Court or Ash Courtlodge or the Manor House, Ash, or Ash Manor is close by Ash church. It may stand, probably does stand, on a site where there has been a manor house of some sort from time immemorial. The house bears the date ‘1637’, so Sir Edmund Fowler did not lose much time in providing himself with a country home in his new domain.
   Whether Ash Place was also intended to serve, or ever did serve, as the venue of the manorial courts seems doubtful. It is known that in the last years of the eighteenth century the courts of the manor of Ash met at the venerable White Swan inn, at the northerly end of Ash Street, and the chances are that they had met there from time out of mind. The courts of the manor of Holiwell met by the Holiwell Manor Beech at the southern end of White Ash Wood, from which somewhat inhospitable surroundings they were, at any rate in later times, adjourned to the Swan.³

   Fowler lived some years to enjoy his new house but, with the country soon torn by civil strife, they must mostly have been clouded years. He died on 28 December 1645, very briefly survived by his second wife and leaving by Anne Bowes, his first wife, a son and a daughter, Nicholas and Anne. His death is not recorded in the Ash registers; most of the Fowlers were buried at Islington, as no doubt was he.
   As to Sir Edmund’s widow, Dame Anne, it was perhaps a case of
   '... she for a little tried 
   To live without him, liked it not and died’.
Her life ended on 30 January 1646. They buried her nine days later in Ash church, in what was long to be known as the Fowler chancel.
   The Fowler chancel occupied that part of the church which seems to have been screened off in medieval times