the road from Ash Street. The association with Stansted was of long-standing. A John Skudder and his wife ‘Annes’ were commemorated by a brass in Stansted church that bore no date, but was of about the year 1510; its stone had also carried another brass that is now gone.⁶
   The first Ash entry for the family is of the marriage of Robert Skudder and Alice Warren in 1571. In the years that followed three daughters were born and then, in 1578, ‘William Skudder son & heire unto Robert Skudder’, which unusually explicit entry sufficiently establishes that this was a family of substance. Mary, one of the daughters may have been the Mary Scudder who was married to one Jeremy Nuington in 1608, but, with that exception, no more Scudders appear until the sixteen-forties. Then come the christenings of three children of John and Susan Scudder of Stansted.
   A longer gap next ensues, the Scudders eventually 

returning in the persons of Thomas Scudder, who was buried in 1726, and of Thomas and Rebecca Scudder, whose four children, John, Elizabeth, Rebecca and Thomas, were christened in the years from 1731 to 1741. This family lived at South Ash, where Rebecca, Thomas’ wife, died in 1744.
    In Ash churchyard, by the church’s north chancel wall, are two tomb-chests that have suffered much from the ravages of time and the North Sea winds. The inscriptions on the leeward sides remain largely legible, that on one tomb being to Elizabeth, the (elder) daughter of Thomas and Rebecca Skudder, who died when she was but twenty-one, and on the other to Mrs Elizabeth Skudder, the wife of Mr Thomas Skudder of the parish of Hunton, who died in 1783 at the age of thirty-seven, and her son William, who had died in infancy a year previously. Evidently Thomas and