before the bishop’s official principal.
   It was unfortunate for Marion, if not surprising, that she could only produce at the hearing one witness of the alleged agreement to marry and in consequence John, who strongly denied the charge, was absolved from her claim. However, she still had her little triumph. John and Margaret admitted that they had contracted a clandestine marriage, now to be solemnised, and for their sins were ordered to be whipped three times round the church.³⁰  That was a standard punishment at the time for such offences, supplemented in deserving cases by further whippings round the market. Offenders were sometimes able to compound for their punishment, but there is no evidence that these two avoided their unpleasant circuits of the church. Unpleasant they would have been, painful they may or may not have been, but in any event small beer as compared with the ordeal which the participants, and everyone else, had next to face.

   In August, 1348, the Black Death broke out in Dorset. By the end of the year it had arrived in North West Kent, where for many months it raged with great ferocity. It is unlikely that Ash escaped.
   The Hodsolls, the Idleighs and the Martyns, or some of then, survived the pestilence, but the Martyns seem to have departed from the Ash scene later in the century.³¹  Not so the others; the Idleighs were, with the Hodsolls, the principal parishioners for much, at any rate, of the fifteenth century. The two families were evidently on friendly terms and when John Hodsoll. died in 1424, he left to John ‘Yedeley’ the sum of 13s.4d., a gift not then to be despised.
   John Hodsoll was a man of substance. The fact that he left gifts to the churches of Stansted and Kemsing, as well as to the church of Ash, is only one indication that his broad acres stretched beyond the