for him a survey of Attwood Place Farm. The farm was then a compact holding of upwards of sixty-five acres, mostly in Ash but with eleven acres in Stansted, five in Kemsing and nine in no parish at all. The latter curiosity was a field called Nine Acres, which lay to the south of the Home Field behind Attwood Place and adjacent to the South Ash Manor estate. It would have been too much to hope that so pleasant an anomaly would be allowed to continue in perpetuity.
   The younger Richard’s son, Charles William Rogers, was the last of the family to farm at Attwood Place. Another son, John, long kept the butcher’s shop in Ash Street. Unfortunately, the farm proved too small to survive the agricultural depression between the two World Wars and when Charles Rogers died in 1956, only about four acres remained with the house. In the following year his widow and son left the home in which had lived six generations of the family. The initials of the last Farmer Rogers are carved over the doorway of the new Rectory across the way. He was churchwarden when that house was built; indeed, he was churchwarden when much else happened in Ash, for he held that office for more than forty-four years.
   The Thorpe or Thorp family were established in the 

parish by the first decade of the eighteenth century, probably then, as certainly later, in the Hodsoll Street area. Apart from a small property in North Ash road, the only land which they seem to have owned in Ash was Upper Pettings, a farm, of about seventy-five acres that in 1780 belonged to Richard Thorpe and had by 1792 passed to his widow. Upper Pettings was let to another of the family, Henry Thorpe, who was also tenant of the more extensive Lower Pettings and of two small farms in the same area, Cop Hall and Lower Yard. Henry, in addition, became tenant, from Multon Lambard, of  Hall Wood, West Field Wood and sundry other land. In all, he held upwards of three hundred and fifty acres. He was one of the grand old men amongst Ash farmers. He appears to have spent all his long life in the parish, he married an Ash girl, Elizabeth Martin, and when he died of old age in 1809, he had achieved the age of eighty-four.
   While Henry Thorpe was farming Upper and Lower Pettings, another Thorpe, John, was tenant of the diminutive Middle Pettings Farm, as also of Gooses Farm, which was large only by comparison; together, his two holdings totalled some seventy-six