a flight of witches on broomsticks. - These oasts are
amongst the loveliest of functional buildings and blend so perfectly into
the Kentish landscape that, when left unmolested, they look to have stood,
unchanged and unchangeable, since time immemorial. In fact, they mostly
stem from an invention by a Mr John Read, of Regent’s Circus, in the
year 1838. They came in good time to see the heyday of hop-growing in Ash
and remained to watch over its decline.
A late eighteenth century survey of the parish shows that
nearly seventeen hundred of Ash’ s three thousand-odd acres were at that
time in use for arable farming. Man contrived and found it profitable to
plough these lands, for all their confusion of flints. In this he was
helped, and long had been helped, by the Old Kent Plough. That remarkable
implement was in universal use in Kent for four centuries or more and was,
indeed, still widely employed on the chalklands during the earlier years
of the present century. It was a heavy wooden plough, operating ‘one-way'
by means of a movable wrist, so that all the furrow slices fell the same
way. At least three or four horses were needed to pull the |
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plough and two men, a ‘waggoner’ and a ‘waggoner’s
mate’, to work it. It could be simply adapted for use as a two-horsed
broadshare and its outstanding capabilities in the destruction of weeds
gave it an even longer life in that guise. The Old Kent Plough was an
object of some derision in other parts of the country, but Kentish
farmers, especially those who battled with flints, knew better.9
In the centuries that followed the coming of the Flemish
weavers in the reign of Edward III, cloth-making developed as England’s
first important manufacture and wool became the fount of England’s
greatness. The North Downs were not far distant from the Weald of Kent, a
major home of the new industry. The gifts of sheep and lambs so frequently
found in the wills of downland farmers, particularly in the sixteenth
century, gifts to their churches or their~’ relatives or their
godchildren, were clearly of prized possessions. Wool must have made an important
contribution to the prosperity of this countryside. It may be no
coincidence that a chapel in Ash church was dedicated to St Blaise, the
patron saint of woolcombers. |