In the 15th century the inhabitants of Lavenham were so prosperous as a result of the booming wool trade that it was among the richest centres in England. The village clothiers were particularly famous for the blue broadcloth, much of which was exported, and by the 1520s Lavenham was considered the 14th wealthiest place in Britain. More tax was paid here then in larger towns such as York and Lincoln.
In 1525 the bubble burst. With the demise of the wool trade its rich merchants moved out, taking their wealth with them. Gradually the grand timber-framed buildings they had built fell into disrepair.
However, in 1525 Henry VIII’s tax raising Cardinal Wolsey overlooked the dramatic decline in Lavenham’s fortunes and demanded huge taxes to pay for the French wars. Ten thousand men from Lavenham and the surrounding villages banded together in revolt but the uprising was suppressed by the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk.
An extraordinary legacy of Lavenham’s hey day is unusual, to say the least. Its prosperity can be measured not only by the amount of tax that was paid but by the ready money that was spent on a lesser-known but highly progressive aspect of medieval life, the sewers!
There is a network of brick tunnels under Water Street which are thought to stretch as far as Church Street, Barn Street and Shilling Street. Historians consider that the culverts are rare examples of municipal plumbing when sanitation was a rare and expensive luxury.
Yet more evidence of medieval grandeur can be seen in Lavenham’s St Peter and St Paul’s, the last of the great Suffolk wool churches to be built before the Reformation. Carvings here depict imaginary or composite creatures.You can find a Pelican in Piety with two chicks, and an ibis and spoonbill fighting over a human skull. There is also a crouching monk and two half-human musicians, one playing a lute-like instrument and the other operating a pair of bellows with a crutch. All the figures are open to interpretation and none more so than a man who is either squeezing a pig as though bagpipes or the pig is running under his arm in a mad dash for freedom.
