Saxmundham


Saxmundham is a small market town in Suffolk, England, set in the valley of the River Fromus about north-east of Ipswich and west of the coast at Sizewell. The town is bypassed by the A12. It is served by Saxmundham railway station on the East Suffolk Line between Ipswich and Lowestoft.

Governance

Saxmundham Town Council comes under the new East Suffolk District. It was previously in Suffolk Coastal District. The district electoral ward also has the name Saxmundham. Its population at the 2011 census was 4,913.

Origin

The place-name Saxmundham is first attested in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Sasmundeham. It appears as Saxmundham in the Feet of Fines of 1213. It denotes 'Seaxmund's village or estate'.
Saxmundham has had a market charter since at least 1272 and holds a market to this day.

Notable residents

With a Wikipedia page, in birth order:
has become Saxmundham's most famous international fictional character, through the best-selling Sister Fidelma mysteries by Peter Tremayne. Brother Eadulf, as companion and assistant to Sister Fidelma, often plays a crucial part in resolving the mystery. He is introduced as originally the hereditary gerefa of "Seaxmund's Ham in the land of the South Folk." He attends the famous Synod of Whitby in AD 664 and joins Sister Fidelma in solving a murder of one of the delegates. He has since appeared in most of the novels and some of the short stories, although the Saxmundham area has been used as a setting in only one of the novels: The Haunted Abbot. Tremayne chose Saxmundham as Eadulf's place of origin because of local connections, the nearness of the town to an ancient royal burial site of the East Angles, and the historic East Anglian connections with Irish Christian missionaries. He appears in all but two of the Sister Fidelma series of mystery novels, set in 7th century Ireland.