Wormshill ( ), historically Wormsell, is a small village and civil parish within the Borough of Maidstone, Kent, England. The parish is approximately south of the Swale and east of Maidstone. The village of Frinsted lies to the east and Bicknor to the north-west; while Hollingbourne is to the south-west. The village lies on an exposed high point of the North Downs, within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Archaeological and toponymic evidence of Wormshill's existence predates its appearance in the Domesday Book of 1086. The village contains a number of heritage-listed buildings, which include a Norman church, a public house and one of the oldest surviving post office buildings in the United Kingdom. The fields and woodland surrounding Wormshill have changed little in the past 500 years, and the village itself remains rural with a low population density compared to the national average. The population of 200 is a mixture of agricultural workers employed by local farms, and professional residents who commute to nearby towns.
History
Toponymy
Wormshill was listed under the name Godeselle in the Domesday Book of 1086. The village is thought to be much older, its name deriving from the Anglo-Saxon god Wōden (a cognate with the Norse god, Odin) and meaning "Woden's Hill". The area was also described in a paper in Archaeologia Cantiana, 1961, as "Wormshill, an ancient possession of the Kings of Kent, the hill where they worshipped the heathen Woden". The University of Nottingham's Institute for Name-Studies has offered the suggestion that the name means "shelter for a herd of pigs".
The Latinised form, Wornesell, appears in the Kent Hundred Rolls of 1274–75 and in a mediaeval will recorded in September 1409. A corruption of the name, Wormsell, is mentioned as the birthplace of a Cistercian Abbot at the nearby Boxley Abbey in 1474; a further variant, Wormysell, is found in a will of 1487, and court papers concerning a land dispute in 1534 use the name Wormeshell.
Early history
A 1994 landscape survey identified woodland to the north of the village as having contained ancient flint tools and what appeared to be flint boundary markers, the latter apparently gathered from loose-lying surface flints. The area around the village features ancient deneholes, or agricultural chalk mines, some of which are pre-Roman. These holes, which may be up to deep, were often dug at the edges of fields, onto which the chalk marl would be spread. A Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulian) hand axe was unearthed in the garden of Blacksmiths cottage in the village. In 1966, the remains of a U-shaped mediaeval pastoral enclosure for controlling the movement of stock were recorded in woodland to the north of the village. The extensive woodland in the parish also meant that it was one of several sources of wooden planking for the piers of Rochester Bridge ( away) from the early 11th century (and theoretically was still liable to do so until the passing of the Rochester Bridge Act 1908.
The parish of Wormshill was originally appended to the village and parish of Boughton Malherbe, since both had the same patron; the patron of a parish was the land-owner who often built the church on the estate and who had the right (known as advowson) to appoint the parish priest. The first recorded patron of Wormshill was Robert de Gatton, who owned the Manor of Wormsell during the reign of Henry III (1207–72). From the Gatton family, the village passed by marriage in the 13th century to Sir Simon de Northwood, whose coat of arms appears in the stained glass of St Giles, the village's only church, and whose name (Norwood) is given to the farm at the north of the village.
Patronage of the parish subsequently transferred through a number of landholding families, vesting by the 17th century with the prominent Kent family of Sir Charles Sedley, which at times held the barony of Aylesford. During this period the Tylden (or Tilden) family, believed to have had links to the Crusades of Richard I, were also significant landholders in the area in the early 17th century; a memorial to William Tylden, who died in 1613, rests in the north chancel of St Giles church. Around the same time in the late 16th century, recruits of Sir Francis Drake's navy may have used a track, now known as Drake Lane, in the south west of the parish or camped nearby as they marched from the Weald of Kent to the dockyards at Sheerness.