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Landscape, Geology and Building Materials

Norfolk has the wide skies of a landscape without dramatic features. It is, however, undulating for the most part, rather than uniformly flat. The whole county is also tilting gently into the North Sea; lifted up on one edge at Hunstanton in the north-west and sloping down toward Yarmouth in the south east. Norfolk's ancient, pre-Cambrian bedrock is nowhere visible, being overlaid by much younger strata of sedimentary material. These layers are somewhat soft and unsuitable as building material but the most recent of them, the county's ubiquitous chalk, contains particles that are very tough indeed. These are nodules of flint, immensely durable lumps of silica formed from the remains of countless spongiform creatures floating in the prehistoric oceans that once covered this part of the globe. The chalk in which the flint nodules are suspended consists itself of the dense residue of that ocean's marine life and extends over most of the county. Flint was successfully exploited as a construction material by the Romans at Caister-on-Sea and Caister St Edmund and consumed voraciously during the massive building programme of the Anglo-Norman era. The vast majority of the county's medieval churches were constructed of it. The twelfth-century masons working in the region were expert at creating beautiful structures, using carefully selected flint pebbles of regular size, laid in very even courses, as in the western tower of Gissing church. The oldest of Norfolk's sedimentary layers are exposed only where they were thrust upward along a line running south from Hunstanton, giving Norfolk the edge of high ground overlooking the Fens that is known as the Western Escarpment or Greensand Belt. Here, running north-south, is a narrow band of iron-stained Lower Cretaceous sandstone, known as carstone. This, with its distinctive gingerbread colour, is the closest Norfolk comes to good indigenous building stone and it is often used for quoins and other dressings in flint masonry, as at St Mary's, Gayton Thorpe. Used in the same way and similar in appearance to carstone, but with a darker, crustier surface, is the ferruginous conglomerate, a much older Jurassic rock, likewise found in buildings in the north-west of the county. It can be seen in the upper section of the tower at Bessingham and in the ruined church at North Elmham, once identified as the Saxon Cathedral of East Anglia but now acknowledged as a post-Conquest structure. Parallel with the carstone belt and overlapping it is a narrow band of Upper Cretaceous chalk, yielding the fairly durable white clunch, which carves well and was popular for internal furnishings later in the middle ages, but which was rarely used in the Romanesque period and never in the parish churches of the era. Though complex and varied, Norfolk's geology does not include any freestone. Ashlar either had to be imported from Caen in Normany or brought in from the closest quarrries of the limestone belt, such as Ancaster, Barnack or Clipsham. In the parish churches of the 11th and 12th centuries, costly imported ashlar was reserved for doorways and other expensive pre-fabricated elements. The cathedral at Norwich and the county's four other major Romanesque monastic churches, a number of lesser ones and several massive and elaborately decorated castle keeps were all built substantially of limestone, in every case imported at great expense. All had walls, and most also had piers, which were faced with freestone with a core infill of flint and rubble. Norwich Cathedral was built in this way, using ashlar from two different sources: milky Caen stone from Normandy, combined with biscuit-coloured Barnack from Northamptonshire. Much of Norfolk's wildwood had already been cleared for cultivation long before the Norman Conquest, with considerable consequences for the county's medieval landscape. In the north-west, Bronze Age deforestation culminated in the development of heathland. In the east, shortage of wood for fuel in the early middle ages led to the digging of peat trenches, which were subsequently flooded to form the manmade lakes now known as the Broads. Lacking great tracts of dense woodland, Norman Norfolk did not provide the Crown with vast hunting grounds. Royal demesne was relatively evenly spread across the county as a consequence, rather than concentrated in areas of forest, as was the case in well-wooded Worcestershire and Warwickshire, for example. Norfolk is a big county - fourth largest in England - watered and drained by numerous small rivers and by a remarkable system of major structural waterways along which the county's pivotal medieval towns naturally developed: King's Lynn at the mouth of the Great Ouse, Yarmouth at the mouth of the Yare, Thetford on the Little Ouse, and Norwich at the headwaters of both the Yare and the Wensum, between them spanning the county for almost 50 miles, linking its northern region with its eastern coast.

History

In 54 BC, the Roman occupying forces accepted the submission of the Iceni, the group of tribes hitherto dominant in Norfolk. The centre of Roman control, Venta Icenorum, was located just south of Norwich at Caister St Edmund. By the late 1st century AD, it boasted public buildings and a grid of streets. The Roman settlement of Norfolk was extensive, reaching all parts of the county. The network of Roman roads, including the Peddars Way and the Pye Road, must have formed the basis for the county's medieval land transport routes. This part of eastern England was among the first to be settled from continental Europe, even before the mid-5th century, by the migrating Anglo-Saxons. Soon after 630 AD, under Sigeberht, head of the ruling Wuffings dynasty, the East Anglian Kingdom received Felix, a Burgundian, as its first bishop. The pre-Conquest bishopric was coterminous with the kingdom of the East Angles and included both Norfolk and Suffolk. The seat of the see was at Dommoc , possibly present-day Felixstowe. In the late-7 th century, a second see was established at Elmham. In the last decades of the 9th century, the Kingdom came under Danish control. It was eventually absorbed into the realm of Edward the Elder, king of the Anglo-Saxons, in 917. A further wave of Danish incursions took place in the first half of the 11th century. The cultural legacy of the Scandinavian occupation of the region was mainly linguistic in character. The most significant noblemen in Norfolk following the Norman Conquest, as revealed by their holdings in the Domesday survey of 1086, were William de Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, and Roger Bigod, sheriff of Norfolk, both of whom were also major figures in national politics. At this time, Norwich was England's second biggest city and Norfolk the most densely inhabited and prosperous of all the English counties, with the country's largest working population. Yet it was without any valuable mineral resources, had no freestone quarries within its borders and possessed only modest amounts of timber. The factor underpinning Norman Norfolk's economic success was its agriculture; the county was endowed with wonderfully fertile soil, good grazing and the lowest rainfall in the kingdom. In addition, with over 90 miles of coastline, medieval Norfolk's economy was inevitably also a maritime one, and its inhabitants must always have kept a weather eye on the possibilities afforded by the North Sea and the coastal towns of the Low Countries beyond. At the Conquest, the cathedral church of the East Anglian diocese was a wooden building at North Elmham. The seat of the see was transferred in 1071 to a church in Thetford. In 1091, Herbert de Losinga was consecrated bishop of Thetford, having, notoriously, been obliged to pay for his bishopric. In 1094, the see was relocated for the last time, and Herbert became first bishop of Norwich, with proposals for a new cathedral already in hand. Fig. 3. Castle Rising. Keep.

Major Buildings

Norfolk's major Romanesque churches were monastic foundations, and thus, with the exception of the Cathedral, all were either damaged at the Reformation in the 16th century, are ruinous, or have disappeared. Norwich Cathedral was begun by Bishop Herbert de Losinga in 1096 and completed by his successor, Bishop Everard, before 1145. Much survives of its original design and fabric. The sculptural decoration of the church itself is fairly restrained, unlike the series of double capitals and decorated voussoirs that came to light at the start of the twentieth century, having been reused in the construction of the existing Gothic cloister, assumed to be components of its dismantled Romanesque predecessor. Several of the carved capitals bear lively and intriguing figural scenes and are among the finest of the period in England. Norfolk possessed over 70 religious houses in the 12th century, a vast number, even given the size of the county. Of these, at least 14 were founded in the time of Bishop Herbert, who clearly presided over a period of considerable monastic expansion. Admittedly, the county presented him with a fairly clean slate; only the pre-Conquest Broadland monastery of St Benet's at Hulme had certainly survived. Norfolk's major traditional Benedictine priories, in addition to the cathedral, were Binham (founded before 1093) and Wymondham (begun c1107), each still with a largely Romanesque nave. Of Carrow, a mid-12th-century Benedictine nunnery, only a fragment of the substantial church survives. The county's three Cluniac priories - Castle Acre in the north-west, founded by William Warenne after 1089, its cell at Broomholm in the north-east (f. 1113) and Thetford in the south-west, begun in 1107 by Roger Bigod - are all ruinous, their fabric dispersed. Norfolk had no 12th-century Cistercian houses. 12th-century foundations of Augustinian canons were numerous in Norfolk, although the Romanesque churches at West Acre, Pentney, Hempton, Coxford and Little Walsingham are all lost. Of the county's 19 Norman castles, Yarmouth, Mileham, Castle Acre, New Buckenham, Weeting, Norwich and Castle Rising all had a masonry tower. The two last, begun c.1100 and c1140 respectively, are the only two which survive to any extent, both with interesting architectural sculpture. Fig. 4. Broomholm Priory. Remains of N transept. Fig. 5. Marham, Holy Trinity. N doorway. Fig. 6. Sculthorpe. Font, E Face. Fig. 7. Fincham. Font, E face.

Lesser Buildings

Norfolk has some 650 surviving medieval parish churches, an extraordinarily high number which nevertheless represents only 75 per cent of the original total. Medieval Norfolk's wealth and the considerable size of its population were clearly factors here. Few of the county's Romanesque parish and non-monastic churches have survived intact or as well as St Lawrence at Castle Rising, albeit restored, or Tilney, All Saints. More commonly, the presbytery of a Norman church was remodelled or its nave extended by the addition of an aisle. In such cases, an ancient Romanesque carved portal was sometimes dismantled and reassembled in the new aisle wall, as occurred at Larling in the 14th century. 125 of Norfolk's parish churches have a circular tower at the western end of the nave. Until relatively recently, the western round tower was thought of as an Anglo-Saxon form but it has now been established that none of the examples in Norfolk predates the second half of the 11th century. Romanesque sculpture is still to be found at over 190 sites in Norfolk, including some 96 decorated doorways. It has long been noted that a group of no fewer than 21 doorways in the south-east of the county, in a triangle of territory between the rivers Yare and Waveney, are decorated with motifs from the same distinctive vocabulary of ornament, including the double-disc, double-cone, dice, wheel moulding, and jambs with pseudo-colonnettes and elevated plinths. All 21, including those at Hales, Heckingham and Chedgrave for example, are apparently the product of a single workshop or workshop tradition. There are just three decorated tympana in the county, two of which bear an identical geometric decoration. One is inside Norwich cathedral, in the north transept, and its twin is at Marham Church. Most of the county's 41 fonts are simple, square or basin-shaped and sometimes decorated with low-relief arcading. A few, all in the north west of the county, also bear figural reliefs, such as Burnham Deepdale, with the Labours of the Months, and Fincham, with rustic Old and New Testament scenes. A set of four fonts, again in the north west, are richly carved and constitute a stylistic group. They are at Sculthorpe, Shernborne, Castle Rising and Toftrees . The connection between them may stem from the fact that some are in churches which were dependencies of Lewes Priory in Sussex, established by William Warenne, founder of the influential Norfolk dynasty.

Jill A. Franklin, 2006.

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