Lavenham, United Kingdom

The Guildhall of the catholic guild of Corpus Christi was built in 1529 and stands in the centre of the village overlooking the market square. When visiting in 1487 Henry VII fined several Lavenham families for displaying too much wealth. However during the 16th century Lavenham's industry was badly affected by Dutch refugees settled in Colchester, who produced cloth that was cheaper and lighter than Lavenham's and also more fashionable. Cheaper cloth from Europe also aided the settlement's decline, and by 1600 it had lost its reputation as a major trading town. This sudden and dramatic change to the village’s fortune is the principal reason for so many medieval and Tudor buildings remaining unmodified, since subsequent generations of citizens did not have the wealth required to rebuild in the latest styles.

The Little Hall is a late 14th-century hall house on the main square. Built in the 1390s as a family house and workplace, it was enlarged and modernised in the mid-1550s and greatly extended later. By the 1700s it was home to six families. It was restored in the 1920s/30s by Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson and his identical-twin brother Thomas. In the 1960s and 70s it was an outpost of Kingston (Surrey) College of Art. In 1975 Surrey County Council offered it to the Suffolk Building Preservation Trust, who restored it. It now contains the Gayer-Anderson collection of pictures and artefacts, including a copy of the Gayer-Anderson cat, and operates as a museum.

During the reign of Henry VIII Lavenham was the scene of serious resistance to Wolsey's 'Amicable Grant', a tax being raised in England to pay for war with France. However this was happening without the consent of parliament. In 1525 10,000 men from Lavenham and the surrounding villages took part in the Lavenham Revolt, a serious uprising that threatened to spread to the nearby counties of Essex and Cambridgeshire. However the revolt was suppressed for the King by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, with the aid of local families. Elizabeth I visited the village during a Royal Progress of East Anglia in 1578.

Like most of East Anglia, Lavenham was staunchly Parliamentarian throughout the Civil Wars of the 1640s. Most local landowners, such as Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, Sir Philip Parker and Sir William Spring, were strong advocates of the Parliamentarian cause. There is no record of the village ever being involved in the conflict direct, although the inhabitants did provide a troop of soldiers to aid in Parliament's Siege of Colchester in 1648. A grammar school opened in the village in 1647. The settlement was struck by plague in 1666 and 1699. Small pox struck in 1712 and 1713, killing more than one in six of Lavenham's residents.

In the late 18th century the village was home to poet Jane Taylor, and it may have been while living in Shilling Street that she wrote the poem The Star, from which the lyrics for the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are taken. Colchester and Ongar, both in Essex, also have claims to be the site of composition of the poem.

Like many East Anglian settlements, Lavenham was home to an airfield in the Second World War II – Air Force Station Lavenham, an American Air Force airfield. USAAF Station 137 was manned by the US Army Air Force 487th Bombardment Group between 1944 and 1945. The airfield, actually located a few miles away in Alpheton, has since been returned to arable farmland, though some evidence of its structures and buildings remains, including the control tower.

In the 1960s a new area of council housing was built in the north of the village, centred on Spring Street, Spring Close and Spring Lane. In 1980 the marijuana smuggler Howard Marks was arrested in the bar of the Swan Hotel.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono filmed their experimental film Apotheosis with a hot-air balloon in Lavenham's Market Place in December 1969.