FLIXTON HALL STOOD FOUR MILES SOUTH-WEST OF BUNGAY near the River Waveney on the border with Norfolk. It was the seat of the Tasburgh family until the estate was sold in the middle of the eighteenth century to the Adairs for whom the house was rebuilt a hundred years later and subsequently extended.

The Tasburgh family originated in Norwich but first acquired, probably by marriage, property in South Elmham St Peter near flixton in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. They enlarged their estates over the succeeding two hundred years and, in 1544, after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, acquired flixton Priory, having previously leased land from the Priory. It is not certain whether the house was built by John Tasburgh (1533–97) or by his son Sir John (1576–1629). Nor is it certain whether flixton Hall stood on the site of the Priory or on that of a ‘capital mansion’ in 500 acres purchased in 1607 by Sir John from his cousin Thomas Bateman. The latter, of course, could only be the case if Sir John was the builder. However, Sir John's ‘newe parke’ is referred to in 1611, and a nineteenth-century account states that the hall was built about 1615. The probability is therefore that Sir John's acquisition of the Bateman property was followed by the rebuilding of the house there on what was a moated site. The extent to which it may have incorporated elements of an earlier building on the site is not known.

The Tasburgh family's tenure of flixton lasted until the last male member died in 1719. The wealth and influence of the family had reached its peak in the time of Sir John, and the decline in the family fortunes in the years after his death has been attributed to his marriage to Lettice Creasy, a member of a Roman Catholic family. Fines for recusancy and sequestration of the estate took their toll. On the death of a later John Tasburgh in 1719 the estate passed to the Wyborne family into which his sister, another Lettice, had married. On the failure of the Wyborne male line the estate was sold around 1750 to Alexander Adair whose family originated in Scotland but which had settled in Ireland in the first half of the seventeenth century. The house remained the Adair family’s Suffolk seat until shortly before its demolition.