Laxfield is a small ancient village in northern
Suffolk
Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...
, England. It is located at a distinct bend in today's
B1117 road.
History
Laxfield arose in
Saxon
The Saxons ( la, Saxones, german: Sachsen, ang, Seaxan, osx, Sahson, nds, Sassen, nl, Saksen) were a group of Germanic
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peoples whose name was given in the early Middle Ages to a large country (Old Saxony, la, Saxonia) near the Nor ...
times as it is known that an early church was there and the village itself appears in the
Domesday Book. In 1226 Laxfield was given charter to hold a market and Saturday was selected.
The All Saints Church in Laxfield is largely of 14th century construct and was essentially complete by 1488.
The village and the surrounding area, like much of
East Anglia
East Anglia is an area in the East of England, often defined as including the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Angles, a people whose name originated in Anglia, in ...
, was a hotbed of
Puritan sentiment during much of the 17th century. Being the birthplace of the intolerant
William Dowsing as well as the home of many of his kin, it was natural enough that Laxfield became a puritan parish. By the mid-1630s, the
Fiske family and others had departed for the
Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630–1691), more formally the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, was an English settlement on the east coast of North America around the Massachusetts Bay, the northernmost of the several colonies later reorganized as the ...
as part of the wave of emigration that occurred during the
Great Migration.
[Thompson, Roger, ''Mobility & Migration, East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640'', Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.]
Laxfield was the final station on the
Mid-Suffolk Light Railway, which ran from the
Great Eastern Railway
The Great Eastern Railway (GER) was a pre-grouping British railway company, whose main line linked London Liverpool Street to Norwich and which had other lines throu