The county contains 5 lathes, a partition peculiar to the county.
At the time of the Domesday Survey Kent comprised sixty hundreds, and there was a further division into six lests, probably representing the shires of the ancient kingdom, of which two, Sutton and Aylesford, correspond with the present-day lathes.
The five modern lathes (Aylesford, St Augustine, Scray, Sheppey and Sutton-at-Hone) all existed in the time of Edward I., with the additional lathe of Bedding, which was absorbed before the next reign in that of St Augustine.
The systematic use of dialogue as an independent literary form is commonly supposed to have been introduced by Plato, whose earliest experiment in it is believed to survive in the Lathes.
Inexplicably, but as on so many precision bench lathes, the tailstock barrel carried an inadequate a No. 1 Morse taper.