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A
Brief History Of Orford
| Orford before the castle was built | |
| The Castle | |
| The church of St Bartholomew | |
| The Borough | |
| The mayor and corporation | |
| The town lands and relief of the poor | |
| Later history |
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Orford before the castle was built The early history of the formation of Orford Ness,
and the construction of the river walls, both very significant in the
development of any sort of settlement at Orford, is, for the most part,
unknown. There is no evidence of any prehistoric (Stone
Age to the early Iron Age) settlement nearer Orford than Butley,
but a number of prehistoric finds (flint scrapers, hand axes, arrowheads and
blades) have been made in the district. There have also been finds of some
artefacts from the Bronze and Iron Ages, but no evidence
of settlement. Increasing numbers of recent finds in the centre of Orford
(cremation urns, a saltpan, a ditch with pottery fragments), near the castle
(coins and brooches) and especially at Gedgrave suggest that there may have
been a Roman settlement within or near the present village. In Anglo-Saxon
times Sudbourne was an important manor (first recorded in c940) and
Anglo-Saxon finds (including a tiny gold coin) so far have been made in the Orford and Sudbourne
area. Many of
the finds can be seen in Orford Museum. After the Norman conquest the part of the Anglo-Saxon manor of Sudbourne was
transferred to Robert Malet, one of William the Conqueror’s barons.
Sudbourne, but not Orford, is mentioned by name in Domesday Book of 1086. Two documents from the first half of the 12th
century (therefore predating the construction of the castle) refer to a market
and a causeway (a road built up over marshy ground - very possibly modern Quay
Street) in Orford, so it seems that there was certainly a village of sorts
(possibly based around fishing from the quay and a market for the sale of the
fish) in Norman times. Orford’s fortunes changed dramatically when King
Henry II (king from 1154 - 1189) chose Orford as the site on which to build a
completely new castle. His royal accounts (the Pipe Rolls) list all the
expenditure on the building of Orford castle between 1165 and 1173.The total
cost was £1,413. When completed, the castle keep was surrounded by a curtain
wall. Development of the town followed and probably the pattern of streets
which exists to this day was laid down. Orford castle was the property of the kings of
England for just over 150 years. In 1336 King Edward III sold it to Robert of
Ufford, Earl of Suffolk. Except in times of war in the 19th and 20th
centuries the castle remained in private hands. As time went by the curtain
walls collapsed and the stone was sold or stolen. The tall keep survived
because it was a useful landmark for shipping. During
the Napoleonic wars the castle formed one of a chain of signal stations.
Later in the nineteenth century the castle’s picturesque qualities were
recognised and it became a ‘summer house’ for the owners of the Sudbourne
estate. The Marquises of Hertford (owners from 1754 to 1870) and Sir Richard
Wallace (the owner from 1871 to 1884) furnished the Upper Chamber. After Sir Richard Wallace there were seven more
private owners, the last being the local Member of Parliament, Sir Arthur
Churchman, who bought the castle in 1928 and presented it to the nation. The Orford Town Trust became the custodian trustees
of the castle in 1929 and immediately set about raising funds for repairs. The
castle was opened to the public in 1930.The furniture and ornamental items
remained in the castle until the Second World War, when much was damaged or
destroyed when the castle was requisitioned by the military who lived in the
castle whilst manning a radar installation on the roof. In 1962 the Orford Town Trust transferred the castle
and responsibility for its upkeep to the Ministry of Works (later the
Department of the Environment). From 1984 English Heritage have been the
owners. A church was built in Orford either at the same time
as or shortly after the castle was erected. Although, for historical reasons, the church was
designated a chapel to the much smaller ‘mother church’ at Sudbourne,
Orford soon assumed sufficient importance to give its name to one of the
Suffolk deaneries.The Norman church was a large cruciform building, with a
central tower.Two of the massive pillars which once supported the central
tower survive inside the church, along with a small portion of the Norman
(Romanesque) architectural detail. The finest Norman remains are those of the
chancel which now stand, as ruins, to the east of the present church. For reasons which are not known, around 1320-40, the
central tower, most of the transepts and the entire nave of the Norman church
were demolished and replaced with a new nave with aisles and a tower at the
west end of the building. The south aisle was wider than the north. It is
possible that the establishment in Broad Street, Orford of an Augustinian
Friary in 1295 meant that a larger nave was needed to accommodate all
those who came to hear the friars preach in the parish church of the expanding
and prosperous town. The church was altered and embellished right up to
the Reformation in the 1530s. The font and porch were notable additions. At
the beginning of the 18th century, when Orford was in severe
economic decline, it was decided to abandon the Norman chancel and to create a
new east wall at the end of the nave, which explains the almost square shape
of the church today. There was a thorough programme of restoration from 1894
to 1901 when the Rev Edward Maude Scott was the rector.
A town granted legal liberties and privileges by a
formal document called a charter could become a borough. Orford had borough
status from at least 1256, when king Henry III granted two charters, until
1886 when the corporation was dissolved and succeeded by the Orford Town
Trust. The earliest surviving Orford charter is from the
reign of king Henry V, dated 24 May 1421. This is not a charter
granting new privileges; its purpose is to set out and confirm all previous
charters. It provides a very useful list of all Orford’s earlier charters. These were: two charters of
the reign of king Henry III, dated 8 and 12 June 1256, the first
granting to the king’s ‘men of Orford’ exemption from certain legal
proceedings, the second, much more important one, granting to the ‘men of
Orford’ property that had belonged to the king - the town, the mill and the
marsh (but not the castle) in return for an annual payment to the king of £30.
The men of Orford could build and use property in the town as they thought fit
and they could form a merchant guild. This charter cost the townsmen (or
burgesses) 40 shillings; a charter of the reign of king Edward II dated 20
February 1326, granting freedom from the payment of tolls, confirmed by
his son king Edward III, 3 February 1352, and then by his son king
Richard II on 14 February 1378. Another charter, of the reign of king Richard
III, dated 11 February 1484 confirmed the charter of his brother king
Edward IV which in turn recited the charter of king Richard II and so on as
set out above. This charter cost the burgesses four marks (£2. 67p). In the course of the Middle Ages trade increased,
merchant guilds were formed and at least two religious houses were established
in addition to the Augustinian Friary. The holding of markets and fairs and
representation in Parliament were amongst the hallmarks of borough status.
Orford’s market was held on Mondays. There was a fair on St Bartholomew’s
day, 24 August. There may have been another fair held on 24 June, the feast of
St John the Baptist. In the Middle Ages there was a chapel of St John the
Baptist in Orford (site unknown). It is said that Orford first sent two representatives
to Parliament in 1306, during the reign of king Edward I. Members of
Parliament had to be paid by the burgesses of the borough and the men of
Orford, in common with many other boroughs, preferring to save their money,
failed to send members to Parliament for so long that they lost the right to
do so. The right was restored by king Richard III. Apart from a brief period
during the Protectorate (1653 - 1660) Orford continued to send two MPs to
Westminster until 1832 when, as a ‘rotten borough’, it was
disenfranchised. On 7
July 1579 in the reign of queen Elizabeth I, the burgesses of Orford
acquired a charter of incorporation which incorporated the town as a
free borough with a common seal and with power to hold property and to hold a
court. The corporation was to consist of a mayor, eight portmen (in most
boroughs called aldermen) and twelve capital burgesses. These, with the
‘free burgesses’ of the town, elected the two members of Parliament. The
officers of the town were two
serjeants at mace, a recorder and a town clerk.
The charter runs to four closely written large parchment membranes
(sheets).
The first office-holders under the new charter were
a group of men who had worked hard to raise the money needed to petition the
Queen for the charter. The petition accompanying the request for the grant of
the charter stated that the town was in a state of ruin and decay. The fairly
obvious prosperity of those original members of the corporation shows that
this was a bit of an exaggeration, but economic conditions had undoubtedly
worsened over the previous 50 or so years. This was due to a downturn in the
fishing industry, continental wars disrupting trade, and piracy. Access to the
river through the shifting shingle bar at the tip of Orford Ness became more
difficult as boats increased in size. The first mayor was James Coe. He married as his
second wife, Bridget, the widow of Roger Sawyer, one of the portmen, and
through her acquired property in Orford including the lease on Chantry and
Rayden Marshes. When James Coe died in 1591 he left the leases, money and land
in Castle Hill to the corporation to be used for charitable purposes. He also
gave a silver gilt mace still owned by the Town Trust.
The corporation was responsible for the quay and for
regulating the fisheries and oyster beds in the river. They took pains to keep
outsiders away. Many boats were engaged in the coastal trade exporting wool
and dairy produce and importing coal. Keeping the quay in repair was a constant
preoccupation and great expense to the inhabitants until it was let on a
repairing lease in 1743 and sold in 1813 to the Marquis of Hertford (who had
owned the Sudbourne estate since 1754). The quay is now back in the ownership
of the New Orford Town Trust. The river and the river bed, which, unusually
for a tidal river, are also owned by the Town Trust, are a source of revenue
from mooring, fishing and landing charges to this day. The difficult trading conditions hinted at when
Orford acquired its charter were a reality within 100 years. In 1673, Richard
Blome who wrote a survey of the whole country called Britannia, said
of Orford, ‘It was in former times a Town of good account for
fishing, but that trade being lost, the Town cannot find itself’. The
hearth tax returns of the following year record 5 empty properties, 20
households too poor to pay the tax and only 37 households able to pay. Daniel
Defoe described Orford in 1722 as ‘once a good Town, but now decayed’. It
had become difficult to find burgesses who were prepared to stand as mayor.
The town’s main asset had become its right to return two MPs, which led to
the county gentry and others with an interest in the area interfering in the
business of the borough, not least by getting outsiders appointed as free
burgesses (and paying for the privilege) so that they could vote in
parliamentary elections. For a chaotic period from 1693 to 1701 there were
actually two mayors and two bodies of portmen and chief burgesses, each
claiming to be the legitimate authority in the town. One or other faction
would break into the Town Hall and steal the charters, the mace and the
assembly books, ie the borough records. In 1700 the Orford corporation
succeeded in a lawsuit to secure the return of
the mayor’s robe, the mace, and a silver badge which had been removed
to Guildford in Surrey! The mayor presided over the town court. There are
records of offenders being sentenced to be
flogging in the market place or put
in the pillory or the stocks. There was a town jail (probably in Broad
Street), rebuilt in 1804.
The Town Lands and relief of the poor Provision of help for the poor inhabitants was an
important part of the duties of the mayor and corporation and it complemented
the statutory system of poor relief run by the churchwardens and overseers of
the poor. The corporation ran the Hospital of St Leonard as a charitable
institution for the care of old men and young boys. It was situated in what is
now Sudbourne Park until about 1603 when it was closed by Sir Michael Stanhope
(who was the owner of the Sudbourne Estate at that time) in return for a cash
payment of £30 a year, a payment which is still made by the owners of what is
left of the Sudbourne Estate. Almshouses were built on land in Castle Hill
bequeathed to the town by James Coe in 1591. The town workhouse was rebuilt on
that site in 1770; we don’t know where the earlier workhouse stood. The rent
income from houses and land belonging to the corporation was applied to poor
relief thus reducing the amount of rates paid by the householders. Some of the Town Lands were sold to private
individuals, but much has been used for the provision of housing, eg in Bakers
Lane and the Town Farm Estate. Until the early twentieth century the town
owned a windmill which they had built on town land in Ferry Road (there was
also a privately owned windmill on Mill Broadway). The Town Marsh, now the
Quay Street car park, is a useful source of revenue to this day. There must have been a Town Hall used by the
corporation but it cannot be identified either from documents or from the
detailed map of the town made by John Norden c1601. In the eighteenth century
the Marquis of Hertford built a new Town Hall, which seems not to have been
much used, in the Market Place. In
1902, after the old corporation had been dissolved and the Orford Town Trust
set up in its place, the fine Town Hall, recently extended and still in use
today, was built on land specially acquired for the purpose fronting the
Market Place and Bakers Lane.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Orford,
having lost the outstanding economic prosperity it had in the later Middle Ages,
became more and more dependent on the owners of the Sudbourne Estate, the
principal landowners and employers in the district. The town assumed much of the
character of an estate village., but the population climbed steeply to over 1200
- almost twice that of today. A
recreation ground and land for a school were given by the Marquises of Hertford.
The distance from the nearest market towns and railway station meant that the
village had to be self sufficient. There were many shops and businesses up to
the time of the Second World War. The agricultural and general depression of the
1920s and 30s saw the break-up of the Sudbourne Estate and the Hall was
demolished in 1951. Two
World Wars and the Cold War of the twentieth century provided an alternative
source of employment in Orford arising from the activities of the Ministry of
Defence on Orford Ness, starting with the airfield in 1915 and ending only in
1985, some 12 years after the Cobra Mist radar project was discontinued. The
population declined during the 20th century as people moved to towns
to find work. Gradually leisure activities and tourism have become an important
focus of the economic activity of Orford. Aided by modern communications some
people can work from home while others are attracted to the village to retire. Under the terms of the Municipal Corporations Act
1883, Orford, along with many other ancient boroughs, lost its mayor and
corporation. The Orford Town Trust was constituted in 1889 to hold and
administer the property of the old corporation. In 1996 the New Orford Town
Trust was formed from the former Orford Town Trust and three other Orford
charities. Copyright Orford Museum. Compiled by Jane Allen from
research by Margaret Poulter. 6 November 2005
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