Pakenham, Suffolk

Historical Description

Pakenham, a village and a parish in Suffolk. The village stands 1½ mile N of Thurston station on the Bury branch of the G.E.R., and 5 miles ENE of Bury St Edmunds, and has a post, money order, and telegraph office under Bury St Edmunds. The parish comprises 3711 acres; population, 945. There is a parish council consisting of seven members. There are three manors in this parish-Pakenham Hall, Nether Hall or Ladies' Hall, and Manikin's Hall-besides the reputed manor of Redcastle. Subsequently to the banishment (1046) of Osgood Clapa, the former owner, King Edward the Confessor granted land, manors, and advowson to Bury Abbey. On the dissolution the manor of Pakenham Hall, with the great tithes and the advowson, was bought by the Spring family, that of Nether Hall by the Bacon family, and that of Manikin's Hall by one Seaman alias Turner. Nether Hall is a Bne mansion of brick in the Queen Anne style, standing in a beautiful, well-timbered park. Pakenham Hall is a modern mansion of white brick and flint. New Hall is an ancient gabled mansion of brick, dating from 1622; Barton Mere is an old mansion which takes its name from a lake of 10 acres which lies adjacent. A Roman pavement was found at Redcastle Farm in 1764. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Ely; value, £195 with residence. The church, which stands upon an eminence, is a cruciform building of flint in the Norman, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles, consisting of chancel, nave, transepts, N porch, and a central octagonal embattled tower. It contains some good stained glass windows and some ancient memorials. There are a mission-room belonging to the Church of England, a Primitive Methodist chapel, a village club and reading-room, a Conservative club, a town estate worth about £50 a year, and several smaller charities, all of which are administered under a scheme approved by the Charity Commissioners.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Pakenham from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Pakenham (St. Mary))

Land and Property

The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Suffolk is available to browse.

Maps

Online maps of Pakenham are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Suffolk papers online:

• The Ipswich Journal
• East Suffolk Mercury and Lowestoft Weekly News
• Bury and Norwich Post
• Bury Free Press