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Unlike Scotgrove, the three principal manors, Ash, alias
North Ash, Holiwell and South Ash, had survived the Middle Ages, as also,
although rather tenuously, had St John’s Ash. In the reign of Henry VII,
it might have seemed that their owners were hardly less durable than the
manors themselves. In the reign of Henry VIII, the Hodsolls alone remained
impervious to death or dissolution. For a while, theirs was the only one
of the manors not in the hands of the Crown. That situation did not last
for long. New lords were waiting in the wings.
Of St John’s Ash there is little more to say. The Hospitallers
having largely fused it with their Sutton manor, it was natural that the
King should choose the
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same lay owner for both St John’s Sutton and St John’s
Ash. His grantee was Sir Maurice Denys, who is said to have been allocated
so many possessions of the unfortunate Knights that ‘he acquired the
addition of St John’s to his name’, a curious augmentation, to say the
least. Thereafter, the descent of the Ash manor, which may have become
mainly a matter of entitlement to quit-rents, seems to have followed the
same tortuous course as that of the Sutton manor; the latter, at any rate,
was divided into moieties in the eighteenth century, but eventually both
parts fetched up with the Mumford family of Sutton.1
Much more of practical interest to the parish was |