his abode in the parish. There was certainly full scope for pastoral care. Illegitimacy was widespread and Ash was also encountering at that time a problem from the multiplicity of travellers entering the parish. The consequential entries in the registers leave little doubt that Dr Pery and his assistant were assiduous in helping those in adversity. One entry in the baptisms for 1754 reflects an especially high devotion to duty. It reads: ‘Xmas day Henry & Rose Twins Bastards of Didumia Couchman’.
   The youngest of the Pery children, Thomas Lambard, died in 1756 and was buried in the chancel. There, after an incumbency of thirty-one years and at the age of sixty-five, his father joined him eleven years later.
   Dr Pery's son and successor retained the services of the vicar of Cudham and, indeed, made greater use of them than had his father. Little emerges as to the part which John junior played in the affairs of the parish and nothing to suggest that it was an especially active one.

Possibly his mother and the family stayed on at the Rectory, but it is perhaps more likely that only his sister Elizabeth remained, to keep house for him. In 1776, Elizabeth was married at Ash to the Revd Thomas Hutcheson, vicar of Northbourne, and in the following year Pery resigned the living.
   Afterwards, some of the Pery family were living with or near their Lambard relatives at Sevenoaks, where Mrs Pery died in December, 1792 and her daughter Caroline four months later. Their oval ledger stone in Ash chancel credits Mrs Pery with the age of eighty, the Burial register gives her one year less. It was Caroline Pery who had erected the memorial in Sevenoaks church to Sir Multon Lambard and his wife Jane, daughter of Edmund Fowler. Eighteen years after Caroline’s death, her brother John made his last journey to Ash. He was then described as late Rector of Wyton, Huntingdon’, to which they might have added, but did not, ‘sometime Rector of Ash’.