County town: Ipswich
Suffolk was the territory of the South Folk of East Anglia, established as a shire after the Danish period. It had been part of the kingdom of East Anglia whose royal house was buried at Sutton Hoo.
Suffolk is a county of wide skies, gentle river valleys, and a long coast of sandy beaches, estuaries, and shingle beaches. Its medieval prosperity was extraordinary — the wool and cloth trade of the 14th and 15th centuries funded the magnificent wool churches of Lavenham, Long Melford, and Southwold, whose towers and clerestories are among the finest in England. Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge, is the burial site of an East Anglian king of the early 7th century, whose ship burial yielded the greatest treasure ever found in England. John Constable, born at East Bergholt in 1776, painted the Stour valley and immortalised Suffolk's agricultural landscape in oils.
Suffolk was surveyed in the Domesday Book of 1086, William the Conqueror's great census of England. The survey recorded 547 settlements in the county, with details of their lords, landholders, population, and resources.
Browse 547 Domesday settlements in SuffolkEngland's 39 historic counties, established between the 9th and 12th centuries, are the framework through which English local history, legal records, and landscape have been organised for a thousand years. Most survive today as ceremonial counties, their boundaries deeply embedded in place identity.
An Aubrey report for a specific location in Suffolk draws on historical maps, archaeological records, Domesday data and landscape history to tell the full story of any site in the county.
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