This Victorian-era account documents popular local traditions and archaeological interest in Mildenhall parish during the 1860s, focusing on ancient earthworks and burial remains. While it predates the actual discovery of the Roman Mildenhall Treasure (1942), it reveals that Mildenhall was already recognized in the 19th century as a site of antiquarian interest with folk legends and genuine archaeological deposits.

The Church of St Mary at Mildenhall, Suffolk - situated in Lackford Hundred, the very hundred in which the Mildenhall Treasure was discovered near the town - is recorded in Domesday (1086), placing it firmly in the medieval parish landscape of the Treasure's findspot. Its institutional placing within the diocese of St Edmunds & Ipswich and the archdeaconry of Sudbury establishes the ecclesiastical jurisdiction that would have governed the area throughout the medieval period covered by both the Taxatio Ecclesiastica (1291) and Valor Ecclesiasticus (1535). The phased construction from the early 13th-century vestry through major 15th-century rebuilding reflects the prosperity of this Suffolk market-town parish across exactly the centuries when the Treasure's late-Roman silver would have lain buried beneath nearby fields.

This Suffolk Historic Environment Record entry confirms that the Mildenhall Treasure - 34 pieces of Roman silver tableware - was found in 1942 at West Row, within the ancient parish of Mildenhall, approximately 30 yards from a known Roman villa site (MNL 064), which is a Scheduled Monument. The findspot's precise location remains contested: a 1978 excavation at an alternative reputed site revealed Roman building remains and coins but no direct evidence of where the treasure lay, and the HER notes that Sidney Ford's account of the discovery was never fully verified. The presence of Chi-rho symbols on some spoons suggests the hoard's owners may have been 4th-century Romano-British Christians, consistent with the late Roman context of the Mildenhall area.

This evaluation report documents archaeological work in the immediate vicinity of the Mildenhall Treasure find spot at West Row. It demonstrates that modern development-led archaeology continues to monitor and investigate the area around this nationally significant Roman silver hoard, with work specifically designed to assess the archaeological impact of residential conversion within the scheduled monument designation that protects the treasure's find location and associated Roman structures.