daughters who were married at Ash all came from without the parish.
   John I died of ‘Fever’ at the age of sixty-nine in May of 1792. Probably the Middletons had never been substantial Ash freeholders and certainly the only property that John I owned in the parish at the time of his death consisted of two cottages, standing a little to the north of Oliver’s Farm and the adjoining ‘Duces Field’; the field, two and a half acres in extent, presumably took its name from one Ducey, who occupied one of the cottages. This Middleton was, however, a substantial tenant farmer, working both ‘West Yoke Farm’ of one hundred and twenty-two acres and ‘North Ash Farm’ of one hundred and sixty acres. The latter farm, which is best differentiated by its alias, Turner’s Farm, had its homestall nearly opposite to that of James Lance’ a North Ash Farm, but all trace of it has disappeared in the New Ash Green development. The house now called Eaglesfield was the farmhouse of John I’s West Yoke Farm and may well 

have been the Middleton family home.
   After her husband’s death, Anne Middleton seems for a time to have taken over Turner’s Farm, but by 1796 John II was working both that and the West Yoke farm. From 1793 to the close of the old registers in 1812, nine little Middletons were brought for christening by John II and his wife Jane and although a daughter died of the whooping cough and a son in infancy, the survivors included three sons, All seemed set for a continuance of the family’s association with Ask, but it was not to be.
   In 1809, or thereabouts, John II apparently’ went into partnership with John Crowhurst and in 1812 the occupiers of the two farms were described as ‘John Middleton & Co’. The firm was evidently dissolved two or three years later and in 1815 the Land Tax was levied on John II as sole occupier. This, the year of Waterloo, saw the end of the Middletons as farmers of Ash; by the following year, both their farms had been taken over by Francis Andrus.