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None of the smaller farms at West Yoke was
distinguished in the survey by a name. Johnson’s Farm, if it was then so
called, was occupied by Mrs Porter, who rented a further eight acres from
Mr Lance; its ownership had lately passed from a Mrs Baytram to a Mr
Argles. Corner Farm had for a number of years been in the ownership and
occupation of the Deane or Dean family, but it was now let by them to
Thomas Stoneham, a new recruit into the ranks of Ash smallholders.
The tenant of Corner Farm was probably of the family of
William Stoneham, who had. been licensee of the White Swan or, as the
survey called it, the Swan. The Swan’s owner was Thomas Stevens, in 1792
‘Mr Steevens’, by which time the pub was kept by William Sharp. Sharp
had a long reign, remaining until he was succeeded by another Stoneham,
George, about 1811. In the meantime, the ownership had passed first to
James Winson 14 and then to Russey Fleet, the Dartford brewer,
in whose family it was long to remain. Nine acres went with the Swan and
successive licensees did a little farming as a sideline. A half-acre hop
garden was a not inappropriate adjunct.
The five or six acres that went with the Swan’
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counterpart at Hodsoll Street likewise included a hop
garden of half an acre. The Green Man belonged to Mr John Colyer, a
substantial farmer in Southfleet who also owned Nursted Hill Farm in the
adjoining parish of Nursted. Then, or later, his branch of the Colyer
family lived at Joyce Hall in the Southfleet hamlet of Betsham, where the
Colyer Arms still recalls their name.15 The licensee of the
Green Man in 1780 was John Munns, of an old Ash family and in 1792 John
Wilkins, whose name no doubt explains why the largest of the house’s few
fields was known as ‘Wilkins’s Mead’.
Neither of the two pubs could claim the smallest hop garden
in Ash; that honour belonged to John Thorpe’s little garden of one rood
and twenty-four perches at Middle Pettings, where everything was on rather
a small scale. Per contra, Charles Whitehead was growing twelve
acres of hops at Ash Place and Pease Hill Farms. 16
Ash’s sixty-seven acres of hop ground were well scattered
throughout the parish and clearly its wind swept heights proved no
sufficient deterrent to the ambitions of either farmers or smallholders;
only in the part of the parish south of the |