A visit to Beccles (2016)

To visit this town, by the southern extremity of the Broads, the Group assembled at the King’s Head, a short walk from Beccles station on the East Suffolk Line. After this, we met Murray’s late grandfather James Woodrow, local historian, to show us around the town.

First, he showed us the Beccles Museum in Ballygate (right, in Leman House, named after an Elizabethan-Stuart tradesman and 1616 Lord Mayor of London, below left). It has memorabilia from the last two milennia, much of which is Victorian but some is related to Azincourt. The town’s grammar school, established by Leman and named after him, was previously on the site.

Then we came to St. Michael’s Church on Saltgate (right), which was built “the wrong way round”, to avoid the graveyard being flooded by the nearby Waveney and where Horatio Nelson’s parents were married in 1758.

Among those buried there are several members of the Crowfoot family, among whom were the Nobel Prize winning chemist Dorothy (Crowfoot) Hodgkin (right), although she rests in Warwickshire. St. Michael’s also has a notable bell tower, dating from 1515, with a separate entrance and 122 steps.

“Bone Detectives” come to Ipswich …

murreyandblue

… and other venues, with Tori Herridge and Raksha Dave.

This Channel Four series, which consists of five episodes, begins at Stoke Quay on the town’s Waterfront where a long-forgotten (St. Augustine’s) burial ground was fully explored before some new buildings were constructed. Three bodies in particular were examined:
1) A wealthy man buried in the nave between about 1250 and 1400. Provisionally identified as John de Holtby, he evidently suffered from the painful, but not deadly, Paget’s disease and suffered some spinal cuts. These could not have resulted from surgery or torture because of their post-mortem nature so he must have suffered dissection, in an era that the Church forbade such a practice.
2) A boy or youth, born abroad, who died between 880 and 1040, in the late Anglo-Saxon era.
3) A young African-born woman, who travelled via Denmark or Germany. She is likely to have…

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