Tasburgh

Tasburgh
St Mary's Church, Tasburgh
Tasburgh Location within Norfolk
Area	3.71 km² (1.43 sq mi)
Population	1,149 (2011)^[1]
• Density	310/km² (800/sq mi)
OS grid reference	TM205955
Civil parish	Tasburgh
District	South Norfolk
Shire county	Norfolk
Region	East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	NORWICH
Postcode district	NR15
Dialling code	01508

Police	Norfolk
Fire	Norfolk
Ambulance	East of England

UK Parliament	South Norfolk
List of places UK England Norfolk 52°30′54″N 01°14′51″E

Early and ancient history

A large hill fort (Ad Taum) abuts the village at the northwest, and the village church is built within it. This may be a remnant of the Danish invasion of the ninth century.

Tasburgh church is a traditional Norfolk Saxon church of flint with a round tower.

The first human beings to leave their mark on Tasburgh were fur-clad Mesolithic hunter bands some time between 8500 BC and 4500 BC. Between what is now Low Road and the River Tas, behind both the old Horseshoes public house and the nearby garage workshop, a scatter of fine flint flakes has revealed where hunters trimmed their spear and arrow heads at a site where firm ground came close to the river by a ford which is still marked on maps. A second ford crossing the tributary stream from Hempnall lay a short distance to the south and remains in use, partly bridged, to this day. More of their flints have turned up higher on the valley slopes near the village hall and the church.

By around 4000 BC the hunter bands had become merged with incoming Neolithic farmers. Flint fragments from the farmer's tools have been found spread widely across the area enclosed by Grove Lane, Low Road and Church Hill.

Flints of these early farmers have never been found on the higher ground of Upper Tasburgh north of Church Road and east of Old Hall Farm, where the thick forest and heavy clay soil seems to have resisted clearance and cultivation.

Some of these Neolithic people lived in what is now the eastern end of the churchyard where sherds of their pottery have been found together with pot boilers and considerable evidence of flint working. Their homes would have been circular thatched huts with wattle walls marking the beginning of human occupation in the area of the church.

After 2500 BC came the knowledge of making tools and weapons of copper then of bronze. Relics of the Bronze Age have been unearthed in Henry Preston Road where a distinctive beaker marked a probable early Bronze Age burial and behind Hall Farm in the far south of the parish where burial mounds have been traced. In both cases the burials had been made on what was then the fringe of the likely cultivated area. Their style indicates the development of an upper class.

Forty-three pieces of Iron Age pottery have been found close by the church, indicating that occupation continued in this area. By the first century AD the people of Norfolk and north Suffolk had become a single tribe, the Iceni, and coins of this age inscribed IC.DURO.T are reported to have been found in Tasburgh.

Chapel Hill, a knoll in the water meadows west of Tasburgh Hall, has produced extensive evidence of ancient burials. Ditch digging south west of the hillock in 1923 revealed several complete and broken amphorae (large wine jars). These were of a type used to transport Mediterranean wine in the first century AD.

Roman Tasburgh

After the Romans invaded Britain in AD 43 the Iceni became a client kingdom falling under full Roman rule following their revolt under Queen Boudica in AD 60.

The most impressive sign of Roman times in Tasburgh was and remains the trunk road running from south to north across the parish, now the A140 which runs from Norwich to Ipswich. The road was constructed to link important Roman towns at London and Colchester with the newly established capital of the Iceni, Venta Icenorum, which stood alongside the River Tas at Caistor St Edmund. Built in a series of straight alignments thrust remorselessly across existing field patterns it stood on a thirty feet wide embankment. The roadway itself was twenty feet wide with a steeply cambered surface of hard packed gravel. With little maintenance from the end of the Roman era in AD 410 to the building of a turnpike in 1768, the embankment and road surface were worn down and the road fell away from its straight alignment on hills, including Tasburgh Hill.

Two Roman coins have been found in the village, one close to the church and the other a short way uphill from the ford near the old Horseshoes public house. Pottery, held to be Roman, has been unearthed in association with burials at Chapel Hill.

Five miles north along the Roman trunk road stood the tribal capital, Venta Icenorum, which translates as 'market town of the Iceni'. The Tasburgh farms were well placed to supply produce to Venta with its town hall, forum, public baths, arena and temples. A few miles south along the trunk road, a little beyond the present day Long Stratton, was a village which had grown up around a relay station for the Imperial Post.

The only signs of early Anglo-Saxon activity in Tasburgh are pottery fragments from the churchyard excavations indicating that this site continued to be occupied. By AD 627 East Anglia had a Christian king. One hundred and forty-four pieces of pottery from the churchyard site dating to between AD 600 and AD 900 show that settlement there continued.

With Danes settled among the previous villagers the hamlet around the church expanded. The churchyard 'dig' revealed over 1000 pottery sherds dating to between AD 900 and AD 1100 together with strap fittings, loom weights, a knife and an arrowhead. The foundation trenches of a house of this period were also excavated. It was a wooden building thirty-six feet by seventeen feet and would have been open to the rafters with an open hearth from which smoke escaped through the thatched roof. About AD 1050 a small church of flints and mortar with a 40 ft-high (12 m) round tower was built. The tower, since heightened, still stands as part of today's church.

In AD 1086, twenty years after the Norman conquest of England, the Domesday Book was compiled giving us the first written record of Tasburgh. The village is named Taseburc and its dimensions are given as ten by seven furlongs, there was a watermill and the land was ploughed by five, eight-ox teams. Two hundred and thirty-one acres of arable land are recorded together with eighteen acres of meadowland, but we must bear in mind that Domesday 'acres' probably represented the taxable value of land rather than precise areas.

Tasburgh in the 19th century

Before 1800 most of the houses in the village were timber framed, but a growing shortage of wood, starting in the previous century, had led to the larger houses being built in brick with tiled, rather than thatched, roofs. Examples are Tasburgh House, Watermill House and Tasburgh Hall (then called Tasburgh Lodge). From the early 19th century smaller houses followed suit and early brick buildings can be seen on Low Road between and including the Old Horseshoes public house and Forge Cottage, all built between 1818 and 1840. Other houses and farm buildings of these times were of clay lump construction, surviving specimens include Rookery Cottage and White Horse Farm in Lower Tasburgh.

Poverty continued to be a problem for many of the villagers, particularly during the agricultural depressions at the beginning and latter part of the century. In 1816 Thomas Clabburn left £400 invested in annuities for the relief of the parish poor, the interest to purchase bread or coal to be distributed on the first Monday of February each year.

The Old Rectory standing to the west of the church was built by the Rev Henry Preston in 1840 to replace the ruinous rectory he had inherited at what is today Glebe Cottage on Low Road.

Henry Preston brought education to Tasburgh when he founded a public elementary school on his rectory land alongside Church Hill (in those days, School Hill). The school was officially opened on 15 September 1844.

A vast improvement in the transport of people, goods, livestock and mail came with the opening of the Eastern Union Railway through the area on 12 December 1849. Steam trains linked London, Ipswich, Diss and Norwich, five stopping daily at the local station at Flordon. At first the Norwich terminal was called Victoria Station and stood at the top of St Stephen's Street. A station was built at Flordon with buildings in typical Victorian style sporting large ornate chimneys, slate roofs and decorated brickwork.

In 1863 rail travel to Harleston, Bungay, Beccles and beyond became possible with the completion of the Waveney Valley Railway, which left the main line at Tivetshall Station. In 1881 a further branch line from Forncett Station to Wymondham opened up travel to many other parts of the county. All the railways in the area were absorbed into the Great Eastern Railway.

By 1851 the population of 363 at the beginning of the century had grown to 475, and the village contained 113 houses. This growth reflected the boom in agriculture in the mid-19th century.

Early 20th century

In the early years of the century Tasburgh continued as a mainly agricultural community. In 1911 the population was 355.

Tasburgh Lodge had been improved and renamed Tasburgh Hall by its owner P. Berney Ficklin. At Rainthorpe Hall, Sir Charles Harvey was spending considerable sums both on the hall and St Mary's Church. The rector from 1897 to 1922 was the Rev Walter Robert Hurd. Sons of these three gentlemen were to have distinguished careers. Horatio Berney Ficklin was a judge Advocate at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals. Oliver Harvey became British Ambassador to France and was made Lord Harvey of Tasburgh. Richard Hurd was later Canon Hurd; he had a lasting love of Tasburgh and left a substantial bequest to the church on his death in 1975. Lord Harvey and Canon Hurd are both buried in the churchyard.

The local organisation for controlling the affairs of the village had devolved from the courts of the lords of the manors to the church during and after Tudor times. Now the Local Government Act 1894 had passed the responsibility on to elected parish councils. The first recorded meeting of Tasburgh parish council was on 18 April 1900. The council was required to meet at least once a year within seven days of 25 March and not before 6 pm. The first council comprised William Briggs, William Duffield, Arthur Fuller, Samuel Rump, John and Robert Dix, with P. Berney Ficklin as chairman and Daniel Burgess as clerk. Meetings were held in the school room on a rather irregular basis.

Taking over duties from a church which still retained a strong influence in the village was difficult, and many of the early meetings dealt solely with appointments to committees or as trustees to the various village charities. In 1914 Ernest Wright was appointed parish constable and later had an assistant in John Harrison.

Something of the heavy casualties of the First World War is told by the War Memorial in the churchyard, which records the names of twelve Tasburgh men. The Depwade Deanery Magazine of March 1919 tells of the passing of a wartime Tasburgh sailor, "... A hero of Zeebrugge. With deep regret we record the death of Charles T. Lyon of this parish. After twenty-one years service in the Royal Naval Reserve he rejoined in August 1914 and was commissioned to HM Trawler Aurora, being made Commodore of Group Seven in November. In the Zeebrugge Raid he showed the greatest gallantry ... after three years service in the war this hero was invalided out". The article goes on to say that Charles Lyon had been given a gold watch and chain for diving into the sea to rescue men during a storm in 1882 and that in 1916 he saved the lives of twenty-seven men from torpedoed fishing smacks.

At this time the present Grove Lane was called Coal House Hill, the Coal House standing on the site of the first house below the village hall. Here coal carted from Flordon Station was stored for distribution to the poor by the local charities. These charities had, by 1928, been condensed into three, the Fuel Allotment and Meek's Charity, the Poor's Land and the Clabburn and Bateman Charity. In that year they were all amalgamated into Tasburgh United Charities.

With the fall of France, a parish invasion committee was set up in 1940, and a local unit of the Home Guard was formed under the charge of Ray Page the farmer then resident at Rookery Farm. The Home Guard post was in a building at The Bird in Hand (now the Countryman). Tasburgh Hall became the headquarters of an army searchlight unit, with a searchlight on the lawn and another nearby at Hapton Hall. Later in the war, the army left, and the hall was used to house evacuees.

There was a wartime drama in the village when a spy was captured. He lived in a cottage on Church Hill and toured the district on a bicycle visiting the Horseshoes public house to mix with the soldiers drinking there. One night a Home Guard saw a flashing light from the cottage as enemy planes were flying over. The incident was reported, and shortly after the Tasburgh Home Guard were called out to patrol the area until a light armoured vehicle and army lorries with Military Police arrived. The spy was arrested and a radio transmitter was found in the cottage chimney.

Late 20th century

In 1945 Tasburgh Women's Institute was relaunched. The earliest surviving minutes are those of 1947, when Mrs Rosemary Hastings of Rainthorpe Hall was president, Mrs Larner, secretary and Mrs Mann, treasurer.

From the wartime salvage fund and from many money raising events, including the saving of pennies by the schoolchildren £562 16s 8d had, by May 1947, been raised for a village hall. For a small, relatively poor village this was a most creditable amount, since it was worth about £16,000 at today's money values. In 1949 a public meeting was called to discuss proposals for a hall. A breakthrough came the next year with the public-spirited offer of the gift of two fields covering about four acres by John Everson of Old Hall Farm and his sons Russell and George. Thus the village gained both a playing field and a site for the village hall midway between Upper and Lower Tasburgh.

On the death of Canon A. E. Gates in 1948 Tasburgh had been the home of only three rectors in 111 years. In the next forty-six years there were to be no less than nine rectors, the first being Rev R. Maudsley. Henceforth Tasburgh rectors were also responsible for Tharston.

After the Second World War, Tasburgh Football Club played on a tiny sloping pitch in Rainthorpe Park, close to the Newton Flotman-Flordon Road. They were not popular with visiting teams, since the pitch was riddled with molehills and rabbit holes. By 1952 the football team had moved to the new playing field, but in their keenness to leave behind the obstacles of their old field they failed to observe that the playing field was littered with sharp flints. Despite compulsory flint-picking sessions for players and officials before every match, players received many nasty cuts, and the club was forced to move yet again. This time they played on a field off Old Hall Farm Loke, where the changing facility comprised an 8 ft (2.4 m) by 6 ft (1.8 m) steel wartime air raid shelter.

An entry in the Eastern Daily Press of 28 August 1953 records the Annual General Meeting of Tasburgh United Football Club, where it was decided to form a combined football and cricket club under the title of Tasburgh United Sports Club. In the meanwhile local youths had developed another form of sport. On the land where Harvey Close now stands a cycle speedway track was developed, and the team racing there in the Depwade League had the proud name of the Tasburgh Tigers.

By 1954 the football pitch at the playing field had been relaid, together with a cricket pitch and practice wicket. The village cricket team played on Saturdays and Sundays for some ten years. In this period football flourished, with three teams and many supporters. In the 1956 / 57 season Tasburgh led the Norwich and District League. Within the next twenty years the football team faded then disbanded.

For a while after the war the railway station at Flordon continued to play an important part in the life of the village as a source of mail, parcels, newspapers and coal, while farmers used the railway to transport their sugar beet, corn and cattle. As motor transport became ever more affordable its door to door convenience killed off much of the rail traffic and Flordon Station was closed in 1961 as part of the Beeching cuts after a life of 112 years.

In 1961 the population of Tasburgh was 343, slightly less than the 1911 figure of 355. While some old cottages had been demolished and council houses had appeared on Grove Lane, Church Road and Ipswich Road the village remained completely rural in character. This changed dramatically after 1961 as widespread house building, mostly in Upper Tasburgh, led to a trebling of the population to reach 1117 in 1991.

1971 The population had almost doubled to 610. The Rev T. Macnaughton-Jones, who had been rector of Tasburgh and Tharston since 1958 retired, to be replaced by Rev Oswald Glass.

1980 The new school was opened on 2 June by the Bishop of Norwich. There were sixty-five pupils at the new lower age limit of eight years, older children being bussed to the Middle and High Schools at Long Stratton. Our

1981 The ever-growing population reached 930. The Tennis Club's hard courts were brought into use and the Old School was converted into a private house.

1989 Cub Scout five-a-side football led to the formation of an under-12 football team playing in the Norwich Sunday Youth League, football had returned to Tasburgh. Ken Ransom, together with Roger and Helen Burnett, had the idea to link Tasburgh with a European village. So it was that Ken and Roger crossed the Channel together with Gayle Macdonald and Steve Beckett representing the parish council and the Inter-Village Sports Team. Their objective was Linden, thirty kilometres from Brussels. Their original idea that the link might be on sporting lines soon changed for one based on two-way family visits. Thus Eurolink was formed and visits have taken place every year since with ties between the two villages growing ever stronger.

1991 The population of the village topped the thousand mark at 1117. Tasburgh had changed in thirty years from not much more than a rural hamlet into a large, mainly suburban, village. On 18 August the village sign was unveiled Following a competition the design was based on the ideas of three pupils of the school.

The 21st century

2010 (1 May) A group called "Recreation For All," an amalgam of village hall user groups, got together to organise Tasburgh Community Festival. The Festival was scheduled to run for the two days of the Bank Holiday. It was officially opened by ex Norwich City players, Craig Fleming and Darren Huckerby.^[4]

2011 (June) and the 2nd Tasburgh Community Festival took place in the grounds of the village hall.

History

Early and ancient history

Roman Tasburgh

Tasburgh in the 19th century

Early 20th century

Late 20th century

The 21st century

Governance

Notable people

Neighbours

References

External links

Wikiwand - on