Its history, if one may call it history, is concerned with the owners of the manor of Ashford and not with any civil or municipal records.  Indeed the earlier chroniclers, though they speak of Great Chart and Wye, know nothing of Ashford which in Domesday Book appears to have consisted of a few mills and a small church, the manor being in possession of Edward the Confessor, while St Augustine’s at Canterbury and Earl Godwin held certain lands thereabout.  Hugh de Montfort got what the King and Earl Godwin had possessed, after the Conquest, but the Monastery of St Augustine’s seems to have continued to hold its land.  We know nothing more of Ashford, which, as I have said, till late in the Middle Age consisted of a church and two mills and a dene for the pannage of hogs in the Weald.  It is not one of the many owners of the Manor who is remembered to-day in Ashford as its benefactor, but the Lord of the Manor of Ripton during the Wars of the Roses, Sir John Fogge, who was Treasurer of the Royal Household and a Privy Councillor.  In the fourteenth century the church had passed to Leeds Abbey, and with the abbey the church of Ashford remained until the suppression, when it passed to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.  It was not, however, the Abbey of Leeds that rebuilt it as we see it, a poor example it must be confessed in spite of the nobility of the tower, of the latest style of English Gothic architecture, the Perpendicular.  It was Sir John Fogge, who for this and other reasons, is the father of the town.  He lies in a great tomb in the chancel.  As for the Smyths, who lie in the south transept, Thomas, and Alicia his wife held the manor of Ashford in the sixteenth century.  Alicia was the daughter of Sir Andrew Judde to whom the manor of Ashford had been mortgaged in the time of Henry VII.  Her son, Sir Michael Smyth, lies close by.  The family were later ennobled and bore the title of Viscounts Strangford.

For the outside world, however, Sir John Fogge is not Ashford’s greatest son.  This honour belongs surely to Jack Cade whom Shakespeare speaks of as the “headstrong Kentish man John Cade of Ashford,” and who, according to the poet, if headstrong, proved in the end so feeble-minded that in Shakespeare’s play we might seem to have a picture of one suffering from general paralysis of the insane.  Jack Cade, however, was, as we are beginning to realise, a much greater and more significant figure than Shakespeare allows us to see.

But Ashford is not made for lingering, it is all for departure, the roads, if not the trains, lead swiftly away north, south, east and west.  As for me I went by the south-west road which said twelve miles to Tenterden.

I went under a fine rain on a day of married white and blue, and even before I had forgot Ashford, which was long before I crossed the Stour, the rain had ceased, the sun shone forth and a great wind came out of the marsh and the sea full of good tidings, so that climbing up to Great Chart I laughed in my heart to be in England on such a day and on such a road.