Long Melford

Long Melford (or Melford, as it is known locally) is a large village and civil parish in the county of Suffolk, England. It is on Suffolk's border with Essex, which is marked by the River Stour, approximately 16 mi from Colchester and 14 mi from Bury St. Edmunds. The parish also includes the hamlets of Bridge Street and Cuckoo Tye.

Its name is derived from the nature of the village's layout (originally concentrated along a 3 mile stretch of a single road) and the Mill ford crossing the Chad Brook (a tributary of the River Stour).

History
The Romans constructed two roads thorough Melford, the main one running from Chelmsford through to Pakenham. Roman remains were discovered in a gravel pit in 1828, a site now occupied by the village's football club.

The Manor of Melford was given to the Abbey of St.Edmundsbury by Earl Aflric in ca. 1050. The village is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 which lists the manor of Long Melford as an estate of 600 hectares. The neighbouring Manor of Kentwell is also recorded. Following the dissolution of the Monasteries, Henry VIII granted the manor to Sir William Cordell.

Landmarks
Long Melford is fairly unusual for a village in that it has a parish church of dimensions more suited to a cathedral. The origin of Holy Trinity Church dates from the reign of Edward the Confessor; it was then substantially rebuilt between 1467 and 1497 by John Clopton of Kentwell Hall. It is one of the richest "wool churches" in East Anglia and is renowned for its flushwork, The Clopton chantry chapel and the Lady Chapel at the East end with some surviving medieval stained-glass. Edmund Blunden, the World War I poet, is buried in the churchyard. Next to the church is the Hospital of the Holy and Blessed Trinity, an almshouse founded by William Cordell in 1573.

Another unusual feature of Long Melford is its large elongated village green, dominated until the 1980s by a group of great elms that included one of the largest in England. The elms were painted in 1940 by the watercolourist S. R. Badmin in his 'Long Melford Green on a Frosty Morning', now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The village contains two stately homes, Kentwell Hall and Melford Hall, all built from the proceeds of the wool trade in the Middle Ages. Kentwell Hall and the Holy Trinity Church were financed by the Clopton family, in particular by John Clopton.

Transport
Long Melford once had a railway station on the Stour Valley Line, but this closed in March 1967 when the line was cut back to Sudbury. It is connected to several large towns by bus, notably Sudbury, Colchester, Bury St Edmunds, Haverhill and Ipswich.