Shambles - used to live there, in Rolvenden, near Tenterden. It's the south west part, in the east of the Weald, which used to be heavily wooded, abutting on to Sussex, north of Romney Marsh. They were the woodland pastures for pigs. Tenterden belonged to the men of Thanet. The early inhabitants (very vague early, don't know whether this was Jutish or Celtic organisation) used to share out the resources of the county so that every unit had access to the coast for fish and salt, the Downs for wood, and grain growing areas, and so on, so the old boundaries cross the geological ones. Other dens may derive prefixes from personal or tribal names, or natural features.

Pete M - should have put NOI on the remarks about the people of Kent. Some of us teachers have a) appallingly heavy humour, and b) a tendency to put forward the bees in our bonnets as fact. Besides which, a part of me is Kentish, but from near London.

Bert - I know Seven-Mile lane, and used to drive along it regularly between Rolvenden and Dartford, but I never noticed it was only five. There's a similar survival at Wye, where a straight stretch is called Milecamp, and it is a Roman mile long.

More on Tyler. I was wrong about him being in Essex at the start of the rebellion. He came from Colchester, as did Ball, and was in Maidstone when the NW Kent band arrived, as was Ball (in gaol). The Dartford Tyler was another man of the same name, first name John, though, but the confusion was spread by Tom Paine as well as others. Wat was almost certainly in the building trade, as one source uses a medieval word for roofer as his surname, and would have been part of the newly formed Tilers' Gild. One of the books I used included a good many old sources, including a treatment on subsequent uses of the story, and had a passage from the Jack Straw play, as well as some of the songs associated, mostly later, with the rebellion. None of which was, or had been at any time, in the metre of the Cutty Wren, or bore any other resemblance to it. I suspect my song book of economy with its researches. I know it was used in Wesker's "Chips with Everything" as a song of revolution, but I am not sure where the idea came from befoe that. So I think I may have answered my own question there. Unless someone else knows better.