The total rent charge was agreed at £680, subject to variation for hop ground, which here, as elsewhere, was made the subject of an extraordinary charge. The sum of £5 was allocated to the glebe lands, which extended to about nineteen and a half acres and comprised the ‘scite’ (sic) of the Rectory House Gardens and land adjoining’, the arable field called Glebe Field and the meadow called Great Bow.
   The area of the parish was computed at three thousand and twenty-two acres and eleven perches, made up of about one thousand, seven hundred and eighty acres of arable land, one hundred and eighty acres of meadow or pasture, six hundred and twenty-five acres of woodland, one hundred and sixty-nine acres of hop ground and twenty-two acres of furze and waste land. As compared with the situation in 1792, the two most significant changes had been the great increase in the cultivation of the hop, for which more than a hundred additional acres were now in use, and the loss of some two hundred

acres of meadow or pasture, evidencing a decline in stock farming. Land under the plough had increased by about ninety acres and, in so doing, may have reached its peak for a long time to come. It is likely that, in the difficult years that followed, some of the poorer ploughland would have been left to tumble down to grass. On the other hand, prospects for the hop-growers remained bright. Given prescience, they would have known that during the next quarter of a century demand would substantially increase and the cost of cultivation would substantially fall. They would probably have been more puzzled than concerned to learn that, after a hundred years, the only hops in Ash would be those crowing wild in the hedgerows.
   In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, the population of the parish had increased from four hundred and seventy-two to six hundred and twenty-eight. It was still growing in early Victorian times. When the first census of the reign was taken, it stood at six