for it was apparently he who prepared the elegant map to the Ash Tithe Commutation agreement of 1839, which he based on the maps annexed to the survey of 1792, as also the tithe maps for some other nearby parishes.¹⁷
   At the time of the 1841 census, the complement at South Ash Farm consisted of William junior, his wife Amelia, his four Sons and two daughters,¹⁸  his old father, then just into his eighties, Sarah Kettel, another octogenarian who was perhaps a niece of Charles Hodsoll’s wife, Mercy, a Governess, three woman servants and four agricultural labourers. The two old people were described as of independent means; supposedly, William VI’s independence came from the fruits of the sale of the estate but those, with a background of mortgage, may not have been all that ripe. Still, the Hodsolls evidently felt able to live with some modest degree of style. They could not do so much longer. In 1846 there was a terrible harvest, followed

immediately by the repeal of the Corn laws. In January 1847, the ‘Valuable Modern Household Furniture and Effects at South Ash Farm’ were offered for sale by auction ‘by order of the assignee of William Hodsoll, a bankrupt’.¹⁹  So ended in tragedy a family relationship with the parish of Ash whereof the origins are lost in the mists of time. The Hodsolls, or some of them, moved on to the Mill House at Orpington and there remained until well into the present century.²⁰
   The Hodsolls of South Ash were basically a yeoman family, albeit armigerous and lords of the manor over many centuries. Perhaps because of ill-health, or the size of their families, or both, they seem never to have reached any great heights socially. Their decline in later years was not reflected in the Wrotham branch, the head of which in mid-Victorian times married into the Pollock family and graduated to the ‘handsome mansion’ of Loose Court, near Maidstone. He, Charles