Assington Hall Destroyed by Fire 1957

ASSINGTON HALL STOOD SOME FOUR MILES SOUTH-EAST OF SUDBURY, south of the road to Colchester, in an estate which by the twentieth century had extended to over 2,000 acres. A mainly Tudor house with later additions, it was one of the few lost country houses of Suffolk to meet its end in a fire that gutted most of the building. From the early years of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth the manor of Assington was owned by the Corbet family by whom it was sold in 1555/6 to Robert Gurdon of Lavenham. Early in the next century his son, John, married the heiress of the Brampton family's estate at Letton in Norfolk. The Gurdons, who also acquired Grundisburgh Hall near Woodbridge to add to their portfolio of landed interests, were to remain at Assington until shortly before World War II. Legend has it that Assington Hall was built on the site of an old monastery ‘in which priests prayed for the souls of those slain in the battle’ of Assandun. However, the location of that battle is the subject of speculation, also being attributed to Ashdon, near Saffron Walden and to Ashingdon between Chelmsford and Southend near the River Crouch. Originally the village of Assington was centred on the house and the nearby church, but it is believed that in the eighteenth century the village community was moved, probably to improve the Gurdon family's privacy. This clearance of the cottages and other properties near the house left it in a more isolated position in its own parkland. IT IS THOUGHT that the first house on the site was of fourteenthcentury origin when the manor was acquired by the Corbets, but what survived until the fire was mainly a late Tudor timbered house built on the foundations of the earlier house and arranged on three sides of a quadrangle. The entrance front was recased in red brick by John Gurdon in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and it seems likely that the projecting side wings of the original house were pulled down at this time. Subsequent additions included a wing at the rear of the older building. The house that survived into the twentieth century had five gables on the entrance front, the central one having a two-storeyed entrance porch which projected forward and had battlemented turrets.

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