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There is no knowing precisely how long the family lived
in the parish, but five hundred years may be a conservative estimate. In
the Lay Subsidy Roll of 1334-35 the names of Richard and Henry ‘Lonce’
appear in the context of other Ash names la and one or the
other of those two was probably the father of the John ‘Launce’ of Ash
who received the first tonsure in 1338. The evidence that the Lances were
settled in the parish quite early in the reign of Edward III is
conclusive, but there is no particular reason to suppose that they were
then newly arrived.
A John Launce, who may or may not have been Ash born, was
briefly rector of the parish in 1395-96, removing thence to Southfleet,
where he died in 1424. He was a lawyer of repute and, as Official
Principal, presided over the Rochester Consistory Court. Bishop William de
Bottlesham of Rochester made him one of his executors. 2
The James Launce, yeoman, who in 1527 directed that he should
be buried in Ash church, in the chapel of St Blaise, was plainly a man of
substance. By his will, he left £6.13s.4d. to an ‘honest secular
preste to |
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celebrate . . . in the chapell of Saynt Blase by the
space of on hole ‘ and he gave to the church 33s .4d. ‘the which I
leyde owte to the vse and behoff of the same church when I was
churchewarden’. He appears to be the first recorded churchwarden of Ash
and, appropriately, was a generous one.
As was often the case with other local families, not all the
Lances were of the same standing. An example is provided by a John Launce
who was one of several members of the family to make their wills in the
middle years of the sixteenth century and who was an husbandman. He seems
to have died two or three years before a John ‘Lannce’ whose burial in
1557 occasioned the first Lance entry in the surviving Ash registers;
whether that John was yeoman, husbandman or neither does not appear.
It is apparent that in the mid-sixteenth century there was
more than one Lance household in Ash and that had probably been the case
for upwards of two hundred years, as it was to be for long to come. In
1664, there were |