Margaret at Wode already mentioned. She died at Gravesend, although Ash was her birthplace arid she  had lately lived there.¹¹  However, Margaret was a wealthy widow, possessed of lands in Stansted, Wrotham, Kingsdown and Meopham, and so rather too grand a person to give much clue as to the generality of the practice in the days before the Elizabethan Poor Law.
   The converse case of people being buried away from their home parish was not unusual. In such instances, the expression ‘Stranger’ was often entered in parish registers, but it was rarely used at Ash. Almost always, strangers were buried in the alien parish because they had died there, but occasionally a person was buried in a parish with which he had no apparent link and in which he did not die.

   One burial at Ash for which there seems no very obvious reason was that, in September 1714, of ‘Martha d of Lionel Daniel Esqr & Martha his wife of ye parish of Fawkham’. Daniel hailed from Surrey and his wife was a daughter of James Master, who built the lovely Yotes Court at Mereworth; they had been married some four years previously at Kingsdown church.¹²  Subsequently, the Daniels lived for some years at Pennis and the little girl now buried was one of twin daughters born to them who were christened at Fawkham in April, 1713. The vagaries of this life are reflected in the fact that this child died an infant and her twin sister, Elizabeth, lived to marry her distant cousin, George Byng, third Viscount Torrington and became ancestress of a long line of Lords Torrington. In course of time, one of them