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to own Scotgrove was Elizabeth, widow or Finch Umfrey
of that place, who died childless in 1781.32 At that
time, Chapel Wood was part of Old House Farm, let to Joseph Oliver, who
was the then head of a family of hereditary Ash butchers established at
West Yoke. Oliver’s tenancy only briefly outlasted Mrs Umfrey’s death.
Old House passed, presumably by sale, from the estate of the last Umfrey
to James Lance, last of the Lances, who was thenceforth to farm it in
conjunction with his larger North Ash Farm.33
James Lance was a direct descendant of the James Lance who
had owned land to the south of ‘The Channtry’ in the sixteenth
century. That James had also been an adjoining owner to the south of the
Ash land which Thomas Walter had settled on his son John in 1590. It is
not unlikely that the Lances were already adjoining owners or occupiers
when Scotgrove was in its heyday.
As appears from the survey of Ash made in 1792, |
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Old House Farm comprised about seventy-five acres,
twelve of which were accounted for by Chapel Wood. Changes in field names
and in acreages make difficult any complete identification between the
land described in the Elizabethan settlement and the land in the same area
described in the 1792 survey, but Old House Farm included Upper and Lower
Chalk Fields, which probably represented the ‘Chalkecrofte’ of 1590
and Parish Field, which lay between the southern part of Chapel Wood and
the Ash road, must have been the earlier ‘Parrisse’. Redlibbets, or
part of it, also seems to have been common to both. Chapel Wood itself was
clearly a a somewhat larger version of Scotgrove Wood. Some other
identifiable land had remained with the Pennis estate, but Old House Farm
as a whole may reasonably be regarded as part of the erstwhile core of the
manorial lands of Scotgrove.
It is open to conjecture, but far from certain, |