The Local Area
Cockfield is a village and
civil parish located approximately 3½ miles
(5.6 km) from
Lavenham in
Suffolk. The village consists of a central
point and several outlying
hamlets. Surrounded mostly by fields
used for farming, and with few roads.
The
present village has been inhabited for well over
2000 years. The finding of a sword (now in the
Moyse Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds) is
evidence of Bronze Age settlement, and a number
of findings indicate a Roman encampment, known
as the Warbanks.
The village's present name is derived from
"Cochan-feld" probably indicating a site
established by a person named Cochan. The
village appeared in the Domesday Book of 1086
under the name of "Cothefelda" and is listed as
a properous manor whose wealth had grown since
the Norman Conquest. During the Middle Ages, the
village became "Cokefield" and finally
"Cockfield".
A landmark visible for a distance across the
neighbouring countryside, is the church of St
Peter's. It is one of the finest of Suffolk's
many village churches, with the present building
mostly dating from the 14th and 15th centuries.
The church's size is unusual for such a rural
location, but this becomes less surprising when
one considers its location between the three
great medieval merchant towns of Bury St
Edmunds, Lavenham, and Sudbury.
Lavenham is a village and civil parish in
Suffolk. It is noted for its 15th century
church, half-timbered medieval cottages and
circular walk. In the medieval period it was
among the 20 wealthiest settlements in England.
It is a popular day-trip destination for people
from across the country and beyond.
Lavenham prospered from the wool trade in the
15th and 16th century, with the town's blue
broadcloth being an export of note. The town's
wealth can be seen in the lavishly constructed
parish church of St Peter and St Paul which
stands on a hill top at the end of the main high
street. The church is excessively large for the
size of the village and with a tower standing
141 ft (43 m) high it lays claim to being the
highest village church tower in Britain. The
church is renowned for its Late-Gothic chantries
and screens.
Lavenham's Market Square was
the main location of the 1968 Vincent Price film
Witchfinder General. In 1986 a more contemporary
film Playing Away, about a visiting cricket
eleven from Brixton, was also filmed here. The
Market Square is the setting of John Lennon and
Yoko Ono's 1970 film Apotheosis. In 2010, under
conditions of strict secrecy, scenes from Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows were filmed here.
Lavenham is also the setting for the last
ever episode of popular mid-1990s BBC drama,
Lovejoy. The episode, which aired in December
1994, was titled 'Last Tango in Lavenham'.
It was thought that the town was the
inspiration for the poem, "A Crooked Little
Man." The town was built using green wood for
many of the houses and over the years as the
wood aged, the buildings became distorted and
out of alignment, hence, many crooked little
houses.
Bury St Edmunds is a historic market town in the
county of Suffolk. It is the main town in the
borough of St Edmundsbury and known for the
ruined abbey near the town centre.
Bury
St Edmunds (originally called Beodericsworth, St
Edmund's Bury), supposed by some to have been
the Villa Faustina of the Romans, was one of the
royal towns of the Saxons. Sigebert, king of the
East Angles, founded a monastery here about 633,
which in 903 became the burial place of King
Edmund, who was slain by the Danes in 869, and
owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed
miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr
king. The town grew around Bury St Edmunds
Abbey, a site of pilgrimage.
In the
centre of Bury St Edmunds lie the remains of an
abbey, surrounded by the Abbey Gardens, a park.
The abbey is a shrine to Saint Edmund. The abbey
was sacked by the townspeople in the 14th
century, and then largely destroyed during the
16th century with the Dissolution of the
Monasteries but Bury remained prosperous
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, falling
into relative decline with the Industrial
Revolution.
Bury St Edmunds Cathedral was
created when the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and
Ipswich was formed in 1914. The cathedral was
extended with an eastern end in the 1960s,
commemorated by Benjamin Britten's Fanfare for
St Edmundsbury. A new Gothic revival cathedral
tower was built as part of a millennium project
running from 2000 to 2005. The tower makes St
Edmundsbury the only recently completed Anglican
cathedral in the UK. Only a handful of Gothic
revival cathedrals are being built worldwide.
The tower was constructed using original
fabrication techniques by six masons who placed
the machine-pre-cut stone individually as they
arrived.
The Theatre Royal, Bury St
Edmunds was built by National Gallery architect
William Wilkins in 1819. It is the sole
surviving Regency Theatre in the country. The
theatre, owned by the Greene King brewery, is
leased to the National Trust for a nominal
charge, and underwent restoration between 2005
and 2007. It presents a full programme of
performances and is also open for public tours.
The UK's largest British-owned brewery,
Greene King, is situated in Bury, as is the
smaller Old Cannon Brewery. Another beer-related
landmark is Britain's smallest public house, The
Nutshell, which is on The Traverse, just off the
marketplace. It is allegedly the smallest pub in
Britain and also believed to be haunted.
Long Melford (or Melford, as it is known
locally) is a large village and civil parish in
the county of Suffolk. It is on Suffolk's border
with Essex, which is marked by the River Stour,
approximately 16 miles (26 km) from Colchester
and 14 miles (23 km) from Bury St. Edmunds.
Long Melford is fairly unusual for a village
in that it has a parish church of dimensions
more suited to a cathedral. Originally completed
in 1484, Holy Trinity Church is the one of the
richest "wool churches" in East Anglia and is
renowned for its flushwork, The Clopton chantry
chapel and the Lady Chapel at the East end with
some surviving medieval stained-glass. Another
unusual feature of Long Melford is its large
elongated village green, dominated until the
1980s by a group of great elms that included one
of the largest in England. The elms were painted
in 1940 by the watercolourist S. R. Badmin in
his 'Long Melford Green on a Frosty Morning',
now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The village contains two stately homes, Kentwell
Hall and Melford Hall, all built from the
proceeds of the wool trade in the Middle Ages.
Long Melford is notable for its large
collection of antiques shops and dealers.
(Information supplied courtesy of Wikipedia)
