Farmstead record RLS 007 - Farmstead: Rishangles Hall (Common Farm)

Rishangles Hall (Common Farm), Redlingfield. 19th century farmstead and 16th century farmhouse. Regular courtyard multi-yard plan formed by working agricultural buildings with additional detached elements. The farmhouse is attached to the agricultural range. Partial loss (less than 50%) of the tradtional farm buildings. Located within a hamle (S1-6).

Recorded as part of the Farmsteads in the Suffolk Countryside Project. This is a purely desk-based study and no site visits were undertaken. These records are not intended to be a definitive assessment of these buildings. Dating reflects their presence at a point in time on historic maps and there is potential for earlier origins to buildings and farmsteads. This project highlights a potential need for a more in depth field study of farmstead to gather more specific age data.

Rishangles Hall lies in open countryside on the eastern side of the B1077 approximately 1 km south of Rishangles parish church. Until the late-20th century the property was known as Common Farm and formerly adjoined a small medieval green marked as Rishangles Green on Hodskinson’s 1783 map of Suffolk. The property consists of a grade II-listed domestic house at right-angles to the road which unusually adjoins a redundant barn to the rear (east). Both the house and barn lie within the same timber-framed structure of the mid- to late-15th or possibly the early-16th century. This structure originally formed a large agricultural building of 8 bays with a central threshing barn of five bays flanked by a two-bay stable and loft on the west and a single-bay stable and loft on the east. Multi-purpose barns are rare outside East Anglian and this example represents one of the best examples in the region with a partly intact queen-post roof (another distinctive East Anglia feature). The building is also of exceptional historic interest as an early barn conversion, with a chimney and windows containing diamond mullions inserted into the western stable and part of the barn to form a complete farmhouse before the mid-17th century. The rest of the barn and the eastern stable continued to be used for their original purpose until the 20th century, and the 1846 tithe map shows a single building on the site (which was then a modest tenanted farm of 64 acres occupied by a direct ancestor of the current owner). Historic England’s listing description recognises the likelihood of this conversion but describes the original barn as a two-phase structure of the 16th century. The new house probably replaced a much larger medieval farmhouse on the north, from which direction the barn was initially entered, and the site may be linked to the changing fortunes of the nunnery at nearby Redlingfield which held the manor of Rishangles until the Reformation. The conversion was extended eastwards in or about the 1980s when the original threshing bay became the present kitchen and a single-storied entrance lobby and utility room was inserted into the adjacent bay. The remaining two unconverted bays have lost their roof and the framing of their front wall from which a mid-19th century stable and granary now projects at right-angles. The loft and the internal partition of the eastern bay have also been removed but the high-quality original framing which survives largely intact in the gable and back wall is identical to that of the western bays of this remarkable building (S7).