Old Cattle Market / St
Stephen's Church
The building in which we're particularly interested is
the
former Blue Coat Boy public house which we mentioned on our More Schools
page in relation to the school sign (now gone) in Curriers Lane.
The metal street sign is a decorative variant on the more heavy-set
cast iron street name signs featured on our Street
Signs page. The six screw heads which attach it to the rendered
wall are picked out in black paint and the curving ogee-type frame has
a sideways fleur-de-lys extending at each side. The satisfyingly
serid'd caps of the name proclaim that 'The Old Cattle Market'
extends to this open area at the top of Silent Street and is not just
the area we now call the bus station.
'The Blue Coat Boy'
However, the real revelation on this building is tucked under the small
jettied overhang of the first floor. '1620'
which is carved into the
(very narrow) black-stained bressummer beam is a surprise, particularly
as it's so well hidden. The lower enhancement shows the characters more
clearly. Photographing the whole beam would require
careful photography and additional lighting. Our only worry about the
beam is that it's in
such surprisingly good nick for a 17th century piece of carving; we
suppose that it could be a reproduction installed during one of the
facelifts that these old buildings were often subjected to. However,
the date could well be accurate and it's nice that it still
exists. Thanks to Ken Nichols for the tip-off about this dated
beam.
It's worth comparing with the (also) rather recent-looking '1636' date
on a
building in St
Helen's Street (near Major's Corner), the rather more weathered
'1631' date on the bressummer beams on the Captain's Houses in Grimwade
Street which can be found on the the the Isaac Lord page which is also dated '1636'.
Where once crowds
gathered to witness martyrs being burned at the stake and bulls being
baited, cattle were bought and sold on the Cornhill. The Cattle Market in Ipswich has been pushed to several
locations
as the town expanded and became more crowded, particularly after the
movements of the cavalry through the town started once the barracks
were opened close to Barrack Corner on Norwich Road. The Provision
Market moved from the Cornhill to a one acre site (formerly the house
and grounds of Major Heron) lying between Market Lane - after which it
was named - and St Stephens Lane and opened on Saturday 22 December
1810. You can still see the 'stub' - to use a Wikipedia term - of
Market Street coming off the south side of the thoroughfare called
Buttermarket at the back of the building now housing a coffee
chain, formerly one of several buildings there owned by the firm W.S.
Cowell which combined the businesses of fine printing & stationery,
wine & spirit merchants, tea, coffee and spice merchants, rag
recycling (into printing paper) and home furnishing. The company was
started by Walter Samual Cowell in the Buttermarket in 1818 and after a
long and, towards the end chequered history, this famous firm came to
an end in 1992. The lower end of Market Street, which used to come out
into Falcon Street was cut off by the Buttermarket Shopping Centre in
1986.
When a bigger
location had to be found for the Cattle Market, the owners of the
Provision Market purchased a third of an acre site and added a low wall
and railings, it had a gate onto the top of Silent Street. The site was
not ideal as it was surrounded by a spider's web of small lanes: Dog's
Head Lane was only 15 feet between house frontages. Buying and selling
of livestock
continued on the site we still call 'Old Cattle Market' until 1856 when
the market was moved to the marshy ground near Friars Bridge: you can
still see Friars Bridge Road coming off the north side of the stretch
of Princes Street, close to the Greyfriars roundabout. The land level
was raised about six feet above the surrounding marsh and the Cattle
Market reopened there in September 1856. It continued in operation on
the site until 1986, when a car park was built there. Plus ca change...
See Reading List for Muriel Clegg's 'The way
we went', used for information above.
Thomas Rush and St Stephen's Church,
St Stephen's Lane
Another carved beam hangs rather incongruously on the back of
Wilkinson's modern block, facing the rear of St Stephen's Church. There
is a small plaque below it which tells
us a little:
'This carved first floor bressummer beam dating from early 17th
century, and showing an unidentified merchants mark, was retained
by Messrs. J. Sainsbury Ltd. and reinstated here by kind permission
of C&A'. (C&A have long gone from this building,
currently occupied by Wilkinson's; Sainsbury's occupy the next shop
down on Upper Brook Street, with a partial frontage on Dog's Head
Street). Where the bressummer came from isn't recorded on the
plaque,
but it is thought that Rush’s house was located on the place
where the supermarket now stands. The first
shield about a third of the way in from the
left with the 'V' shape is said to be the coat
of arms of the Rush family. The mark on a
shield beside it is a vertical with
arrow heads at each end and an 'X' at its centre.
The letter 'R' is on a corresponding shield about a third of the way in
from the right. The remaining carving shows
mythical beasts.
Ken Nichols has supplied this information:
"You requested more information about the 'R' on the beam near St
Stephen's. It is the R of Thomas Rush [or Russhe] 1490 -1560 who apart
from being an important man in the town and country funded the
rebuilding (I believe the south area) of St Stephen's Church. There is
also a 'T' for Thomas on the south side (or doorway) I need to check
where, I gained these notes from a town guide."
Another source is Ryan Rush's blog about his ancestor:
"In 1490, Thomas Rush was born in Sudbourne, Suffolk, England. He
gained favour with the Tudor monarchy, first with King Henry VII and
later with his son Henry VIII, who knighted him in 1533 at the
coronation of Anne Boleyn [the year before he was made sheriff of
Norfolk and Suffolk.]. He married Anne Rivers of Ipswich. In 1543
Sir Thomas became the father of another Thomas. This Thomas
served briefly in the House of Commons." It's worth a searching for on
your favourite search engine.
Thomas Rush was a friend of Cardinal Wolsey (Henry VIII's first Lord
Chancellor and Ipswich's most famous son), he survived the fallout from
Wolsey's downfall and attached himself to Wolsey's successor, Thomas
Cromwell. Sir Thomas Rush is interred in the nearby St. Stephen's
Church in Ipswich,
which is now the Tourist Information Centre and art gallery. Sir
Thomas' most famous name-bearing descendant is Dr. Benjamin Rush,
signer of the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. Dr.
Rush is Sir Thomas' descendant through the latter's eponymous son.
[UPDATE 27.2.2012: Eventually,
in early 2012 we solved the problem of the missing 'T'.of 'Thomas
Rush'. It took two visits to St Stephen's Church, two good walks
round the exterior and one round the interior, consultation with the
Tourist Information person inside, reading of a free sheet on the
church and a 'phone call from within to one of their local history
experts. It is now clear that the wealthy and important Thomas Rush
endowed the church in order that a chapel be built on the south side of
the nave dedicated to him. Looking at the exterior south wall of the
church seems initially unpromising until one realises that the third
buttress down the wall from the 'Wilkinson's end' is rather wide and
contains an arch. For our photograph, two feral pigeons posed above it.
The area of interest is above the small blocked arch where a Rush
family crest borne by two angels carved in stone
was once in place in the masonry. The initials
'T' to the upper left and 'R' to the upper right comemmorated the
donor; the 'R' is long gone as is the crest. However, if you look
carefully there is a 'Medieval Gothic' style initial 'T', roughly
similar to that used on a well-known daily newspaper masthead: 
Our image includes an enhancement to show
the decorative
character 'T' with hints at the shield shape which seems to have
surrounded it. There are traces of the decorative scoring which was
incised into the letter. We learn that the blocked arch was a tiny
doorway through the centre of this wider-than-normal buttress; it gave
access to the private chapel. Clearly, they built people much smaller
in those days.]
It is only a few steps away from here that we find The Sun Inn (formerly Atfield & Daughter).
The Conservative Club, St Stephen's Church Lane
We had dismissed this lettering for many years, perhaps
because of politics, perhaps because it has always looked worn and run
down. However, in updating the St Stephens Church section (above), we
passed it again and decided it ought after all to be included. The left
panel is in rather poorer nick than the right, perhaps due to vandalism
(it doesn't say much for the quality of the ceramic tiles which make up
the signs), but the figure of the crusader bearing the huge Union Flag
banner is unmistakable. The yellow has worn better than the blue, it
must be said. The entrance to:
'IPSWICH
CONSERVATIVE
CLUB'
is in a narrow passageway leading from the church to
Upper Brook Street called St Stephen's Church
Lane. This is distinct from St Stephen's Lane which leads up from Dog's
Head Street, past The Sun Inn and
–
after Arras Square – runs up alongside The Ancient House to come out opposite Dial Lane.
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