There exists in the Suffolk Records Office at Ipswich (well it was in Ipswich when I took the details but I think it may have been re-housed) a remarkable document that is key to the historical background of the meadows. This document is beautifully drawn on parchment, tinted in the most delicate colours and is entitled “A Platt taken and made of the lands of Mr George Stebbing lying in monewden by Nath: Fuller The 20th of Maye 1656”. This seventeenth century map shows a substantial house, hedges and boundaries, field names and sizes and the whole of the current Martins’ Meadows reserve can be seen to lie within it – some of the hedges and fields corresponding exactly to those on the map (click to see notes on Fuller's map).
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Norman Scarfe in his book "The Suffolk Landscape" describes the house as one of those built during the period of the ‘Great Rebuilding’ in Suffolk between 1570 and 1640 when ‘thriving yeomen’ were starting to be able to afford to build new houses in the Elizabethan style.
Initials on the chimneystack show that John Stebbings and his wife built the farmhouse in 1593. Scarfe states that the farm was on land that was perhaps newly taken from the woods at the edge of the parish in the 1590's. If this is the case then the fact that the landscape is already enclosed may point to the possibility that the hedges that form the boundaries to the fields may be remnants of strips of very much older woodland. If anyone can throw any further light on the history of this part of the parish then please let me know as I would love to know more about this.
The barn that stands at right angles to the house did contain some really old structural timbers and some of the wooden dividing panels within the barn had lots of old “graffiti” consisting of names, dates and drawings of farm life carved into the wood. (click to see the section on Barn Graffiti). The house and outbuildings, including the barn, have been renovated in the last few years but the current owners have preserved some of the panels for posterity. Please note that these are part of the owner's private buildings and do not form part of the reserve.
There also exists the 1838 Tithe Map for Monewden; early Ordnance Survey maps and a plan of the property recorded as an auctioneers map for Moore, Garrard & sons dated 1914. It has therefore been possible to trace some of the boundary and field name changes that have taken place since the Fuller map of 1656. (See the Comparative Maps section).
The former warden and artist Evangeline (Voline) Dickson told me a couple of stories about the more recent history of the meadow.
