St Peter's Hall

Details

SOUTH ELMHAM, ST. PETER TM 38 NW

2/84 St. Peter's Hall

1.9.53 GV II*

Manor house on a moated site. C15, C16 and C17, but probably with an earlier core to part. 2 storeys; attics to part. L-shaped form: main range aligned east-west; rear wing, north-south. Mainly in ashlar stone, but also partly in brick, rendered flint rubble, and render over timber-framing. Plaintiled roofs. A stone chimney-stack projects slightly from the eastern side of the south front, and another stack, having 2 square red brick shafts with moulded bases, forms part of the west gable. An important feature of the building is the fine series of medieval 3-light stone-traceried windows, which are clearly not in situ, and are thought to have come from the Augustinian nunnery at Flixton following the Dissolution. The main entrance is through a storied porch on the north side: pointed arched doorway, with multiple mouldings and a 4-light traceried window above, diagonal buttresses, roof pitch raised in C19. Round the base of the porch and along the eastern half of-the north front are reused stone panels with flushwork decoration, including the crowned sacred monogram and 'M'. To the right (west) of the porch there are indications, including a blocked doorway, of an earlier core to this part of the house. Cross-entry inside, and further evidence of reused stonework. To the east of the entry the former hall, which was divided into 2 by a large inserted chimney-stack in the late C16, has now been returned to a single room, with the ceiling raised, and the original external stack reopened; this has a Tudor arch with multiple mouldings. To the west of the entry, a large 3-bay upper room, with heavy moulded cross-beams and C16 square panelling, was divided up later. This part of the building may have had a flat lead-covered roof originally: the present roof is a C19 replacement. Above the eastern half of the front the roof was replaced in the C17: 5 bays have 2 rows of stepped butt purlins; deep, narrow chamfered principals, and the rafters in 2 separate lengths, tenoned into the lower purlins; some reused medieval rafters around the site of the chimnmey-stack. The timber-framed north-south range is an early C17 addition mainly of service rooms. For information on the background of the house and its owners, cf. Nesta Evans, 'The Tasburghs of South Elmham: the rise and fall of a Suffolk gentry family', in Procs. Suff. Inst. Arch & Hist., Vol. XXXIV Pt.4, 1980.

Listing NGR: TM3360085342

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

282343

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Books and journals
Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History in Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, Vol. 34, (1980)

End of official list entry

All text content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 , except where otherwise stated. Any supplied maps are © Crown Copyright [and database rights] 2026 OS AC0000815036 and may not be reproduced without permission.