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Grundisburgh History

 

Grundisburgh is situated 6 miles from Ipswich and 3 miles from Woodbridge in the county of Suffolk on the eastern side of the United Kingdom.

Although it is quite close to these towns, it has retained the quiet country feel that the British countryside is renowned for.

Mentioned in the Domesday Survey of 1086, it was at that time little more than a settlement, and was about one third of the size of the present parish with a population of almost 250.

The name may have come from the old Norse, Grundi, a ninth century Vicking who built his fort or burgh nearby or it maybe the ground ( grund ) below Burgh, an old Roman settlement to the north east close to the main road.

The present village has over 1500 residents, the younger children attend the local Grundisburgh Primary School (click on the link for more details).

The older children mostly move on at eleven years of age to Farlingaye High School in Woodbridge, or Woodbridge School, a fee paying school in the same town.

Census Links

1841	1851	1861	1871
1881	1891	1901	1911

 

Below is an articles from the Grundisburgh Local History Society

THOMAS WALL THE SALTER

 by

 Peter Northeast

 “Just before the Reformation a little chapel was thrown out on the south side of the chancel”; this is the quaint language used by the elderly Rev. Graves Lombard, organiser of an excursion of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology to Grundisburgh in 1931, when referring to the Lady Chapel. The chapel is the only portion of the medieval church (as distinct from the 18th century tower) for which we have any details of date or founder. These are given in the inscription on the parapet, which exhorts us to pray for the souls of Thomas Wale (or Wall) and Alice his wife, and is dated 1527. When the chantry chapel of Thomas Spring III of Lavenham was built at about the same time, the Spring arms were carved on it, as they were on the top of the tower. It is the Spring Merchant’s mark, though, which appears at the bottom of the tower, which itself epitomises the rise of the family. Thomas Wall was not as successful as that, and had to be content with using his merchant’s mark on his Grundisburgh chapel, which he alternated with the arms of his London company, the Salters. These are both repeated on the corbels within the church, where, being protected from the weather, they appear as sharp as the day they were cut.

What do we know of this Thomas Wall? His will (P.C.C. 6 Thower), made on his deathbed on 3rd March 1531 (although he called it 1530 because the new year then began on 25th March, not 1st January), tells us that he was a citizen and salter of London, hence his use of the Salters’ arms. His parish church in the City, where he was to be buried, was that of St. Botulph “nigh Billingsgate”, the right place for one supplying the essential ingredient in the 16th century for preserving any form of flesh. He was never Lord Mayor of London, despite V.B. Redstone’s state­ment to the contrary on an earlier S.I.A. excursion in 1925; in fact, we know that his attempt at obtaining election to the Court of Aldermen in 1524 was opposed and frustrated.

That Wall was wealthy, if not of the Spring class, can be seen from the bequests in his will and the property mentioned. He left over £60 in direct monetary gifts, representing some thousands of pounds at today’s values, and further subsequent payments out of pieces of property. By City standards, his funeral was fairly modest; his body was accompanied by sixteen poor men carrying torches and tapers, and dirige (from which we get “dirge”) and requiem mass was said and sung by guilds (including the Salters), friars and nuns. He remembered the prisoners in London, leaving coal and victuals to them in the various gaols, with future gifts from the surplus of certain rents, but made no other contribution to the poor, as citizens were then urged to do.

Wall had property in Suffolk, Essex, Kent and Middlesex, as well as in the City. He left it all to his wife for life, enjoining her to provide a priest (and pay his salary) to celebrate mass regularly in Grundisburgh church in memory of his and his parents’ souls. This celebration was presumably to take place in the new chapel, although there is no mention of it in his will. After his wife’s death, his two daughters and their husbands were to share his property, the elder Katherine (married to John Collett) having the Suffolk property, and the younger, Jane (married to William Saunderson) the rest.

Two pieces of property, though, both London inns, were earmarked for the special purpose of providing for a priest in Grundisburgh church after the death of Alice Wall. These, the “Sun” and the “Chalice”, both in The parish of St. Botulph’s, were left in the care of his daughters who were to use the rents for paying the Grundisburgh priest. After the deaths of Katherine and Jane and their husbands, the two inns were to be transferred to the rector and churchwardens of St. Botulph’s, London, who were to continue to pay a priest at Grundisburgh and to use any surplus money for relieving prisoners in London gaols (who were, in return, to pray for Wall’s soul) and for providing a priest at St. Botulph’s to do the same.

We have to assume that the provisions of the will were complied with, though There seems to be no evidence either way. No chantry appears under Grundisburgh in the “Valor Ecclesiasticus”, the survey of religious finances conducted for Henry VIII in 1555, nor is there any sign of it in the Chantry Certificates of 1548. The London property would have been confiscated by the Crown as a result of the Chantries Act of 1547, unless the trustees could convince the authorities that the whole income was to be used for true charity, and not for “superstitious uses” (i.e. pre Reformation religious practices), in which case they would have survived as London charities. St. Botulph’s, Billingsgate, was one of the churches which was not rebuilt after being destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.