Having drawn breath - the crucial element still concerns Ring Hurd and a mother. If Dorothy Hurd was buried in 1780 then she couldn't have been Ring's mother - according to the information supplied on this thread, he was born in 1781 (an 'advance', by the way, on his previously supposed birth, c. 1782-3).
So: did Philip, father, marry again? Or is there a mistake in the entry for Dorothy's burial?
I need also to be quite sure that the list of Philip Hurd's family does include the two children who died young, Martha and Thomas; and who, like Ring, would, surely, have been the children of someone other than Dorothy.
It then remains to consider Philip, son of Patience, who also carried the name 'Price'. In view of the revelatory example of 'base born' children of Mary Hayward and then a subsequent union, it may be that this Philip was the product of yet another liasion, this time between Patience Rogers and a 'Price'. Or is this stretching things too far?
The subsequent family history is fascinating in itself.
I should add that it is also very gratifying to have the 'extra' details that delineate parts of Hurd's progress - for instance, those that mark Hurd's involvement with the King's Bench; and a date of 1804 for his emergence as some sort of printer...These are particularly valuable for my tracing of his work issuing broadside ballads - the ultimate objective is to quantify this sphere of activity.
In this regard, perhaps it's worth indicating that there are two periods when Hurd issued ballads that would seem to mark his entry into the field; the first - as far as I can gauge it - when he worked our of 'Shaston' and the second from 'Shaftesbury'. The first period has sixteen ballads that look back in time for material and inspiration - the characters in the ballads seem to me to smack of an eighteenth century habitat. The second period (seventeen ballads) contains practically all of Hurd's output that is based on known historical dates and they set him firmly in the second decade of the nineteenth century as printer of such ballads (a 'murder' ballad from 1813; another ballad on the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817 and so on); and one pushing the continuity of his work into the third decade of the new century - a ballad on the death of Queen Caroline in 1821.
It looks as if 'Shaston' and 'Shaftesbury' were interchangeable as descriptions; and I'm reasonably sure that 'Shaftesbury' did, indeed, come second in the time-scale. If there are any comments on this, I'd like to have them.
May I say how grateful I am to all correspondents for help given.
roly