Three people died from smallpox and ague and fever, brain fever and rheumatic fever each claimed one victim. 'Fever' which no doubt covered a variety of ailments not more precisely diagnosed, accounted for a further twenty-nine deaths, five being of children.
   Sixteen adult deaths were attributed to dropsy and another to dropsy of the chest. Bowel disorders, sometimes merely described as such, caused the deaths of six adults and. seven children. Five adults died from paralytic strokes and two from apoplexy. Cancer is only specifically mentioned in three cases. Rather surprisingly, there were only two deaths in childbed; these occurred within a few weeks of each other. Whooping cough claimed six children and measles two. Causes of death entered in either one or two instances included abscess, asthma, croup, fistula, flux, jaundice, pleurisy, rupture, stone and thrush.
   In five cases, the diagnosis was no more explicit than ‘Sudden death’ or ‘Suddenly’. Some, not all, of these were deemed to merit further light by way of the ‘Occasional Remarks’ column. That, for example, was called in aid to explain that Thomas Gladdish, a local farmer who died in 1801 at the age of forty-seven, ‘Dropp’d from his horse at Ridley’ and that Elizabeth Gladdish, who died aged seventy-three in 1804, was ‘Pound dead in a field near the Church’.
   A few instances of accidental or violent death are 

recorded. In 1801, Samuel Tiesdell, a farmer in his middle thirties, was accidentally drowned in a pond at West Yoke. An infant died from ‘A Burn’ in 1809. In the following year a boy aged five died, allegedly from ‘Bruises’, after being ‘run over by a waggon in the hay-field’. The most sombre entry is of a boy of thirteen, buried in 1811. The cause of death is given as ‘Strangulation’; there is no occasional remark.
   In seven cases, no cause of death was attempted. Five were infants, one an elderly widow who had died at Maidstone and the other an old man who had been ‘Found dead in his own house’.
   The wealth of detail provided by Mr Lambard and his successor relates only, of course, to people who were buried at Ash. Those included nearly thirty who had died elsewhere, usually not far away, and were brought to Ash for burial. That figure can, at best, give only rough guidance as to the number of people likely to have died in Ash and been buried in other parishes.
   A man buried in 1807 had died in Guy’s Hospital. The only comparable reference is to the death of Joseph Wiffen in 1794; he had been ‘Sent to the hospital’ (not named) ‘but returned uncured’. When reflecting upon this seeming dearth of hospital treatment, it should be remembered that of their nature successes would not have found mention in this register.