A Brief History
As Written By Daevid Hook and Robin Ambrose in “Boxley: The History of an English Parish”.
1999. Modern Press Ltd. Maidstone. Kent. UK
The story of the yew tree commences with the Constable family. They occupied 4 cottages at Farthings from at least 1826. One of which was to become the beerhouse. When exactly they commence purveying beer is uncertain. But one imagines that it probably coincided with the establishment of the abbey brewery just a few hundred yards away in the early 1840’s. The 1841 census shows that John Constable and his wife Hester had a “female servant” living in. It is possible that she was employed behind the bar, and certainly by 1851, John was described as “landlord”. By 1865, George Constable the younger, was running an alehouse there for which the 1871 census records the name The Yew Tree Beerhouse.
The following year, John Richardson began a 10 year spell in charge. In 1874 he fell foul of the increasingly draconian legislation aimed at reducing the popularity of the “beer and gin culture”. His premises were inspected, and two quart measures were found to be incorrect, not surprisingly in his favour. Fined 10 shillings with an additional 9 shillings costs, he was lucky not to have been closed down [See our earliest picture of the Yew Tree]. James Fullager followed him, seeing the beerhouse into the 20th century. It was probably under Jarvis Jarett who ran it through to about 1930, that it finally attained the status of a public house.
Originally tied to Edward Mason’s brewery of the Waterside, Maidstone, It became a Shepherd Neame pub when they took over Masons in 1956. By that time the now thriving little establishment was being run by the second generation of the Sear family who had arrived more that 20 years earlier and remained well into the 1960’s. Despite pastoral view, the quaint inn survived the desecration to the valley caused by the construction of the M20 which today overshadows it.