Samuel Rudder

Samuel Rudder (c. 1726 – 15 March 1801) was a Gloucestershire topographer, printer and antiquarian who was born at Uley and baptised 5 December 1726. He was the son of Roger Rudder (c. 1687–1771), a shopkeeper and pig-killer. Rudder ran a printing and bookselling business in Cirencester in the 1750s and wrote and published several important works on the history of Gloucestershire.

Samuel married Mary Hinton (1724–1800) on 22 June 1749, the daughter of a maltster, and it has been speculated that Mary might have been related to the Cirencester printer Thomas Hinton.

Rudder's A New History of Gloucestershire was compiled from printed questionnaires, which he said made him very troublesome to his friends, Sir Robert Atkyns' Ancient and Present State of Glostershire (1712), and an unpublished manuscript history of the City of Gloucester by the Rev. Richard Furney.

The work was well received by critics and Horace Walpole described it as "the most sensible history of a county that we have had yet". The work had taken him twelve years to complete during which time a competing work had been published and Rudder was forced to deny rumours that he had abandoned the work. His later works on Cirencester (1780) and Gloucester (1781) were extracted from his New History. Some of the other works published by Rudder were of a less serious nature.

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