family, who was an attorney practising in Clifford’s Inn, had testified that he had transacted ‘severall businesses’ for the deceased and was well acquainted with his writing.
   Edmund Fowler’s strange will, representing by no means all his wishes, at least made it clear that his wife was to have, as well as her jointure, his ‘Chariott’, two of his best horses, her linen and household stuff and jewels, her chamber furniture and all the underwood then growing and, also, that his mother was to receive £130 per annum. He wished to be buried at Islington ‘in Woollen only’ if he died in London and at Ash if he died in the country; the poor of Ash were to have forty shillings. Edmund’s executors were to have been his father-in-law, Ralph Petley, and Thomas Harris, but both renounced and his widow proved the will, such as it was.¹¹
   It is not clear as to how long the Fowlers continued at Ash Place after Edmund’ a death. In 1718 his daughter Jane, then in her late teens, married Multon Lambard of Sevenoaks, but the ceremony was not at Ash. With that marriage the manor of Ash and the advowson of the church passed into the family with whom they were to remain into modern times. With it, too, went the manor of Holiwell.
   The Lambards or Lambardes - they seem to have spelt 

their name as the fancy took them, though  eventually the final ‘e’ gained the edge - were directly descended from William Lambarde, a lawyer of distinction but whose chief claim to fame is as the author of the first great county topography, ‘The Perambulation of Kent’, which he published in 1576. William Lambarde’s first wife was Jane Multon, daughter of George Multon of St Clere, who died three years later and was buried at Ightham. Somewhat curiously, Lambarde had his eldest son by his second marriage christened and ever after ‘Multon’ was to recur as a Lambarde Christian name.
   The Multon Lambard to whom Jane Fowler was married was a younger brother of the then head of the family, Thomas Lambard of Sevenoaks Park. Multon, who was later knighted, was already in his forties at the time of his marriage, but he lived another forty years. Jane herself lived to be eighty, spending her widowhood at Vine Court House at Sevenoaks. This, the last home of a Fowler of Ash, was last in the tide of development in that town towards the end of the last century; its name survives in Vine Court road.¹²  Jane died in 1780 and was buried with her husband in the church of St Nicholas at Sevenoaks. A memorial to Sir Multon and his wife was erected in the Lambard chancel there by Caroline Pery, of whom more anon. They had no children and;