The+nook+communities

Halesworth is one of the smaller parishes of the Blything hundred and is characterised for the most part by an angular boundary, which follows hedges and ditches between fields. Only its southern edge is marked by a natural feature, where the parish boundary is delineated by the meanderings of the southern Blyth (Figs. 1-2).

Fig 1 Parish boundary of Halesworth (shaded) in the 19th century.

Parish boundaries are the outcome of more than a thousand years of socio-economic history. They came after the primary process of English settlement, which was followed by adjustments from time to time by the exchange of land with neighbours. In modern times, boundaries were changed radically in response to urbanisation and the coming of the railways. For example, Halesworth’s boundary was altered after the railway had cut off small irregular portions of the parish from its main body. The last major alteration to Halesworth’s boundaries was in 1934 and this more or less gave the parish its present form (Fig 2).

Fig 2 The position of Halesworth parish (modern boundary) in relation to river, roads and farms. WL=wetland; BCL=Bramfield common lane

Counteracting the forces of change was the need for geographical cohesion on the part of the community. A sense of place was maintained year on year by the ceremony of beating the bounds. This was the annual perambulation, led by the churchwardens, of young and old along an established route that circumnavigated the parish. Beating the bounds originated before the days of maps, and involved a procession from one prominent feature to another, i.e. an ancient tree, a stream or a hilltop.

Fig 3 Compartmentation of outlying titheable lands (modified from Warner, 1987) Shaded area tithable to Halesworth

When the first map of Halesworth was made in the mid 18th century, a detached portion of Halesworth was embedded in the northern parish of Spexhall (Fig. 3-5). Subsequent adjustments of this anomaly between Halesworth and Spexhall accounts for the narrow northern extension of the parish parallel to Stone Street, the main road to Bungay. However, to understand the origins of the parochial territory of Halesworth that subsequently conditioned its economic development requires examining its condition and that of its northern neighbours at the time of Domesday.

Fig 4 Halesworth in Spexhall (1842) The fields of the Halesworth’s northern extension are rectangular and appear to have been planned with their common axis running north to south (Fig 4).

Nearer to the centre of Halesworth, the boundary forms a projection, which contains the homestead of Hill Farm (Fig. 5). This is also evidence of some kind of land deal in the past that took place between Halesworth and Holton. It could have been that Holton received a finger of land from Halesworth or that Hill Farm was carved out of Holton. There are no documented clues as what actually happened.

Fig. 5 Parish boundary of Halesworth in relation to the Holton and Wissett 1842

The Domesday survey tells that most of Halesworth was in the hands of a powerful Norman baron, Earl Hugh. He was pressing his claim on the remainder of the vill, which was contested by another of King William’s henchmen, Earl Alan.

The following Domesday entry for Halesworth is substantial and describes three estates with manorial status.


 * //Aelfric held Halesworth TRE as a manor with 2 carucates of land. Then 4 villans, now 5. Then 7 borders, now 10. Then as now 2 slaves. Then as now 2 ploughs in demesne. Then 3 ploughs belonging to the men, now 2. Then woodland for 300 pigs, now for 100. Then as now 4 acres of meadow. 1 mill, 1 horse. Then as now 6 head of cattle. Now 10 pigs. 18 sheep. Then it was worth 30 (s). now 40(s).//
 * //In the same vill Ulf the priest held 40 acres of land as one manor. 2 borders. 1 plough in demesne. Woodland for 6 pigs. 4 acres of meadow. 14 sheep. 2 goats. It is worth 5s.//
 * //To this manor have been joined 4 free men with 60 acres of land. 2 borders. 2 ploughs in demesne. It is worth 10s. And Bigod de Loges holds these 3 estates from Earl Hugh.//
 * //It is one league long and another broad. It renders 7 ½ d in geld. Count Alan claims the land of the aforsaid priest and those of 4 men through his predecessor and his own seisin and the Hundred testifies (for him).//

Earl Hugh also had interests in four parishes adjacent to Halesworth, holding Bramfield as one manor, with properties in Walpole, Thorington, Wenhaston and Wissett. There is no Domesday entry for Spexhall and its eastern neighbour, Westhall.

Omissions of villages that were later described as long-established communities are unusual, but not unknown in Suffolk. This simply adds to the air of mystery surrounding the origins of Halesworth, not least because 19th century Halesworth shared its northern boundary with Wissett, Spexhall and Westhall.

It has been said that the landscape of Suffolk is still essentially a Saxon one. The description of Domesday Halesworth as being one league long and another broad, fits with the relative dimensions of the 19th century parish. A clue to the settlement’s connection with Spexhall could be Halesworth’s ownership of Domesday woodland that could provide pannage for 300 pigs. This is a substantial amount of land that could have been sited on unoccupied claylands to the north of the town. Another large area of pannage was included in the survey of Wissett, again amounting to 300 pigs. These figures are not accurate but are taken to represent orders of magnitude for comparative purposes. In the 1842 Tithe Apportionment, two blocks of fields belonging to Halesworth were embedded in Spexhall, and there was also a part of Spexhall that was titheable in Westhall. These arrangements indicate that this flat, and still relatively uninhabited landscape, which is part of the watershed between the Blyth, Wang and Waveney, was pre-Conquest wood pasture, with common land rights held by villages to the south. Subsequently, the block of land straddling Stone Street, a supposed Roman road, became shared between the three communities, each having specified amounts of common land, and these commons were subsequently enclosed to give the parochial boundaries as shown in the Tithe Maps. This virtual snapshot of the northern edge of Blything in 1086 illuminates the process of clearing and settlement of upland forest. The process had long been a feature of the spread of the English, as families moved west, exploring Suffolk’s network of streams to access the heavy clay cornlands.

//Parish boundaries// The peculiar arrangement of Halesworth’s northern parish boundary as it was mapped in the early 19th century, in relation to Wissett and Holton, with the detached portion of Halesworth embedded in Spexhall, requires some explanation. The fact that Spexhall church appears to have originated to serve a chapelry of Wissett, suggests that Spexhall was actually a post-Conquest community created on the eastern plateau lands of Wissett. Wissett’s pannage for 300 pigs reinforces the idea that there was a large tract of woodland available to the parish that was probably the plateau land upon which Spexhall was eventually established as an independent parish, where it shared common rights with Halesworth and Westhall.

Fig. 6 Plateau-edge parishes of Brampton, Westhall and Sotherton There are also intriguing arial relationships between the lands immediately to the north of Halesworth and the territory of the three north-eastern parishes of Brampton, Westhall and Sotherton, to the east of Stone St. These three parishes are situated on the edge of the clay plateau with their communities focused in three small valleys with streams feeding the River Wang (Fig 6). If their churches are taken as the main points of settlement, it is clear that the 75 ft contour is a key to the original suitability of these valleys for their first communities. From the churches, the parish lands rise up the valleys to the west, where, in the case of Westhall, the boundary is for the most part aligned north to south, parallel to Stone Street, from which it was separated by about half a mile of territory belonging to Halesworth and Spexhall. The northern boundaries of Westhall and Brampton coincide with Blything’s Hundred boundary, as did Halesworth’s detached northern block of land.

Sotherton is the smallest of the three villages and abuts onto Holton and Blyford. The contiguity and shapes of their 19th century boundaries (Fig. 7) is strongly suggestive that they were originally one community, with a western nook, or valley, which became a separate village. Sotherton or ‘south community’, which is mentioned in Domesday, is a candidate for an early division of Brampton. Westhall has to be ‘west’ of something, and indeed, it forms the western boundary of Brampton. The name ‘Brampton’ is common throughout England and has been equated with ‘burnt place’ i.e. a community laid waste by fire. This is a clue to a point in time when a disaster overcame Brampton in Suffolk, after which three new nuclear villages, Brampton, Sotherton and Westhall were created out of the one territory. Regarding their origins, in 1086 Brampton had about three times the farming activity of Sotherton, which from its holding of 100 hogs was probably largely a woodland area. The actual dimensions of Sotherton were given as 1 league long by half a league wide. Brampton’s size was not recorded.

Fig 7 The ‘nuclear’ communities of Wissett and Brampton Warner, in his booklet, ‘//Seven Wonders from Westhall’// has mapped the probable 14th century distribution of woodland in the three parishes (Fig 8). His map shows a southern block straddling the boundary between Westhall and Sotherton. This pattern of distribution, taken together with the relatively large area of common land in Westhall that was probably derived from woodland, indicates that Westhall was a post-Conquest creation by the division of Sotherton and its settlement from Brampton. Its relatively large area of common land was probably a legacy from its origins as a block of wood pasture. From an examination of the plan and Romanesque features of Westhall church, Warner favours a late 11th century origin for its foundation as a stone-built chapel, which was subsequently embellished with an apse, a well-carved ‘Norman’ chancel arch and portal in the next century.

What have these ancient topographic features of the communities north of the town to do with the development of Halesworth? First there is an etymological unity with the name 'hal or hall' used to describe an out of the way place.

The name Halesworth (various early spellings are Halesuuorda, Haleurda, Healesuurda) may have originated as a local description of 'the farming community (urda) of the nook (hale)'. Hal or hall is common to the designations of Spexhall, Westhall, Titshall (an isolated wood in Brampton), Spexhall and Ilketshall. In line with this, there is evidence that these communities spread out from small well-watered valleys at the northern edge of Blything Hundred, up onto the intractable wooded clayland of the high plateau. This plateau between the Blyth and Waveney catchments was probably an impediment to north-south communication from the earliest times. In this respect, Stone Street is regarded as a local engineering initiative of the Romans, to drive a route across the impenetrable claylands between Halesworth and Bungay. This was probably in order to connect the Romano-British farms of Blything with military installations on the Yare and Waveney.

Fig 8 Disposition of parishes to the east of Stone St in relation to 14th century woodland (modified from Warner, 1996)

Finally, the shape of Halesworth probably developed, and was restricted, as the result of competition between the ‘nook’ communities for the empty claylands. In this connection, Brampton may be regarded as a prototype of Halesworth, with its church sited above a stream crossed by a minor road. At Domesday it was about twice the size of Halesworth and like Halesworth its lord successfully petitioned Henry III for a market and fair (1251), as did the lord of Sotherton (1226). The latter rights were later transferred to the secondary community of Westhall. This signalled the beginning of the decline of Sotherton relative to Westhall, and by the 17th century it was only half the size of its northern neighbour. At this time (1674) Brampton had 20 households, Westhall had 46, and Sotherton had 21. In contrast, Halesworth had 226 households at this time, and the retail revolution, which boosted the population of Halesworth, had bypassed its northern neighbours, and even the coming of the railway did not significantly enhance their agrarian economies. In contrast to Halesworth, they remain to this day as sparsely populated, out of the way places, and rare examples of extreme rurality.