Tranmer House is a country house in

Sutton Hoo Sutton Hoo is the site of two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries dating from the 6th to 7th centuries near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. Archaeology, Archaeologists have been excavating the area since 1938, when an undisturbed ship burial containing a wea ...

, Woodbridge,

Suffolk Suffolk ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Norfolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Essex to the south, and Cambridgeshire to the west. Ipswich is the largest settlement and the county ...

, England, dating from 1910. The house is located on the

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...

burial site, and in 1938 was the home of

Edith Pretty Edith May Pretty (née Dempster; 1 August 1883 – 17 December 1942) was an English landowner on whose land the Sutton Hoo ship burial was discovered after she hired Basil Brown, a local excavator and amateur archaeologist, to determine whether ...

. In June 1938, Pretty employed

Basil Brown Basil John Wait Brown (22 January 1888 – 12 March 1977) was an English archaeologist and astronomer. Self-taught, he discovered and excavated a 6th-century Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939, which has come to be called "one of t ...

to undertake the excavation of a range of

burial mounds A tumulus (: tumuli) is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds, mounds, howes, or in Siberia and Central Asia as ''kurgans'', and may be found throughout much of the world. ...

on the estate, leading to Brown's discovery in May 1939 of a

ship burial A ship burial or boat grave is a burial in which a ship or boat is used either as the tomb for the dead and the grave goods, or as a part of the grave goods itself. If the ship is very small, it is called a boat grave. This style of burial was pr ...

, "one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time". The house is now owned by the

National Trust The National Trust () is a heritage and nature conservation charity and membership organisation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Trust was founded in 1895 by Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley to "promote the ...

History and description

Tranmer House, then called Sutton Hoo House, was designed in 1910 by John Shewell Corder, an architect based in

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in Suffolk, England. It is the county town, and largest in Suffolk, followed by Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds, and the third-largest population centre in East Anglia, ...

, for a Suffolk artist, John Chadwick Lomax. In 1926 the Sutton Hoo estate was bought by

and her husband, Frank, for £15,250. Edith Pretty, born Edith Dempster in 1883, inherited a considerable fortune from her father upon his death in 1925. Following Frank Pretty's death in 1934, Edith Pretty developed an interest in excavating the burial mounds that lay to the north-east of Tranmer House and engaged a local archaeologist,

, to undertake two digs, in 1938 and 1939. During the second dig, Brown located the

ship burial site under Mound 1, "the largest Anglo-Saxon ship burial ever discovered". The trove of treasure within made Sutton Hoo "the richest intact early medieval grave in Europe with a burial chamber full of dazzling riches". Edith Pretty died in 1942, having gifted the Sutton Hoo treasure to the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

. The house was sold by her son's trustees in the late 1940s, and was owned by a number of local farming families until bought by the Tranmers. Following the death of Annie Tranmer, the house and the Sutton Hoo burial site were bequeathed to the National Trust in 1998. The Trust renamed the house in acknowledgement of the donation.

James Bettley James Bettley is a British architectural historian, whose publications include editions of the Pevsner Architectural Guides to Essex (2007), Suffolk (2015) and Hertfordshire (2019). In 2019-20 he served as High Sheriff of Essex. In July 2025 he w ...

and

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (195 ...

, in their ''Suffolk: East'' volume of

The Buildings of England ''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The ...

series, describe the architectural style of Tranmer as "Tudor". The house now operates as a museum, while the stable block, and original squash court, form part of the Sutton Hoo Visitor Centre. In 2000, a second Anglo-Saxon cemetery was discovered beneath the rose garden.

Footnotes

References

Sources

* * {{cite book , first1 = James , last1 = Bettley , first2 = Nikolaus , last2 = Pevsner , authorlink2 = Nikolaus Pevsner , title = Suffolk: East , series = Buildings of England , year = 2015 , publisher =

Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and ope ...

, location = New Haven, US and London , isbn = 978-0-300-19654-2 , oclc = 995084088 , url = https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/995084088

External links

Sutton Hoo
at the

website Country houses in Suffolk National Trust properties in Suffolk 1938 archaeological discoveries 1939 archaeological discoveries Anglo-Saxon art Archaeological museums in England Archaeological sites in Suffolk Sutton, Suffolk Sutton Hoo