England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Hunston St Michael

The Parish

The parish of Hunston lies in northern Suffolk roughly 10 miles northeast of the town of Bury St Edmunds and a similar distance northwest of Stowmarket. Hunston is a crossroads settlement with sits about 2 miles east of the A1088 which links Ixworth with Woolpit, from which a broad lane heads eastwards to Stowlangtoft with Hunston gathered around a crossroads midway along it. Like most of Suffolk's rural parishes Hunston was an arable farming village, sitting on clay-rich soils this has increasingly been the case with advent of modern machinery. Hunston is drained westwards by a small tributary of the Black Bourn which is soon joined and turning northwards runs to the Little Ouse, thence out across the Fens to its larger version, the Great Ouse and the sea through the Wash. Hunston is sited at around 40 metres above the sea with land rising only gently to local heights of just under 70 metres away to the south. In a county of numerous small parishes Hunston was toward the smaller end of the scale, covering barely 950 acres it would have supported a population of just over 150 parishioners. In Domesday times Hunston was equally small, largely held by Bury St Edmunds Abbey it could offer a mere 8 ploughs plus the usual meadows and woodland.

The Church

St Michael's church sits away from its village to the south, a quarter of a mile down the lane leading to Norton Little Green. St Michael is one of the oldest in its county with early 12th century fabric found reused within the priest's doorway. Speculation, indeed, places these fragments as part of an earlier pre-Conquest structure. The walls of the nave are, however, more certainly 12th century Norman Romanesque work whilst the rest of the main body dates from the 13th century. Both chancel and southern transept show the characteristically thin windows of the lancet style fashionable during the Early English Gothic era. The unbuttressed western tower is later still and Perpendicular in date with documentary evidence showing a late 15th century for its construction or possibly renewal, the parapet was added in 1907. The Victorian restoration of 1878 saw a general refreshment as well as adding the southern porch. Amongst cereal fields a white sign points to Hall Farm and the church down a gravel track, the church being to the north and the farm to its south. A compact churchyard but with no obstacles to seriously inconvenience the photographer.