separate identities. The farm thus created appears to have been looked after for a number of years by a bailiff named Jeremiah Simmonds. Simmonds, a widower, was a local man; he had been born in either Kingsdown or Fawkham, but seemed not to be sure which.²²   In 1861, he was living at Turner’s Oak and was probably only responsible at, that time for Turner's Farm. During the following decade, be moved to North Ash, where he was to share house with his daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Thomas Mills, and their infant children. If, as seems likely, his home was at North Ash Manor, that had followed its counterpart at Idleigh in becoming a bailiff’s house.
   Bailiff s were not, perhaps, persons best placed to cope with the hard times that lay ahead. When the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, Mr Disraeli and his followers had predicted the ruin of English agriculture. In the event, disaster was deferred for nearly thirty years, while the English farmer fought

a skilful and apparently successful rearguard action. Ironically, nemesis came at last when Disraeli was himself Prime Minister. From 1875, there was a series of appallingly bad harvests, but the root of the trouble was the vast influx of corn from the New World. There, corn could be grown without regard to the needs of good husbandry. It mattered not, or appeared at the time to matter not, that the soil quickly became sick or eroded; there was a seemingly inexhaustible supply of virgin land to take its place. With steam providing cheap and speedy transport by land and sea, the corn was sold in England for less than English corn. Within a decade, the home acreage of wheat fell by nearly a million acres. The exodus of farm workers grew apace.²³
   After 1884, there was some recovery. It was not to last and, during most of the last years of the Victorian