in an agricultural trade carrying on a little farming as well and probably Johnson’s Farm was always small in acres. Later in the century, and until the eighteen-sixties, its modest nineteen or twenty acres were being farmed by the Porter family, who were primarily wheelwrights. However, the farm name may have a much later provenance.
   From the nineteenth century census returns can be traced something of the chequered career of a certain Richard Johnson, a native of Birling or, as he apparently preferred to spell it, ‘Burling’. In 1851, he was the bailiff of South Ash Farm, working three hundred and eighty acres and employing, no doubt vicariously, twenty-two men and three boys. By 1861, he had shed this considerable load and was an agricultural labourer living in Ash Street. At some time during the following decade he enjoyed a modest resurgence in fortune, 

for he reappears in 1871 as a farmer of eighteen acres at West Yoke. That holding may very well have been Johnson’s Farm and he the Johnson from whom it took its name. Alternatively, that may have been Johnson’s Farm, but he not the Johnson from whom it took its name. The only remaining possibility, not a very likely one, is that it was not Johnson’s Farm.
   Of much greater significance than the Johnsons in the agricultural history of Ash were the Middletons, who were in the parish for the whole, or virtually the whole, of the period covered by the ancient registers. During that time, fifty-five of their number were christened, eighteen were married and thirty-five were buried at Ash. No doubt there were other such occasions ‘forgot to be registered’.
   The first evidence of a Middleton presence comes