Six or seven children were born of John II's marriage to Rebecca, the daughter of Nicholas Tucker of Sutton Valence. The eldest son, William, died in 1714, a few days before his fifth birthday; the little stone to him in the Hodsoll chancel has lost its brass but not its inscription, which curiously gives as the date of his death what was in fact the date of his birth. To make confusion worse confounded, he was later replaced by another William, born in 1718. History then repeated itself. John II died two years later, aged only thirty-nine, and he, like his father before him, predeceased his youngest child. Another Hodsoll lady faced a long widowhood; Rebecca lived on until 1754.
   The young family with whom Rebecca was left included two sons, John (‘John III’), who was then barely eight years old, and the infant William (‘William V’); the posthumous child was also a son, Thomas. There were also two daughters, Rebecca and Ann, and, although she does not figure in the Baptismal register, there seems to have been a third daughter, Sarah. John III, who must have become at least titular head of the family, died, apparently unmarried, when he was only twenty-eight. Thomas, his youngest brother, fared little better; he married but died, apparently  childless, at the age of thirty. Both were survived by William V.
   Although Hodsolls had on occasion ventured into the 

professions, learned or otherwise, they were primarily a farming family. It appears, therefore, to have been an entirely new diversification when one of them, identified as William V, became a tanner at Dartford.⁹   That enterprise may perhaps have resulted from a split-up of the South Ash estate, which seems to have been divided at some time or other amongst the children of John II. Eventually William V bought out the rest of the family; that, at least, seems the likely conclusion to be drawn from a Fine of 1770 whereunder he paid £320 for a moiety of the estate to Barbara Hodsoll, widow, Edward Brownson and Rebecca his wife, William Stevenson and Ann his wife and Sarah Hodsoll, spinster.¹⁰  Barbara Hodsoll was his sister-in-law, the widow of his younger brother, Thomas, and Rebecca Brownson, Ann Stevenson and Sarah Hodsoll were presumably his sisters. At that time, the estate, of which William V was no doubt already owner of the other moiety, consisted of the Manor of South Ash, four messuages, eight barns, eight stables, eight gardens, four orchards, three hundred and seventy acres of (arable) land, ten acres of meadow, twenty acres of pasture, fifty—five acres of wood ..and common of pasture for all cattle; it was situate in ‘Ash-next-Ridley’, Kingsdown, Stansted., Wrotham and Kemsing.