or yearly rentcharge of ten guineas, payable out of a house and seven acres of land at 'West Choake’, which adjoined the lane that has become Chapel Wood road. Five pounds were to go annually to the schoolmaster appointed pursuant to Samuel Atwood’s will, fifteen shillings for pens, ink, paper and books for the children of the school, five shillings for the ‘necessary entertainment’ of the trustees and the school overseers at their annual meeting, forty shillings for bread to be distributed amongst the poor of the parish on Good Friday, forty shillings for the provision of blankets for the poor at Michaelmas and ten shillings to be divided amongst such poor children as might usually attend at Ash church during Lent to say the church catechism.³
   The creation of these trusts, their true worth concealed by the inflation of recent times, was a not unfitting climax to the long reign of this ancient yeoman 

family. Although the poor were primarily dependant for their sustenance on the parish of their settlement, parish aid was invariably supplemented by private benefactions, whether made on an ad hoc basis or by the more valuable foundation of a perpetual charity. Ash had its share of gifts in the latter category, ranging from the twenty pence given by William Warren the elder in 1568 to the almshouses and annuity given by James Lance in 1811. Each contributions could, of course, be at best a palliative. In the eighteen-thirties, the intractable problem of the poor was to be tackled by the zeal of a reforming Parliament, which succeeded in institutionalising poverty for the next hundred years. The kindness of James Lance must have spared many Ash widows from spending their last days within the inhospitable confines of the Dartford Union workhouse.