The name Norwich (Old English Norvic, or ‘northern port’) first appears on coinage minted around AD 930 by King Athelstan. The settlement was developed by Anglo-Danish settlers on a site above the junction of the rivers Wensum and Yare, with access via Yarmouth to the North Sea trading network that extended to Scandinavia and the Rhineland.
The town grew rapidly within the protective embrace of two ditched enclosures on either side of the Wensum, and the settlement was considered important enough for the Norman invaders to have built a castle there in c.1067, within months of the Battle of Hastings. This timber keep (rebuilt in stone in 1100) looked down on a growing settlement with a market and the city’s largest church, St Peter Mancroft, which was founded in c.1070. By c.1086, according to Domesday Book, there were already 23 churches and 43 chapels serving a population of 8,000, including 1,320 tax-paying burgesses, making it one of the five most prosperous and populous cities in England, along with London, York, Lincoln, and Winchester.
The city walls, which still exist in parts to an impressive height, were constructed 200 years later. Begun in 1294 and completed in 1350, the walls encircled the city for 4.1 miles (6.6km), enclosing an area of 1.5 square miles (3.9km2) – larger than London’s renowned Square Mile. Within this space there were 56 parishes, each with a church, as well as a priory that also served as a cathedral after the seat of the bishop moved to Norwich from Thetford in 1094. Additionally, there were six friaries (each with a church, cloister, chapter house, refectory, and dormitory), a college of priests, and numerous chapels, hospitals, and hermitages.
Roman towns and cities: Colchester – Excavating the CA archive