedantic oratory, and the Church Commissioners decided after only four years that he would not do. What they found for him instead was a humiliation: a parsonage on a ‘windy hill’ 650 feet above sea level in an ‘unfrequented and obscure’ corner of north east Kent, with 94 acres of land and 9 of coppice wood, and an impoverished flock of 378 people, 35 of whom were dependent on parish relief. Stalisfield was called ‘Stanefelt’ (stone field) in the Domesday Book, and the flinty soil and high rainfall meant that ‘stiff tillage’ was the best that could be achieved from the harvest. The fields were over-worked and there was no money for fertilisers or improved drainage so yields, and their income, fell. John Elvy Chambers, a farmer aged 67 with 11 children, ‘having had a great deal of trouble with his stock and crops, more than he could bear’ and having ‘lost a horse and thirty sheep this year, and the wet harvest’, hanged himself on a beam in the granary, and this cannot have been an isolated case. ‘Small tithes’, one-tenth of the village produce – grain, lambs, hay, wood and milk – were meant to be paid to support the parish, valued in 1858 at £362 a year, with £174 a year from the glebe (‘parson’s pasture’) land. Jerome’s stipend (salary) from the Canterbury diocese was £240 a year, from which he had to support his wife, educate his surviving children and maintain the church, whose tiled roof required constant repair, quickly slipping into dereliction. By 1870, even the Church Commissioners recognised the gulf between Jerome’s income and his needs, and made a capital payment of £51 16s. 10p. (£7,000 today), backdated to 1869, from the fund for the ‘augmentation and maintenance of the Poor Clergy’, and a new tithe for repair and upkeep of the church. On 20 August 1865, Jerome’s wife Frances died aged 38, the same day as her stillborn daughter, leaving 7 children aged between 11 and 3; after his remarriage to his cousin Ann Johnson a year later he began to suffer from depression, though everyone said he remained assiduous in tending to the sick and indigent among his flock until he died in 1877, aged only 51. Some of the information in this post is from the History and Topographical Survey of Kent, vol. 6 (1798) and the Topographical Dictionary of England, ed. Samuel Lewis, 7th edition (1858). The report of John Elvy Chambers’ inquest is from the Kentish Gazette, 23 October 1860
