APPENDIX A.

terms of compromise,—will value this record of the reluctance
with which a staunch country squire submitted to the duties of
his position. It is not only amusing, but instructive, to watch
those men of the seventeenth century, fighting on the minutest
grounds of squabble : very amusing, to those who take the world
as it is, to have been always as it is, and likely always so to re-
main : very instructive to those who know the miserable condition
from which such “ squabbles ” have raised us. There are people,
who having no sense of right, but a profound sense of the wrong
done them, raise barricades, and overturn dynasties in moments of
irrepressible and pardonable excitement : there are people on the
other hand who steadily and coolly measure right and wrong, who
take to tho law-book rather than the sword, who argue the ques-
tion of ship-money, on which a system of government depends, as
calmly as if it wore a question of poor-rates in a parish attorney's
hands, and having brought their right, the ancient right of the
land, into light, fall back into the orderly frame of society in
which they lived before, as if no years of desperate struggle had
intervened,—the law being vindicated, and the work of tho work-
men done. This work without distinction of Parliamentarian or
King’s Man was done by the Seldens and tho Twisdens, and men
of more general note and name, but not more claim to our grati-
tude and respect. But to do this, required that study which un-
happily our English gentlemen no longer think absolutely neces-
sary to their education, the study of the law, of which they arc
, the guardians, though a professional class may bo its ministers ;

and most amusing now it is to see how zealously these old cham-
pions of the law did battle in its defence, even in the most minute
and now unimportant details. It was then a happy thing for
England that there were courts of Dens, and squires who did not
like them : it is now an admirable thing for England that there
are courts of all sorts and descriptions, and people who do not
like them, who are constantly trying their right against them,
constantly winning and losing at the great game of law, or per-
haps tho greater game, of the forms under which law is admini-
stered,—litigious people,—people liking to argue the right and

THE MARK.

the wrong in a strict form of logic, the legal form ; who are
always arguing, and therefore never fighting. If there had not
been courts of Dens to argue about,—and unhappily, at last, to
fight about,—there would most certainly not now be a “ High
Court of Parliament,’’ for there would never have been those
who knew how to establish it. The country-gentlemen of tho
seventeenth century appeal to the experience of tho nineteenth, in
every land but this of England, whose steady, legal order the
country-gentlemen of the seventeenth century founded ; and the
grateful middle class of the nineteenth century in no country but
this respond to that appeal in this year 1848, by declaring that no
force, whether of king or not of king, shall be known in England,
except that of the law,—tho great and ancient law,—that all asso-
ciations of men are united in a guarantee of mutual peace and
security.

It is now time to return to Sir R. Twisden and the Court of
Dens. It appears that this was held at Aldington, and that it
Claimcdjurisdiction over a considerable space. If we follow tho
main road from Hytho to Maidstone, a little to tho north of
Aldington ', and running to the east of Boughton, we find a tract
of country extending to the borders of Sussex and filled with
places ending in -den, or -hurst ; this country of the Dens runs
exactly whoro wo should expect to find it, viz. along tho edge of
tho Weald, within whoso shades the swains found mast and pas-
ture. I will enumerate a few of tho places so named : they can
readily bo found on a good map of Kent, and form a belt of mark
or forest round the cultivated country, quite independent of the
woods which once lay between village and village.

Castlcden.

Chiddcnden.

Cottenden, Sussex.

Cowden.

Frittenden.

Aldington is about 57' east of Greenwich.

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