There is a document dated 1556 which records an agreement between Thomas Wells and Lady Bridget Willoughby, then the owner of Bore Place, in which he agrees to supply her with wheat and oats for a period of five years and to ‘bring and carry or cause to be brought and carried yearly during the space of 20 years’ from London to ‘the house of the said Lady Willoughby called Bore one sufficient wain load of such victuals and stuff as she or any other to her use shall buy and provide for the provision of her house’. In this document Thomas Wells is described as a ‘carpenter and farmer’. Ten years later when Thomas Willoughby (the second) mortgaged Bayleaf ‘with all its lands, appurtenances, pastures and woods now in the tenure and occupation of Thomas Wells’ to Richard Water, a wealthy miller, Thomas Wells is described as a yeoman. So he was a farmer, a carpenter and, at least by 1566, a yeoman. A yeoman is a recognised economic class in the early modern period and usually describes someone who was farming at least 100 acres. He was above ‘husbandman’ but below ‘gentleman’. In other words, yeomen constituted a rural middle class. He would expect to produce a large marketable surplus each year and be a regular employer of non-family labour.

Evidence from London, where carpenters were organized in a craft guild (the carpenters’ company) suggests that the profession was not a very profitable one. However, outside London and the larger provincial towns the activities of carpenters were unregulated which means that there are few details of how the craft was organised or of the wealth it generated. As a carpenter Thomas Wells might have been responsible for building entire houses as well as commercial and industrial buildings. The more successful carpenters acted as architect contractors, arranging for materials and sub-contracting with other craftsmen.

Analysis of tax and poor rate assessments suggests that Thomas Wells was a wealthy man within his community – in the top 10% of the Chiddingstone population – which would have made him a substantial, and respected, member of the community. This is reflected in his local office holding. In 1562 he was elected to the office of constable of the hundred of Somerden, an unpaid position he would have held for two years. A hundred was a unit of administration covering a number of parishes. As a constable for the hundred he (together with another constable) would have overseen the collection of poor rates, the supervision of parochial officers and the maintenance of roads and bridges. Together with petty constables they were also responsible for controlling any disturbances within their communities. Between 1565 and 1566 Thomas Wells also served as one of two collectors of the poor, an office (later called overseers of the poor) that emerged from the developing poor law legislation of the 16th century.

Bayleaf farm comprised between 100-130 acres of land, a mixture of arable, pasture, woods and meadow. How it is farmed is unclear. In this region of Kent livestock farming – cattle rather than sheep – was predominant. Only one quarter of the demesne lands were being used for arable in the early 16th century, the remainder being pasture, even though this meant that the owners of Bore Place were obliged to buy in additional grain to supply their household. Like Thomas Wells, they grew wheat and oats. Barley, which did not grow well on the heavy clay soils of the Weald, had to be bought in. The commercial value of cattle was in their meat and hides, with some of the cattle destined for the London market. Bailiff’s accounts for Bore Place which survive for the years 1513-1514, 1516-1517 and 1517-1518 show that the bailiff (William Walker) was selling livestock to individual traders spread out over an approximately 40-mile radius from Chiddingstone, including to a trader from Southwark where the London tanning industry was based.

The baptism register for Chiddingstone, which begins in 1566, records the birth of five of Thomas Wells’ children within a 10-year period – three boys and two girls. By this date he already had at least one son, Thomas, which we know because there is a record of his burial in 1572. Another son, Percival, died aged two in 1571. A ‘snapshot’ of the Wells family in December 1578 at home in Bayleaf would find Thomas and Mrs Wells, Anne aged seven, Henry aged five, Ralph aged two and Martha aged one month. There may have been one or two older children whose births pre-date the start of the baptism register and who survived to adulthood. It is likely that the Wells’ household included at least one, and probably two, female domestic servants, so called ‘life cycle’ servants who entered service in their mid-teens and stayed until they married in their early to mid twenties. This means that the Wells’ household is likely to have been large at between nine and 10 people, considerably larger than the average early modern household of five but consistent with what is known of other Chiddingstone yeomen families at this date. Thomas Wells must have relied on paid labour to manage his farm, probably day labourers who would have been employed on a seasonal basis. Such men are likely to have maintained their own households and so would not have been resident in Bayleaf.
It is probable that Thomas Wells was illiterate. Although unequivocal corroboration for this is missing, in 1581 only seven out of 17 jurors of the Somerden hundred court – men of the same status as Thomas Wells – were able to sign their names: the rest indicated their assent with their ‘mark’. Had he been able to write one would expect him to have signed the 1556 agreement he entered into with Lady Bridget Willoughby, discussed above. Instead, he ‘signs’ it with his seal. Although nationally literacy levels were rising throughout the early modern period, outside of London and larger urban centres illiteracy remained the norm below the ranks of gentry.