Bury My Heart at Pettistree

 

After seven months, we escaped the strictures of lockdown to visit my family in Suffolk, the county of my birth. I have not lived there for almost 50 years, but have fond memories of its quaint charms and sometimes severe beauty.

 

Saints Peter and Paul, Pettistree.

We rented a cottage in Pettistree, population c.190. Despite its size, the village has a 14th century pub, the Greyhound, reputed to be the oldest in Suffolk, and a 13^th century church.  One of the glories of Suffolk is its many Medieval churches, often known as wool churches since Medieval Suffolk grew rich (or rather its landowners and merchants did) on wool. Pettistree’s church of St Peter and St Paul was locked, but we wandered the churchyard and found a curious inscription on a granite monument, the finial of which has broken off. Among those buried in Pettistree is Charles Peirson, born 20 or so miles to the north in Uggleshall in 1814, “Formerly President in this parish and for many years a citizen of New York”, buried in 1880, and his wife Julia Frances, who died in Houlgate in the Calvados region of France. Also buried here is Anthony Van Bergen, born in Coxsackie, NY, on the Hudson River, in  1827, died in Paris in 1912. The monument records his address in life as 118 Champs Elysées, Paris. Anthony’s wife Julia Augusta, daughter of Charles and Julia Peirson, lies here too since her death in 1897.

 

The Greyhound, Pettistree.

I was curious as to why an American who lived at such a fancy address, and his Suffolk father-in-law who had lived in New York, should be buried in a small Suffolk churchyard. Anthony and Charles it seems were both involved in the first American department store, Arnold Constable & Company, founded in 1825 at 91 Front Street, Manhattan. The Van Bergen’s had been prominent political and business figures in New York for generations stretching back to the Revolutionary War. Anthony became Arnold Constable & Company’s representative in Paris, where he also represented the Equitable Life Assurance Society. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. His children married well: one son to a prominent family of Buffalo, NY; another son to a descendant of a Scottish-American banker, Richard Irvin; and his daughter, rather grandly, to Count  Otto von Grote.

 

A thatched cottage painted Suffolk pink, Pettistree. This house is Vicarage Cottage, perhaps the former rectory.

I assume that Anthony had his body transported from Paris to Pettistree so that he could be buried with Julia Augusta, but exactly how the Peirsons came to Pettistree I have not discovered.

 

The Street, Pettistree. The owner of this house is evidently a dahlia specialist.

I remember another Suffolk grave from my childhood which was notable for another reason. It stood atop the fragile cliffs of Dunwich, about 20 miles from Pettistree, looking out over the cold North Sea. My memory is too vague to be certain, but the stone I remember is possibly the one that marked the last resting place of John Brinkley Easey, who died at Dunwich in 1826, aged 23. John’s grave was the last remaining trace of All Saints church, long lost to the sea by the 1960s. Modern Dunwich, no larger in size and population than little Pettistree, is what remains of an important Anglo Saxon town and one of the major ports of Medieval England.

 

St. James's Street, Dunwich. The first building on the left is the Ship pub. Dunwich museum is further along the street.

Dunwich makes its first appearance in history about 630 AD when King Sigebehrt installed Bishop Felix, a Burgundian cleric, there as the first bishop of East Anglia. Dunwich remained a bishop’s seat until 870. According to the Domesday Book (1086), around 1060 Dunwich was a manor of Edric de Laxfield, with a population of 120 burgess families (so, 500-600 people or more). The Domesday Book presages the causes of Dunwich’s eventual doom, since it records that the town had lost about half its cultivable land to coastal erosion in about 1070. The book also records a substantial increase in Dunwich’s population, to 306 burgess families. About 1200 the population has been estimated at 3,000.

 

Dunwich beach and cliffs, looking north to Dunwich, Walberswick and Southwold. The Medieval coastline was some distance out to sea.

History records a great storm on this coast in 1091, though how it affected Dunwich we do not know, but the need to protect the town from storms was much discussed in the 12^th century. Remnants of a ditch and rampart dated to the 12^th and 13^th century can still be seen. Meanwhile, another threat appeared in 1173. While Henry II was absent in Anjou, his wife Eleanor, supported by King Louis of France, rebelled to place her son Henry on the throne in his father’s stead. A rebel force landed on the banks of the river Orwell to the south and marched across country to Dunwich, led by Robert Earl of Leicester. According to a poem written by the Bishop of Winchester:

  

Thus did the people of Dunwich defend themselves,

             As these verses tell which are written here.

And so stout-hearted were both great and small

             That Earl Robert withdrew completely discomfited

 

Dunwich beach and cliffs. We met two National Trust volunteers who had been photographing the cliffs to monitor continuing erosion.

Dunwich was on its way to becoming a major player in Medieval England, home to one of the most important ports, many ships and wealthy merchants. Their business was wool, wine, herrings, shipped to France, from where Dunwich ships returned laden with a variety of goods. They also indulged in a number of not very legal enterprises and fought hard with their neighbours, Blythburgh, Walberswick and Southwold to the north, to control trade. The shipping business was subject to the whims of international politics. In 1624 23 Dunwich ships were seized and held for a year in Bordeaux. Dunwich’s ship-owners and merchants were regularly called upon by the King for ships to pursue his war games. In 1229 he demanded 40 ships (he received only 30, but that was one eighth of the royal fleet) to wage war at Poitou.

 

Putative plan of Dunwich c.1280, from Rowland Parker, Men of Dunwich, Collins, 1978.

The other business of the Middle Ages was religion, and Dunwich had plenty of it. In 1200 the following churches were recorded:

            St Leonard's, built c. 1086

            St Martin’s, built probably after 1086

            St Nicholas’s, swallowed by the sea c.1355

            St John’s, demolished in 1540 before the sea could do the demolition work

            St Peter’s, close to the harbour, stripped of lead, timber and bells in 1702

            All Saints, which may or may not have yet existed in 1200

            There were also three chapels

 

This part of Suffolk was notable for some major friaries established by the religious orders. There was a small Benedictine monastery in 1200. By the mid-13^th century the Black Friars and Grey Friars had arrived. There were other religious buildings as well, such as the Leper Hospital of St James, whose remains still stand. By the 13^th century there was also a more general purpose hospital, Maison Dieu.

 

But Dunwich had a problem as the storm of 1070 presaged. The coast here was very prone to erosion  and consequent large-scale changes in the coastline. Some changes happened over quite a long time. For example, a shingle spit protected Dunwich harbour (but not the town) from the worst of the storms. This spit had moved southwards from Walberswick to Dunwich over a long period as tides and storms shifted huge quantities of stones. As well as protecting Dunwich’s harbour, it had also closed direct access to the sea from the River Blyth. Therefore, ships could reach rival ports to the north (Blythburgh, Walberswick and Southwold) only by passing through Dunwich’s waters and along the channel created by the spit. Dunwich thus controlled access to the ports of its principal rivals.

 

Disaster finally struck the night after New Year’s day 1286. There was an unusually high tide, although Dunwich was accustomed to flooding. But that night, and the next day and night, a ferocious wind from the east drove the high tides straight at Dunwich, overwhelmed the ramparts and destroyed large parts of the town. Greyfriars priory was completely destroyed. Two parishes disappeared entirely under the sea, two more were reduced  in size. Churches collapsed, homes and business premises were swept away. To cap it all, the storm opened direct access for Blythburgh, Walberswick and Southwold to the North Sea. This was not yet the end of Dunwich port, but it never recovered and over the centuries the sea took more land and buildings away.

 

Grey Friars, Dunwich, general view with gateway in the distance. This was the second site of the friary, occupied until the dissolution of the monasteries.

Plan of Grey Friars Friary. The church bottom right is All Saints, lost to the sea in 1920.

Perhaps John Easey went to his early grave assuming that his headstone would be a lasting memorial to remind later generations that this man of Dunwich once lived and worked there among others buried in the churchyard. In the unlikely event that it still stands (I could not find it when we walked the cliff) John’s grave is one of the few remaining traces of a Dunwich lost to the sea.

 

St Mary, Dennington. The church houses one of the finest alabaster monuments in England. Here lies William Bardolph (d.1441) and his wife. William was chamberlain to Henry VI. He fought at Agincourt.

About 14 miles west of Dunwich is the village of Dennington, which has one of the finest of Suffolk churches, St Mary, a 14^th century flint church. In 2006 we roamed the churchyard with my mother in search of a little Jacobs family history. A shout from one of our sons led us to the gravestones of Laurence Jacobs, his wife Mary and son James. Like many of my ancestors, Laurence and Mary were poor rural folk, which is about all we know of them. Their son Laurence, however, earned his living as a poulterer, and his son Charles, a blacksmith and Primitive Methodist preacher is my great grandfather. But that’s a story for another time.

The graves (left to right) of Mary, Laurence and James Jacobs, Dennington churchyard.