Long Melford

Coordinates: 52°04′37″N 0°43′05″E / 52.077°N 0.718°E / 52.077; 0.718

Long Melford
Holy Trinity Church
Long Melford  Long Melford shown within Suffolk
Population	3,675 [1]
OS grid reference	TL8646
District	Babergh
Shire county	Suffolk
Region	East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	Sudbury
Postcode district	CO10
Dialling code	01787
Police	Suffolk
Fire	Suffolk
Ambulance	East of England
EU Parliament	East of England
UK Parliament	South Suffolk
List of places: UK • England • Suffolk

Long Melford (or Melford, as it is known locally) is a large village and civil parish in the county of Suffolk, England. It is on Suffolk's border with Essex, which is marked by the River Stour, approximately 16 miles (26 km) from Colchester and 14 miles (23 km) from Bury St. Edmunds. The parish also includes the hamlets of Bridge Street and Cuckoo Tye.

Its name is derived from the nature of the village's layout (originally concentrated along a 3 mile stretch of a single road) and the Mill ford crossing the Chad Brook (a tributary of the River Stour).

Long Melford is notable for its large collection of antiques shops and dealers^{[citation needed]}

History

The area now occupied by Long Melford has been occupied since at least 100 B.C..^{[citation needed]} The village's layout was defined in Roman times^{[citation needed]} with the empire building two roads thorough Melford, the main one running from Chelmsford through to Pakenham. Roman remains were discovered in a gravel pit in 1828,^[2] a site now occupied by the village's football club.

The Manor of Melford was given to the Abbey of St.Edmundsbury by Earl Aflric in ca. 1050.^[3] The village is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 which lists the manor of Long Melford as an estate of 600 hectares. The neighbouring Manor of Kentwell is also recorded. Following the dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII granted the manor to Sir William Cordell.^[3]

Landmarks

Long Melford is fairly unusual for a village in that it has a parish church of dimensions more suited to a cathedral. The origin of Holy Trinity Church dates from the reign of Edward the Confessor; it was then substantially rebuilt between 1467 and 1497 by John Clopton of Kentwell Hall. It is one of the richest "wool churches" in East Anglia and is renowned for its flushwork, The Clopton chantry chapel and the Lady Chapel at the East end with some surviving medieval stained-glass.^[4] Edmund Blunden, the World War I poet, is buried in the churchyard. Next to the church is the Hospital of the Holy and Blessed Trinity, an almshouse founded by William Cordell in 1573.^[5]

Another unusual feature of Long Melford is its large elongated village green, dominated until the 1980s by a group of great elms that included one of the largest in England.^[6] The elms were painted in 1940 by the watercolourist S. R. Badmin in his 'Long Melford Green on a Frosty Morning', now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.^[7]

The village contains two stately homes, Kentwell Hall and Melford Hall, all built from the proceeds of the wool trade in the Middle Ages. Kentwell Hall and the Holy Trinity Church were financed by the Clopton family, in particular by John Clopton.^[8]

Transport

Long Melford once had a railway station on the Stour Valley Line, but this closed in March 1967 when the line was cut back to Sudbury. It is connected to several large towns by bus, notably Sudbury, Colchester, Bury St Edmunds, Haverhill and Ipswich.

See also

• Long Melford F.C.

External links

• Village website

References

1. ^ Neighbourhood Statistics
2. ^ Kelly (1900). Kelly's Directory of Suffolk. Kelly's Directories, Ltd.. p. 259. http://www.historicaldirectories.org/EXE/tiff2png.exe/00005RE2.PNG?-i+-r+80+-g+4+-h+1,130,3+E%3A%5CZYIMAGE%5CDATA%5CHISTDIR%5CTIF%5CLU8FD8%7E1%5C00005RE2.TIF. Retrieved 2008-10-21 
3. ^ ^{a b} Kelly (1900). Kelly's Directory of Suffolk. Kelly's Directories, Ltd.. p. 260. http://www.historicaldirectories.org/EXE/tiff2png.exe/00005RE3.PNG?-i+-r+80+-g+4+E%3A%5CZYIMAGE%5CDATA%5CHISTDIR%5CTIF%5CLU8FD8%7E1%5C00005RE3.TIF. Retrieved 2008-10-21 
4. ^ "Holy Trinity". The Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. http://www.stedmundsbury.anglican.org/longmelford/. Retrieved 2008-09-16. 
5. ^ Charles Henry Cooper; Thompson Cooper (1858). Athenae Cantabrigienses. 1: 1500-1585. DEIGHTON BELL & CO, MACMILLAN & CO, BELL & DALDY FLEET STREET. p. 433. http://books.google.com/?id=8koJAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA433&dq=long+melford+hospital+cordell#v=onepage&q=long%20melford%20hospital%20cordell&f=false. 
6. ^ Photograph in Oliver Rackham, A History of the Countryside (London, 1986)
7. ^ [1]
8. ^ Britain Express