On an adjoining hill sits the Parish Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, quite a grand structure built in the years around 1500, largely in celebration of Henry VII's victory over Richard III at Bosworth (1485), and the prominent part that local hero John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, played in the battle.

 In a more general way, the church also celebrates the prosperity of Lavenham, which was a hotbed of medieval industry, specifically that of clothmaking from wool. Unlike the image one has of such industry in, say, the nineteenth century, this was entirely domestic; people carried out the process sitting in their own homes. The social result was a tidy little community of rather spacious townhouses, and a highly developed guild organization (four separate "gilds" formed for religious or civic reasons--they were not divided by trade or craft). The production of cloth reached a peak in the 1520's and within a hundred years had utterly collapsed, for complex economic reasons, including capitalist/worker disputes, duties, cheap imports, and declining energy or talent in family-owned businesses as younger generations inherited what they had not worked for. The economy bottomed out in the 1620's, about the time when Isaac Ong's family emigrated, and while it made temporary recoveries with other cottage industries, it was never really prosperous again until quite recently, and was particularly destitute between the World Wars in this century.