acres were in Ash, and also of a small. field called. Angle Croft which abutted. on the south side of Billet Hill. A ‘Miss Hodsoll’ was proprietor and occupier of upwards of twenty-eight acres of land which lay on either site of the road leading from West Yoke to Fawkham Court Lodge and included a sizeable hop garden. This farm, once Thomas Hodsoll the younger's last redoubt, may not have been so diminutive as appears since it abutted on and may well have extended into Fawkham parish. Save for a small orchard, it was detached from the homestead, Mann’s Farmhouse.
   ‘Miss Hodsoll’ cannot be precisely identified as the contemporary Land Tax assessments show the two Miss Hodsolls, Jane and Margaret, as joint owners then and until 1794. However, Margaret, assuming she was the same Margaret, ceased to be a Miss Hodsoll early in 1793, when she married a young farmer named Samuel Tiesdell, who lived next door at West Yoke Farmhouse. Her marriage came to a sad end seven years later; it was this Samuel Tiesdell who was accidentally drowned in a pond at West Yoke. Over the years many ponds have disappeared from the locality, but there is still a sizeable one behind West Yoke Farmhouse. If that was the locus in quo, this strange calamity happened very near to home.
   Mann’s Farmhouse and its land passed about 1795 to

one Thomas Burbary, but was later acquired by the Cox family and eventually added to their farm at West Yoke. For some years during the first decade of the nineteenth century, a Mrs Tiesdell held the house and land as tenant from the Coxes; she, no doubt, was Margaret Hodsoll that was, back in her old home.
   At South Ash, Charles Hodsoll was followed by his only son, yet another William Hodsoll (‘William VI’), who was then thirty-eight years of age. This William may well have been associated with the tannery, for he had married a Dartford girl, Ann Lawford, and their eldest son, William, had been christened at that place in 1790. The event was considered of sufficient importance for an entry of the baptism to be made in the Ash register, a recognition, perhaps, that if the waters ran smoothly for this small boy, which in fact they did not, he would eventually be lord of South Ash. If William VI was a tanner, he was also a farmer, for he was so described in the register; maybe he was helping Charles to run South Ash Farm, as at that time he was neither an owner nor an occupier, at any rate in Ash.
   William and Ann had four more children, of whom two died in infancy; the others were John, born in 1793, and Charles, born in 1798. The last Hodsoll entry in the ancient registers is of the burial