Oxburgh Hall

A moated manor house

Chapter 1: Introduction

If you were to imagine an early Tudor manor house, chances are you would conjure up something very like Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk. Built in the 1480s by Sir Edmund Bedingfield, it has everything - red brick walls, a moat, a gatehouse, a ruined church and a priest hole. Although now run by the National Trust, it is one of the few houses of the period still lived in by direct descendants of the builder.

Oxburgh-3
Oxburgh Hall © Tudor Times 2014

The Hall is on the outskirts of Oxborough, a small town in a part of northwest Norfolk that now seems very remote. However, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, East Anglia was the most populous area in England, after London, and the great towns of Norwich, King's Lynn, and Boston, over the county border in Lincolnshire, were important centres of trade and industry.