In the Rector’s chancel of Ash church is a small mural monument the effigies whereof, a man and a woman, have kneeled opposite each other these three hundred and seventy odd years. The man, bald, bearded and wearing the gown of a doctor in Divinity, is the Thomas Maxfield who succeeded his father as rector of Ash in 1575. The woman is his wife Joan, but whether his first wife Joan or his second wife Joan is a matter of some nicety. Unlike some other parts of the memorial, the effigies are not of the highest quality.¹ They now look the worse for wear.
   Shepherd of his flock, preacher, a man of handsome presence and powerful intellect, such, according to his epitaph, was Thomas Maxfield. The tribute is rendered in Latin, but there is no reason to suppose that the 

parishioners of Ash would have dissented, had they been able to understand it.
   Maxfield had become rector of Ridley in 1562, an even more improbable cure than Ash for a man of such learning. He continued incumbent of Ridley for more than forty years, but for the last thirty years of his life his activities centred upon Ash.²  In his first year at Ash, his wife Joan presented him with a daughter, who was christened Dorothy. A son, William, was born in 1578, but no more is learnt of him and it was Dorothy who eventually became the doctor’s heir. In Elizabethan times, marriage at the age of fifteen or sixteen would have been nothing out of the way and she was probably the Dorothy Maxfield who was married