to Mrs Wingate, one of the Ash widows, was ‘so very small in the top that it is quite impossible for her to wear it, she being rather stout and the Gown being rather small she cannot get it on’. Whether Mrs Wingate ever did get it on is not on record, as with Mr Fletcher’s letter the correspondence ends.⁵  Josiah Rolls was soon engaged in another quarrel, this time with the Fawkham vestry. Thereafter, his reforming zeal was not called in aid by the parish. He chose for the place of family sepulture neither Fawkham nor Ash nor Hartley, building instead an imposing vault in the churchyard of Horton Kirby.
   The Miller charity derived from the will of Richard Miller, yeoman of Ash, made on 24 February 1670/71, whereby he gave to the overseers of the poor of the parish and their successors an annuity or yearly rentcharge of twenty shillings, issuing out of a house and land in Hartley that had lately been left to him by his brother. The annuity was to be for the only proper use and benefit of the poor of Ash and was to be distributed ‘Vnte, and amongst the poorest sorte of people Inhabiting in the said pish according to ye discretion of the Overseers ... yearely at the feast of the Nativity of our Saviour Jesus Christ ...‘. Power was given to the overseers to distrain on the Hartley property in case of default.

   There are numerous Miller entries in the registers from the late sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century but it is a common name and. these may not all relate to the same family. If the eighteenth century Millers came of the same stock as Richard Miller, they had lost the yeoman status of their forbears.
   Richard Miller’s father, Walter Miller, had married Elizabeth Hubbard at Ash in 1619; there were eight children of the marriage, some of whom died in infancy. Richard himself was christened on 22 December 1625. He seems not to have married and died in his middle forties in 1671, about a week after his widowed mother. His will was made a few days before his death.
   There were two witnesses to Richard’s will, Nicholas Best and Edmond Hodsoll. Best was of a family for whom there are many entries in the registers from 1620 to 1757, but he himself does not seem to figure. Perhaps he came from Hartley, where at some time a branch of the Best family became settled at Middle Farm and remained until well into Victorian times. Edmond, or Edmund, Hodsoll, who was a younger son of one of the Hodsolls of South Ash, we shall meet again.