seven, his brother Thomas, who married Elizabeth Scudder of Fawkham, at forty-one and his younger brother, William, at twenty-three. His only sister, whom he never knew, died in infancy. John himself made only forty-two. After his death in 1779, his widow continued at Idleigh for a few years and may have remained after John Winson came there from Ridley about 1783.
  During the eighteenth century, several generations of the Winson family worked Ridley Court Farm, then, as now, one of the major farms of the locality. The unravelling of relationships within that family is complicated by the predilection of Winsons named John for marrying girls named Mary. Even some contemporary difficulty in differentiation seems to have been experienced when a third generation John Winson died in 1791, he was described on his tombstone in

Ridley churchyard as the son of John and Mary Winson, ‘late of Idley’, and the grandson of John and Mary Winson ‘of this Parish’, whereas the John Winson, ‘late of Idley’, seems to have been one and the same as the John Winson ‘of this Parish’ who died a few months after the John Winson of the third generation.
   What looks to have been the position is that the John Winson who went to Idleigh in the seventeen-eighties was Elizabeth Allen’s father and that he returned to Ridley a few years later after the death of his own father, ¹⁴ in any event, by 1788 John Winson had given way at Idleigh to another tenant, James Wade. Wade was to remain there for a good many years and until another Allen took over, not long before Wade succeeded the last James Lance as the owner-