A Market Town and its Surrounding Villages is the first proper treatment that has ever been given not only to a single community but to a group of communities focused on a market town. Although numerous studies of local communities have been made, never before has anything like this group study been achieved.

Cranbrook and its six contiguous parishes in the Weald of Kent - Benenden, Biddenden, Frittenden, Goudhurst, Hawkhurst and Staplehurst - are fortunate to have parish registers that are almost complete for the period in question. This has given Anthony Poole the opportunity to effect a fascinating reconstruction of the families living in the parishes in the late 1600s, and, consequently, the pages teem with local people and families. Dr Poole's groundbreaking survey concentrates on the 40 years between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the close of the 17th century, which offers a wealth of resources including the Hearth Tax returns and the Compton Census; the study also benefits from remarkably full contemporary Accounts by Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor, and makes use of an abundance of wills, inventories and probate accounts.

Over ten chapters the author examines the sources themselves and the general background to the area and the period, analyses the development of families from courtship through marriage to death, discovers the role in society of the administrators, the poor and the very poor of the parish, and explores mutual support across societies, the borrowing and lending of money, and the influence of nonconformity. He provides fresh insight into family formation, preservation and limitation, the interrelationships between kin and neighbours, the function of parish welfare and credit systems, and the role of nonconformists in a time when religion shaped both community and country. At each stage Dr Poole places each of the Wealden parishes in context with other well-known studies.

This investigation is unique in being both essentially local in its focus, yet with an astonishing breadth that takes in national patterns of social and demographic history. This absorbing book will be of interest to the current inhabitants of the parishes, whose family histories may be entwined with the area's history, but also to local historians around the country, sparking academic debate and discussion about this fascinating subject.