a yearly pound to pay for pens, ink and paper for the scholars and, a nice touch this, a further ten shillings for the entertainment of the school’s trustees at their annual meeting;. the Gee land was also to provide a pound each year for bread to be given to the poor on Good Friday.²³  All in all, these gifts and the manner of their making suggest that Atwood was a kind, convivial and modest man.
   It was during Atwood’ s incumbency that the manor of Ash and the patronage of the living had come into the ownership of the Lambards. His successor, John Pery, was the first Ash rector to be presented by that family. Pery must have married a Lambard daughter; more than gratitude to his patron would have prompted him to christen one of his children ‘Multon’ and another ‘Thomas Lambard’ and, in any case, there is other evidence of a close relationship between the two families. Pery soon showed himself a man of enterprise, by procuring the rebuilding of the parsonage house. He 

was also a scholar and achieved, like his predecessor Thomas Maxfield, a doctorate in Divinity.
   The first Pery entry in the registers is of the baptism, on 15 October 1737, of ‘Caroline d of John Pery (Rector) & Jane’. Whether or not Caroline was born in the old Rectory house, it was very clear that this was no place in which to bring up a young family. A quite high-powered commission was accordingly appointed by Bishop Wilcocks of Rochester to advise on what should be done or, more probably, to rubber stamp what the rector had decided must be done. Early in 1739, Multon Lambard and his five fellow commissioners reported that ‘we have duely inspected the old rectorial house of Ash, which we find to be in so ruinous a state that we apprehend there would be great danger in repairing a building that seems to stand in need of so many shores as are now made use of’'. That conclusion had been