particularity may have been prompted by the inconvenience of her time of passing. ‘Mother Warre’ followed her in the next year, 1582. The Hubbards of Ash, a family of some standing, might not have appreciated the combination ‘Old Mother’, but in fact it was never used.
   ‘The Widow’, or simply ‘Widow’, was sometimes employed as a prefix, early uses being for ‘Widdowe Edwards’ in 1627 and for ‘The Widdow Wellard’ in 1650. Similar instances, with or without the definite article, occur in eighteenth century entries.
   ‘Dame’, in the sense of an aged housewife, was used in a few cases besides that of Dame Waller during the period from 1758 to 1766. The same prefix had been used for Ann Fowler in 1646, but in her case to denote the widow of a knight. Dame Ann had been the wife of Sir Edmund Fowler, who built Ash Place; she is the only person of title to appear in the registers.

   From 1625 to 1812 there are recorded burials of upwards of. seventy people, exclusive of travellers, who either belonged to or were brought from other parishes. With four or five exceptions, all those parishes were in Kent; the great majority adjoined or were only a few miles distant from Ash.
   Throughout the district, as no doubt elsewhere, there was a tradition, which is still sometimes followed, of bringing back for burial in their original home parish people who had died and, often enough, had long lived in some other place. The extent of this practice may have been partly attributable to a person’s right to burial at the expense of the parish in which he or she had a Poor Law settlement, but the practice itself, at least in the higher echelons, had other and earlier origins. The first known instance at Ash, which is unlikely to have been the first actual instance, was that of the