France. This was swingeing taxation since apart from paupers, who were exempt, the minimum rates were two shillings for a birth, half a crown for a marriage and four shillings for a burial. Death may seem to some a most inappropriate occasion on which to activate the taxman, but that it was to cost twice as much to be buried as to be born reflects the fact that legislators have never taken that view. The levy rose progressively up the social scale so that at the top, in reaches to which Ash did not aspire, the birth of a Duke’s eldest son cost £30 and the marriage or burial of a Duke £50. A birth had to be notified to the local incumbent under penalty of forty shillings and he was to receive a fee of six pence for recording it and to pay forty shillings for failing to do so. In fact so many clergy did fail that in 1705 an Act was passed to indemnify them from the ruinous fines to which they had become liable.⁶  Perhaps Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim had satisfied Parliament that vigour was now achieved.
   From May 1701 to May 1706 the entries are much more informative, recording not only the date of birth but also the father’s occupation and the ‘borough’, ‘burrow’ or ‘borow’ of either Ash or Holiwell (sic) in which the family lived.
   Amongst the fathers of the borough of Ash were Joseph Oliver, butcher, John Christopher, wheeler 

(who was probably a wheelwright, but possibly a carrier), Richard Wallis, taylor, Michael Beal and Henry Johnson, both blacksmiths, William Hubbard and Thomas Middleton junr., both yeomen, Edward Dalton, carpenter and James Mun, cordwinder (presumably a cordwainer or shoemaker). The fathers of the borough of Holiwell, which centred on Hodsoll Street, included Hugh Knowlden, yeoman, James Edmunds, husbandman, Edward Best, blacksmith, John Wyburne, carpenter and Mark Glover, labourer.
   In 1704 began a practice, not always consistently followed, of differentiating in the register the period from 1 January to 25 March in each year. The legal year still ran from Lady Day, but since the latter part of the seventeenth century the Old Style and New Style years had sometimes been used conjointly; this innovation had now arrived in Ash. Rather surprisingly, John Pery, who became rector in 1736, reverted to the exclusive use of Old Style and continued it until 1752; then the Julian Calendar was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar and the first of January was designated as the beginning of the legal year.⁷  The change of calendar involved the loss of eleven days from the month of September 1752, which fact has some minimal effect on comparative statistics gleaned from parish registers and