Atwood.¹⁸   Its probable purpose was to serve as his residence because the Rectory, although a sizeable. house,¹⁹  was beginning to tumble down. There may in any case have been need for two clergy houses in the parish, since there was another clergyman, a curate maybe, resident in Ash in Atwood’s time. He was one Charles Pocklington, who first comes to notice through the baptism of his son Charles, who was born and christened on the same day in 1706. Later entries for the Pocklington family occur in the Burial register. A Charles Pocklington, perhaps the son rather than the father, died in 1723, a Mrs Pocklington, probably Charles senior’ s wife, Mary, in 1727 and a Mrs Susan Pocklington in 1732.
   Unlike his Ordinary, Bishop Atterbury of Rochester, who was eventually exiled and deprived for his Jacobite activities, Samuel Atwood seems to have supported the Hanoverian succession. At any rate, a board displaying the arms of George I was set up in his church. It was 

not a new board, as it had previously borne the arms of Queen Anne and, whether in truth or irony, her motto ‘Semper eadem’.²⁰  Most likely, the new painting, and perhaps the old, was done at Atwood’s expense, for he was a generous benefactor of the church and parish of Ash. In 1713, he gave a paten of the finest silver, inscribed simply with the words ‘Ash Ex Dono Rectoris’; ²¹ and the date; it was a fit companion for the church s Elizabethan chalice of 1565-6. Another of his gifts was an handsome altarpiece that beautified the chancel until its removal in the last century,²²  a victim presumably of the Gothic revival. His final benefaction, made by his will, was for the young and the poor. An annual sum of twenty pounds, payable out of land vested in one John Frend, was allocated towards the establishment of a free school for the children of the poor of the parish and land vested in one Richard Gee was to provide