Place:Rugby, Warwickshire, England

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NameRugby
Alt namesRocheberiesource: Oxford: English Place Names (1960) p 396
Rokebisource: Oxford: English Place Names (1960) p 396
Rokebysource: Oxford: English Place Names (1960) p 396
TypeChapelry, Parish (ancient), Civil parish, Urban district, Borough (municipal)
Coordinates52.383°N 1.25°W
Located inWarwickshire, England
See alsoClifton upon Dunsmore, Warwickshire, Englandancient parish of which it was part until 1291
Knightlow Hundred, Warwickshire, Englandhundred in which it was located
Rugby District, Warwickshire, Englandnon-metropolitan district covering the area since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Rugby is a market town in Warwickshire, England, close to the River Avon. According to the UK census of 2011, the town had a population of 70,628, making it the second largest "town" in the county. The enclosing Borough of Rugby had a population of 100,500 in the 2011 UK census.

Rugby is 13 miles (21 km) east of Coventry, on the eastern edge of Warwickshire, near the borders with the counties of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.

The town is credited with being the birthplace of rugby football.

History

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Rugby was originally a small Anglo-Saxon farming settlement, and was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Rocheberie. Rugby obtained a charter to hold a market in 1255, and soon developed into a small country market town.

Rugby School was founded in 1567 with money left in the will of Lawrence Sheriff, a locally born grocer, who moved to London and earned his fortune. Rugby School was originally intended as a school for local boys, but over time became a mostly fee-paying private school. The Lawrence Sheriff School was eventually founded in the late 19th century to carry on Sheriff's original intentions.

Rugby remained a sleepy country market town until the 19th century and the coming of the railways. In 1838 the London and Birmingham Railway was constructed past it, and in 1840 the Midland Counties Railway made a junction with the London and Birmingham at Rugby. Rugby became an important railway junction, and the proliferation of rail yards and workshops attracted workers. Rugby's population grew from just 2,500 in 1835, to over 10,000 by the 1880s.

In the 1890s and 1900s heavy engineering industries began to set up in the town, and Rugby rapidly grew into a major industrial centre. Rugby expanded rapidly in the early decades of the 20th century as workers moved in. By the 1940s, the population of Rugby had grown to over 40,000. In the postwar years, Rugby became well served by the motorway network, with the M1 and M6 merging close to the town.

Rugby is a birthplace of the jet engine. In April 1937 Frank Whittle built the world's first prototype jet engine at the British Thomson-Houston works in Rugby, and between 1936-41 based himself at Brownsover Hall on the outskirts, where he designed and developed early prototype engines.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Rugby.

Rugby was originally a chapelry in the ancient parish of Clifton upon Dunsmore, but became an ancient parish in its own right by 1291. It was located in the Knightlow Hundred of Warwickshire, England.

It was made a civil parish in 1866 and in 1894 it became an urban district. It was made a municipal borough in 1932. Since 1974 it has been part the principal urban area of the non-metropolitan Rugby District.

Research Tips

  • GENUKI main page for Warwickshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
  • Warwickshire and West Midland family history societies are listed in GENUKI.
  • The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence at that date with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time, Warwickshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
  • The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.
  • A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. It shows the detached sections of Warwickshire as they were in 1832. These detached sections have now been moved into the counties that surrounded them.
  • As of October 2016 Warwickshire Parish Registers, 1535-1984 are available to search online on FamilySearch
  • As of September 2018 TheGenealogist has added over 1.5 million individuals to its Warwickshire Parish Record Collection and so increases the coverage of this Midland county for family researchers to find their ancestors baptisms, marriages and burials. These records are released in association with Warwickshire County Record Office and have the benefit of high quality images to complement the transcripts, making them a valuable resource for those with ancestors from this area. These are available to Genealogist Diamond Subscription holders.
  • The website British History Online provides seven volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Warwickshire. The first (Vol 2) covers the religious houses of the county; Volumes 3 through 6 provide articles the settlements in each of the hundreds in turn, and Volumes 7 and 8 deal with Birmingham and Coventry respectively. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Rugby, Warwickshire. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.