🏰 The history of Nettlestead
Nettlestead takes its name from Old English: netele, a nettle, and stede, a place or homestead. It has been settled a long time — Nettlestead Place, the manor house west of the church, appears in the Domesday survey of 1086, and parts of the present house date from the middle of the thirteenth century.
The parish church of St Mary the Virgin, Grade I listed, was begun in the thirteenth century. Only the ragstone tower survives from that first building. The nave followed in about 1438, the chancel around 1460, and the south porch about 1496.
The Pympes and the glass
Much of what the church is known for is owed to one family. Reynold de Pympe — High Sheriff of Kent in 1409 and Member of Parliament for the county in 1411 and 1422 — rebuilt Nettlestead Place and remodelled the church at about the same time, filling it with stained glass on a scale unusual for a village. His son John added more later in the same century. All forty-one windows are recorded in the archives of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, the international survey of medieval stained glass, and people still travel to see them.
Either side of the chancel arch are memorials to the two wives of Sir John Scott, whose family succeeded the Pympes at Nettlestead Place: Lady Elizabeth, who had been a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth I and died in 1598, and Lady Katherine, who died in 1616.
The bells
The tower has been added to repeatedly. Philip Wightman cast and hung two bells; Thomas Mears II added a tenor in 1838; the tower itself was raised by four and a half feet in 1841 to make room for an organ gallery. Mears and Stainbank added trebles in 1885 and 1909 to make five, and Whitechapel brought the ring to six in 2005.
Writing in 1798, the Kent historian Edward Hasted called St Mary's a small but handsome building with a low pointed tower, and noted the good remains of painted glass already in it.
Nettlestead Green
Nettlestead Green is a separate village about two miles to the south, and has its own character — the seventeenth-century Hop Pole Inn, and a plant nursery. Yalding station, on the Medway Valley line, is closer to the Green than it is to Yalding.
1944
On 26 June 1944 Warrant Officer Richmond Anthony Blumer of the Royal Australian Air Force, known as Red, was killed when his Spitfire came down in woodland near the church. There is a memorial to him, and a service is held in his memory every other year on the Saturday nearest the date.
Where to read more
This page is a summary. The detail is in the sources, and all four are worth the visit:
- St Mary the Virgin Church — the fullest account of the building and its glass, with historic images.
- Kent Past — the place-name, the listing and a detailed history of the bells.
- Nettlestead Place — the manor house's own history, from Domesday onwards.
- Wikipedia — a short overview, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.
Compiled by the Parish Council from the sources above. Corrections are welcome — please contact the Clerk.