Ashe Ford

Ashe Ford is a village of the eastern carriage road, beyond the edge of the Cambridge liberty, where the Collegium's yard officers have no standing. From the White Walls it looks like unlicensed ground and nothing more. From the road it looks older and more respectable: the country benches were mending engines and cutting wards long before anyone called them a problem, and a century of the Collegium's hesitations over what to license has left them plenty to do. Bench-Master Corin Slee put the village's case in his day-book in 4615: he is not unlicensed but unlicensable, the Collegium having four times declined to grant him a licence, and the work and the money are still there.

The benches here do three kinds of work: repairs a licensed man may not touch without losing his bench, things the Collegium has refused to license, and custom the licensed trade cannot take, chiefly farmers with engines, parishes wanting wardings and the Ladies of the valleys, who are forbidden to buy prepared material within the walls. Under Slee the village keeps the country benches' own rules strictly. Nobody works in essence; nothing goes out under a counterfeit mark, so every piece leaves unmarked and the buyer knows it; and work a licensed bench refused for safety, as against licence, is refused here too. Seen from the road it is a busy, open run of workshops, not a den.

Its name travels further than its trade. This year Maidstone has had some thirty door wards cut by one Nathan Pidcock, so he styles himself, under a Collegium licence the Register says it never issued, and the town blames Ashe Ford. Slee denies it, and nothing has yet been shown against him. The Collegium's graver worry lies with the four or five country benches that have become small manufactories, with a dozen hands and money to buy refused material in quantity; where those stand, no one yet knows.

A company with a farm engine, a lock or a warding to mend can have it done here quickly and honestly, and should expect no mark. Unmarked work is still unmarked at the Cambridge gate, where anything on the restricted schedule must be declared.