Yalding, United Kingdom

In 1086 Yalding was held by Richard fitz Gilbert, also known as Richard de Tonbridge, as tenant-in-chief; before the Norman Conquest it had been held by Alred under King Edward. The manor was assessed at two sulungs and had land for 16 ploughs, with 1.5 lord's plough teams and 6 men's teams. Its 43 recorded households comprised 16 villagers, 12 smallholders and 15 slaves, placing it among the largest 20 per cent of settlements in the survey. It had 5 acres of meadow, woodland for 150 pigs, two mills worth £1 5s, four fisheries and two churches, which Hasted identified as Yalding and Brenchley. Hasted's translation gives the fisheries' render as 1,700 eels less twenty. The manor's value had fallen from £30 in 1066 to £20 in 1086, and it was recorded as partly waste.

Yalding remained with Richard fitz Gilbert's descendants, the de Clare family, later earls of Gloucester and Hertford. Under Edward I Gilbert de Clare was allowed all the privileges of a manor there. Surviving estate accounts for 1299–1300, 1307–08 and 1317–20 show that Yalding yielded the Clares more than £79 in 1300 and £66 19s 6d by 1320. After Gilbert de Clare was killed at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the Clare inheritance was divided among his three sisters, and Yalding passed to Margaret and her husband Hugh de Audley. In the twelfth year of Edward II Audley obtained a weekly market and a three-day fair for the manor, held on the vigil, day and morrow of the feast of St Peter and St Paul. A fair was held on the Lees beside Twyford Bridge from 1339. On Audley's death in 1347 the manor passed through his daughter Margaret to her husband Ralph Stafford, created Earl of Stafford in 1350, and it descended in the Stafford family to the dukes of Buckingham.

Within the parish lay several lesser manors, including Woodfolde, Lodingford (alias Bermondsey), Jennings Court and Henhurst, held of the Clare earls by knight service. The manor of Bockingfold, on the southern edge of the parish, had a free chapel and an extensive park. Edward II stayed there in the nineteenth year of his reign, before leaving for France, and ordered the indictment of those who had hunted unlawfully in the park.

Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford gave the church of Yalding, with the chapel of Brenchley, to Tonbridge Priory, which he had founded. Gilbert Glanvill, Bishop of Rochester, confirmed the appropriation and ordained a vicarage; Laurence, presented in 1184, was the first vicar. The present Church of St Peter and St Paul was begun in the 13th century and is a Grade I listed building. When the priory was suppressed in 1525 for Cardinal Wolsey's college at Oxford, the church passed to that foundation, and to the Crown after Wolsey's fall in 1529. In the tenth year of Elizabeth I the rectory and advowson were leased to John Warde at £30 a year, and in the reign of James I they passed to his son Ambrose Warde.

Yalding stands at the confluence of the Medway, the Beult and the Teise, and the low ground near the rivers was prone to flooding. Twyford Bridge, which carries the road over the Medway south-west of the village, was first scheduled as a monument on 5 December 1928. It has four pointed arches, is about 4 metres wide and spans about 55 metres across the Medway. A bridge is recorded there in 1325 and in wills of 1475 and 1488. In 1600 the bridge was presented at the Maidstone sessions as being in bad repair, its upkeep falling on the inhabitants of Twyford hundred. Town Bridge, the ragstone bridge over the Beult in the village, dates from at least the 15th century and probably replaced a timber bridge. Money was left for its upkeep in wills of 1474 and 1475, and Historic England considers it the longest medieval bridge in Kent. Excavation in 1969 found that its foundations rested on brushwood, and the finds included a silver penny of Edward I. The antiquary John Leland, writing under Henry VIII, called Yalding "a praty townelet".

After the 2nd Duke of Buckingham was executed in 1483, Richard III granted the manor to Ralph Banister, who had betrayed him. It was restored to the Staffords under Henry VII. When Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, was executed for treason in 1521, Yalding was forfeited to the Crown. Henry VIII granted it the same year to Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester, who sold it to George Nevill, Lord Bergavenny. It remained with the Nevill family until a later Lord Bergavenny sold it; it then passed to the Freers of Westmeston in Sussex, who sold it around 1670. The Court Lodge and the demesne lands had by then been separated from the manor. According to local research cited in the Yalding Project, an epidemic in 1510 killed more than half of the village's inhabitants, possibly from plague or sweating sickness.