BREDFIELD HOUSE, OCCASIONALLY REFERRED TO AS BREDFIELD HALL AND AS BREDFIELD WHITE HOUSE, STOOD THREE MILES NORTHWEST OFWOODBRIDGE. It was built by Robert Marryott, a lawyer from Woodbridge, in about 1655 but was the reshaping of an earlier house. Forty years later it passed into the ownership of the Jenney family, two of whose forebears had been prominent lawyers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and who were lords of the manor. In 1765 it formed part of the marriage settlement of Edmund Jenney and Anne, daughter of Philip Broke of Nacton.

During the Jenneys’ ownership the house was tenanted by the Purcell family and Edward, the third son of Dr John Purcell, who changed his name to FitzGerald. This Edward was the translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (see page 27). He was born at Bredfield in 1809 before the family moved to Boulge Hall in the next village. In 1859 Stewart William and Arthur Henry Jenney sold the property to Joseph White, and it remained in the ownership of the White family until the middle of the twentieth century.

MARRYOTT's house was built of brick on an H-plan. It had a kitchen and dairy at the rear of the right-hand wing in what survived of the earlier timber-framed house dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It had Dutch gables on the projecting wings of the entrance front and one at the rear of the left-hand wing. It was of two storeys with attics and two segmentally pedimented dormers at the front. Considerable changes, including a new staircase, were made to the house in the eighteenth century when an orangery was added to the rear of the lefthand wing and other works, including the creation of a canal in the garden, were undertaken. In the middle of the nineteenth century the space between the rear wings was partially infilled. An inventory of the house in 1852 refers to the old and new drawing rooms, the kitchen and the new kitchen, and the scullery and the new scullery, suggesting recent changes to the old house.

Substantial alterations to the appearance of the house were also made. These included the building of two-storey canted bays with balustrades on the entrance front, the erection of Tudor-style barley-twist chimneys, new windows and entrance doors and the overlaying of the original brick with stucco.