In producing these web pages both authors acknowledge long established ancestral connections
with the Suffolk Hundreds.
"Suffolk and its landscapes penetrated my
mind relatively late in life through a random contact with
a county that, unknown to me, had been home to my mother’s ancestors, the Kemps, for over a
thousand years. The Kemps are recorded in the annals of Dunwich in a litigation with the nearby
priory of Butley over the pilfering of a cargo destined for the monks. My father’s clan the Bellamys
is also to be found in a minor rebellion of the citizens of Dunwich against the indolence of the
Mayor and corporation regarding the maintenance of the sea defences.
These events occurred in the 13th century. At
this time the 'bel amis' were part of the French
immigration to Lincolnshire in the train of the Plantagenet Kings. Possibly the William Bellamy who
'entered into a conspiracy not to permit the court of the Dunwich mayor and bailiffs to be held' had
arrived there as a mariner sailing the coastal trading route from the Plantagent port of Grimsby.
How strange that 600 years later, the Kemp menfolk left Aldeburgh to eventually settle in Grimsby
where I was born a Lincolnshire Bellamy with maternal roots in the Suffolk Hundred of Blything.
Denis Bellamy
I was born on a thirty two acre farm in South
Elmham St Cross in the Wangford Hundred in 1929,
but when I was nine months old my parents bought a larger one in Heveningham, as it was
impossible to make a living from a small acreage in the agricultural depression.
I lived there for twenty five years until marrying
a farmer in Chediston, so most of my life has been
spent in the Blything Hundred.
I have seen such vast changes in the countryside over the past sixty years. Each farm had horses,
sheep, pigs, poultry and cows, and it was the monthly milk cheque that enabled the farmer to pay
his way before being paid for the grain, which was harvested and brought in by horse-drawn wagons
at the end of the summer. Now the land is farmed with very large machinery so that the fields have
been made much bigger, and farmers have to set-aside ten per-cent of their land to avoid over
production. Suffolk horses are rarely seen except in the county shows.
For the past twenty five years I have been researching the history of the Blything Hundred, where I
have traced my roots back five centuries.
Ruth Downing
