they were perhaps the first occupants of the present Court Lodge, hard by Trottiscliffe church, that is the successor of the manor house which in the fourteenth century had been a much favoured residence of Bishop Hamo de Hethe. They, seem to have lived there in some style and each of two Thomas Whitakers, father and son, kept his shrievalty at the Court Lodge when be was High Sheriff of Kent, the one in 1743 and the other in 1748. Thomas the son seems to have been one and the same as the Ash landowner of 1792.⁶
   Whitaker had not long owned the two Ash farms, the previous proprietor having been Thomas William Coke, one of the family of the Cokes of Holkham. The farms had evidently been amongst the numerous outliers of the Coke’s Kingsdown estates, which comprised the manor of Hever (Heaver) and a moiety of ‘the manor of Chipsted⁷ and had come to the family’ through the marriage in 1620 of Henry Coke with a Margaret Lovelace, the heiress of the Lovelace estates.^7a  The Cokes had eventually decided to pull out ‘of their Kentish estates, as also of land that they owned in Somerset, and in 1785 an Act of Parliament was passed vesting the estates in Kent and Somerset that had been devised by the will of Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester ⁸ in trustees, who were to sell the property and invest the proceeds in other estates to be purchased in Norfolk. The Kingsdown manors were then bought by a London

merchant, Duncan Campbell, but, whether directly or indirectly, Thomas Whitaker acquired the Ash farms. He must by then have been getting on in years and in 1793 his death was reported to the Ash manorial court.⁹ His son, another Thomas, succeeded him and retained the farms for another twenty years and more.
   In the eighteenth century, as two hundred years before when the Bowes family were lords of Ash, there was a connection between Ash land and the manor of, North Cray; now, however, this related so far as Ash was concerned to Idleigh Court and its accompanying farm, which latter was rather more a Ridley farm than an Ash farm. In Ash there were one hundred and thirty-nine acres and, of course, the farmhouse. It has been suggested that Idleigh Court had the same architect as Ridley Court, which would make its probable date a few years either way from 1701.¹⁰  
    The old house survived until the middle of the later nineteen-seventies when, on a bitter winters night in which the firemen had difficulty in reaching the scene, it was destroyed by fire.
   The Idleigh estate belonged in 1792 to Thomas Coventry, who lived at North Cray Place and was of the same family as the Earls of Coventry. Earlier in the century, Idleigh had belonged to a family called Hatherington or Hetherington; one Jeffery Hatherington had