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Four or five years after Thomas Hodsoll's, death in
1762, his son and daughter-in-law, Thomas and Mary Hodsoll, were involved
in a transaction affecting land in Ash and Fawkham which was probably
either an outright sale or a renewal of the mortgage of the land comprised
in the transaction of 1727. The consideration was the same as previously,
£60, but the other party in this instance was one John Taylor, gent.13
He may have been a nominee or trustee of the Cox family, for the
Land Tax assessments show that some fifteen years later the proprietors of
what must have been West Yoke Farm were a Mrs Cox and a Mrs 'Penury' these
two were related and the name ‘Penury’ was still in use many years
later as a Christian name in the Cox family.
Between the ancient West Yoke Farmhouse and the house called
Eaglesfield, once the farmhouse of the other main West Yoke farm, there is
another house, Mann’s Farmhouse, and it was there that Thomas Hodsoll
the younger lived., at any rate in his later years; with it went a modest
acreage of land.
Thomas and Mary Hodsoll had a very numerous |
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family in which, characteristically, daughters greatly
outnumbered the sons. Thomas lived. to see at least two of his daughters
married, one of them to a kinsman, Henry Hodsoll of Wrotham. He died. in
1786 and was succeeded for a few years by James Hodsoll, who attains
immortality through the Land Tax assessments rather than the Ash
registers. James was followed at Mann’s Farmhouse by two of Thomas’
daughters, Jane and. Margaret.
According to the 1792 survey, there were then in Ash three
Hodsoll ‘proprietors’ and one Hodsoll of the humbler status of ‘occupier’.
The latter was Charles Hodsoll of South Ash Farm, of which he was in fact
the owner of the freehold reversion. A ‘Mr Hodsoll’, who may
have been one and. the same as Charles, was proprietor, but not occupier,
of a smallholding in Stansted Lane, the homestead of which is now
represented by the house known as Rose Cottage. Mrs (Hester) Hodsoll, the
life tenant, was shown as proprietor of South Ash Farm, of which about two
hundred and ninety |