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fine old English Gentleman" ', a performance
that perhaps inspired the press to describe Mr Munyard as a ‘fine old
specimen of an English farmer’. Whether the reporter was given access
to the choicest wines, or had to make do with the ale, is not
specifically mentioned, but he was led to conclude that ‘altogether,
perhaps, a more pleasing scene of rural felicity has seldom been
witnessed’.
Some further evidence of how Ash enjoyed it self in the
eighteen-forties is afforded by a report of another local festivity,
which took place some three years later against what might have seemed a
less promising background. When the Court Baron of William Lambarde
Esquire for the manors of Ash, Holiwell and Ridley was held at the Swan
Inn in June 1848, the tenants were provided with ‘old English cheer’
and the evening passed very pleasantly, ‘being enlivened by the songs
of Messrs. Fletcher, Bensted, Coombs, Skuder, &c.’.
A star turn on that occasion was old Francis Treadwell of
Fairby in Hartley, who was a few weeks short of his ninetieth birthday
and Mr Lambarde’s oldest manorial tenant. Mr Treadwell |
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‘sang one of the songs of his youth with a strong
voice, to the great delight of the company, who immediately drank his
health in a bumper, when the old gentleman returned thanks in a manner,
which showed that he was in full possession of his facultiest.16
Thus encouraged, he duly achieved the age of ninety, as had his
father before him, and added three years more.
Meanwhile, at Terry’s Lodge, old George Munyard had but
briefly survived the celebration of his Golden Wedding and another of
the same name, presumably his son, had taken his place. Young George
Mandy had been born down the hill from Greenwich, in Deptford, and his
wife came from Lewisham. If the father had really employed nearly thirty
men on the farm, not so the son, who in 1851 was making do with ten. He
was then working about three hundred and sixty-four acres and the farm
remained of substantially the same size ten years later, by which time
the farmer from Suffolk, Ralph Willoughby Cleghorn, had taken over. He
was employing six |