Monument record LGH 009 - Medieval Settlement features, Langham Hall estate

2003: Series of test holes (to be followed by trenching) S1

2005: Work has continued for the second year on a three-year project to excavate two sites near the isolated church at Langham. The foundations of an 18th-century dovecote and the outline of an early building with finds of Saxon pottery and artifacts have been found on the small moated site to the east of the church. On the second site, in an area of rough pasture lying immediately south of the church, evidence has been unearthed of a settlement dating from the 10th to the 14th century, with a later reoccupation of the site by a rectory from the mid-16th to the mid-18th century.
Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 2005 (S2)

2006: Work continued on excavating a settlement site in an area of rough pasture immediately south of St Mary’s Church and just above the flood plain of a tributary of The Black Bourn. The site has produced evidence of occupation from the Middle Saxon period down to the 14th century, in the form of clay and cobbled surfaces, postholes, hearths, a possible ‘oven’, some Ipswich Ware and a large amount of medieval pottery, oyster shells, cut animal bones, quern fragments and metal slag. The flint foundations of the former rectory, known from documentary records to have existed near the church, were discovered in 2006, showing several phases of rebuilding and possible evidence for a medieval origin. From the excavations it would appear to have been of no great size, probably in a poor state of repair and a possible eyesore at the time of its demolition by Sir Patrick Blake, c.1760, as part of his creation of a park around his new hall. Sir Patrick achieved this coup de grace by exchanging the glebe land, on which the rectory stood, for land elsewhere where a replacement was built. Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 2006 (S3).