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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.
Laying the foundations
The ways in which churches were founded and parishes created in the Middle Ages is a topic of much research and debate, but the authors of the newly published history of the parish churches of medieval Norwich (see ‘Further reading’ on p.45) tend to the view that many began as private chapels. This would mean they were each founded by a relatively wealthy individual (including clerics) in order to cater primarily to the religious needs of their household.
St Simon and St Jude was founded as a private chapel by Bishop Ailmer, while St Clement Colegate was probably founded by a local lord as it was in private hands in 1100, and St Benedict was a small estate church belonging to Thomas of St Giles in the 12th century. St Edmund Fishergate, St Botulf, and St Margaret Westwick remained in secular possession throughout the Middle Ages. Groups of townspeople could also establish a church: Holy Trinity belonged to 12 burgesses in 1066, St Vedast had six owners, and St Saviour was jointly controlled by two families.
These private patrons enjoyed the right of advowson – the right to nominate the Rector and present him to the bishop of the diocese, who had, in theory, the right to say no, but rarely did. Being ‘presented to the living’ meant enjoying the tithes and the rental income from parish property. As 19th-century novels testify, this income could be substantial in well-endowed parishes and the ‘right of advowson’ could be traded. The founders of many Oxbridge colleges, for example, purchased advowsons as a means of providing an income for their institutions, aiming to enjoy the revenues while paying a stipend to a salaried vicar or chaplain, who was often a retired college fellow. In Norwich, the advowsons of the city’s 56 churches were owned by just 16 individuals or institutions by 1325: the cathedral chapter was the largest owner, with at least 20 parishes under its direct control.
Alongside the creation of the church building, the process of forming the parish entailed establishing an agreed boundary. The number of properties within that boundary and the occupations of the residents would determine the wealth of the parish and the size of the church, because the lay congregation was responsible for the maintenance of the fabric and furnishings of the whole building west of the chancel. The laity might also be called on to contribute to the costs of the chancel, if the rectory was insufficiently profitable.
Tithes of 10% of rents and trading income were levied on parishioners, but income from endowments (the gift of buildings or land to the parish) could make an important contribution. Thus St Etheldreda (redundant since 1961 and now a studio for artists) benefited from endowments linked to a former royal estate of some size and wealth. St Etheldreda’s fabric, however, did not benefit directly from this income: acquired by the cathedral priory in 1272, the revenue was initially given to the refectorer and spent on ‘napkins, towels… goblets, cups, and other receptacles’. Only later (in 1538) did the income benefit the parish, when it was transferred to support the minister at the church attached to St Giles Hospital.
It is far from clear how parish boundaries were agreed, by whom, and when, but since many churches and churchyards sit at the centre of their parishes, it might simply be that the boundary was established at the midpoint between two adjacent parishes, and that a property came within the boundary of whichever church was nearest. Designating a church as parochial probably was the prerogative of the bishop of the diocese, especially where they controlled an existing church or initiated the foundation, but secular authorities also played a role, as the example of St Peter Mancroft demonstrates. Founded by Ralph de Gaël, Earl of East Anglia, the large and prosperous parish was later managed by the Sheriff of Norwich on behalf of the monarch.
Parish boundaries were not always fixed in perpetuity. The construction of the city walls resulted in the enlargement of several parishes, which took in the undeveloped land leading up to the walls. A similar phenomenon occurred when the area around the castle was developed, resulting in an additional 70 properties that were divided among eight parishes. The boundaries of the parish of St Martin-at-Oak were extended on several occasions to take in ribbon development on reclaimed land along the river. Such changes, along with small-scale developments and piecemeal building on yards and gardens, resulted in a jigsaw-like pattern of interlocking parish boundaries.
Evolution of edifices
Just like the parish precincts, the church buildings themselves underwent frequent changes – additions, alterations, and rebuilding campaigns that responded to modifications in liturgical practice, the growing population, and the wishes of parishioners and patrons for chantries where Mass could be said for their souls. As a result, no single church in Norwich is exactly like another. St Peter Mancroft is the grandest of all, with aisles and transepts in addition to the standard church configuration of nave and chancel. Some churches had an additional aisle in the chapel or a west tower, which could be square (St Gregory’s) or round (St Julian’s). Some had semicircular apses and some had rectilinear eastern walls.
The junction between the chancel and nave could take several forms. The standard solution was to build a chancel arch that served like a theatrical proscenium arch to frame the high altar and the priest. Some churches had no division between the two components, with walls that ran uninterrupted through the length of the building. At St Etheldreda, the junction was marked by a high arch supported on corbels, and at St Benedict the nave and apse, of equal width, were separated by a wall with only a narrow opening.
The larger and more central churches changed the most often, since the rector, or patron and wealthy parishioners had the means to enlarge and modernise their building. Motivated by a mix of piety and showmanship, rivalries between parishes no doubt also explained the desire for architectural novelty and ostentation. The former soldier and royal official Henry Despenser (bishop from 1370 to 1406) played a substantial role in several church improvement projects, including the churches of St Gregory, St Swithin, St Giles, St Andrew, and St Helen – the latter was attached to the Hospital of St Giles, founded by one of Henry’s predecessors: Bishop Walter Suffield.
St Andrew was subsequently rebuilt (from 1506), but Henry Despenser’s hand in the construction of the late 14th-century predecessor is marked by the survival of his shield on the east wall, along with those of several other aristocratic and royal patrons. His involvement in St Andrew may seem surprising given that the living was held by the College of St Mary in the Fields, rather than by the cathedral, but Despenser was an important benefactor to the College, using income from those parishes under his direct control to provide stipends for his favoured College clerks.
By the mid-15th century, church maintenance and rebuilding had largely been taken over by the citizenry, with little financial input from bishops or ecclesiastical institutions. From 1404, when the status of Norwich as a county borough was confirmed by Royal Charter, the city was led by a mayor and aldermen, elected from the wealthy merchants and leading artisans. They expressed their pride in their new civic status by rebuilding St Andrew and St Peter Mancroft – the two largest churches in Norwich – in newly fashionable Perpendicular style. St George Colegate, St Laurence, and St Stephen all benefited from the donations of citizens. The various striking elements at the church of St Michael Coslany, for example, including the magnificent display of black flint and white stone flushwork, resulted from the largesse of four families: the Ferrours, Ramseys, Clerks, and Thorps, who served as mayors and aldermen at the start of the 16th century.
Groups of citizens were also behind the funding of new chapels dedicated to popular saints, or built for meetings of the city’s guilds and confraternities. Inserting larger windows and stained glass depicting saints and biblical scenes was another popular expression of civic pride, and Norwich was not unusual in this respect: historians have noted a shift toward secular initiatives in many other English towns in the century from around 1430 to the Reformation. A significant factor was the decline in church revenues caused by the effects of inflation on fixed rental incomes. Even so, Norwich remains unusual in the sheer number and size of the churches enhanced and modernised at this period by citizens signalling their wealth, piety, and taste.
Archaeology has established that most of the churches built in East Anglia during the Anglo-Scandinavian period (AD 970-1070) were constructed of wood. The region lacks sources of freestone, so the flint and mortar walls of the Norman cathedral were faced in stone imported from Caen, in Normandy, and Barnack, in Northamptonshire. For the smaller churches built from the 11th century onwards, flint and chalk were the principal materials. Until the 13th century, flint was largely used unworked, set in deep beds of lime mortar, but the use of squared-up flint, set in tight courses with minimally visible mortar became fashionable from around 1400. The resulting walls of shimmering black are visible today at St Andrew, St Gregory, St Swithin, and St Laurence. Flushwork followed later in the 15th century, setting black flint into limestone or chalk to create geometric tracery patterns.
Several Norwich churches have magnificent hammerbeam roofs, and the timber for this and other church furnishings – seating, font covers, and screens – was sourced locally. Records show that suitable trees were felled from several of the cathedral’s property holdings, such as the woods at Plumstead, 20 miles (32km) north of the city. Constructional timber – poplar and ash, used for scaffolding and for centring arches and vaults – came from local sources too, but boards for flooring and ceilings were imported, ready formed, from the Baltic. Meanwhile, glass, both plain and coloured, was imported from Normandy, the Low Counties, and the Rhineland.
Locally made brick and tile were used from the 13th century, though they were initially restricted to the less visible structures, such as the vaulted crypt under the north chancel chapel at St Peter Mancroft. When used to construct arcade pillars or relieving arches over doors and windows, they were plastered over to resemble stone. Only in the early 16th century was brick used for decorative effect – alternating with black flint at St Simon and St Jude, or to outline the clerestory windows at St George Tombland.
The talent of tradesmen
Because of its wealth and the number of ecclesiastical buildings that were continually being constructed or updated, Norwich attracted some of the leading artisans of the day. This meant that church design in the city often pioneered new and original architectural concepts. A study of the records of St Saviour shows that several different trades were independently involved in any single building, so that the construction of walls was a separate activity from designing and making the tracery to insert into window openings. Similarly, joinery and the construction of the roofs were discrete specialist crafts.
It is far from clear, however, who drew up the designs or managed the various trades – the patron, a master mason, or a combination of both. The authors of this volume point out how difficult it is to pin down specific work to an individual designer or mason, because there was no copyright on moulding or tracery designs. These were easily copied, encouraged by patrons who often expressed their wishes in terms such as ‘I want the work to be like that at [named church]’.
Among the named masons of their day are the two members of the Ramsey family, originally from Ely, who worked for Bishop Salmon in the first quarter of the 14th century. They were succeeded by Robert Woodhurst and James Woodruff, who worked in the city up to 1450. Master masons undertook work much broader than their name suggests. As well as being project managers and architects, all four were sculptors, and the quality of their work is well displayed in the cathedral cloister, as well as in the tracery designs and the vaulting of several churches in the city.
Also working in the city, and again largely anonymously, were the artists who painted wooden panels, walls, and stained glass. Eight of the 12 magnificent pre-Reformation painted panels from St Michael at Plea have survived, and these were conserved and moved to the cathedral after the Second World War. The restored panels have a freshness and subtlety that speaks of artists of the highest quality. The best surviving wall paintings are in St Gregory’s church (now used as an antiques centre) and they are among the most accomplished examples in England – especially the large and richly detailed St George mural, commissioned by the Guild of St George in 1450.
Medieval Norwich was home to a community of stained-glass makers, mostly active between the mid-14th century and the Reformation, when much of their glass was destroyed. The east window in St Peter Mancroft is the one place where their work has survived in quantity, though there is also a panel in the stained-glass museum in Ely depicting parents leading their child to school (possibly from the life of St William of Norwich, whose murder in 1144 was falsely blamed on the city’s Jewish community).
The Dissolution and the iconoclasm of the Reformation and the Civil War periods led to the destruction of the sculpture, glass, paintings, and furnishings that made medieval churches colourful, but the loss of whole buildings began as early as 1349, when the Black Death reduced the city’s population from 25,000 to 10,000. By 1540, 14 of the city’s churches – a quarter of the original total – had been abandoned and their location and character are now known mainly through archaeological excavation. Some of those are described in documentary records as having been in combusto (destroyed by fire), while bombing during the Second World War took its toll in the last century.
This drawing by Philip Williams shows the 11th-century timber stave church excavated by Norfolk Archaeological Unit in the north-eastern bailey of the castle. Recent research has determined that this building is the earliest known church of its kind, and the precursor to the later and more elaborate stave churches that survive in Scandinavia. Image: Norfolk Archaeological Unit
Archaeological recording has been undertaken at 30 of the city’s parish churches and their cemeteries over the last 200 years, most notably since the establishment of the Norwich Survey in 1971. Survey staff helped to establish the newly emergent discipline of church archaeology in 1972 when they carried out the country’s first comprehensive excavation of an urban church at the bombed site of St Benedict, finding evidence of the first church on the site dating from AD 1100.
Several other excavated churches have been found to have had Anglo-Scandinavian predecessors, dating from the late 10th or early 11th centuries. These were built in timber originally, and then rebuilt in stone after the Conquest. One of them was the previously unknown church excavated by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit in 1979 in the north-eastern bailey of the castle, which proved to be a pioneering example of a timber stave-church design.
Future fate
In providing a comprehensive account of 59 surviving and lost churches, of which ‘at least a quarter are of the highest quality in terms of materials and design’, this volume demonstrates that, despite 200 years of study, we still have a huge amount to learn about our parish churches as architectural works and as repositories of art and social history. And, as the nation faces the possibility of mass closure and the disposal of a third or more of its churches (something that has already happened in Scotland and is predicted for England and Wales over the next decade), one looks to Norwich to see what has been the fate of those churches that have been taken into the care of the Norwich Historic Churches Trust (NHCT).
The first lesson that we can learn from the NHCT is that churches need initial investment to make them suitable for other uses, and constant maintenance thereafter. This has involved the Trust engaging in a never-ending effort to raise the necessary funds to maintain the 18 churches that it has managed in the 53 years of its existence. Security is also an issue: it is heartbreaking to read of the numbers of times that the NHCT and its tenants have had to deal with the after-effects of arson and vandalism.
Second, the Trust is deeply committed to access. Some of its churches are open daily, while others can be viewed by appointment with a tenant, and all are accessible during the annual Heritage Open Days weekend in September. This is an approach that is fundamental to any change of use, and any sale or lease of a church should require the new owner to provide reasonable access on request and to open fully for the various versions of the Council of Europe’s European Heritage Days – the scheme launched in 1985 to raise appreciation for Europe’s cultural heritage.
Finally, a constant effort is needed to find tenants, as they come and go, depending on the success of their enterprises: St Simon and St Jude has been variously a scout headquarters, a shop, a boxing gym, and a dance studio, while St Michael Coslany has been a science discovery centre and a circus school. Other uses that have been found for these churches include antique centres, tea rooms, bookshops, museums (St Peter Hungate, now the Hungate Medieval Art Centre), theatres (St James Pockthorpe is a puppet theatre; St Swithin has long served as the Norwich Arts Centre), studios for artists, a training centre for stonemasons (St Clement), a music academy (St Martin-at-Oak), and offices.
Let us hope that every town and city in the UK is able to emulate this model of church ownership by a community-run charitable trust and that enough people are motivated to adopt them and keep them from the fate of demolition, which was originally proposed for the churches of Norwich in 1970.
Further reading:
Brian Ayers, Clare Haynes, Sandy Heslop, and Helen Lunnon (2026) The Parish Churches of Medieval Norwich: city, community, and architecture (Oxbow Books, ISBN 979-8888571828, £35).
