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A History of Norwich
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Price: £16.99
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ISBN-13: 978-1860770838
Author: Frank Meeres
Published Date: 21-06-2024
Publisher: Phillimore & Co Ltd
A History of Norwich Contents Page
A History of Norwich Index Page
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| Norwich was an important Anglo-Saxon market town at the time of the Norman invasion, and grew to become one of the leading cities of England by the early Middle Ages. It retained its importance during the Industrial Revolution, maintaining its reputation as being one of the most radical and progressive of cities with many dramatic episodes in its life “ ... too good to miss, either as a volume for your own shelves or as a present to a friend.” Norfolk Ancestor |
1
The Beginnings
The earliest known reference to Norwich is not in a document but on a coin of King Athelstan who reigned from 925 to 939. There are only five known written references to Norwich before the Norman Conquest in 1066 and yet by that time it was already one of the largest cities in the country. What little we know of the beginnings and early history of the city is derived from archaeological evidence and from the study of place-names. Of course it is very difficult to make systematic excavations in a place like Norwich. It is still a flourishing city and the only possible digs are on sites cleared for redevelopment. These often have to be rushed as the developers naturally want to exploit the site when they can. Even so some major archaeological work has been done in the city in the last twenty years, firstly by the Norwich Survey in the period 1971 to 1978 led by Alan Carter and more recently by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit led by Brian Ayers.
The popular opinion of Norfolk is that it is a flat county but in fact parts of it are far from flat: indeed Ayers has called Norwich one of the hilliest cities in England.
Evidence of man in the greater Norwich area has been found in all periods since the end of the last Ice Age. There are few finds from the Palaeolithic era (roughly 50,000 to 10,000 B.C.), though hand axes have been found at Carrow and one was turned up at Morse’s Rose garden in Eaton in 1943.
Low-lying sites in the valleys close to the later city include the important religious centre of Arminghall which was discovered from the air by Wing-Commander Insall in 1929. It proved to be a horseshoe of eight holes that once contained huge timber posts each over a metre across and sunk into the ground to a depth of well over two metres. Each one weighed about seven tons. Charcoal from these posts gave a radiocarbon dating of about 3,000 B.C. These may have been tall carved totem poles or they could have had lintels across the tops like the large stones at Stonehenge. Alternatively they could have been connected in some way to form a tower. The entrance to the henge through the surrounding ditches faces south-west and would have been facing mid-winter sunrise. The henge is close to several burial mounds. Its site is on a promontory above the meeting place of the waters of the Tas and the Yare.
Mysterious deep shafts with Neolithic material have been found at Eaton: these consist of 21 vertical shafts some eight metres deep as well as the usual pit and post holes. The function of the shafts is completely unknown. They could be wells or ritual features or, as Rodney Castleden suggests, they could even be natural—ancient solution pipes into which Neolithic occupation material has fallen. If so, Eaton Heath is a normal Neolithic settlement site with a radiocarbon date of about 4,000 B.C.
1 The Growth of a City sums up the geology: East Norfolk is composed of sands, gravels and clays overlaying chalk. Much of it is drained by the rivers Yare and Wensum and their tributaries, and when most of the plateau was heavily forested these rivers would have provided easy routes inland from the coast.2 The basic reason for Norwich growing up where it did is that given by A.L. Poole: ‘The commercial importance of [towns such as Norwich] was largely due to their position on tidal rivers at points where they could be bridged. Goods could thus be carried far into the interior of the country and thence distributed over a wide area’.3 There is a map in Great Yarmouth Town Hall showing the Yare estuary as it might have been about A.D. 1000. The map was drawn in about 1600 and so has no claim to historical accuracy but the impression it gives is the right one: in Roman and Saxon times Norwich stood at the head of a large shallow estuary, the mouth of which stretched from Caister on Sea to Burgh Castle.4 The main evidence for man’s activity in the Norwich area in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (approximately 10,000-2,000 B.C.) is the finding of flint tools. Flints have been found on Mousehold Heath and hand-axes at Carrow.5 A barrow in the same area was cut through by the Norwich southern bypass. Although nothing was found, careful analysis of stains in the soil showed there had been an individual in a wooden coffin buried here in the third millennium B.C. This represents one of the earliest known examples of an individual burial.6 However Paul Ashbee thinks the shafts are huge post-sockets and that the site was an artificial grove.7
No settlement sites of the Bronze Age (approximately 2,500-800 B.C.) have been found but there is considerable evidence of the presence of these people. In 1979 the Norfolk Archaeological Unit excavated a site within the city boundary at Bowthorpe which air photography had shown as a circular crop mark. It turned out to be the remnant of a Bronze-Age round barrow, dated to about 2,000 B.C. by radiocarbon dating. Here again the archaeologists could detect that there had once been a body in a coffin. Signs of 11 more graves were found around the edge of the barrow. The best preserved of these was found to contain a body resting on a hay-filled pillow in a coffin made of oak planks. A thousand years later the barrow was again used for a burial but practices had changed—the ashes were found of a cremated body covered by a large urn.
The Romans
Julius Caesar had a preliminary look at Britain in 55 B.C., but the invasion and conquest began in A.D. 43 under the emperor Claudius. The Iceni tribe did not surrender easily. In A.D. 47 the Roman governor attempted to disarm them, which provoked a serious uprising. When their client-king Prasutagus died he left the Roman emperor co-heir to the kingdom along with his own two daughters, but the Romans treated the Iceni as defeated enemies. After the king’s daughters were raped and his widow Boudicca beaten, the whole tribe rose up and sacked Colchester, London and St Albans before being finally defeated by the Roman armies. Roman authors disagree about Boudicca’s fate. Tacitus says she took poison, but Dio Cassius says she died from disease and tantalisingly adds that the British gave her a rich burial: unfortunately her grave has not yet been found.
8 Two round barrows, of an original group of four, survive on Eaton golf course and bronze tools and weapons have been found all over the area. The finest discovery in Norfolk from the Iron Age (800 B.C. to A.D. 43) is now at Norwich Castle but was actually found in Snettisham. This is a collection of magnificent gold torcs or necklaces that could well have belonged to some member of the ruling family of the tribe of the Iceni who lived in the Norfolk area. Rescue archaeology along the route of the southern bypass revealed a fine Iron-Age longhouse in this area not far from the later Roman town at Caistor St Edmund.9
It is not known where the centre of Iceni power in the county actually was. Ashbee suggests that their chief camp may have been where Norwich Castle now is.
Venta was the major settlement in the area in the Roman period. The main stone buildings of the town—market, public hall, baths—were put up in the second century and elaborate town walls were erected in the third century. However the story of Venta is not one of peaceful and uninterrupted progress. The forum was at one time destroyed by fire and remained derelict for over 50 years before being rebuilt on a much smaller scale. The third-century walls only enclosed half the area of the original town, another indication of decline. It is possible that the association of wool with the Norwich area goes all the way back to Roman times. There is a fourth-century reference to the Roman army being supplied with cloth from a state weaving mill at Venta. This could be Caistor, but equally it could be one of the two other towns in Britain called Venta (Winchester and Caerwent).
10 It would have been superseded by the new town at Venta which was probably founded soon after Boudicca’s rebellion was defeated. There was never a Roman town at Norwich: indeed much of the Roman material found in Norwich (including Roman bricks built into the fabric of the Cathedral) is probably re-used from Caistor as suggested by the old rhyme, ‘Caistor was a town when Norwich was none, Norwich was built with Caistor’s stone’.11
The Roman town of Caistor, the henge at Arminghall and the hill fort at Tasburgh, which is probably Iron Age in date (but could be much later), appear on the map as a straight line. They make one of the most convincing of the many ‘lines of power’ suggested by ley-line enthusiasts.
12
Roman roads probably crossed on the site of the later city of Norwich. The archaeologists have found evidence for an east-west road running from Brundall entering the city near Pilling Park, continuing through Mousehold House grounds and down Gas Hill to a river crossing on the site of Bishop Bridge. It is not known if this crossing was by a bridge or a ford. The road continued along Bishopgate: this section would have been on a causeway through marshland. It then continued along the line of St Benedict’s Street and Dereham Road.
13 This line is still preserved at Tombland Alley and became part of the much later Saxon grid pattern of streets largely destroyed by the Normans who built their cathedral right on the former Roman road. A road running north from Caistor may have run up along Long John Hill and along the Ber Street ridge, or perhaps along King Street and Magdalen Street.14
Pottery of Roman date has been found in the Magdalen Street area, perhaps indicating, as Malcolm Atkin suggests, a farmstead in the St Augustine’s area.
Saxons and Danes
As the Roman empire fell apart the Saxons invaded and eventually drove the native British into the fringe regions of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. However they probably did not slaughter the British but slowly merged with them. Two early Saxon cemeteries very close to Caistor suggest that people continued to live there after the Romans had left.
15 There have been other finds in the Yare Valley at Eaton and in the Wensum Valley at Lakenham and Earlham, probably also farmsteads. Two rich Roman burials were discovered at Stanley Avenue in Thorpe in 1950: one included three coins of Nero. Two skeletons that were found under Woodlands Park off Dereham Road in 1861 were probably of the third or fourth centuries.16 Pottery fragments and Roman coins have been found all across the city but these could of course have been dropped years or even centuries later.17
Alan Carter and others have suggested that Norwich may at this time have been slowly growing out of a number of small settlements. He postulated four of these called Needham, Westwick, Conesford and Coslany. The archaeological evidence for this is small but there is the evidence of the place-names themselves. The name ‘Westwic’ occurs in 12th-century documents and the form of the name suggests it originated before 850.
The place-name ‘Conesford’ means the ‘King’s Ford’: the name is used now for the area at the southern end of King Street but there is nowhere in that area suitable for a ford. Possibly the name was originally given to the crossing at what is now Bishop Bridge. Until recently it was thought that the largest of the Middle Saxon settlements which eventually became Norwich was that called ‘Needham’ (meaning ‘poor meadow’ or ‘poor homestead’).
18 So did the name ‘Coslania’ (which according to Alan Carter means ‘piggies’ long island’ and could well have been meant as an insult).19 A pagan Saxon cemetery has been found on the higher ground north of the river where Eade Road now is: perhaps the people buried here were living down by the river in Coslany.2021 It was thought this might be centred beneath the later Norman castle. However digging on the Castle Mall site has failed to find any evidence for it. For this and other reasons, Brian Ayers suggests a different origin of Norwich, not as four settlements that have merged but as ribbon development along the banks of the river.22 If it had a centre it could have been on the north bank by what is now Fyebridge—Malcolm Atkin points out that finds at Fishergate suggest an eighth-century settlement there.23
The Danes conquered the east of England after the murder of King Edmund in 869. The only Norfolk town mentioned at this period is Thetford, where the Danes spent the winter in 869 before slaughtering Edmund after a battle.
One of the main indications of the Danish occupation of Norwich is the evidence of Danish place names, such as the ending ‘gate’, referring to a street and not a gate, as in Fishergate, Colegate, Cowgate and Pottergate. Other examples are the name ‘Thorpe’ which is Danish for a new settlement and the name ‘Cowholme’ from the old Danish word ‘holme’ meaning water meadow.
24 This is generally thought to have been at Hoxne, although a few authorities think Hellesdon a more likely site for this decisive victory. The martyrdom of King Edmund can be seen carved in stone in the spandrel of the west door of the church of St Lawrence. He is shown being hit by many arrows and the wolf, which according to legend, guarded his body, can be seen peeping out from a cave.25 One street name in Norwich has two Danish elements—Finkelgate. ‘Finkel’ may mean ‘crooked’ or, as Sue Margeson suggests, it could come from the Danish word for ‘cuddles’ and be the equivalent of ‘lovers lane’ (a role the street retains even today).26
The Danish settlement was north of the river and was defended with a bank and ditch. This has actually been found in St George’s Street but the other boundaries are not known.
27 The pattern of the streets suggests it may have been along the curving road now called Cowgate, but the boundary may have been along Peacock Street instead. Where Anglia Square now is there was once a wood called Mereholt, which means ‘boundary wood’ and which may mark the northern edge of this settlement.28 There have been a few finds in the city reflecting the period of Danish occupation such as a cross shaft with Scandinavian-style decoration found on the site of St Vedast at Rose Lane and now on display in the Castle Museum.29
The Danes were driven out of East Anglia by the English armies of King Edward the Elder in 917. However this did not lead to the restoration of an independent kingdom of East Anglia: it became part of the kingdom of the West Saxons. The name ‘Northwic’ first appears for certain on coins of King Athelstan, Edward’s son, who ruled from 925 to 939. Mints were only set up in ‘Burhs’, the essential features of which were fortifications and a market. No-one knows if the term means the ‘Wic’ or trading area to the north of the river rather than the south, or whether the word means it was the north ‘Wic’ of the kingdom in contrast to the south ‘Wic’ at Ipswich.
30
At last we have come to the earliest written reference to Norwich. This is in the Book of Ely written in the 980s. When the Abbot of Ely wanted to buy land in Cambridge, he was informed ‘that Cambridge and Norwich and Ipswich and Thetford were of such liberty and dignity that if anyone bought land there he did not need witnesses’. This shows that Norwich was already regarded as a ‘civilised’ town.
Danish raiding started up again in the late tenth century. The second earliest written reference to Norwich is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This tells us that in 1004 the Danish King Sweyn ‘came with his fleet to Norwich and completely ravaged and burned the borough’–so Norwich was definitely a borough by this date.
31 Sweyn was avenging Danes who had been massacred in England including his own sister Gunhilda who, Ralph Mottram says, had been murdered in Norwich: however, he does not give any evidence for this.32 Edith Henderson imagined the scene—
Norwich suffered terribly from the cruelty of Sweyn and his warriors. They came to the little fishing town here at the foot of the hills of the Yare estuary; and when they sailed away, the red flames were leaping from the homesteads, spreading from hut to hut, filling all the sky with a fierce red glare.
33
After this raid the Danes came back again and again and in 1013 the whole of Eastern England surrendered to King Sweyn. The English King, Ethelred, fled abroad. Sweyn died in the same year but his son Canute invaded and eventually won the entire kingdom for himself. He was also king of Denmark and (from 1028) of Norway as well: Otto the Black says, ‘Canute is the foremost sovereign under Heaven.’ The same poet has a mention for Norwich, but the battle he describes is otherwise unrecorded, ‘Gracious giver of mighty gifts, you made mailcoats red in Norwich … still you pressed on, blunting swords upon weapons; they could not defend their strongholds when you attacked’.
34
A late Saxon skull on display at the Castle Museum could be that of a victim of this battle. It has a large hole made by a battle axe or heavy sword. The label says grimly, ‘This one shows no trace of healing and death must have occurred almost at once’. It was found near the site of St Catherine’s chapel in Thorpe.
Canute, of course, was much more than a Viking raider. He secured his place in the line of English kings by marrying the widow of his predecessor Ethelred the Unready and devised a code of law based on those of earlier Anglo-Saxon kings. Under Canute, as under Athelstan, money was minted in Norwich. Over 300 coins minted in the city in his reign are known (compared, however, with over 1,500 each from Lincoln and York).
Ships landed goods at the wharf on the south side of the river near St Martin at Palace Plain. There may have been a market here but the main Saxon market was at Tombland: the name probably means ‘open’ or ‘empty space’ and has no connection with tombs. It may not have been the name that the Saxons called it—the earliest written evidence for the name Tombland is in about 1250.
What were the people who lived in Saxon Norwich like? When the site now occupied by Anglia Television was excavated, 130 skeletons were found buried in a churchyard. The state of their bones gives us some clues about how they lived. Half the burials were of children. Of the adults, 40 were male and 20 were female. This may be because it was not possible to dig up the whole graveyard: perhaps some areas were reserved for males and some for females. The age of death could be calculated: 46 per cent of the males and 67 per cent of the females survived to the ages of 35 to 45 years. Very few people lived beyond the age of 45. The lives of these people were hard: their torsos and arms showed signs of heavy labour. Several suffered from rickets and nine had a bone condition which would have meant a continuous pain behind the eyes. These diseases suggest that the diet of these people was not adequate. Surprisingly, one of the skeletons appears to have been of a negress, perhaps a slave or perhaps a descendant of the small black population of Roman Britain.
35 In the time of Canute, England was part of an empire centred on the North Sea. Eastern towns like Norwich must have benefited enormously from this, just as towns on the west coast gained from the opening up of trade with America 500 years later.36 This must have been the heart of the late Saxon town with the palace of the Earls of East Anglia along its southern side and in the centre the church of St Michael Tombland, the richest in the city according to Domesday Book. When the underground lavatories were being dug here in the late 19th century a walrus-ivory cross was found which probably came from St Michael’s church. Brian Ayers calls it ‘the finest piece of art known from pre-conquest Norwich’: it is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.37 Even today the main roads into Norwich, like King Street and Magdalen Street, lead to Tombland rather than to the present-day market place. No doubt goods brought in from Europe by boat would be sold here and also local pottery from the street of potters or ‘Pottergate’ area of Norwich.38
Clearly a large town like late Saxon Norwich needed relatively sophisticated organisation. Roberta Gilchrist has estimated that a town of 10,000 people in A.D. 1050 would consume in a year 1,000 pigs, 1,250 cattle and 1,750 sheep. It would need almost two million pounds of grain for bread and a further 200,000 pounds for beer. It would create almost a million gallons of human urine and over 700 tonnes of human excrement each year.
39
The Christian Church
40
One Saxon resident of the Norwich area was Walstan, who became a popular saint in East Anglia. According to legend he was born at Blythburgh, the son of a king, and renounced wealth giving his clothes away and working in the Taverham area as a farm labourer, setting an example by his life of simple poverty. Eventually his parents came to Norwich and issued a proclamation asking if anyone knew where he was. His employer heard this and went to Walstan who, however, died very soon after. His dying wish was that his body be put onto his cart and his two bullocks allowed to take it where they chose. They stopped twice to piss (some versions prefer to say to rest but Eamon Duffy’s translation has an authentic ring to it). At each place a healing well sprang up. They arrived at Bawburgh and by a miracle passed through the wall into the church where Walstan was buried by the bishop and monks of Norwich and many miracles of healing occurred at his grave.
41
Some of this story is clearly untrue—he is supposed to have died in about 1016 and at this date there were no kings in Blythburgh and no bishop or monks in Norwich. What is important is not whether it is true but that it was believed by everybody in Norfolk in the Middle Ages—a local farm labourer became a much-loved saint among the peasantry. Even today two images of him can still be seen in Norwich: on the bowl of the font now in St Julian and on the screen from St James Pockthorpe now in St Mary Magdalen on Silver Road.
By 1066, the city had between 25 and 40 churches for a population of 5,000-10,000. Two pre-Conquest churches are named in the will of Sifflaed, our fourth document to mention Norwich—St Mary and Christchurch. Unfortunately the precise date of this Saxon will is not known but it must date from some time between 990 and 1066. Six further churches that already existed in 1066 are named in Domesday Book: All Saints, Lawrence, Martin [at Palace], Michael [on Tombland], Simon and Jude, Sepulchre. Late Saxon churches in the Tombland area are commonly on street corners: this, together with the regularity of the street pattern in this area, suggests some form of planning. The fifth, and final, written mention of pre-Conquest Norwich is in another Saxon will which can be dated to 1035-1038: this merely mentions a house plot in Norwich. That is the sum total of archive evidence for Norwich in the period before the Norman Conquest.
42
The round flint towers for which East Anglia is famous include some which may be pre-Conquest. The most well known is St Mary Coslany where the windows in the tower are of a typically Saxon style. Others in Norwich are at St Benedict (where only the tower survives) and St Etheldreda. The flint for these churches was no doubt dug locally—some of the workings under Norwich that have caused so much trouble for homeowners in the 20th century probably have Saxon origins. Some people argue that the towers are round because it was difficult to build square towers out of flint. However, it is just as difficult to join a round tower to a square nave. It seems more likely that church builders simply liked round towers. They are found in all the countries surrounding the North Sea, so Norfolk is just one part of an international taste for them.
The discovery of the site of a church in the Anglia Television dig is important as it was completely unexpected from written records.
Then came the Norman Conquest and the shape of Norwich was forever changed.
43 It shows just how inadequate our knowledge of early Norwich still is. It is also important because it can be dated fairly exactly: we know that the buildings in this area were cleared to make way for the Norman castle. There appear to have been three stages of development of the church, the final one being of a nave eight by five metres with a chancel of three metres square. There was a font, which replaced an earlier baptistery. The building, like its predecessors on the site, was of course made of wood. It probably gives a good idea of the kind of building in which most of our Saxon ancestors would have worshipped.
Some of the citizens of the later Roman Empire were certainly Christian and the Saxons would have found it an established religion at least among the elite. During the late fifth and sixth centuries England seems largely to have lapsed into paganism.
Pope Gregory recommended that Christian churches be built at places already used by pagans as places to worship. This is why church sites are one of the features used by ley-hunters to trace ancient ‘lines of power’. A possible example in the city is St Michael at Plea—pagan Saxon burials have been found in the churchyard.
Bede in his ‘History of the English Church’ says that the first seat of the bishopric of East Anglia was set up at ‘Dommoc’ by Felix in the middle seventh century. This has usually been thought to have meant Dunwich but more recent scholars have suggested Felixstowe as a likelier site. The bishopric was divided in about 673, the northern part being given its centre at Elmham. The identity of this Elmham is not certain: some people think it is Elmham in Suffolk but as this is only seven miles from Hoxne, the southern centre, it seems more likely to be North Elmham in Norfolk. Because of the Danish occupation there are no known bishops of either see in the ninth and early tenth centuries. After the Christian Saxons re-established their authority in East Anglia, the two centres were at Hoxne and at North Elmham.
|
|
|
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A History of Norwich
|
Price: £16.99
Add to basket
|
|
ISBN-13: 978-1860770838
Author: Frank Meeres
Published Date: 21-06-2024
Publisher: Phillimore & Co Ltd
A History of Norwich Contents Page
A History of Norwich Index Page
|
| |
| Norwich was an important Anglo-Saxon market town at the time of the Norman invasion, and grew to become one of the leading cities of England by the early Middle Ages. It retained its importance during the Industrial Revolution, maintaining its reputation as being one of the most radical and progressive of cities with many dramatic episodes in its life “ ... too good to miss, either as a volume for your own shelves or as a present to a friend.” Norfolk Ancestor |
1
The Beginnings
The earliest known reference to Norwich is not in a document but on a coin of King Athelstan who reigned from 925 to 939. There are only five known written references to Norwich before the Norman Conquest in 1066 and yet by that time it was already one of the largest cities in the country. What little we know of the beginnings and early history of the city is derived from archaeological evidence and from the study of place-names. Of course it is very difficult to make systematic excavations in a place like Norwich. It is still a flourishing city and the only possible digs are on sites cleared for redevelopment. These often have to be rushed as the developers naturally want to exploit the site when they can. Even so some major archaeological work has been done in the city in the last twenty years, firstly by the Norwich Survey in the period 1971 to 1978 led by Alan Carter and more recently by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit led by Brian Ayers.
The popular opinion of Norfolk is that it is a flat county but in fact parts of it are far from flat: indeed Ayers has called Norwich one of the hilliest cities in England.
Evidence of man in the greater Norwich area has been found in all periods since the end of the last Ice Age. There are few finds from the Palaeolithic era (roughly 50,000 to 10,000 B.C.), though hand axes have been found at Carrow and one was turned up at Morse’s Rose garden in Eaton in 1943.
Low-lying sites in the valleys close to the later city include the important religious centre of Arminghall which was discovered from the air by Wing-Commander Insall in 1929. It proved to be a horseshoe of eight holes that once contained huge timber posts each over a metre across and sunk into the ground to a depth of well over two metres. Each one weighed about seven tons. Charcoal from these posts gave a radiocarbon dating of about 3,000 B.C. These may have been tall carved totem poles or they could have had lintels across the tops like the large stones at Stonehenge. Alternatively they could have been connected in some way to form a tower. The entrance to the henge through the surrounding ditches faces south-west and would have been facing mid-winter sunrise. The henge is close to several burial mounds. Its site is on a promontory above the meeting place of the waters of the Tas and the Yare.
Mysterious deep shafts with Neolithic material have been found at Eaton: these consist of 21 vertical shafts some eight metres deep as well as the usual pit and post holes. The function of the shafts is completely unknown. They could be wells or ritual features or, as Rodney Castleden suggests, they could even be natural—ancient solution pipes into which Neolithic occupation material has fallen. If so, Eaton Heath is a normal Neolithic settlement site with a radiocarbon date of about 4,000 B.C.
1 The Growth of a City sums up the geology: East Norfolk is composed of sands, gravels and clays overlaying chalk. Much of it is drained by the rivers Yare and Wensum and their tributaries, and when most of the plateau was heavily forested these rivers would have provided easy routes inland from the coast.2 The basic reason for Norwich growing up where it did is that given by A.L. Poole: ‘The commercial importance of [towns such as Norwich] was largely due to their position on tidal rivers at points where they could be bridged. Goods could thus be carried far into the interior of the country and thence distributed over a wide area’.3 There is a map in Great Yarmouth Town Hall showing the Yare estuary as it might have been about A.D. 1000. The map was drawn in about 1600 and so has no claim to historical accuracy but the impression it gives is the right one: in Roman and Saxon times Norwich stood at the head of a large shallow estuary, the mouth of which stretched from Caister on Sea to Burgh Castle.4 The main evidence for man’s activity in the Norwich area in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (approximately 10,000-2,000 B.C.) is the finding of flint tools. Flints have been found on Mousehold Heath and hand-axes at Carrow.5 A barrow in the same area was cut through by the Norwich southern bypass. Although nothing was found, careful analysis of stains in the soil showed there had been an individual in a wooden coffin buried here in the third millennium B.C. This represents one of the earliest known examples of an individual burial.6 However Paul Ashbee thinks the shafts are huge post-sockets and that the site was an artificial grove.7
No settlement sites of the Bronze Age (approximately 2,500-800 B.C.) have been found but there is considerable evidence of the presence of these people. In 1979 the Norfolk Archaeological Unit excavated a site within the city boundary at Bowthorpe which air photography had shown as a circular crop mark. It turned out to be the remnant of a Bronze-Age round barrow, dated to about 2,000 B.C. by radiocarbon dating. Here again the archaeologists could detect that there had once been a body in a coffin. Signs of 11 more graves were found around the edge of the barrow. The best preserved of these was found to contain a body resting on a hay-filled pillow in a coffin made of oak planks. A thousand years later the barrow was again used for a burial but practices had changed—the ashes were found of a cremated body covered by a large urn.
The Romans
Julius Caesar had a preliminary look at Britain in 55 B.C., but the invasion and conquest began in A.D. 43 under the emperor Claudius. The Iceni tribe did not surrender easily. In A.D. 47 the Roman governor attempted to disarm them, which provoked a serious uprising. When their client-king Prasutagus died he left the Roman emperor co-heir to the kingdom along with his own two daughters, but the Romans treated the Iceni as defeated enemies. After the king’s daughters were raped and his widow Boudicca beaten, the whole tribe rose up and sacked Colchester, London and St Albans before being finally defeated by the Roman armies. Roman authors disagree about Boudicca’s fate. Tacitus says she took poison, but Dio Cassius says she died from disease and tantalisingly adds that the British gave her a rich burial: unfortunately her grave has not yet been found.
8 Two round barrows, of an original group of four, survive on Eaton golf course and bronze tools and weapons have been found all over the area. The finest discovery in Norfolk from the Iron Age (800 B.C. to A.D. 43) is now at Norwich Castle but was actually found in Snettisham. This is a collection of magnificent gold torcs or necklaces that could well have belonged to some member of the ruling family of the tribe of the Iceni who lived in the Norfolk area. Rescue archaeology along the route of the southern bypass revealed a fine Iron-Age longhouse in this area not far from the later Roman town at Caistor St Edmund.9
It is not known where the centre of Iceni power in the county actually was. Ashbee suggests that their chief camp may have been where Norwich Castle now is.
Venta was the major settlement in the area in the Roman period. The main stone buildings of the town—market, public hall, baths—were put up in the second century and elaborate town walls were erected in the third century. However the story of Venta is not one of peaceful and uninterrupted progress. The forum was at one time destroyed by fire and remained derelict for over 50 years before being rebuilt on a much smaller scale. The third-century walls only enclosed half the area of the original town, another indication of decline. It is possible that the association of wool with the Norwich area goes all the way back to Roman times. There is a fourth-century reference to the Roman army being supplied with cloth from a state weaving mill at Venta. This could be Caistor, but equally it could be one of the two other towns in Britain called Venta (Winchester and Caerwent).
10 It would have been superseded by the new town at Venta which was probably founded soon after Boudicca’s rebellion was defeated. There was never a Roman town at Norwich: indeed much of the Roman material found in Norwich (including Roman bricks built into the fabric of the Cathedral) is probably re-used from Caistor as suggested by the old rhyme, ‘Caistor was a town when Norwich was none, Norwich was built with Caistor’s stone’.11
The Roman town of Caistor, the henge at Arminghall and the hill fort at Tasburgh, which is probably Iron Age in date (but could be much later), appear on the map as a straight line. They make one of the most convincing of the many ‘lines of power’ suggested by ley-line enthusiasts.
12
Roman roads probably crossed on the site of the later city of Norwich. The archaeologists have found evidence for an east-west road running from Brundall entering the city near Pilling Park, continuing through Mousehold House grounds and down Gas Hill to a river crossing on the site of Bishop Bridge. It is not known if this crossing was by a bridge or a ford. The road continued along Bishopgate: this section would have been on a causeway through marshland. It then continued along the line of St Benedict’s Street and Dereham Road.
13 This line is still preserved at Tombland Alley and became part of the much later Saxon grid pattern of streets largely destroyed by the Normans who built their cathedral right on the former Roman road. A road running north from Caistor may have run up along Long John Hill and along the Ber Street ridge, or perhaps along King Street and Magdalen Street.14
Pottery of Roman date has been found in the Magdalen Street area, perhaps indicating, as Malcolm Atkin suggests, a farmstead in the St Augustine’s area.
Saxons and Danes
As the Roman empire fell apart the Saxons invaded and eventually drove the native British into the fringe regions of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. However they probably did not slaughter the British but slowly merged with them. Two early Saxon cemeteries very close to Caistor suggest that people continued to live there after the Romans had left.
15 There have been other finds in the Yare Valley at Eaton and in the Wensum Valley at Lakenham and Earlham, probably also farmsteads. Two rich Roman burials were discovered at Stanley Avenue in Thorpe in 1950: one included three coins of Nero. Two skeletons that were found under Woodlands Park off Dereham Road in 1861 were probably of the third or fourth centuries.16 Pottery fragments and Roman coins have been found all across the city but these could of course have been dropped years or even centuries later.17
Alan Carter and others have suggested that Norwich may at this time have been slowly growing out of a number of small settlements. He postulated four of these called Needham, Westwick, Conesford and Coslany. The archaeological evidence for this is small but there is the evidence of the place-names themselves. The name ‘Westwic’ occurs in 12th-century documents and the form of the name suggests it originated before 850.
The place-name ‘Conesford’ means the ‘King’s Ford’: the name is used now for the area at the southern end of King Street but there is nowhere in that area suitable for a ford. Possibly the name was originally given to the crossing at what is now Bishop Bridge. Until recently it was thought that the largest of the Middle Saxon settlements which eventually became Norwich was that called ‘Needham’ (meaning ‘poor meadow’ or ‘poor homestead’).
18 So did the name ‘Coslania’ (which according to Alan Carter means ‘piggies’ long island’ and could well have been meant as an insult).19 A pagan Saxon cemetery has been found on the higher ground north of the river where Eade Road now is: perhaps the people buried here were living down by the river in Coslany.2021 It was thought this might be centred beneath the later Norman castle. However digging on the Castle Mall site has failed to find any evidence for it. For this and other reasons, Brian Ayers suggests a different origin of Norwich, not as four settlements that have merged but as ribbon development along the banks of the river.22 If it had a centre it could have been on the north bank by what is now Fyebridge—Malcolm Atkin points out that finds at Fishergate suggest an eighth-century settlement there.23
The Danes conquered the east of England after the murder of King Edmund in 869. The only Norfolk town mentioned at this period is Thetford, where the Danes spent the winter in 869 before slaughtering Edmund after a battle.
One of the main indications of the Danish occupation of Norwich is the evidence of Danish place names, such as the ending ‘gate’, referring to a street and not a gate, as in Fishergate, Colegate, Cowgate and Pottergate. Other examples are the name ‘Thorpe’ which is Danish for a new settlement and the name ‘Cowholme’ from the old Danish word ‘holme’ meaning water meadow.
24 This is generally thought to have been at Hoxne, although a few authorities think Hellesdon a more likely site for this decisive victory. The martyrdom of King Edmund can be seen carved in stone in the spandrel of the west door of the church of St Lawrence. He is shown being hit by many arrows and the wolf, which according to legend, guarded his body, can be seen peeping out from a cave.25 One street name in Norwich has two Danish elements—Finkelgate. ‘Finkel’ may mean ‘crooked’ or, as Sue Margeson suggests, it could come from the Danish word for ‘cuddles’ and be the equivalent of ‘lovers lane’ (a role the street retains even today).26
The Danish settlement was north of the river and was defended with a bank and ditch. This has actually been found in St George’s Street but the other boundaries are not known.
27 The pattern of the streets suggests it may have been along the curving road now called Cowgate, but the boundary may have been along Peacock Street instead. Where Anglia Square now is there was once a wood called Mereholt, which means ‘boundary wood’ and which may mark the northern edge of this settlement.28 There have been a few finds in the city reflecting the period of Danish occupation such as a cross shaft with Scandinavian-style decoration found on the site of St Vedast at Rose Lane and now on display in the Castle Museum.29
The Danes were driven out of East Anglia by the English armies of King Edward the Elder in 917. However this did not lead to the restoration of an independent kingdom of East Anglia: it became part of the kingdom of the West Saxons. The name ‘Northwic’ first appears for certain on coins of King Athelstan, Edward’s son, who ruled from 925 to 939. Mints were only set up in ‘Burhs’, the essential features of which were fortifications and a market. No-one knows if the term means the ‘Wic’ or trading area to the north of the river rather than the south, or whether the word means it was the north ‘Wic’ of the kingdom in contrast to the south ‘Wic’ at Ipswich.
30
At last we have come to the earliest written reference to Norwich. This is in the Book of Ely written in the 980s. When the Abbot of Ely wanted to buy land in Cambridge, he was informed ‘that Cambridge and Norwich and Ipswich and Thetford were of such liberty and dignity that if anyone bought land there he did not need witnesses’. This shows that Norwich was already regarded as a ‘civilised’ town.
Danish raiding started up again in the late tenth century. The second earliest written reference to Norwich is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This tells us that in 1004 the Danish King Sweyn ‘came with his fleet to Norwich and completely ravaged and burned the borough’–so Norwich was definitely a borough by this date.
31 Sweyn was avenging Danes who had been massacred in England including his own sister Gunhilda who, Ralph Mottram says, had been murdered in Norwich: however, he does not give any evidence for this.32 Edith Henderson imagined the scene—
Norwich suffered terribly from the cruelty of Sweyn and his warriors. They came to the little fishing town here at the foot of the hills of the Yare estuary; and when they sailed away, the red flames were leaping from the homesteads, spreading from hut to hut, filling all the sky with a fierce red glare.
33
After this raid the Danes came back again and again and in 1013 the whole of Eastern England surrendered to King Sweyn. The English King, Ethelred, fled abroad. Sweyn died in the same year but his son Canute invaded and eventually won the entire kingdom for himself. He was also king of Denmark and (from 1028) of Norway as well: Otto the Black says, ‘Canute is the foremost sovereign under Heaven.’ The same poet has a mention for Norwich, but the battle he describes is otherwise unrecorded, ‘Gracious giver of mighty gifts, you made mailcoats red in Norwich … still you pressed on, blunting swords upon weapons; they could not defend their strongholds when you attacked’.
34
A late Saxon skull on display at the Castle Museum could be that of a victim of this battle. It has a large hole made by a battle axe or heavy sword. The label says grimly, ‘This one shows no trace of healing and death must have occurred almost at once’. It was found near the site of St Catherine’s chapel in Thorpe.
Canute, of course, was much more than a Viking raider. He secured his place in the line of English kings by marrying the widow of his predecessor Ethelred the Unready and devised a code of law based on those of earlier Anglo-Saxon kings. Under Canute, as under Athelstan, money was minted in Norwich. Over 300 coins minted in the city in his reign are known (compared, however, with over 1,500 each from Lincoln and York).
Ships landed goods at the wharf on the south side of the river near St Martin at Palace Plain. There may have been a market here but the main Saxon market was at Tombland: the name probably means ‘open’ or ‘empty space’ and has no connection with tombs. It may not have been the name that the Saxons called it—the earliest written evidence for the name Tombland is in about 1250.
What were the people who lived in Saxon Norwich like? When the site now occupied by Anglia Television was excavated, 130 skeletons were found buried in a churchyard. The state of their bones gives us some clues about how they lived. Half the burials were of children. Of the adults, 40 were male and 20 were female. This may be because it was not possible to dig up the whole graveyard: perhaps some areas were reserved for males and some for females. The age of death could be calculated: 46 per cent of the males and 67 per cent of the females survived to the ages of 35 to 45 years. Very few people lived beyond the age of 45. The lives of these people were hard: their torsos and arms showed signs of heavy labour. Several suffered from rickets and nine had a bone condition which would have meant a continuous pain behind the eyes. These diseases suggest that the diet of these people was not adequate. Surprisingly, one of the skeletons appears to have been of a negress, perhaps a slave or perhaps a descendant of the small black population of Roman Britain.
35 In the time of Canute, England was part of an empire centred on the North Sea. Eastern towns like Norwich must have benefited enormously from this, just as towns on the west coast gained from the opening up of trade with America 500 years later.36 This must have been the heart of the late Saxon town with the palace of the Earls of East Anglia along its southern side and in the centre the church of St Michael Tombland, the richest in the city according to Domesday Book. When the underground lavatories were being dug here in the late 19th century a walrus-ivory cross was found which probably came from St Michael’s church. Brian Ayers calls it ‘the finest piece of art known from pre-conquest Norwich’: it is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.37 Even today the main roads into Norwich, like King Street and Magdalen Street, lead to Tombland rather than to the present-day market place. No doubt goods brought in from Europe by boat would be sold here and also local pottery from the street of potters or ‘Pottergate’ area of Norwich.38
Clearly a large town like late Saxon Norwich needed relatively sophisticated organisation. Roberta Gilchrist has estimated that a town of 10,000 people in A.D. 1050 would consume in a year 1,000 pigs, 1,250 cattle and 1,750 sheep. It would need almost two million pounds of grain for bread and a further 200,000 pounds for beer. It would create almost a million gallons of human urine and over 700 tonnes of human excrement each year.
39
The Christian Church
40
One Saxon resident of the Norwich area was Walstan, who became a popular saint in East Anglia. According to legend he was born at Blythburgh, the son of a king, and renounced wealth giving his clothes away and working in the Taverham area as a farm labourer, setting an example by his life of simple poverty. Eventually his parents came to Norwich and issued a proclamation asking if anyone knew where he was. His employer heard this and went to Walstan who, however, died very soon after. His dying wish was that his body be put onto his cart and his two bullocks allowed to take it where they chose. They stopped twice to piss (some versions prefer to say to rest but Eamon Duffy’s translation has an authentic ring to it). At each place a healing well sprang up. They arrived at Bawburgh and by a miracle passed through the wall into the church where Walstan was buried by the bishop and monks of Norwich and many miracles of healing occurred at his grave.
41
Some of this story is clearly untrue—he is supposed to have died in about 1016 and at this date there were no kings in Blythburgh and no bishop or monks in Norwich. What is important is not whether it is true but that it was believed by everybody in Norfolk in the Middle Ages—a local farm labourer became a much-loved saint among the peasantry. Even today two images of him can still be seen in Norwich: on the bowl of the font now in St Julian and on the screen from St James Pockthorpe now in St Mary Magdalen on Silver Road.
By 1066, the city had between 25 and 40 churches for a population of 5,000-10,000. Two pre-Conquest churches are named in the will of Sifflaed, our fourth document to mention Norwich—St Mary and Christchurch. Unfortunately the precise date of this Saxon will is not known but it must date from some time between 990 and 1066. Six further churches that already existed in 1066 are named in Domesday Book: All Saints, Lawrence, Martin [at Palace], Michael [on Tombland], Simon and Jude, Sepulchre. Late Saxon churches in the Tombland area are commonly on street corners: this, together with the regularity of the street pattern in this area, suggests some form of planning. The fifth, and final, written mention of pre-Conquest Norwich is in another Saxon will which can be dated to 1035-1038: this merely mentions a house plot in Norwich. That is the sum total of archive evidence for Norwich in the period before the Norman Conquest.
42
The round flint towers for which East Anglia is famous include some which may be pre-Conquest. The most well known is St Mary Coslany where the windows in the tower are of a typically Saxon style. Others in Norwich are at St Benedict (where only the tower survives) and St Etheldreda. The flint for these churches was no doubt dug locally—some of the workings under Norwich that have caused so much trouble for homeowners in the 20th century probably have Saxon origins. Some people argue that the towers are round because it was difficult to build square towers out of flint. However, it is just as difficult to join a round tower to a square nave. It seems more likely that church builders simply liked round towers. They are found in all the countries surrounding the North Sea, so Norfolk is just one part of an international taste for them.
The discovery of the site of a church in the Anglia Television dig is important as it was completely unexpected from written records.
Then came the Norman Conquest and the shape of Norwich was forever changed.
43 It shows just how inadequate our knowledge of early Norwich still is. It is also important because it can be dated fairly exactly: we know that the buildings in this area were cleared to make way for the Norman castle. There appear to have been three stages of development of the church, the final one being of a nave eight by five metres with a chancel of three metres square. There was a font, which replaced an earlier baptistery. The building, like its predecessors on the site, was of course made of wood. It probably gives a good idea of the kind of building in which most of our Saxon ancestors would have worshipped.
Some of the citizens of the later Roman Empire were certainly Christian and the Saxons would have found it an established religion at least among the elite. During the late fifth and sixth centuries England seems largely to have lapsed into paganism.
Pope Gregory recommended that Christian churches be built at places already used by pagans as places to worship. This is why church sites are one of the features used by ley-hunters to trace ancient ‘lines of power’. A possible example in the city is St Michael at Plea—pagan Saxon burials have been found in the churchyard.
Bede in his ‘History of the English Church’ says that the first seat of the bishopric of East Anglia was set up at ‘Dommoc’ by Felix in the middle seventh century. This has usually been thought to have meant Dunwich but more recent scholars have suggested Felixstowe as a likelier site. The bishopric was divided in about 673, the northern part being given its centre at Elmham. The identity of this Elmham is not certain: some people think it is Elmham in Suffolk but as this is only seven miles from Hoxne, the southern centre, it seems more likely to be North Elmham in Norfolk. Because of the Danish occupation there are no known bishops of either see in the ninth and early tenth centuries. After the Christian Saxons re-established their authority in East Anglia, the two centres were at Hoxne and at North Elmham.
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