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Between them the holdings of the nine major
proprietors, Multon Lambard, Mrs Hodsoll, Thomas Whitaker, William Evelyn,
James Lance, Thomas Coventry and Messrs Kebble, Cox and Budgen, made up
rather more than two-thirds of the parish. Of the remaining one
thousand-odd acres, upwards of three hundred acres were accounted for by
ninety-nine acres that formed the Ash portion of Pells Farm in Kingsdown,
owned by a Mr Round and let to a Mr Taylor, the seventy-nine acres lying
to the south of Billet Hill that belonged to Mr and Mrs Tasker 13
and were tended by Joseph Oliver, the seventy-six acres of Upper Pettings,
which belonged to Mr Thorpe and were farmed by Henry Thorpe and the
fifty-eight acres of Rands House Farm, owned by Joseph Fletcher and worked
by Michael Fletcher.
The two biggest tenant farmers in Ash itself were Charles
Whitehead and Henry Thorpe. Numerically, Thorpe was a very short bead in
front of Whitehead, his mixed bag of holdings at Pettings and elsewhere in
the Hodsoll Street area totalling three hundred and fifty-five acres,
whereas Whitehead’s much more compact Ash Place and Pease Hill Farms
together comprised about one acre less. Whitehead had more under the |
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plough, two hundred and seven acres as opposed to
Thorpe’s one hundred and sixty-seven; that difference has largely
accounted for by Thorpe having one hundred and thirty-four acres of
woodland, as against Whitehead’s eighty-three. Charles Hodsoll no doubt
farmed more extensively than either Thorpe or Whitehead, but his South Ash
Farm, or rather that part of it that lay in Ash parish, extended only to
two hundred and ninety-one acres. That was five acres more than the sum of
John Middleton’s two holdings, West Yoke and North Ash, alias
Turner’s.
In 1792 Idleigh Farm, of which one hundred and thirty-nine
acres were in Ash, was in the tenure of James Wade, but it is first
appropriate to say something of his predecessors and, more especially, of
the Allen family, one of whose number was, in the nineteenth century, to
become owner as well as occupier of Idleigh.
The story begins with Robert and Mercy Allen, who flourished
at Hadlow in the second half of the seventeenth century. Of the family
born to them at that place, Robert Allen, the son and heir, settled at
Scadbury, in Southfleet, and one of the daughters, Mary, |