but no burials are entered for that year and only one during the seven succeeding years.
   It is clear that Maxfield must have been in reasonable health until at least the early part of 1601, as in February of that year he was in London attending the sick-bed of a brother-in-law, one of the Walter family, whose will he witnessed.³  It could be that at about that time he had in hand the copying of the old registers, but was stricken by some crippling illness before he had quite completed his task. Another possibility is that the transcripts were not begun until after the Canon of 1603 and that Maxfield decided to complete first the entries up to 1600, but was overtaken by his last illness before he had finished. Later entries may have been made either in the original registers or on loose sheets and, death being a great gleaner of paper, those may not have long survived. Such conjectures may, however, 

be wide of the mark; they do not account for the fact that a few entries from Maxfield’s last years remain, nor for the gaps that continued for an appreciable time after his death. What is apparent is that the earliest register book now extant inadequately reflects the patterns of life and death in Ash during the first seven years of the seventeenth century. Even the burial of the rector himself is unrecorded in that book.
   The ancient registers of Ash, that is to say, the registers covering in whole or in part the years from 1553 to 1812, are comprised in four volumes. The first volume is entitled, somewhat paradoxically:
   ‘The Register of the Pishe of Ashe next Dartford Kent in Rochester Dyoces. for Christenings, Marriages & Burials beginning at the year of our lord 1560 the second yere of queen Elizabeth’s Reigne.’