A market town grown rich on woollen cloth: one street of timber-framed houses on long narrow plots, a market place with its guildhall, wool hall and cross, the clothiers’ hall houses among the weavers’, and a great church rebuilt with their money; a plausible town, not a survey.
In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the making of woollen cloth made the small towns of south Suffolk and north Essex, Lavenham, Long Melford, Kersey and Coggeshall among them, some of the richest places in England. The clothier bought the wool, put it out to spinners and weavers working in their own houses, had the cloth finished and dyed, and sold it; the profits rebuilt the houses of the town and its church.
The town is a street and a market. Its houses stand side by side on long, narrow plots that run back to a lane and the fields, some with their eaves and some with a gable to the street, framed in oak, their panels filled with wattle and daub and limewashed, their upper storeys jettied out over the ground floor. Among them stand the clothiers’ houses, each a hall house: the hall in the middle, entered by a screens passage, with a cross-wing at either end under its own gable. On the market place are the hall of the town’s religious guild, a wool hall and a cross; at the end of its own street, on the rise, the church.
When the trade moved away later in the century, to the new lighter cloths made in other towns, places like Lavenham grew poor; too poor to rebuild, they kept their timber houses, which is why so many still stand. Click a house for the rule it follows.