Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

7 Chapter One Origins This ROLVENDEN is a very beautiful village; and, indeed, such are all the places along here. These villages are not like those in the iron counties, as I call them; that is, the counties of flint and chalk. Here the houses have gardens in front of them as well as behind; and there is a good deal of show and finery about them and their gardens. The high roads are without a stone in them; and every thing looks like gentility. So said William Cobbett, the journalist and social reformer, in his Rural Rides , published in 1830, but written in instalments in the 1820s, as a survey of contemporary rural conditions. Rolvenden lies in the heart of the KentishWeald, about half a dozen miles from the Sussex border and sixteen south-west of Ashford. It is still a beautiful and ‘genteel’ village, not that much changed since Cobbett’s time; indeed, the population, 1,507 in 1831, was almost identical at the time of the 2001 census. Its name means ‘Hrothwulf’s woodland pasture’, and it is recorded as ‘Rovinden’ in the Domesday Book of 1086. This version of the name has been retained in the correct modern pronunciation of ‘Rovvinden’, but by 1610 the current spelling had come into circulation. The picture is somewhat complicated by the temporary demise of the original ‘Streyte’ when it was almost completely burned down in 1665, the year of the Great Plague. The villagers moved a mile down the road to the common land of the ‘Layne’, an old dialect word for a large tract of arable land. They later returned to rebuild the Street, creating the two centres of population that survive to this day. It was into this rustic scene that Edgar Willsher was introduced on 22 November 1828, the youngest of 14 children born to John and Charlotte Willsher. There is evidence of a Willsher family – the name incidentally has many variant spellings and simply means ‘from Wiltshire’ – living in Rolvenden from the sixteenth century, but the earliest inscription in the graveyard of St. Mary’s, the parish church, relates to Stephen Willsher, ‘yeoman’, who died in