or 'Marcey'.'
   Although Charles’ interest in the estate was subject to a life interest for Hester, who lived on into her eighties, he farmed South Ash during her widowhood and may have done so before that, while William V devoted his energies to tanning. He finally came into, his own when Hester died at East Malling in 1796, but by then he was an old man and a widower, he wife had died three years before and Charles himself was to end his days before the century was out, at the age of seventy-seven. His heraldic ledger stone is the last of the family memorials in the Hodsoll chancel. Its inscription, but not the register, makes his wife Marcey, which was no doubt how she was known.
   The next half century was to see the decline and fall 

of the Hodsolls of South Ash, but there were other Hodsolls living in the parish whose fortunes seem already to have been long on the wane. To account for them it is necessary to go back to the earlier part of the eighteenth century and to a Thomas Hodsoll, who was then a landowner at West Yoke. This Thomas, who was born in 1691, was another of the younger sons of William IV, In 1727 he and his wife Sarah either sold or, more probably, mortgaged to John Cox, gent., for £60, some land in Ash and Fawkham which looks to have been what in more recent times came to be known as West Yoke Farm; if such it was, that began a Cox family interest, whether as mortgagees or, then or later, as owners, and occasionally as occupiers, which was to last well ever a hundred years.¹²