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asked that his body should be decently buried in the
chancel between the graves of his dearly beloved wife and mother, as no
doubt it was.
Everard Clement remained rector of Ash for more than a
quarter of a century. He lived to see the marriage of his daughter, Margaret,
to Pinch Umfrey and the birth, on 28 November 1700, of their son and heir.
If he christened young Finch, that was amongst his last duties; the
christening was on 30 November and on 20 January 1701 ‘Mr. Everard
Clement Rector of this Parish’ was buried. His death came just in time
to spare him the loss of his only surviving child. Margaret Umfrey lived
only some six weeks more.
Brief indeed was the incumbency of Clement’s successor,
Samuel Atwood, or Attwood, who had previously for a few years been rector
of Addington. On his death, his place was taken by his son, also Samuel,
who was instituted in March, 1702.15 |
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It seems that the elder Atwood
must have married into the Hodsoll family, for his son Samuel figures in a
will made in 1710 by Edmund Hodsoll, the one of that name who practised
the law, and is therein described as the testator’s nephew.16
Edmund Hodsoll owned the house and farm called Bakers at Stansted,
in the church of which place several of his children are buried, and later
bought an estate at St Mary Cray, where he died in 1711. The alliance
between the two families was further strengthened when Samuel Atwood
junior married Edmund’s youngest daughter, Jane. The marriage was
apparently childless and Jane predeceased her husband, dying in 1734 at
the age of fifty. She was buried near her father in the south chancel of
St Mary Cray church, beneath a ledger stone bearing the arms of Atwood
impaling Hodsoll.17
Attwood Place, the pleasant early eighteenth century house in
Ash Street, was built by the younger |