Qualla: Lavenham

Lavenham: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Linwood, CC BY 2.0. When Henry VII visited in 1487 he fined several local families for displaying too much wealth. This is the rare English town where royal taxmen complained the residents were ostentatious. By the late fifteenth century Lavenham was paying more in tax than York or Lincoln, both vastly larger cities, because Lavenham had something both wanted: a monopoly on a particular kind of dark blue broadcloth that everyone in northern Europe wanted to wear. Then the Dutch refugees in Colchester started making cheaper, lighter cloth. The Lavenham bubble burst, the merchants ran out of money to renovate or rebuild, and the town simply stopped. Most of what stood in 1525 is what stands today.

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Image: Jim Linwood | CC BY 2.0

Lavenham: Wool, Then Nothing

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Pettitt, CC BY 2.0. Lavenham appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as the manor of Aubrey de Vere I, ancestor of the Earls of Oxford, who had already planted a vineyard there. The Vere family held the estate for over five hundred years, until 1604. The wool trade arrived in the fifteenth century and ...

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Image: Martin Pettitt | CC BY 2.0

Lavenham: Why the Houses Lean

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SuffolkEditor73, CC BY-SA 4.0. Many of Lavenham's buildings appear visibly crooked from the outside, leaning at odd angles, with windows and doorways slightly skewed. The traditional explanation, recounted with relish in every visitor's guide, is that the town grew so fast in its boom years that the houses wer...

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Image: SuffolkEditor73 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lavenham: Twinkle, Twinkle

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SuffolkEditor73, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the late eighteenth century, the village was home to the poet Jane Taylor (1783-1824), and it may have been while living in Shilling Street that she wrote 'The Star', the poem from which Twinkle Twinkle Little Star takes its lyrics. Colchester and Ongar, both in Essex, also cl...

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Image: SuffolkEditor73 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lavenham: Witchfinders, Beatles, Wizards

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Pettitt, CC BY 2.0. The crooked, time-frozen quality of the streets has made Lavenham an irresistible film set. The witch-burning scenes in the 1968 Vincent Price film Witchfinder General were staged in front of the Guildhall. In 1969 some of The Thirteen Chairs was filmed here, Sharon Tate's last r...

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Image: Martin Pettitt | CC BY 2.0

Lavenham: What's Around

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Hill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Lavenham sits about five miles northeast of Sudbury, on a ridge above the River Brett, with the church on the southernmost summit, the marketplace on the central one, and a windmill ruin on the northern. The southernmost valley contains a brook that has been covered by a culvert ...

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Image: Andrew Hill | CC BY-SA 2.0