This apparent equality may be somewhat misleading. So many more of the men from other parishes who came to marry Ash girls were literate than otherwise that it seems reasonable to assume a similar proficiency for most of the Ash men who found their brides and married elsewhere. Education and enterprise ever went hand in hand.
   The forty-six ‘foreigners’, mostly men, who married parishioners at Ash came from some thirty-three parishes, of which all except one, or possibly two, were in Kent. At least thirty-nine of them came from within a radius of ten miles; these included one or more from each of the parishes, other than Longfield, that were actually contiguous to Ash. Few had the need, or the means, to look far for a spouse.

   While the earliest evidence of christenings and marriages in Ash comes from the registers, the same is not entirely true of burials. Mention has already been made of some instances in which burial in Ash church in pre-register days is attested either by surviving memorial brasses or by testamentary instructions. Other early burials in the church included those of Margaret at Wode, whose will proved in 1515 directed burial ‘in the chaunsell of ouer ladie ...‘, and of James Launce, yeoman, who by his will of 1527 asked to be buried in the ‘chapell of Saynt Blase’. William and Thomas Hodsoll, by their wills made respectively in 1499 and 1537, directed that they should be buried in the churchyard.¹⁰