Woodbridge grew up around the Market Hill as an Anglo-Saxon settlement. Across the valley, on the facing hilltop, is Sutton Hoo, the royal burial field of the east Anglian dynasty of the time. Trade and shipbuilding brought prosperity and the Augustinian Priory acquired the right to hold a market, but it was in Elizabethan times that it boomed. "Robert Simper has used this rich pictorial archive to skilfully tell the story of the town ... " Suffolk & Norfolk Life