| Grundisburgh is a good
village, settled around its green with the
beautiful St Mary's church on one side and the
Dog public house on the other. The former village
school, now sheltered housing, overlooks it all.
Roads run through fords to cross the streams
which cut through the green, and it is all very
charming. Somehow though, the settled scene
serves to emphasise the fact that in any age
there are outsiders who do not necessarily feel a
part of the mainstream, and in East Anglia in
general, and in Suffolk in particular, the
tension between non-conformism and the
establishment over the centuries has left a
legacy. When the Baptists of Grundisburgh came to
build their chapel in the late 18th Century, it
was unthinkable that it could be part of this
harmonious village centre. Instead, they built it
out in a hamlet on the road to Great Bealings,
where it stands to this day. This is a fine, typical Suffolk
Baptist chapel, originally constructed in 1798. Schoolrooms
and a house for the minister were added to the
south side in 1819, and the street sides were
refaced in red brick in the 1860s. At the time of
the 1851 Census of Religious Worship, the
Reverend George Edis Webster, Rector of St Mary's
church down in the centre, bemoaned the fact that
Grundisburgh has many Baptists, and said
that his own congregation of barely a hundred, in
a parish of eight hundred souls, was much
influenced in these scattered villages by the
weather. Meanwhile, out at the Baptist
chapel, the minister Samuel Collins recorded that
his chapel had seating for 700 people, and an
average attendance of more than 400 in the
morning, more than 600 in the afternoon. The
Reverend Webster countered that the Baptist attendants come from '9
or so' parishes.
Even so, there were affiliated chapels in both
Woodbridge and Waldringfield, and a large chapel
burial ground, which is still in use today. An
interesting insight then, into the tension
between the established church and the
non-conformists in a 19th Century Suffolk
village.
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