The sleepy English county that was the Dubai of the Middle Ages

With its flint cottages and low-key seaside resorts, Norfolk was once both the wealthiest area of England and a global powerhouse

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How do the nouveau riche celebrate their new-found status? They spend their money extravagantly and ostentatiously. And whether they are private individuals or flourishing communities, what they like to spend it on most is buildings. Expensive edifices, designed to impress and awe. The grander, the higher, the shinier the better.
Today we see it in Shanghai, Dubai, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. In the 1930s it was New York and Chicago. Seven hundred years ago, it was Norfolk that was having its moment. And it was a long one at that – a phase which burned brightly throughout pretty much the entire Middle Ages.
Yes, that quiet rural backwater of sleepy by-roads, flint cottages and low-key seaside resorts was once both the wealthiest area of England and a European economic powerhouse. Comfortably England’s most populous county, Norfolk was home to half a million people in the 14th century, comprising some ten per cent of the national population. Norwich itself was a boom town. By 1525 it was the second richest city in the country after London, while King’s Lynn was eighth.
The money came largely from commerce, manufacturing and agriculture. Exports of Norfolk-made worsted cloth and linens and trade in wool, dyes, timber, iron and luxury goods thrived for centuries. And the county’s long coastline was also a huge asset to the local economy. Its ports had direct access to the most important trading cities of the Low Countries and they supported a fishing industry of national significance. And it was the national leader in sheep farming. Norfolk’s contribution to the 1341-42 wool tax made up more than an eighth of the total for all England, two-and-a-half times as much as that of any other county.
William the Conqueror and his barons had made an early impression, quickly identifying the wealth available in this already prosperous county and demonstrating their intent with an astonishingly ambitious cathedral and castles. And as Norfolk continued to prosper, its own people were also keen to impress.
Merchants and landowners built fabulous houses and financed an extraordinary proliferation of monasteries, established to ensure that hundreds of masses were sung to help save their souls. Sadly, only a handful of those grand medieval residences survive – most were knocked down and rebuilt in the 17th or 18th centuries. And only the ruins of the priories remain, thanks to Henry VIII’s brutal Dissolution.
But the story of Norfolk’s centuries of prosperity is still enshrined in its churches. Nearly all were reconstructed and aggrandised in the decades after the Black Death in 1349. This particular building boom seems to have been driven both by intense piety – which probably stemmed from the devastation of the plague – and civic rivalry between neighbouring parishes vying to outdo each other. Either way, the result is one of the richest collections of medieval churches in Europe built by some of the most talented masons and mason-architects of the time.
Back then, these churches stood at the centre of thriving communities. They were fabulously decorated with frescoes and panel paintings, sculpture and carvings, stained glass and intricate brass work and lit by hundreds of candles. Reformation and revolution stripped away most of those interiors, but the stonework, the knapped flints and the heavily embellished oak timbers of the roofs – all often of astonishing quality and finesse – remain.
Now, those parish churches rest mostly silent and empty. Bats flutter in the belfries, the graveyards are colonised by cow parsley. But they are deeply moving places to visit. The sun streams through the windows onto the tombs of those who financed them and the crenellated towers stand sentinel over the graves of the communities that made them so many centuries ago.
Nearly every village in Norfolk has a medieval church; here are some of the other reminders of the high-points of its history, from the Norman conquest to the Reformation.
One of the great Norman buildings of England, Norwich Cathedral was founded in 1096 and further aggrandised in the 15th century. We don’t know the height of the original spire. It was completed in 1297 but blew down in a storm in 1361-2, but the current version, probably dating from 1485 is, at 96m, the second highest in England after Salisbury. Other highlights include the cloister and dozens of carved and painted stone bosses which decorate the network of ribs supporting the roof of the nave.
Apart from the cathedral, key surviving medieval buildings in Norwich include its Norman castle, built by William the Conqueror, now a museum, and dozens of ancient churches. But it is the city’s medieval halls which reflect most directly its prosperous mercantile past. Strangers Hall, named after immigrant Flemish weavers, dates to 1320. The treasure box of a Guildhall with its superb flint work, was built in 1414, while the Dragon Hall was built a decade later by one of the richest men in the city – Robert Toppes – as a trading warehouse.
The substantial ruins of this 11th-12th century Cluniac priory church and the monastic buildings which surrounded it are the most impressive in the East of England. And the setting in the river valley by this small town near Swaffham is idyllic. On the other side of the Castle Acre are also the earthworks from the original Norman motte-and-bailey castle.
The nave of this former Benedictine Abbey survived the Reformation intact because it was converted into a parish church. It was an ambitious and pioneering building. The great west window (made in 1226-1244), now bricked up to prevent it collapsing, is the earliest surviving use of bar tracery in Britain. This technique for making the internal frames of large windows revolutionised the aesthetics of church building. It had been developed in France only about a decade earlier and was to be used at Westminster Abbey, a few years after Binham.
The fabulous, elaborately-decorated stone keep of this Norman stronghold dates from about 1140 and is one of the best preserved of its type in the country. It stands largely intact and still surrounded by massive defensive earthworks. When you see its full glory as you emerge through the gatehouse, I guarantee it will take your breath away.
In the 14th and 15th centuries Great Yarmouth was one of the fishing capitals of Europe, supplying London with vast quantities of cured herring, which were one of the most important staples of the time. The town was badly damaged by German bombs and now it is a fading seaside resort, but a few relics of its glory days survive, including sections of the 23ft-high town wall – one of the best preserved medieval enclosures in England – which was built between 1285-1400 and strengthened in the 15th and 16th centuries.
When construction started in about 1400, St Nicholas was one of the biggest building projects in Europe. This enormous church, some 200ft long, with one of the earliest “angel roofs” to be constructed after the one in Westminster Hall, is not even technically a parish church. It was built as a chapel of ease by the thriving fishing and trading community of North Lynn, when it was one of the most important ports in England.
Sir John Fastolf, the immensely wealthy soldier and landowner later lampooned by Shakespeare as Falstaff, built this moated castle between 1432 and 1446. Although now a ruined shell, the castle’s 90ft-high round tower remains intact and can still be climbed by visitors.
This extraordinary building began life as an early medieval Benedictine priory which was radically developed in the 14th-15th centuries when the parish nave was doubled in size and the roof raised. In 1447 the monastery was granted abbey status and the huge bulk of the west tower – over 140ft high and out of all proportion to the rest of the building – was added.
A vision of the Virgin Mary in 1061 and the miraculous appearance of a replica of the Nazareth home of Joseph, Mary and Jesus gradually established Walsingham as one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Europe. The popularity of its shrine and the Augustinian monastery attached to it took a leap up when Henry III began visiting in 1216, the first of seven monarchs to come here up to and including Henry VIII. The towering arch of the east end of the ruined priory church is the only substantial survival, but it gives a sense of the sheer scale of the original building.
One of the few surviving of the once many grand medieval mansions, the red-brick Oxburgh Hall near Swaffham was built in the last quarter of the 15th century. It has a huge turreted gatehouse and a splendid moat and is now in the care of the National Trust.
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