Edward Hasted, the local historian of Kent, has dismissed the story of the Biddenden Maids as a folk myth, claiming that the image on the cake had originally represented two poor women and that the story of the conjoined twins was " a vulgar tradition " invented to account for it, while influential historian Robert Chambers accepted that the legend could be true but believed it unlikely.
32.
There are three competing theories for the origins of this bizarre tradition : that it genuinely commemorates two adult conjoined twins from the year 1100 ( which would make them one of the oldest documented cases ever recorded ); that the twins existed, but in the 16th century; that the twins are a folk myth based on the unusual cake design, which was actually intended to represent poor widows.
