South Elmham Hall

South Elmham Hall is a manor house of 16th-century date containing substantial medieval remains. The building is L-shaped, arranged in two ranges of two storeys with attics to part.

The north-south range is constructed in rubble flint with some freestone, mostly rendered. It has a plain-tiled roof with 19th-century ornamental ridge-tiles, pierced and fluted bargeboards, and a spike finial to the north gable. An internal chimney-stack with sawtooth shafts sits on a rectangular base. The east-west range is built in Tudor red brick with some diapering on the ground floor, and is timber-framed and rendered above. The west gable wall is in red brick, crow-stepped, and incorporates a chimney-stack. This range has a plain-tiled roof with decorated ridge-tiles, apparently of the 17th century. Both ranges are lit by mainly early 19th-century 3-light casement windows with transomes on the ground floor and cross-windows of similar style above. The main entrance on the north side features a 19th-century enclosed and gabled brick porch with plain-tiled roof and carved bargeboards matching those of the north gable.

The north-south range contains the medieval core of the building and is traditionally thought to have been a palace of the early Bishops of Norwich, possibly originally a first-floor hall. The interior contains numerous moulded stone arches and doorways of 13th and 14th-century date on the ground floor, all now resited. On the upper floor at the north end, two linked doorways with pointed arches, heavily weathered, appear to have originally been in external positions. Above these, in the attic, the truncated remains of a 3-light stone-mullioned window with deep inner splay survive. This is the only decorative feature that appears to be in situ, and its reduction in height indicates the building has been lowered. Small panels of decoration, executed in red ochre with simple flowing designs of around 1300, survive on the inner walls to each side of the window remains, though now very faint. A small band of similar decoration is exposed on the east side wall on the first floor, later embellished with added scrolls and colouring. The attics are high and spacious, reroofed in the 16th century with trusses featuring tall queen-struts morticed into cambered collars and supported by small solid brackets. The associated side purlins have wide, flat top surfaces and were intended to support the ends of joists for a cambered ceiling, now removed. The east-west range, entirely a 16th-century addition overlapping the older range at its east end, has a smaller version of the queen-strut roof.

The house stands at the southern corner of a large roughly rectangular moated site, just within the parish boundary of St. Cross, South Elmham, though part of the moat platform extends into the adjacent parish of St. Margaret, South Elmham. The site is of particular historical interest due to its association with the See of Elmham, created in the 7th century, and documentary evidence of a palace or house for the Bishops of Norwich in the 13th century and perhaps earlier. Roger de Skernyng, Bishop of Norwich, died at his manor house at South Elmham in 1278. Henry Despenser, a later bishop, was granted licence to crenellate his house at South Elmham in 1387. In 1540, Henry VIII granted the manor to Edward North, who was created Lord North in 1553. It appears to have been North who added the east-west range and reroofed the north-south range. The manor subsequently passed to Sir John Tasburgh and remained in the Tasburgh family until 1740.