49, Church Street

House, circa 1565, altered in the 18th and 19th centuries. Timber framed, plastered and weatherboarded with some exposed framing, roofed with handmade red plain tiles. The building comprises a main range of one bay facing south-east with a rear stack, and a 2-bay crosswing to the right with an axial stack of circa 1600. A single-storey lean-to extension extends to the rear of the main range, roofed with red clay pantiles. The building is 2 storeys high.

The south-east facing elevation has, on the ground floor, 2 late 19th or early 20th-century sash windows of 4 lights. The first floor has 2 early 19th-century sash windows of 12 lights, or replicas. A central 20th-century 6-panel door with the top 2 panels glazed is set in an early 19th-century moulded architrave with a moulded flat canopy on profiled brackets, and has one stone step. An underbuilt full-length jetty features an exposed bressumer carved with grotesque beasts and scrolls, now weathered. Above the jetty is exposed close studding without visible bracing. Mortices beside the first-floor windows indicate the former presence of oriels; it is likely that similar oriels existed below the jetty.

The rear elevation is weatherboarded and has on the first floor one early 19th-century sash window of 3+6 lights. The posts are jowled and ledged for the binding beams. A post in the rear wall of the main range is rebated for a former external door.

Internally, the crosswing has exposed joinery including moulded transverse and axial beams with step stops, some with foliate carving, mostly sand-blasted, and plain joists of horizontal section, mostly plastered to the soffits. In the front wall of the crosswing is one of a former pair of flank windows of early glazed type with 2 moulded mullions and 2 of 3 diamond saddle bars, inserted circa 1575. The right front hearth has ovolo-moulded jambs and a depressed arch, stripped back to brick and sand-blasted. The rear hearth against it is 18th or 19th-century. A 20th-century grate is present in the main range.

The left tiebeam of the main range is chamfered with step stops; the right tiebeam is chamfered with lamb's tongue stops and has one chamfered brace. The right section has jowls facing forwards and backwards, one chamfered brace in the same plane, and a mortice visible for another. One beam above the first floor is a later insertion with a face-halved and bladed scarf and mortices for missing studs.

The roof of the rear bay of the crosswing is original, featuring high clasped purlins and straight wind-braces; the rear gable contains original wattle and daub infill. The remainder of the roof was rebuilt in the 17th or early 18th century in one continuous range parallel with the street, with pegged apices and clasped purlins, without wind-bracing.

The house occupies the site formerly occupied by the entrance bay and service bay of an early 14th-century aisled hall to the left (no. 47); deeds in the owner's possession indicate that it was part of the same building, the Bull Inn, in the 18th century. The combination of mouldings, step stops and lamb's tongue stops, and the style of the carved bressumer, permit close dating to circa 1565. The building is adjacent to a building of similar date (nos. 51, 53 and 55) and opposite to a building dated 1565 (nos. 52 and 54) and another marginally earlier (no. 1, Albert Place), indicating a local wave of prosperity at that period, when elsewhere in Essex and Suffolk the woollen cloth industry was in decline.