Although there is no evidence of a fatal contagion sweeping through the parish on a large scale at any particular time, there are some sad instances in which a fever of some kind must have hit a single family with especial ferocity. In 1565 John Reed buried a daughter and two sons within the space of eighteen days and in 1637 William Gyles buried a son on 22 April and another son and two daughters on 10 May. In 1727 William Wickham was buried on 22 October, his son John on 25 November and his son William and his widow, Jane, both on 5 December.
   Ash itself escaped a fatal epidemic that hit the nearby hamlet of Fawkham Green in the year 1795, but one of the victims, John Stigger, a labourer, was buried at Ash. Mr Lambard noted in the register that Stigger had died of ‘Fever’ and that he had been ‘brought from Fawkham Green where 7 have died of the same disorder’. Perhaps the fever was typhoid; it is unlikely to have been smallpox, since the symptoms of that scourge were all too well known in the eighteenth century and it would have been named as such.
   Before the eighteenth century, professions or occupations were rarely mentioned in the Burial register, save for rectors who died in office. An exception was ‘Edward Bell Clerke of this Parish’, who died in 1652. In later years, two other parish clerks were mentioned 

as such; they were Henry Reeve, who died in 1707, and Richard. Rabson, who died aged fifty-nine in 1797. Rabson’s predecessor, Thomas Wellar, had called it a day in 1773 and died in the following year at the age of eighty-four.
   Richard Rabson, who came of an old Ash family, had succeeded James Trumball as village schoolmaster in 1771 and Wellar as parish clerk in 1773. Mr Lambard wrote in the register that he was ‘A man deservedly esteemed & lamented as be fulfill’d the duties of his station conscientiously’. His untimely death and the manner of it must have come as a shock to the parish. As the inscription on his tombstone in the churchyard recalls, he dropped down dead in the Rectory yard while carrying the surplice from the parsonage to the church.
   As in the Baptismal register, but rather more spasmodically, references to the ‘borough of Ash’ and the ‘borough of Holiwell’ appear in the years from 1701 to 1706 and, during that time, occupations or descriptions are frequently given. Amongst those from the borough of Ash were John Dalton senior, carpenter, in 1701, John Beal, labourer, in 1702, and Bennet Bell, widow, and Robert Averil, labourer, both in 1705, and from the borough of