All Saints - Semer, Suffolk - Medieval Churches on Waymarking.com

"The site of All Saints was likely to have been old before our church was constructed in the 14th C, perhaps it replaced a wooden Saxon church for the village had been in existence a while before the Domesday Book. Look at the board naming rectors on the South wall, you will see that John was Installed here in 1314, would it be this church or perhaps the one before. This building likely had a crown post and collar purlin roof, see original mark on the tower outside where the earlier and steeper roof connected. In the late 19th C James Y Cooke restored the interior and removed the last traces of the previous timber roof like other churches from the 1530's it would have suffered at the hands of the officers of Henry VIII and may have lost wall paintings, stained glass and perhaps a rood screen. One advantage ganed ls that the King ordered that all church records, forthwith be written in plain English and we have in Semer to original church records from 1538 listing all the births, marriages and deaths to the present date I also wonder how Peter Barron coped with the pressures of religious changes in those times; another of his colleagues was taken to task by his bishop for working in the open fields in his shirt. The earliest bell was made in Norwich around 1440, more information about this and the other two bells can be found in the Semer Book, written especially for the millennium, a copy can be found in the church and you may purchase your own for only £5, all the money going towards church funds In the 17th C a John Goodale left twenty shillings a year for bread to be given to the poor, firstly given at the church arch, later in the 19th C the poorer folk collected the bread from the Mission Hall, just beside the old church school. Through the village is a tiny parish the name became well known for the workhouse built on the east side of the village overlooking Hadleigh, we need to remember the many hundreds of people from the surrounding villages who are interred there in the two burial grounds from 1806 to 1923, to workhouse was erected in 1780. The workhouse had its own chapel and another place of worship was the congregation Chapel on the corner of Ash Street and Dairy Farm Lane, built in 1877."

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Building Materials: Stone

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