In The Beginning
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 Hempriall lay a short distance to the south and remains in use, partly bridged, to this day.
From their base the hunters could thus easily range through the wooded slopes on either side of the valleys of the Tas and the Hempriall stream, fishing, picking hazel nuts and berries or hunting deer, wild cattle and wild pigs. More of their flints have turned up higher on the valley slopes near the village hall and the church. Sometimes the chase must have taken them up into a dense forest of oak, elm and lime cloaking the flat clay land above the valleys, the area we now call Upper Tasburgh.
To obtain sufficient food the small group of hunters would need constantly to move around an area far wider than Tasburgh. Their only easy route would be along the strip of open woodland on the light soils of the valley sides, sandwiched between the river marshes and the dark forest on the higher ground. The line of Saxlingham Lane and Low Road follows this route and leads to both of the fords. Did these roads begin as the tracks of Stone Age hunter bands?
By around 4000BC the hunter bands had become merged with incoming Neolithic farmers. With flint axes and fire, patches of the valleyside woodland had been cleared for crops of primitive wheat and barley. Flint fragments from the farmer's tools have been found spread widely across the area enclosed by Grove Lane, Low Road and Church Hill where sites were likely to have been cultivated in rotation as the poorly manured soil became exhausted. Domesticated cattle, sheep and pigs would have been pastured on the marshes and in the woodland glades.
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, here 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.Ancient history up to AD 1200
After 2500BC came the knowledge of making tools and weapons of copper then of bronze - far more adaptable and effective materials than flint in most cases. 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.
New lords arose soon after 5OOBC when the warlike, artistic Celts brought access to iron, a far stronger and more accessible metal than bronze. Iron axes and iron shod ploughs may well now have made inroads into the heavily forested claylands. 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 lceni, 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. At this time wine was a rare luxury in Britain, consumed by the nobility who had the habit of incorporating amphorae with the grave goods of their dead chieftans. Do we have here the burial site of an Icenian noble?
After the Romans invaded Britain in AD43 the Iceni became a client kingdom falling under full Roman rule following their revolt under Queen Boudica in AD60.
The most impressive sign of Roman times in Tasburgh was, and still remains, the trunk road running from south to north across the parish. 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.
Roman Tasburgh
The course of the Roman road is today followed by the A140, Ipswich Road. With little maintenance from the end of the Roman era in AD410 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. Where the road follows its original course in the north of the parish we can imagine couriers of the Imperial Post galloping by, smart mule carts, merchant's pack horses, lumbering farm wagons delaying other traffic and weary pedestrians; all using the road for many of the same reasons that we do today.
The possible sites of Roman farmhouses are indicated by scatters of tile fragments at three locations. Excavations in the eastern end of the churchyard in 1975 and in 1979/80 produced 3421b of Roman tile pieces and two sherds of Romano-British pottery (Point X on Map). Broken roof tiles and pottery fragments have been held to indicate a farmhouse at the top of the now defunct Figgett Lane (Point Y on Map). A third farmhouse has been inferred from tiles found at Church Wood near Rainthorpe Hall (Point Z on Map). A minor Roman road to, or passing, this farmhouse is indicated by the north-western parish boundary, once a lane, which runs in a straight line toward the corner of Church Wood. Straight lengths of parish boundaries sometimes indicate the line of a lost Roman road.
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.
Roman rule finally disintegrated in AD410. Anglo-Saxons, probably already here as mercenaries, were at Venta, soon to bejoined by kinfolk arriving to settle. There is evidence that the better-off Britons fled leaving their villagers to be merged into an Anglo-Saxon dominated world which had become the kingdom of East Anglia by about AD500.
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 AD627 East Anglia had a Christian king and in time a small wooden church may well have stood on the site of the present building. One hundred and forty-four pieces of pottery from the churchyard site dated to between AD600 and AD900 show that settlement there continued despite the interruptions of Danish raids and invasions from AD841.
With Danes settled among the previous villagers the hamlet around the church expanded. The churchyard 'dig' revealed over 1000 pottery sherds dated to between AD900 and AD1100 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 forty foot high round tower was built. The tower, since heightened, still stands as part of today's church.
At the place where the Roman road crossed the marshes of the Hempnall stream the embankment had worn away, leaving a miry morass aptly named Deepwade. This muddy obstacle and its name almost certainly originated in Saxon times when the local administrative area which included Tasburgh was called Depwade Hundred.
In AD1086, twenty years after the Normans had conquered England, the Domesday Books were 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.
The arable land and meadow was divided into four holdings, each being part of a widespread portfolio of estates held from the king by four magnates. These absentee landlords included Roger Bigot, Sheriff of both Norfolk and Suffolk and Count Alan of Brittany, son-in-law of the king. Two small thirty acre holdings seem to be embryo manors but for the most part the land was farmed by twenty semi-free sub tenants, some called freemen, others known as sokemen. The size of their land varied widely, one man had thirty acres of arable and two acres of meadow while at the other end of the scale six men shared ten acres. The population can be estimated at around 125 persons, less than a third of the predominantly agricultural population of Victorian times. On the lands of Roger Bigot there were new masters on the spot in the form of Berard and Azelin, men with likely names for Norman army veterans.
The archaeological evidence from the vicinity of the church shows that from around AD1100 activity there declined until a hundred years laterthe church stood completely isolated. The village had transferred piecemeal to the valley below, its flimsy dwellings scattered around the edges of small greens.
