It is strange that the Middletons should have faded from the picture so quickly after the Lances. For centuries the two families had tilled the soil of Ash, latterly, maybe always, side by side. Of the 11 families who had been major farmers in the pariah, only the Hodsolls now remained and the sands were running out for them.
   It must have been the Middleton family who gave their name to Middleton Farm across the parish boundary in Longfield, but they have left no such memorial in Ash. Nor, apparently, has Ash any claim to the longest lived of Middletons in these parts - John, erstwhile shepherd of Hartley, who died in the Dartford Union workhouse in 1891 at the age of one hundred and three.
   Begining with the burgling of Thomas Scudder’ a house at Horton Kirby in the year 1451, references to the Scudders or Skudders in the records of North-West Kent are legion. One branch of the family long remained by the banks of the Darent, farming much land around South Darenth and, in the seventeenth century, 

providing a Puritan flank to the Cavalier enclave up stream and an unwelcome presence to a Gifford who lived in their midst. Some Scudders had by that time already followed the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World, where a flourishing Scudder Association now admirably combines with its philanthropic purposes a watchful eye on family history. Others still live in these parts.
   Unlike the Hodsolls, the Lances and the Middletons, the Scudders did not maintain a continuous presence in Ash, although entries for them recur in the ancient registers from 1571 to 1810 and they were never far away. Actually, some of those who were christened or buried at Ash were brought from Stansted, which parish bites into Ash within hailing distance of Ash Street itself. There can be little doubt that some of the Scudders lived nearer to Ash church than to Stansted church and, not improbably, their abode may have been Rumney Farm, just down