successor, John I, was to fare no better, but on his gravestone in the Hodsoll chancel he was dignified as ‘captayne John Hodsoll, of South Ashe, esq.’.
   John I’s rank came by sea legs, not by spurs; he was an officer in the navy of Charles II. He seems, in fact, to have founded something of a naval tradition in the family. One of his sons, James Hodsoll, served in the Royal Navy in the reign of Queen Anne. At the time of his death in 1710, James was in command of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Squirrell’ and had with him in his ship as a ‘Voluntier’ his nephew James Henry Hodsoll.⁵
   The Royal Navy apart, John I was very much a family man. During the period of the Commonwealth he had married Mary, daughter of John Butcher and she bore him eight Sons and four daughters. The Butchers were of Wadhurst in Sussex and seven of the children were christened there. It was perhaps the expense of providing for so many children that in 1678 led to a property transaction, presumably either a mortgage or some kind of family arrangement, in which John I, his wife and Edmund Hodsoll received from one Robert Saunders junior the sum of £500. The property concerned was the Manor of South Ash and two messuages, four barns, two stables, two gardens, two orchards, three hundred acres

of (arable) land, twenty-four acres of meadow, fifty acres of pasture, fifty acres of wood and 38s. of rent in the parishes of Ash, Stansted, Kemsing and Seal.⁶
   John I died at the age of sixty-one in 1683. His name was long to be kept fresh at South Ash Manor by a painting of a royal naval occasion in which he had participated and it was also from him that, traditionally, ‘the Captain’s room’ there took its name.⁷  Mary, his widow, survived him eleven years.
   The family honours next devolved on John and Mary’s eldest son, William (‘William IV’), who but for his premature death in 1699 at the age of forty-three might have had as large a family as his father. As it was, he and his wife Hester, or Esther, had six sons and three daughters, of whom the youngest daughter, Jane, was posthumous.⁸  The eldest son, John (‘John II’) was still under-age when his father died; his younger brothers included the James Henry who was to serve under his uncle on the ‘Squirrell’ and so, at any rate initially, to carry on the family naval tradition into a third generation. Hodsoll wives usually long outlived their husbands and William IV’s widow may have been the ‘Esther Hodsol’ who was buried at Ash in 1736.