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people called Man had lived in the parish during the
fifteenth century; in particular, there had been a Thomas Man, whose will
of 1455 was proved at Rochester in the same year and whose widow, Johanna,
made her will six years later.28 Their home may
well have been an earlier version of Mann's Farmhouse.
As to Turners Place, this could have taken its name from the
John ‘Thurnar’ who was baptized in 1563 or from some other and perhaps
earlier member of the family. As the name had been established by 1620,
the Nicholas Turner who died in 1665 is unlikely to have been its
progenitor. Nicholas had in the year prior to his death been the occupier
of a house then rated for the Hearth Tax at two hearths. That seems likely
to have been Turners Place.21
‘Man’s farm or Turner’s farm’ turns up again against
Constantine Wood’s name in the Register of Ash voters for 1848, but this
time the name of the tenant does not appear. It seems clear, however, that
at about that time |
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the tenancy was taken over by Glover Mungeam, another
member of the Meopham family of that name, who had apparently arrived in
Ash a short time before William Mungeam took over the more important Ash
Place Farm. In 1851, Glover Mungeam, who was a widower in his middle
forties, was working a hundred and seventy acres. He was only employing
four labourers and, apart from his sister Rebecca, who kept house for him,
there were no other Mungeams to help him. At the neighbouring North Ash
Farm, which had by now grown to two hundred and twenty acres, Robert Olive
found it necessary to employ seven men and two boys. Whether the one had
too little assistance and the other too much, both farms lost their
resident farmers during the next ten years.
At some time after the departures of Glover Mungeam and
Robert Olive, Turner’s Farm and North Ash Farm merged as a single unit
and they never thereafter recovered their |