FHS Report April 24: “If these walls could speak” (My 600 year old house).

FHS Report - April 2024.  Roger Green:

“If these walls could speak” (The history of my 600 year old house).

There was a full house on 9th April when local historian Roger Green led us all back in time some 600 years to accompany him from the Market Hill, Sudbury down what was to become Friars Street to a group of houses built opposite the Priory. His house No 64 was called Crooked Cott before Friars Street was actually built. The roadway (now School Street) stopped there by the gate to the Priory and there is still a generous forecourt for carts and carriages - and now cars - to turn. 

Roger Green has lived there for 41 years. The modern-day group of houses often linked into each other as ownership changed over the centuries. A spiral staircase from next door actually now ends in Roger Green's wardrobe! Three of the houses now have rear extensions but two do not! 

Roger took us back to C16 and Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. He noted that the last Prior had sold off land at that time and received housing in lieu, probably Nos 62 & 64. 

Starting with John Cotton the last Prior, Roger led us through a whole range of owners and residents to the present day; From the C16 when the Ruddells family owned almost all the houses in that row. They were in the wool trade and in the 1620s they had an office in Friars Street which was then being constructed. But in 1637 George Ruddell lost a court case for refusing to pay a local weaver for substandard work (in his view) and the blow to his reputation led to a move to Bocking in Essex - and the eventual resurgence of the family as the best weavers in that locality, and the purchase of magnificent Spains Hall in Finchingfield in 1760.

We heard of Susannah Gainsborough (Thomas’s sister) who had a milliner’s shop there.  Also about the Gardiners, the story of Theophilus Lane and the Hills family - all of whom lived in the row of houses. And a clay pipe manufactory which was unearthed in the garden!

Roger Green concluded with the tale of  barge folk and the mystery of Elizabeth Sarah Ann Plantin? or Norman?

There was much to keep the large audience entertained. A fascinating trip back in time. The walk down Friars Street past the cricket ground to the site of the Ship & Star pub will never be the same again.

An accomplished Musician, Organist and Head of the music department at Great Cornard school, Roger remembered St Peter's church with its organ becoming redundant in 1971, and facing possible demolition in favour of a car park. As volunteer Heritage officer with Friends of St Peters he has been credited with helping transform the church into our current vibrant and cherished Arts centre. His interest in the history of the church, younger than his house, led him into further research of the area, his house and others nearby. He still plays the organ in St Peter’s church. 

Our thanks for a most entertaining talk.

Michael Stebbing.

FHS Report March 2024 AGM & Talk: ‘An Election Entertainment’ by Stephen Astley

FDLHS. - Report for Parish News Tuesday 12th March AGM. &

 ‘An Election Entertainment’ by FDLHS. member - Stephen Astley 

Foxearth & District Local History Society held its A.G.M. on Tuesday 12th March.

2023-4 was another successful and interesting year with increasing numbers of both Members and Visitors. The committee was re-elected, and Keith Robson was chosen as our new Chairman.

Following a break with refreshments, Stephen Astley, ex-curator at Sir John Soane's Museum, spoke about William Hogarth’s sequence of four paintings (also reproduced later as a series of prints): ’’.  As the UK has an imminent General Election, he felt it a good time to look at the series.

The paintings illustrate the 1754 election of an MP in Oxfordshire. Hogarth mercilessly satirises the process of a Parliamentary election, with candidates vying for the votes of the easily duped electorate - which is desperate to be bribed. There had not been an election there since 1710.

The series demonstrates the corruption endemic in parliamentary elections before the 1832 Great Reform Act. Then, each constituency elected two MPs, and there was a property qualification for voters, so only a minority of the male population was enfranchised. Without secret ballots, bribery and intimidation were rife. Stephen pointed out and explained details and characters in each painting. 

The first painting ‘An Election Entertainment’ depicts a tavern dinner organised by the Whig candidates, while the Tories protest outside. 

In the tavern the two Whig candidates are ingratiating themselves with supporters. One candidate is kissing a conventionally unattractive woman, while a girl tries to steal his ring; the other is listening to a drunken bore. At the other end of the table the mayor is collapsing from over indulgence in oysters, while the election agent is knocked out by a brick thrown through the window by the Tory mob.

‘Canvassing for Votes’, The second painting depicts Tory and Whig agents, both attempting to bribe an innkeeper to vote for them. The crowd outside the tavern is visible in the background.

‘The Polling’, shows voters declaring their support for the Whigs (orange) or Tories (blue). Agents from both sides are using unscrupulous tactics to increase their votes or challenge opposing voters. Even a dying man is being carried to vote. In the background is a woman in a carriage with a broken axle (Britannia). 

‘Chairing the Member’, last in the series, shows the celebrations of and their supporters carrying the victorious Tory candidate through the streets on a chair in a traditional ceremony. He is about to tumble because one of his carriers has just been accidentally hit on the head by a Tory-supporting rural labourer who is attempting to fight off a Whig supporter.

The many now unacceptable practices now seem unlikely but still amusing.  We reflected how far our democracy has progressed and counted our blessings. Of course, such corruption does not feature in today's UK elections!  And at least we are not in Russia…

FDLHS Talk May 2023: The History and Conservation of the Sudbury Common Lands

 FDLHS May 2023 - Nick Shimwell and Jack Creswell

The History and Conservation of the Sudbury Common Lands

Nick Shimwell and Jack Creswell’s natural habitat is the Sudbury Common Lands, the 46 hectares that provide a green lung stopping the westward sprawl of the town. You may have spotted them in the wild, wearing their distinctive green ranger’s uniform. They came indoors to speak to a well-attended meeting of the FDLHS at Foxearth Village Hall.

Sensibly, Nick and Jack started by explaining what a “common” is and helped dispel the myth that commons are owned by the public. There are over 8,000 of them scattered across England. A defining feature is the “rights of common”, which give third parties the legal right to do something on the land, which is owned by a private individual or body such as the National Trust or local council. In Sudbury, the right is to “pasturage” (to put livestock out to feed on the grass) over the five water meadows to the west of the town, but on other commons rights can include for example “pannage” (right to put pigs out to feed in woodland) and “piscary” (right to take fish from ponds, lakes, rivers and streams).

It is the Sudbury Freemen who have pasturage rights over the Sudbury Common Lands – or to be exact, the right “to depasture two head of cattle on the Common Lands, and widows or widowers of Freemen one head of cattle”. If you fancy becoming a Freeman you are out of luck unless you are the adult child or grandchild of a Sudbury Freeman or have been apprenticed to a Sudbury Freeman (in which case, you can take up your rights by applying to Sudbury Town Council). These days, none of the Sudbury Freeman own cattle. The Sudbury Common Lands Charity was established in 1897 to be the custodian of the Common Lands, and trustees contract with a farmer to graze their cattle on the water meadows. The charity pays £4 a year to each Freeman for use of their rights. A “turning on” ceremony is held every five years, attended by the Freemen and Mayor of Sudbury in their regalia, with the Mayor invited to sample the sward. As Nick and Jack explained, this doesn’t have to involve actually eating the grass though some Mayors have chosen to do so.

Over recent decades, the cattle breeds have changed from South Devons and Highland cattle, to Simmentals and Limousins. Their grazing is vital to achieving biodiversity, eating down and churning the pasture just enough to allow wild flowers to flourish, including what Nick and Jack called the “star plant”, the Tubular Water-dropwort. Ditches were reformed in 1993, designed to retain still water for wildlife to create an additional type of aquatic habitat in contrast to the flowing Stour. Trees have been planted, the willows pollarded every 2-3 years.

The Charity is also contracted to manage the Valley Trail, now an important “biological corridor” for 2½ miles from Kingfisher Leisure Centre to Melford Country Park. Dr Beeching’s closure of the railway in 1967 has been a boon to bats and rare flora including the Deptford pink, which is found in only 15 sites across East Anglia. Nick and Jack also work on the ancient and reclaimed woodland of the Great Cornard Country Park, which provides different habitat for wildlife, including bluebells and bea orchids.

We’re fortunate to live surrounded by so much countryside along the Stour Valley but modern farming practices over the last 80 years, though taking great strides in improving productivity, have often had a negative impact on biodiversity. The work that Nick and Jack do provides a small remedy.

Andrew Le Sueur

FHS Feb 24: A Millennium of Mills and Milling

FDLHS - Report - February 2024

Robin Drury -  A Millennium of Mills and Milling – A Potted History of Windmills and Watermills

Mr Drury’s talk on mills was tightly focused geographically on Sudbury. His time span was enormous, from before the Romans to the demise of the local mill in the late nineteenth century. He showed how a few brand names only survive until today, and then only as a result of diversification.

Robin revealed a remarkably equidistant distribution of the mills along the Stour, which he attributed their use of Roman weirs built to improve navigability on a notoriously shallow river. It would be interesting to see this thesis tested by comparison of mills on other rivers. Almost all of the mills discussed were recorded in the Domesday Book.

These local watermills suffered a variety of fates. A few have been demolished. Others still have commercial uses such as the Mill Hotel in Sudbury. Most have been turned into homes, some with sensitivity toward the historic buildings, others less so. Some had famous residents ranging from the poet Edmund Blunden at Hall Mill, Long Melford, to Derek Taylor, publicist to the ‘Fab Four’ and one of the many called the ‘fifth Beatle’, at Brundon Mill.

A sadly all too short part of the talk covered wind mills, but astonished at the number in and around Sudbury. Mr Drury also explained the excellent but neglected late eighteenth century house at 48 North Street as having been the home of the owner of two windmills in Sudbury, one of which stood just across the road.

The end for these mills came suddenly when an East Anglian farmer’s son, John George Cranfield, went to Minneapolis, saw steam powered steel roller mills, and brought this new technology back in the 1880s to a mill on Ipswich docks. It was so efficient that to keep it running, cheap grain had to be imported from the wheat lands of North America.

Stephen Astley

FHS April 23: ‘The Soil Sisters’

FDHS  April meeting 2023

Nicky Reynolds: ‘The Soil Sisters’ - The Women’s Land Army in Suffolk 

Rat catching, farm labouring, and commercial logging are occupations that in normal times are dominated by men but twice in the twentieth century women from all social backgrounds stepped forward to do these types of work – during the Great War and the Second World War. In a meticulously researched and nicely illustrated talk to a good-sized audience, Nicky Reynolds shared her “obsession” with the history of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) in Suffolk.

Women, of course, have always played an important role in the countryside economy. On farms, women’s work tended to be seasonal (all hands needed for the harvest) and in aspects of dairy and poultry keeping. In 1916, with enemy U-boats disrupting food imports to the UK, the Ministry of Agriculture agreed to fund a new voluntary organisation to recruit women for emergency work on the land and so a “Land Army” was launched. Enticed by uplifting posters showing idealised images of farm work in sunny fields, 23,000 women signed up in the Great War and more than 80,000 in the Second World War. Though it caught the popular imagination, “Army” is a misnomer. While the workers were issued with uniforms, the WLA was a civilian not military organisation and the women were employed by individual farmers. Nicky illustrated her lecture with numerous slides showing Land Girls at work and off duty. The work was hard and the women were away from loved ones, but it’s clear that many experienced a sense of camaraderie. A structured training programme was available, with opportunities to progress to higher rates of pay as proficiency tests were passed.

Nicky’s talk concluded with an unsettling note: there was, she said, “no fairytale ending”. Too often women are not written into official histories and so it sadly proved for the Land Girls. It was not until 2008 that the contribution of members of the WLA and its sister organisation the Women’s Timber Corps, was formally recognised when the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) issued a badge of honour to the 45,000 surviving Land Girls and Lumber Jills. Some felt that this was too little too late. There is now a memorial statue at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. 

In conjunction with Suffolk Archives, Nicky and colleagues are fundraising for a permanent memorial to commemorate the WLA’s work in Suffolk. The project has already completed a digital roll of honour, tracking down some 1700 of the 2500 women who helped feed the country and ensure wood supplies for the war effort. This work is a brilliant example of “public history”, where through engaging with communities historians can help us reconstruct our local stories and sense of place in the world.  

Andrew Le Sueur