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for it was apparently he who prepared the elegant map
to the Ash Tithe Commutation agreement of 1839, which he based on the maps
annexed to the survey of 1792, as also the tithe maps for some other
nearby parishes.17
At the time of the 1841 census, the complement at South Ash
Farm consisted of William junior, his wife Amelia, his four Sons and two
daughters,18 his old father, then just into his eighties,
Sarah Kettel, another octogenarian who was perhaps a niece of Charles
Hodsoll’s wife, Mercy, a Governess, three woman servants and four agricultural
labourers. The two old people were described as of independent means;
supposedly, William VI’s independence came from the fruits of the sale
of the estate but those, with a background of mortgage, may not have been
all that ripe. Still, the Hodsolls evidently felt able to live with some
modest degree of style. They could not do so much longer. In 1846 there
was a terrible harvest, |
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followed immediately by the repeal of the Corn laws.
In January 1847, the ‘Valuable Modern Household Furniture and Effects at
South Ash Farm’ were offered for sale by auction ‘by order of the
assignee of William Hodsoll, a bankrupt’.19 So ended in
tragedy a family relationship with the parish of Ash whereof the origins
are lost in the mists of time. The Hodsolls, or some of them, moved on to
the Mill House at Orpington and there remained until well into the present
century.20
The Hodsolls of South Ash were basically a yeoman family,
albeit armigerous and lords of the manor over many centuries. Perhaps
because of ill-health, or the size of their families, or both, they seem
never to have reached any great heights socially. Their decline in later
years was not reflected in the Wrotham branch, the head of which in mid-Victorian
times married into the Pollock family and graduated to the ‘handsome
mansion’ of Loose Court, near Maidstone. He, Charles |