of Ash. As with the Middletons, twins ran in the family. Indeed, after a Middleton married a Walter in 1652 some of the Middleton twins may have had a Walter provenance.
   Another John Walter, perhaps a brother of the twins of 1597, married Sara Weller at Ash in 1636; their union was to last many years. Although his baptism is unrecorded, ‘Old Thomas Walter’, who died in 1725 at the age of eighty-eight, may well have been the first-born of this marriage. Old Thomas himself seems to have been twice wed but although he had one daughter, and possibly another, by his second wife, there is no obvious record of a son.
   After the Walters had left Pennis in Restoration times, some of their humbler relatives lingered on in Fawkham for a good many years. The last to remain there were Richard and Elizabeth Walter, who disappear from the Fawkham registers after the christening, in 1713, of their second daughter. They, or, it could be, another Richard and Elizabeth Walter, then turn up in the Ash registers as the parents of a son, Richard, christened in 1724. Another son, Thomas, followed in 1727.
   The younger Richard* seems to have divided his working life between Ash and Stansted. In 1750 he 

married Elizabeth Dalton at Ash, their three eldest children were christened there and their four youngest at Stansted; he himself was buried at Ash. In 1780 he was the owner of the Crooked Billet, then occupied by one Allen French who was probably the Allen French who in 1733 had married, somewhat late in the day, a daughter of old Thomas Walter. Subsequently, Richard took over the Billet which, whether or not then an alehouse, was the centre of a small farm straddling the boundary between Ash and Kingsdown; twelve of its acres were in Ash and, to judge from its later history, there were probably much the same number in Kingsdown.

   * It may be wrong to identify this Richard as the son of Richard and Elizabeth as, according to the Burial Register, their son Richard died in 1738. But Richard Walter junr., who died in 1793, aged 69, and who is presumably the Richard Walter who married Elizabeth Dalton in 1750, must have been born c. 1724. 1738 was a transitional period at the Rectory and one suspects that the wrong Christian name may have been entered for the Walter buried that year.