B20.1

The Judd family were tenant farmers for generations on the Leigh estate, working the land at The Hurst. There are eighteenth-century documents showing them frequently supplying anything from hay, to apples, to horses to the Leigh family. See D 18.1 and D 18.2 for William Judd's parents and siblings. The impressive box tomb, which once had rails all around, commemorates William Judd and his wife Dorothy (nee Mann), and three of their sons. William and Dorothy's names are on one long side, and their sons George and Henry on the other. At one of the short ends there is the name of Joseph, a third son, and it may be that another child is commemorated on the other short end. The stone is badly worn, however, and nothing is legible. William was born in 1779 at Stoneleigh to William senior and his wife Mary nee Grimes, farmers at The Hurst. At the time of William and Dorothy's marriage in September 1802, she was living in Wolston, which is where they were married by Licence. They had ten children - four boys and six girls (one of the girls, Eliza, died as a baby and the next girl, born three years later, was called Eliza in her memory). As a voter William appeared on the voters' list for Stoneleigh in 1836. Dorothy died on 10 July 1843 and was buried at Stoneleigh on 13 July. William survived for almost ten more years, dying on 27 February 1853 and being buried on 8 March. The eldest son Edward farmed 156 acres alongside his father at The Hurst, married and had three children and when he died in 1875 was buried at Weston under Wetherley. George, the second son, was born in 1805 and baptised in Stoneleigh at the same time as his older brother Edward, who had been born in November 1802. He worked as a draper in Warwick's Market Place, where until her marriage in 1851 his sister had kept house for him. He died aged 47, on 24 May 1852 and was buried at Stoneleigh on 27 May. Joseph was born in late 1807 and was baptised at Stoneleigh on 13 January 1808. He did not marry, and lived at home at the time of the 1851 census. By 1861 he was living with his farming brother Henry at The Hurst, and working as a shepherd; by 1871 he was living at Hill Wootton with his widowed farming sister Eliza Moore and working as her farm bailiff. (Eliza had been married and widowed twice.)He died on 10 November 1875 and the Stoneleigh burial register gives his residence as Leek Wootton, so presumably he continued to live with Eliza. Henry was the last of the four sons, and the eighth child. He was born in 1819 and baptised at Stoneleigh on 4 March. At some time before 1856 he married Sarah (maiden name unknown) and they had four children, continuing to farm at Hurst until the 1871 census. However, perhaps Henry became ill, since in the 1881 census he was at Warwick Union workhouse as an inmate, although he was described as a farmer. His wife Sarah had moved to the village of Leek Wootton where she described herself as married, and supported herself as a seamstress along with her son George, who was a groom. Henry died on 1 June 1887 and was buried at Stoneleigh, the last in the family grave, on 6 June.