Ashenhurst

Ashenhurst is a Wealden parish, and its overseers have been keeping a book for longer than anybody can say. The oldest voice remembered from it is Overseer Susan Kitchingham, who in 4502 noted with weary precision that the Winter Watch, the first and cheapest bell of the movable year, was ignored every year by somebody who then came to her door at the Fast of High Winter asking what was left in the parish store.

The parish is poor, close country of the kind the Weald is known for, shut in for weeks when the clay closes the lanes and living on hop poles, charcoal and timber that belongs to House Ashcombe. Overseer Margaret Iden keeps the book now, and her entries are as dry as her predecessor's: she has written that a lodger merely pays rent, whereas a household owes the parish, keeps a stair and answers for its children. Ashenhurst sets great store by that distinction and keeps a careful list of who belongs to it.

The blight came in the summer of 4620. It spread across three parishes around Ashenhurst, and by Michaelmas nineteen women stood accused before the Maidstone bench. Grand Witchhunter David Rooke's examiners mapped the damage before they questioned anyone, and found that it traced one boundary and one family's feuds. Inside a week they had the culprit, Judith Tolhurst, widow of a farmer, who had purchased a forbidden working in London and hidden its parts along the hedges of the people next door. The chapter court heard her, the assize condemned her, and she was hanged. Clearing the eighteen innocent took the examiners another two months; one of them, Mother Tabitha Hearne, a cunning woman, had almost been drowned by her own village before they came. Maidstone's bench now treats the case as its pattern, Examiner Mary Swanton at Canterbury sets it against the Otham burning of 4613, and Rooke regards it as the closest he has come to a proof no bench could wave away. The most complete record belongs to Anne Moyle, justice's clerk at Abbot's Weald. What was dug from the hedges remains in the bench's keeping as evidence, and Laurence Tufton, a collector who covets it, has the bench's clerks to dine with notable frequency.

A company in Ashenhurst should go to the overseers before the alehouse, and should say nothing about witches unless asked. The parish has not forgotten how near it came to hanging the wrong women, and does not enjoy strangers reminding it.