There's a place called Great Redisham too
ContentsGreat Redisham.
The Church
Incumbents of Great Redisham.
Footnotes
Great Redisham.
This is a district of heavy but fertile land, not more than four or five miles south-west of Beccles; but being approached by cross roads only, and containing no object of peculiar interest, is little known. It appears, to a passing stranger, a lost and half-deserted village, for which its early appropriation to Butley Priory, and its consequent incapacity to maintain a resident pastor, will, in great measure, account.
The appropriation of the revenues of the secular clergy by the religious houses, was, to say the least of it, an impolitic and unjustifiable measure; but the subsequent occupation of ecclesiastical property by laymen, is a blot on the Reformation, and an augmentation of the robbery at first committed by monastic rapacity.
Great Redisham, which is also called, in ancient writings, Upredesham, was held at the period of the Norman Survey by Robert de Curcun, under Roger Bigot, the capital lord; and afterwards belonged to Hugo de Berry. (fn. 1) It then became the lordship of a family which assumed its surname from the village; for in the fifty-first of Henry III., Walter Redisham had free-warren in Redisham, Upredesham, Stanfield, Weston, and Ringsfield. (fn. 2)
In the ninth of Edward I., Roesia de Redisham was lady of the manor, which soon after passed to Sir John de Norwich, who, in the thirty-first of Edward III., obtained a charter of free-warren for all his demesne lands in this town. He bequeathed it, with his other estates, to John his grandson, who left it to his next heir, Katharine de Brews, who released to John Plaice, Sir Robert Howard, Knt., and others, all her right in this manor, &c., (fn. 3) which was settled on the college in Mettingham Castle, where it remained till the dissolution of that religious establishment.
By an inquisitio post mortem, taken at Ipswich, on the 6th of April, thirty-fourth of Henry VIII., William Rede, citizen and mercer of London, was found to die on the 10th of February in that year, seized of the manor of Redisham, held of the King, as of his Hundred of Wangford, and valued at £12. 13s. 4d. (fn. 4)
By a like inquisition, taken at Bury, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it appears that Robert Bumpstede held three acres of pasture in Great Redisham, late parcel of the lands of Mettingham College, now dissolved, of the value of three shillings; and of the lady of the manor, in capite, by service of a tenth part of a knight's fee, a messuage, four cottages, thirty acres of land, thirty of pasture, twenty of meadow, and five acres of wood, in Redisham Magna, Redisham Parva, Ringsfield, &c.
The lordship afterwards became united with those in Little Redisham, and is now the property of John Garden, Esq., of Redisham Hall. The Priory of Butley possessed rents here
From: 'Great Redisham', The History and Antiquities of the County of Suffolk: volume 1 (1846), pp. 57-60. URL:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=75112 Date accessed: 19 September 2009.
