KERSEY near Hadleigh, South-Suffolk

KERSEY – THE VILLAGE: Kersey is mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon will of about 990 A.D., and in the Domesday Book as a thriving community of some 150 souls. The village appears a century later in the tax records of Abbot Sampson of Bury St. Edmunds, and an Augustinian priory was founded to the north of the village about this time, on land provided by a local heiress. Prosperity was underlined by the Lord of the Manor being granted the right to hold a weekly Monday market in 1252. Despite local sheep-rearing featuring strongly in Domesday, there is no direct evidence that wool was the foundation of Kersey’s prosperity, nor that the “Kersey” coarse ribbed cloth mentioned in Skakespeare’s “Loves Labours Lost” came from the village. But clothmaking was well established in neighbouring towns by 1300 and Kersey would undoubtedly have been involved in weaving and fulling.

Despite the general prosperity of the area, based on wool, Kersey’s priory declined and was dissolved in 1444, and in the Peasant’s Revolt, on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1381, five rebels are recorded from Kersey. The market had fallen out of use by the seventeenth century, as the woollen industry moved to Yorkshire, but a fair is listed from 1759 to 1805. The registration for hearth tax in 1674 showed Kersey having upwards of 70 households, but nearly half of these were classified as poor. In the following century Kersey had an endowed school, paying the schoolmaster 40 shillings a year, and by 1776 a workhouse, soon to be superseded by the nearby Cosford workhouse and, after 1834, by a 10–Parish Union workhouse at Semer.

By 1884 agriculture–based prosperity supported a population of 787, with representatives of almost every trade and service. The population has fallen steadily since then to the present c350, influenced mainly by the agricultural depressions of the 1870’s/80’s and 1920’s/30’s. The village school, however, was opened in 1873 and thrives today, and the population – a mix of agricultural workers, commuters and retired people–appears to be benefiting from a welcome influx of newcomers.

Kersey, with less than 300 residents on its electoral roll, is a small, extraordinarily picturesque village set in a valley in undulating countryside. Near to Lavenham and Long Melford, both of which cater for every whim of the tourist, Kersey remains quiet and apparently unmodernised with many ancient timber-framed houses and cottages. From the visitor's viewpoint, there is one pubs, both of which serve food, a thriving pottery workshop, and the large church of St Mary which stands as a sort of sentinel at the top of a flight of stone steps at the Southern end of the village. And that appears to be all. Visitors are probably not aware of the school beside the church and the many village children who walk there daily.

Ordance Survey Map of Kersey...

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