Building record WHR 094 - Wherstead Hall

Wherstead Hall is a grade II-listed timber-framed farmhouse immediately to the west of its former farm buildings, which have been converted in recent years to accommodate the Suffolk Food Hall. Although the oldest part of the present house dates from the 15th century it occupies the site of the Domesday manor of Wherstead Hall. The original manorial complex included a chapel mentioned in a document of 1282 and probably lay in an empty moated enclosure to the south. Having been occupied by its affluent owners, the de Reymes family, in the 12th and 13th centuries the status of the site saw a sharp decline in the later Middle Ages when it fell into the hands of absentee landlords. This change may explain the abandonment of the moat and the construction of a more modest new house opposite the barn in the 15th century – possibly as late as 1485 when the Earl of Wiltshire gave the property to a distant relative: Henry Bures of Acton. The majority of this building still survives, with a two-bay hall that was initially open to its roof in the manner of a barn and heated by a bonfire-like open hearth. The roof timbers are still thickly encrusted with medieval soot, although its carved crown-post has been removed. Two in-line service bays that contained a pair of store rooms and an undershot cross-passage adjoin the hall to the north, but the site of the contemporary parlour on the south is now occupied by a substantial cross-wing that ostensibly dates from the early-17th century. The house was heavily renovated in 1985, when much of its early fabric was either replaced or concealed by plaster, and the main chimney was completely rebuilt, but an impressive roll-moulded hall ceiling of circa 1530 remains intact. Shortly before his death in 1528 Henry Bures leased the property to Dame Anne Causton, for whom this ceiling may have been inserted. There seems to have been some dispute over her tenancy as a document in the Public Record Office details an extraordinary episode in which she took a serving-man to court after he forcibly ejected her from ‘the manor-place of Wherstede Hall’, seized her deeds and destroyed her goods. By the time of the parish tithe survey in 1839 the farm was a tenanted holding of 192 acres on the Wherstead Park estate owned by Sir Robert Harland. The tithe map shows the house with a small wing behind the modern utility room in the medieval service bay, but without its large southern wing, and this appears to represent a separate 17th century house that was brought from elsewhere to form a new extension as part of a major refurbishment of the site in circa 1850. The small rear wing is shown in an aerial photograph taken shortly before its demolition in or shortly before 1985, and it is now proposed to build an extension of comparable scale and appearance on the same site (S1).