The name first appears in Saxon charters as "de maeides stana" and "maegdan stane" - possibly the "stone of the maidens" or the "stone of the people," referring perhaps to a nearby megalith around which Anglo-Saxon assemblies gathered. The Domesday Book of 1086 rendered it as Medestan; by 1396 it was Mayndenstan; by 1610, Maidstone. There is evidence of human settlement here going back before the Stone Age. The Romans built a road through the town and left villas in the surrounding fields. The Normans set up a shire moot - a place where local legal disputes were judged. The suburb of Penenden Heath, now full of pleasant houses, was historically the open ground where Kent's courts met outdoors and, in medieval times, where its executions were performed.

Maidstone has a habit of rebellion. In 1381, during the Peasants' Revolt, the rebel priest John Ball was imprisoned in the town. He was freed by Kentish rebels under Wat Tyler, who himself is reputed to have lived in Maidstone. Ball's sermon - "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" - is one of the founding texts of English social radicalism. In June 1648, during the English Civil War, the Battle of Maidstone saw Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax storm the town and defeat a Royalist uprising in fierce street fighting. The following year, with Charles I on trial in Westminster Hall, Maidstone's mayor read the king's sentence to his face. The plaque calling Broughton "Regicide" has stood through monarchical Restoration, Hanoverian succession, Victorian morality, and Elizabethan jubilees. The town has never apologised.

Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Maidstone industrialised quietly along the Medway. Paper mills, stone quarries, breweries, cloth works. James Whatman and his son, working at Turkey Mill on the eastern edge of town from 1740, invented wove paper - a smooth, even sheet made on a tightly woven brass mesh rather than the older laid pattern of parallel wires. Whatman paper became, and remains, a brand of choice for printmakers, watercolourists, and engravers. William Blake printed his illuminated books on Whatman. The Declaration of Independence draft was written on it. The paper that carried much of the British Enlightenment came from this riverside town in Kent. A military presence was added in 1798 with the cavalry barracks at what is now Invicta Park, today home to the 36 Engineer Regiment. The town's prison, north of the centre, opened in 1819 and is still operating.

In late 1897 and early 1898, contaminated water from the Farleigh and East Farleigh springs spread typhoid fever through Maidstone. At least 132 people died, in what was at the time the largest typhoid epidemic recorded in Britain. The town was overwhelmed. Hundreds of nurses volunteered from across the country to care for the sick. Among them was Edith Cavell, then a young nurse, sent by Eva Luckes, matron of The London Hospital. Cavell would later become world-famous - and a wartime martyr - after being shot by a German firing squad in occupied Brussels in 1915 for helping Allied soldiers escape. Her Maidstone service was an early test of the steady professional courage she became known for. The epidemic forced the town to overhaul its water supply, an investment that quietly saved thousands of lives in the decades that followed.

Few towns have a dinosaur on their coat of arms. Maidstone does. In 1834, workmen in a quarry at Queen's Road found an iguanodon skeleton embedded in Kentish ragstone - one of the earliest dinosaur fossils ever recovered in Britain, and important enough that the town added the creature to its heraldry alongside a golden lion and the white horse of Kent. The original fossil is in the Natural History Museum in London. The arms also display three roundels and a wavy fess representing the Medway. The river still defines the town: it carries pleasure boats now rather than cargo, but its line through the centre still organises everything around it. Maidstone today has roughly a hundred thousand residents. Its economy is mostly retail, service, and administrative rather than the heavy industry of the 19th century. Graham Chapman of Monty Python died at Maidstone General Hospital in 1989. Tony Hart, of "Take Hart" and the plasticine character Morph, was born here in 1925. The town keeps adding names to a long roll of unexpected fame.