RENDLESHAM HALL, FROM 1796 UNTIL AFTER THE GREATWAR THE SUFFOLK SEAT OF ONE BRANCH OF THE THELLUSON FAMILY, was situated five miles north-west of Woodbridge. The house, which was demolished in 1949, replaced in the 1870s an earlier and ‘far more important’ house burnt down forty years previously.

In 1552 the manor of Rendlesham and various properties in that and neighbouring parishes were purchased from John Harman by James Spencer of Bexwell in Norfolk. The family also owned other manors in the parish notably that of Naunton Hall held by the Harman family since the late fifteenth century, which appears to have been one of the most important, having annexed to it a house of that name which became part of the Rendlesham estate. The property passed through succeeding generations of the Spencer family until it was inherited by Anne Spencer, co-heiress of Edward Spencer, who died in 1727. In 1737 Anne Spencer married as his third wife the fifth Duke of Hamilton, bringing Rendlesham into the hands of the Hamilton family. The sixth Duke sold it to Sir George Wombwell from whom it was acquired by the Thelluson family.

Peter Thelluson, a London banker with West Indian commercial interests, was the son of Isaac de Thelluson, Swiss ambassador to the Court of Louis XV of France. He settled in England in the 1760s, amassed a large fortune from his financial and commercial ventures, and in about 1790 acquired the manor of Brodsworth in Yorkshire. In 1796, the year before he died, the Rendlesham estate was bought in the name of his son, Peter Isaac Thelluson, although on Peter Thelluson's death it appears to have been part of his estate. By his extraordinary will Peter Thelluson left £100,000 to his widow and children and the remainder of his fortune, some £600,000, to accumulate until the death of his last surviving grandson, when it was to be divided between the eldest male descendants then living of his three sons. The will was contested but upheld by the courts, although concern that property could be left to accumulate in the hands of trustees for a long period led to the Accumulations Act 1800 (the ‘Thelluson Act’), which imposed restrictions on the length of accumulation periods in trusts.