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.
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.
