On the last day of May 1838 in a woodland clearing in northern Kent, a detachment of soldiers from nearby Canterbury clashed with a band of local labouring men. The labourers were led by an impostor calling himself Sir William Courtenay.
Subsequently called the last battle fought on English soil, the conflict in Bossenden Wood lasted only a few minutes, but was fiercer and more savage than anything those present had before experienced. By its conclusion, 11 men were dead, including Courtenay himself and one of the military officers.
Who was Sir William Courtenay?
Said to be six-feet tall, heavily bearded and dressed in an outlandish costume of gold-braided velvet, Sir William Courtenay had first appeared under that name in Canterbury in the autumn of 1832. With his stories of vast wealth and exotic foreign travels, he became a figure of local celebrity and notoriety, but he was frustrated in his attempt to gain a parliamentary seat in the elections that winter.
Shortly afterwards, his impostures caught up with him and he was arrested for embezzlement, and later for perjury. Sentenced to transportation to Australia, he was saved by the appearance of family members, who convinced the authorities of his true identity: the supposed Sir William Courtenay, they explained, was in fact John Nichols Tom, a Truro wine merchant who had a history of mental illness.
Stripped of his false titles, John Tom spent the next four years in Kent County Lunatic Asylum. Released in 1837, he returned to the local countryside and swiftly attracted a new following from among the labouring communities of Hernhill, Boughton and Dunkirk.
Dressed now in a smock and hat, he began presenting himself as a champion of the poor and oppressed. Welsh battles Contender for the final conflict on Welsh soil is the Newport Rising of 1839 which saw 4,000 Chartist sympathisers battle the 45th Foot regiment of Bossenden.
Rural unrest in England
Conditions in the rural areas of England at the time were far from bucolic, and over the preceding decade Kent had seen violent unrest. The ‘Swing’ riots in 1830 had aimed to destroy agricultural machinery and terrorise farmers into raising wages.
Five years later the district again erupted in opposition to the New Poor Law, which threatened to end the parish relief many labouring families used to sustain themselves outside the harvest season. Denied the hope of change and improvement by rational or legal means, many in the villages of Kent were drawn instead to the irrational claims of Sir William Courtenay.
Some of the impostor’s new followers even maintained that he was a divine figure, the Saviour himself. Belief in the imminent second coming of Christ was common at the time, and when Sir William preached that a “great and bloody day of retribution” was approaching, when he himself would call fire from the sky to destroy his enemies and lead his disciples to salvation, many among the labouring people were primed to believe him.
Sadly, their faith proved futile. The local authorities summoned a detachment of the 45th Foot from Canterbury to aid in quelling what one local clergyman called “an insurrection of the labouring classes”; the result was predictably bloody.
When was the last battle on English soil?
Military historians might identify Sedgemoor, fought in Somerset during the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, as the last pitched battle in England. Others prefer the skirmish at Clifton in Cumbria during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, and some historians widen the definition to include the exchange between British troops and the crew of a downed German bomber at Graveney Marsh in 1940.
The bizarre clash in Bossenden Wood in 1838 was variously reported in contemporary newspapers as a battle, a riot or an uprising. But it involved two distinct forces, one of them a fully equipped military detachment, several musket volleys, a bayonet charge, and a brief but bloody melee that left casualties on both sides. Whether we class it as a battle, or merely a skirmish, it was no less violent for those involved, or deadly for the unlucky few.
Bossenden Wood is today a peaceful place, with woodland paths leading north through the coppice trees from a bypassed stretch of the old A2 road between Canterbury and Faversham. Nearby Mount Ephraim, in 1838 the home of one of Sir William’s most ardent foes, has a tearoom featuring prints and memorabilia of events of that time.
In the picturesque village of Hernhill, just across the valley, a plaque in the churchyard records the unmarked graves of the impostor and seven of his slain disciples. In March 2026, the old plaque was replaced by a permanent stone memorial, and the fateful uprising of John Nichols Tom and his followers inscribed for posterity.
Words by Ian Breckon. Mad Tom's Rising is out now on Icon Books.
Top image: The death of Thom, alias Sir William Courtenay, Dunkirk, Kent, 1838 (Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)
