acres. He was probably one and the same as a John Thorpe who married Isabella Gill at Sevenoaks and whose son Edward was christened in 1798. Another Edward Thorpe was farming hereabouts in the early years of the nineteenth century; he had a son, Joseph Henry, born in 1804, and another son, Richard, in 1806. One of the family who diversified from the land was a Henry Thorpe who set up in business as a saddler, perhaps in Lambeth, where he died prematurely from consumption; he was not the only Thorpe to succumb to that scourge.
   Despite a measure of ill-health, the Thorpes seemed sufficiently set up to carry on their long tradition as Ash farmers but, like so many others, they left their farms there during the first half of the last century. Joseph Thorpe, who had inherited Upper Pettings, was still farming it in the early eighteen-forties, when he was over seventy, but he had left by 1845 and in or about

that year the farm seems to have been sold..²¹  The Thorpes were gone, apparently never to return. Upper Pettings became the abode of a farm worker and his family, but was later revived as the farmhouse of a middle-sized farm, worked by one Henry Skinner. He stayed through most or all of the eighteen-sixties, though by 1871 he, too, was gone and the house was empty.
   For much of Victoria’s reign, the more imposing Lower Pettings was the preserve of a wealthy bachelor, Thomas Nunn Gladdish. In his earlier years there, he farmed on quite a big scale, but later seems to have concentrated on his business as a lime and cement merchant. Appropriately, he was a native of Chalk. In more recent times, the house has been known as Pettings Court. It has for many years been the home of the Stoneham family and the centre of their extensive Pettings Court Farm.