Bedfield Hall
An isolated ninth-century site, moated around 1300 and adjacent to the eleventh-century church.
Church Lane, Bedfield, Suffolk, IP13 7JJ
The isolated ninth-century site was moated around 1300 and is adjacent to the eleventh-century church.
The earlier part of the house, built in 1421, was enlarged and modernised with two wings of 1620 and 1630. Until the Dissolution, the manor was held by Eye Priory.
The Midsummer Rose, by Timothy Easton
I write this on the Old Midsummer’s Eve, knowing there is a connection between Bedfield Hall, the house my wife Christine and I bought in 1982 and this feast day. Although the central section of the Hall was constructed in...
Thomas Dunston
The first owner-occupier since around 1100 was a wealthy farmer, Thomas Dunston (resident 1610-1657). He was responsible for the layout of the painted rooms, two enriched plaster ceilings and, in his new kitchen, a remarkable painted and inscribed ceiling with magical symbols to ward off witches. Most of the rooms have their early seventeenth-century decorative schemes intact or restored.
The sub-divided two-acre gardens around the house have five connecting bridges over the water. There are formal yew hedges and topiary with a potager, shrub roses, iris beds and a woodland area.
Timothy Easton on the ‘Magical Protection of Buildings’ – Members Lecture
Although for over 800 years churchmen constantly reminded people not to use the services of specialist wisemen or women, but to resort to prayer in church for their worries, there continued to be an alternative belief system which shows up...
