than twenty-six per cent of the total deaths, died under the age of five and of these thirty-one lived less than twelve months. Prospects were much better for children who reached the age of five, although a further nineteen died before they were twenty. One sombre feature of the statistics is that the number of children dying under five exceeded the number of people who died after achieving their allotted span. Thirty-two people died in their seventies and twenty-three in their eighties. There was one nonagenarian, whom we have already met.
   Professions or occupations, with the year of burial where individual names are mentioned, included a clergyman, the Revd John Pery junr., 1811, thirteen farmers, amongst whom were, from old Ash families, John Middleton, 1792, Richard Walter, 1793, Richard Baker, 1795, William Warren, 1798, Charles Hodsoll, 1799, and John Rogers, 1805, an husbandman, John Steevens, 1795, a bailiff, Thomas Goodwin, 1800, thirty-six labourers, two blacksmiths, William Edwards, from Greenwich, 1790, and James Gladdish, 1802, a wheelwright, William Luck, 1800, two sawyers, Richard Lane, 1790, and Thomas Lane, 1807, a saddler, Henry Thorpe, 1805, three butchers, William Gladdish, 1794, Thomas Oliver, 1795, and Joseph Oliver, 1799, a ‘dealer in Coals’, John Rabson, 1792, he having died of a fever ‘in George St, Grosvenor Sq London’, a shoemaker, William Elcombe, 1806, a publican, John Ralph, 1807,

an ostler, an higler, and one male and six female servants. Other trades gaining incidental mention were those of carpenter, in the person of William Rhodes, whose small daughter died of smallpox in 1796, and taylor, this reference being to Solomon Wallis, whose wife died in 1807. Amongst those distinguished by description rather than by occupation were six travellers, a traveller’s child, a gentleman and four paupers.
   It will be less reassuring to some than to others to know that the fatal distempers which occurred most frequently and. resulted in thirty- nine deaths were ‘Old Age’, ‘Gradual Decay’ or the like. Moreover, the processes of gradual decay seem to have ranged over many years and in some cases to have started uncomfortably early; no doubt some were more gradual than others.
   Although the clinical significance of the causes of death as recorded might sometimes, perhaps, baffle an expert, it is at least of interest to learn from this somewhat macabre feature of the later Burial registers what those causes were thought to be at the time.
   In thirty-two cases, including nine children under the age of fifteen, the cause of death is given as ‘Decline’. In five other instances, adults’ deaths were attributed to ‘Consumption’. Nearly as numerous were deaths from ‘Convulsions’ or 'Fits' - three adults and twenty-seven children.