who were long to remain, included the Bishops, the Dirlings or Durlings, the Elcombs or Elcomes, the Fetchers, the Gladdishes, the Rogers, the Thorpes and the Wadlows.
   The Bishop family were in Ash by the reign of George I and it could be that them, as later, they were carrying on the trade of blacksmiths at the Hodsoll Street forge. In earlier tines the forge was where the Green Man now stands and the alehouse faced it from the other side of the Green. At some time during the nineteenth century, forge and pub changed places.
   In 1780 a Thomas Bishop senior and a Thomas Bishop junior were both living at Hodsoll Street and between them owned several small properties there. One looks to have been the diminutive Fishers House Farm, then occupied by Mary Baker and a few years later bought by the Baker family,¹⁵ and another the forge.
   Three of the family named Thomas had been married at Ash in previous decades, one Thomas Bishop to Elizabeth Staples in 1744, another in 1764 to Sarah Britten of Ash, the third to an Ash widow, Sarah Mart, in 1771. One Thomas died in 1782 and another in 1788 and, with a single exception, the Bishop properties at Hodsoll Street were then disposed of. 

The exception was ‘The House, Forge Yard Garden and Orchard’ where, in 1792, one Richard Bishop was established as the village blacksmith. A few years before, Richard had married Elizabeth Bennett at Milton next Gravesend; he was now in his middle twenties, with a young and growing family. About the turn of the century another of the family, William, was also following the sane trade, perhaps as assistant to Richard.
   Richard Bishop’s blows long rang the Bishop anvil, but in later life he removed to Ridley, where he farmed some few of that parish’s not very numerous acres. He was evidently still so doing in 1847, when Bagshaw's Directory named him as one of the three principal residents. That was something, as Ridley in those days came as near to harbouring a hundred inhabitants as ever it has; however, the land of the parish, Bagshaw's added, was ‘chiefly occupied by Mr. Ray, of Horton Kirby’.
   At the time of the census taken four years later, Richard, who was then eighty-five years old, had retired from the fray and was content to describe himself as ‘Retired Blacksmith’. He was then sharing house at New Street with one of his sons, William.