England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Belstead St Mary

The Parish

The parish of Belstead lies in southern Suffolk roughly 3 miles south west of the county town of Ipswich. Belstead sits immediately south of the busy A14 road which links the eastern ports of Felixstowe & Harwich with the main national motorway network. Belstead is an estate village, where all land was held by a single landholder and no formal village developed as a consequence, the parish has a strip of properties running southwards from the Belstead Brook whilst both church and hall sit a quarter mile to the west together with further farms and cottages. Like most Suffolk parishes Belstead was and still is an arable farming parish, today, however, its proximity to the county town has seen some commuter development at its northern end. The modern development of the A14 has come to the parish, here it also functions as Ipswich's southern bypass as well as a national dual-carriageway highway. From earlier times the Ipswich to London railway line skirts the eastern edges of Belstead parish too. Belstead is drained eastwards by its eponymous Brook which soon meets the Orwell as it opens into an estuary, passing under the iconic A14 Orwell Bridge it widens and eventually reaches the nearby North Sea. Belstead is sited on a rising site, the Brook being at below 10 metres whilst the southern edge of the properties stands at 40 metres at Blacksmith's Corner, land is at or below that height for many miles in this rather gentle terrain. Belstead was one of Suffolk's smaller parishes at barely 1,000 acres within which it would have supported a population of around 250 parishioners. Belstead#s status in Domesday Book is rather controversial and in complete contrast to today's tiny village, its population of 42 households was apparently enough to place it within the top 20% of settlements recorded in that book, its assets, shared between no fewer than 6 "lords" were typical merely of a large rural settlement with 13 ploughs backed up with the normal meadows & woodland.

The Church

As already mentioned St Mary's church sits a quarter of a mile west of the main portion of the village, alongside the hall, and at the junction of Church Lane with Buck's Horns Lane. Whilst undoubtedly medieval in origin the church has been so extensively modified by Victorian restoration as to have little dating evidence remaining. The core of the church, however, the nave, chancel and oddly placed southern tower are merely assigned to a wide range of dating by Pevsner, 14th to 15th century. Historic England's listing of the church is a little more forthcoming, the tower being given to the 14th century whilst both nave and chancel's Perpendicular styling clearly place them to the end of the 14th or early 15th centuries. Tudor times and the 16th century saw the northern chapel added in line with the will of one John  Goldingham who died in 1518. Three phases of Victorian work are detailed by Pevsner, the first of 1856 was a general restoration which also saw the removal of a former western gallery,  in 1862 the northern chapel was opened into the nave and in 1896 the battlementation was added to the church. Parking around the church site is made relatively safe by little traffic, the lane to the hall being a dead-end. The churchyard has a picket-fence separating it from the lane with a wrought-iron gate for entry. Oddly the churchyard is narrow on the north to south axis and this combined with many trees removes most of the favoured angles for the photographer making the church a challenge to adequately record.