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Focus Summer 2016

uffolk hops were generally held in
high esteem, particularly a variety

called ‘Marriott’, which was widely
grown around Stowmarket. According
to the Raynbirds’ Agriculture of Suffolk,
this variety, which had flowers that were
“small, firm and good”, had an excellent
flavour which was much sought after by
Scots brewers for making the, then
renowned, ‘Edinburgh Ale’.

At the beginning of the 19th century,
hops were still being grown in many
parts of Suffolk, from Clare and Long
Melford in the west, to Foxhall and
Kesgrave in the east, but, with the
exception of the Stowmarket area, the
acreage under the hop was small and
commercial growing in Suffolk ended
during the first decade of the 20th
century.

The last documentation I can find being
in Kelly’s 1908 Directory of Norfolk and
Suffolk, which, under the entry for
‘Stowmarket’, says, rather sadly: “In the
vicinity are several hop gardens”.
Growing had ceased totally by 1906. An
abundance of wild hedgerow hops in
Suffolk (Fig.3; Fig.4.) is a legacy of this
ancient agrarian practice.

o illustrate how rewarding the crop
could be it is recorded that, in 1631,

20 acres of hop bines growing at Earl’s
Colne, were valued at £400; an enor-
mous sum. Thirsk also maintains that at
by end of the 16

century the hop

trade in Suffolk and Essex was more
extensive than that of Kent, and her
suggestion of the pre-eminence of Nor-
folk and Suffolk is likely partly based on
the fact that the ports of these two
counties, such as Lynn, Yarmouth, and
Ipswich, were known to have imported
hopped beer from the Low Countries
from as early as the 14th century

Witness the customs accounts for the
port of Ipswich, which tell us that,
during the period between February
and September 1358, some 16 lasts (=
192 barrels) of beer entered the port on
ships from Holland and Zeeland. This
was at the beginning of a period when
considerable quantities of Dutch beer
were being brought into various East
Coast ports and it is likely that hops
would fairly soon replace beer as an
import, as some of the local population
learned how to brew their own beer.

Chronologically, the first evidence
relating to the hop in Suffolk comes
from middle-late Saxon times, when
considerable quantities of charred
fragments of hop were recovered from
a 10th century storage pit, uncovered
during excavations at The Buttermarket,
Ipswich. Unfortunately, we have no
direct evidence that they were used for
brewing. A great admirer of Suffolk hops
was the eminent Elizabethan physician,
writer, and sometime rector of the
Suffolk village of Blaxhall, William
Bullein, who made reference to hop-
growing in the county in two of his
mid-16th century medical treatises.

It was Bullein who probably laid
foundations for the claim Suffolk was
one of the first in England to grow hops
commercially. In his 1540 Governement
of Health, a work that regales the
health-giving virtues of hopped-beer,
Bullein, who is said to have been a
kinsman of Anne Boleyn, also extols the
quality of English hops, and those of
Suffolk in particular, saying: “......the
fruitful grounds of England do bring
forth to mans use, as good hops as
groweth in any place of this world, as
by proof I know of many places in
Suffolk whereas they brewe their beer
with the hoppes that groweth upon
their owne groundes.”

In Bulwarke of Defence, written in 1562,
Bullein is more specific, and says that
hops were being grown “at Bruisyard,
near Framlingham and at many other
places”. In 1618, Robert Reyce, an
antiquary and man of letters, wrote A
Breviary of Suffolk, in which there is an
extended paragraph dedicated to the
hop. Reyce indicated that the crop could
bring vast wealth to those growing it in
a diligent fashion, and commented that
Suffolk hops were sold as far away as
London and the West Country. It is
obvious from Reyce’s account that
growing hops in Suffolk was a very well
established, and important, facet of the
county’s agriculture.

By the end of the 18

century, howev-

er, it seems as though the industry had
declined, somewhat, for Arthur Young’s
A General View of the County of Suffolk,
published in 1797, places hops in a sec-
tion entitled ‘crops not commonly culti-
vated’. A little later, William and Hugh
Raynbird, in their 1849 Agriculture of
Suffolk, reaffirm what Reyce, and oth-
ers, had intimated, i.e. “…that it is prob-
able that Suffolk was the first county in
which they were grown”.

Tradition has it that hops were first
planted in the parish of Old Newton,
near Stowmarket, a town that was to
become the centre of the Suffolk hop
industry. Some interesting details are to
be found in Rev. Hollingsworth’s History
of Stowmarket of 1844.  It is an irony
that one of the most renowned hop
gardens in Stowmarket was at Abbot’s
Hall (Fig.2), which is now the home of
the Museum of East Anglian Life, and
the venue for Suffolk CAMRA’s highly
successful Festival of Beer and Brewing,
held annually in July.  At the time of a
sale in 1803, the Abbot’s Hall estate was
described as: “Comprising an excellent
brick-built mansion, coach house, barn,
stable, and suitable and convenient of-
fices, malt house 40 combs steep, gar-
dens, an orchard, and 125 acres of
extremely rich and fertile arable, mead-
ow and pasture lands and hop ground in
the highest state of cultivation.”   Stow-
market and its environs continued to
support hop grounds, even toward the

end of the 19

century, when cultiva-

tion of the crop in the county was in
terminal decline. Such a fact can be
gleaned from John Raven’s 1895 History
of Suffolk, where the reverend gentle-
man avers: “A Kentish traveller passing
by Stowmarket may for a few minutes
fancy himself in his own county.”

Fig 2. Abbot’s Hall, Stowmarket

Fig 3. Hedgerow hops; Ashen Road; Clare

Fig 4. Hedgerow hops; Stowmarket