Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Rudge, Edward
RUDGE, EDWARD (1763–1846), botanist and antiquary, born on 27 June 1763, was son of Edward Rudge, a merchant and alderman of Salisbury, who possessed a large portion of the abbey estate at Evesham. He matriculated from Queen's College, Oxford, on 11 Oct. 1781, but took no degree. His attention was early turned to botany, through the influence of his uncle, Samuel Rudge (d. 1817), a retired barrister, who formed an herbarium, which passed to his nephew. His uncle's encouragement and the purchase of a fine series of plants from Guiana, collected by M. Martin, led Rudge to study the flora of that country, and to publish between 1805 and 1807 ‘Plantarum Guianæ rariorum icones et descriptiones hactenus ineditæ,’ fol. London.
Between 1811 and 1834 he conducted a series of excavations in those portions of the Evesham abbey estate under his control, and communicated the results to the Society of Antiquaries, who figured the ruins and relics discovered in their ‘Vetusta Monumenta,’ accompanied by a memoir from Rudge's son. ln 1842 he erected an octagon tower on the battlefield of Evesham, commemorative of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester.
Rudge was at an early period elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and was elected to the Linnean Society in 1802, and to the Royal Society in 1805. In 1829 he was sheriff of Worcestershire. He died at the Abbey Manor House, Evesham, on 3 Sept. 1846. He married twice. A genus of the botanical order Rubiaceæ was named Rudgea in his honour by Richard Anthony Salisbury in 1806 (Trans. of Linn. Soc. viii. 326).
Besides the work above named, Rudge was author of some seven botanical papers in the Royal and Linnean societies' publications, and of several papers in ‘Archæologia.’
His son, Edward John Rudge, M.A. (1792–1861), of Caius College, Cambridge, and barrister-at-law, was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and author of ‘Some Account of the History and Antiquities of Evesham,’ 1820, and ‘Illustrated and Historical Account of Buckden Palace,’ 1839.
[Burke's Landed Gentry; Proc. Linn. Soc. i. 315, 337; Gent. Mag. 1846 ii. 652, and 1817 i. 181; Britten and Boulger's English Botanists; Royal Soc. Cat.; Brit. Mus. Cat.]Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.240
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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