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covered three thousand and twenty-three acres, two
roods and twenty-six perches, which included nearly sixteen hundred and
ninety acres of arable land, sixty-seven acres of hop ground, three
hundred and eighty-three acres of meadow and pasture and just over six
hundred and thirty-four acres of woodland. The balance of some two hundred
and fifty acres mainly comprised homestalls, sites of houses or cottages
and their gardens and the parish lanes and roadside waste. The lanes
accounted for about twenty-eight acres. The Ash section of the London to
Maidstone turnpike was evidently regarded as lost to the parish and
discounted. Another piece of land apparently not computed was the Green at
Hodsoll Street, which was no doubt common land of the manor of Holiwell
and on which, incidentally, were located the Hodsoll Street stocks,1
There were upwards of sixty landowners or, as they were
called, proprietors, which expression included both absolute: owners and
limited owners; thus, for example, Mr Hodsoll, who was tenant for life of
settled land, figured as a proprietor. The owners ranged from David
Durling whose cottage and garden near Hodsoll Street made a
holding of eighteen perches, to Multon Lambard, who possessed five hundred
and twenty |
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thirty-six
Ash acres.2 The humblest proprietor, perhaps if not the
least enterprising, was Thomas Ashenden, who lived in one of the two
cottages in Rosemary Lane that belonged to ‘The Poor of Ash’; he owned
an orchard of perches taken from Waste’.
Save for Angle Croft, which was another of the bits
and pieces occupied by Joseph Oliver, Mrs Hodsoll’s two hundred and
ninety-three acres in Ash were all comprised in South Ash Farm. The
curious mix up of the boundaries of Ash, Stansted and the detached land of
Kemsing is emphasised by the fact, recorded in the perambulation that
concludes the survey, that. there was a post in the kitchen of South Ash
Manor where those three parishes met. There was also another such meeting
point, which at some time was marked by a stone inscribed K A S. This
stone, which is mentioned in pencil note on the relevant plan to the
survey, was positioned westwards from the house on the south side of the
private road leading from the South Ash road to Crowhurst in Kingsdown.
Most of the Kemsing land lay a little way to the north of South Ash Manor,
but it seems that a tongue of Kemsing land must have crept round to the |