A HISTORY OF NORFOLK 



population during the eleventh century must have been larger than it is to-day. The richness of 

 the soil, the fisheries on the coast, and the important salt industry ^ which gave employment to a 

 large number of the inhabitants, constituted the wealth of the landowners and promoted general 

 prosperity. 



This curious district was wholly Danish in the tenth century. With the single exception of 

 Caistcr all its twenty-seven parishes have Danish names. In the Survey (1086) there is specific 

 mention of eight churches which were geldable ; and at least seven other instances of early Norman 

 remains, in more or less good preservation, are to be met with in the hundred at the present day. 

 In 1368 the archdeacon of Norwich visited twenty-seven churches in this deanery, and the record 

 of his visitation gave us a minute list of the furniture, vestments, books, sacred vessels, and orna- 

 ments which those churches contained. Since that time nine of these churches have fallen into 

 ruins, and the benefices which they severally represented have been united with others, to the 

 advantage of all parties ; but even now it would be difficult to find in the whole deanery a church 

 which is two miles distant from another. It is a safe estimate to make — from the evidence 

 which the great survey affords and from the remains which survive to tell their own tale — that in 

 the eleventh century there were no fewer than twenty churches in the Flegg Hundred. 



But this collection of churches in so small an area must represent a continuous activity in 

 church building during the whole period going back even to St. Felix's day. Between him 

 and his successors in the bishopric as far as building, restoring, and rebuilding the houses of God in 

 the land is concerned there can have been no solution of continuity. Moreover, as a rule, the little 

 ecclesiastical territories governed in religious matters by their rectors, or resident parish priests, are 

 in Norfolk smaller in extent than in any other English shire — suggesting that their boundaries were 

 laid down when the number of landowners was large and their manors or estates were small. 



To divide a tract of land eight miles by six into twenty-seven distinctly marked parishes, and 

 to provide each of these parishes with a church built at the expense of the people, with a sufficient 

 maintenance for a resident priest ministering to their religious needs, and more or less responsible for 

 their social and educational requirements — all this implies the working out of a great idea imposed 

 upon a people in the first instance by a great personality, and taken up with a certain contagion of 

 enthusiasm by those who followed in his steps. The cutting up of the county of Norfolk into 

 many hundred separate parishes, so that not a single acre in the shire could be found that did not 

 belong to some one or other of these parishes may have taken centuries to bring to its completion, 

 but it must have begun somehow, somewhere, at some point of time. The question is what 

 time ? 



The assertion made by Thomas of Elmham that Archbishop Theodore (668-90) exerted 

 himself, and with success, to stir up the faithful to build churches and mark out parishes in 

 the towns and villages of some of the English provinces ' was interpreted by earlier historians 

 to mean that Theodore was ' the creator of the parochial system ' in England, while one, who 

 in such matters is by far our greatest authority, has pronounced of this passage that it is ' mere 

 tradition or invention.' ^ 



Recent researches however have gone far to prove that there may be much truth in this assertion. 

 A careful study of Professor Imbart de la Tour's remarkable volume has compelled me to arrive at 

 the conclusion that there are strong grounds for believing we must put back the sub-division of 

 dioceses into rural deaneries and parishes to the seventh century.* 



It was certainly a measure which Theodore had much at heart, and which would be 

 attended with comparatively little difficulty in East Anglia, where the opposing influence of 

 any powerful monastic foundation was altogether insignificant. 



Here, we are told, the Danes (who had already conquered East Anglia in 870) after the battle 

 of Ethandune and the baptism of their King Guthrum, returned home and occupied and divided the 

 land. I cannot resist the conviction that this curious expression in the chronicle refers to the ecclesi- 

 astical organization whereby the land had already been partitioned into a number of parochial 

 units, each with its well-marked boundaries, and that what is meant is that the invaders adopted 

 the territorial divisions which they found ready to hand, availing themselves of those divisions 

 for their own convenience, and doing on a small scale what William the Conqueror did on a 

 large scale when he distributed the thousands of English manors among his Norman followers. 

 How the bishops of the East Anglian see fared under the circumstances we can only guess ; but we 



' In the Dom. Bk. salt works are mentioned at Filby, Trigby, Mautby, Runham, Stokesby and 

 Herringby, all lying in a cluster within easy access of the Bure. But at Caister no fewer than thirty-nine 

 salt works are reported as in active work. How much the Caister saFwae may have influenced the early 

 importance of Yarmouth has never, I think, been enquired into. 



' Hilt. Mon. St. Jugust. Cant. 115, p. 285. ' Bishop Stubbs, Const. Hist. vol. i, c. viii, 85. 



* Les Originfs Religieuses dt la France, Us Paroisses Rurales du IV au X*" Steele ; par Imbart de la Tour. 

 Professeur a I'Universite de Bourdeaux. Paris, 1 900. 



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