three heads of families, James, William and Hugh Lance. Hugh’s abode was modest, with only one hearth, but William’s was rated at four hearths and James’ at five hearths, which was only one less than for the manor house at South Ash. James Lance’s home was probably the farmhouse of North Ash Farm and, as such, a predecessor of the last Lance abode, later known as North Ash Manor. That agreeable Georgian house, never in fact a manor house., still survives, if in strange company. It is now the only complete building of any age within the confines of New Ash Green.
   The ancient registers record for the Lance family forty-nine baptisms, fourteen marriages and thirty-three burials, but after 1660 the baptisms number only thirteen and nine of those were of girls. The male line was gradually nearing its end, although the ripe old ages achieved by successive heirs served to conceal the fact and it took a. very long time a’dying. The last of the Lances lived on into the nineteenth century,
   The heads of the family during its last three hundred years look to have been James, who died in 1624, his eldest son, James, who was born in 1616 and died in 1662, his eldest surviving son, James, who was born in 

1649 and died in 1739, his only son, James, who was born in 1696 and died in 1783, and his only son, James, who was born in 1737.
   During the Napoleonic Wars, bread rose to famine prices and the poor suffered no less than the farmers prospered. When peace came, the farmers themselves faced disaster, the Corn laws were passed to save them, the poor continued to suffer. That denouement was still some four years distant when the last James Lance, then well into his seventies, provided some welcome aid for the poor of his own parish. First, he built on his land at Turner's Oak two almshouses, the successors of which yet remain, for the use and benefit of four aged or infirm widows, ‘being poor sober and orderly Parishioners or Inhabitants’ of the parish of Ash and members of the Church of England, and those houses he then conveyed to six trustees. By the same deed, he made a further charitable gift of which the principal purpose was evidently to supplement the charity founded many years before by Samuel Atwood and of which wartime inflation had doubtless taken its toll. This gift took the form of an annuity