family of two sons and five daughters. It must have been a devoted family; twenty years later, by which time the elder son and the three eldest daughters were into their thirties, all seven children were still unmarried and living with their parents at Rands House. With a wealth of domestic talent available, the servants, or at least the servants who lived in, were limited to a cook, a housemaid and a footman.
   Amos Fletcher died in the spring of 1876, a few months too soon to see the marriage of his second daughter, Fanny, to Bion Reynolds, a Professor of Mathematics. Fanny was not a youthful bride, but some three years later she and her husband brought a son for baptism at Ridley church, where they had been married. Appropriately enough, the young Reynolds was christened 'Bion James Fletcher’.
   Frances Fletcher survived her husband for a good many years, the long family regime in Ash finally coming to an end in the eighteen-nineties. Apparently by that time Rands House had already become known as Holywell House. In the earlier part of the present century, when for many years the owner was Mr Raoul Hector Foa, Holywell became the centre of an estate that, at the time of Mr Foa’s death in 1935, exceeded eight hundred acres.²⁰  Much of the land was then sold and the house itself has now for a number of years been an Old People’s Home.

   The burial place of the Fletchers in Ash churchyard is a little to the west of the entrance path leading to the south porch of the church, within an ironwork surround. Close by are the graves of the Olivers and, too, those of many of the Rogers family.
   The Rogers were in Ash for some two hundred years. The first there recorded was a John Rogers, who was already living in the parish when be married an Ash girl, Martha Morgan, in 1758; he was then about thirty years of age. It may well be that John and Martha spent all their married life at Attwood Place, where certainly they were established by 1780 and remained for the rest of their days, In 1792 John owned with the house about fourteen acres in Ash and no doubt more across the parish boundary.
   John and Martha’s first-born, a son, died in infancy, but another son, John, and a daughter, Mary, followed; it was these two who both married members of the Walter family. The younger John and his wife, Elizabeth, seem to have spent the early years of their marriage in Stansted and probably came to Attwood Place after the death of John’s mother in 1796. It was this John who became one of the original trustees of Mr. Lance’s charity. He had succeeded his father in 1806 and was in turn succeeded by his only son, Richard, in 1827.