The Crosses on Melford Green

Anyone looking at the beautiful map of  Melford drawn in c 1615, and currently at Melford Hall, will have been struck by the two crosses on the green. What happened to them?

Melford Green, on the 1615 map of Melford.

The biggest cross is the easiest to explain. It was  a Market Cross, of which the stone base was reported by William Parker to still exist in the 1850s.  It indicated the site of the market that was granted to the Abbots' of Bury by King John, whose charter was confirmed and extended, by Henry III. for a weekly market here, and again ratified by another charter of Edward III., 13 Sept., 1330

The market was traditionally held weekly, on a Thursday. The cross that marked the site of the market required repair in 1555-6, according to the Melford churchwardens accounts for 1556

• Item: for carrying the stonys for the grete crosse on the grene twelve pence (xiid)
• Item: to Harne the mason for hys cherge abowt the grete crosse on the grene  twelve shillings and sixpence (xiis v1d) 

It was probably destroyed in 1642, in the great riot of Melford, when mob of Puritans, mostly from  Colchester, occupied and plundered Melford Hall and the Rectory, and almost destroyed both places. The mob was confident, self righteous and convinced in the offensiveness of the old cross to their beliefs. So it goes.

Somewhere, an old woodcut survives where that shows what the cross looked like. From the solid base there rose a square shaft tapering upwards, and surmounted by a small cross. It is very close to the drawing of the cross on the map and must have been a prominent local landmark. It was certainly carved on the visible side, with sacred subjects in panel work, one of the upper panels representing the Crucifixion.

Besides this Market Cross, there was that other mark on the map.  I'd heard that there were once two crosses on the green, so I initially thought at first that this was the second mediaeval one, with  a symbol probably meaning  'the site of' a cross'. In the Churchwardens accounts of 1548, among many sales of broken fragments, resulting from the " cleansing from superstition," there is the item:

• Sold to Master Clopton the brokyn Crosse in the Churche-yerde wyth all the Stonys therewith as they be. two shillings and four pence.

When you consider how local people liked to keep and reused old stone, I can't help wondering if any part of either of these crosses that had once been erected on the bases, still survive somewhere. There is a clue. The field by the old entrance to the Kentwell Estate was once called High Cross field.  Maybe 'Master Clopton, at some risk from the rising puritanism of the public mood,  re-erected the remains of the churchyard cross at his home at Kentwell Hall.