history | News from Norfolk

11/06/2025

Robert Cunyngham and Elizabeth Arnold in Crowland

One of the best things about having any kind of relationship with an old house — seeing it, visiting it, living in it, owning it — is the chance to image other lives that have also, over the years, passed through it. Better still, of course — although, admittedly, it isn’t always possible — is the opportunity to feed that imaginative exercise with scraps of historical narrative.

Who lived here? Why did they live here? What did they do when they were here? What did they eat, drink, read? How did they pass the time?

Very often, research is better at generating such questions than it is at answering them. Still, each little tiny bit of the puzzle, somehow salvaged from the destructive torrent of those intervening years or centuries, helps to create a slightly more legible picture, a slightly more audible tune.

If we are very fortunate indeed, we may even be able to catch the odd glimpse of some long-ago drama, enacted here, in this very place, amid what is at least semi-recognisable scenery. We may not understand it clearly, we may miss or misunderstand a great deal of what is going on — but once we have encountered it, perhaps it becomes that little bit easier to spot, out of the corner of our eye, in the dark spot under the stairs or at the top of the landing, the shadow of one of the protagonists, or to hear another voice joining in, just for an instant, with some ordinary, everyday, easily-forgotten conversation.

Between 1725 and 1727, Robert Cunyngham and Elizabeth Arnold both lived at the Manor House in Crowland, Lincolnshire. They remained there for a total of about sixteen months. They were there at the request of Robert Hunter, former governor of New York and New Jersey, and future governor of Jamaica, who also lived there for part of that time.

Here, then, in PDF form, is a very rough draft of their story.

I took the time to try to learn about these three people because the house in which they lived is now my house, and so, in a sense, their stories — and the stories of those around them — are now my business, too.

I will continue to update the link above, as the draft text becomes more polished. The references, in particular, are not yet complete. They will improve. The PDF format, incidentally, seemed the best answer to the eternal problem of how to show footnotes on a WordPress site.

It seemed better, though, to post an awkward imperfect version of what happened at the Manor House, and how and why it happened, than not to post it at all.

I hope, then, that you will all enjoy this very double-edged, sometimes paradoxical, real-life early Georgian diversion.

This is Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Brig General Robert Hunter, former governor of New York and New Jersey, and future governor of Jamaica. He, too, lived in the Manor House at Crowland.

26/03/2025

Pilgrimage

“You argue by results, as this world does
To settle if an act be good or bad.” 

TS Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

For three nights in a row, Agnes dreamed the same dream.

On the morning after that third night, she washed her face, put on her best red damask gown, fresh linen and also a hood in the new fashion, and went to see the parson.

Sir John rarely visited the village, a wealthy little port on the Norfolk coast. His other livings — there were perhaps half a dozen of these now — were all better situated — closer to the places frequented by mighty men and their wives. Nevertheless, he happened to be in residence at the moment, dealing with a lawsuit, an unreliable bailiff and contested tithes. So it was that Agnes found him there in the parsonage, enthroned at the high end of the hall, holding court as members of his flock, more or less welcome, offered up to him and his secretary their complaints, petitions and grievances.

The parson’s eyes lit up when he noticed Agnes at the far end of the room. Somehow the crowd of people — friends, neighbours, relations — parted before her, so that within a few moments she was standing in front of the parson, who looked her up and down, rose, and, almost before she knew it, had shepherded her into the parlour beyond.

“Ah, Mistress Wright, we must speak about that husband of yours, and the roof of this, my poor parsonage house, and why it lets in the rain!” he declaimed, loudly, as he shut the door, for the benefit of those waiting outside.

The two stood alone for a moment, regarding one another. Each thought the other had aged a little. This was, of course, true. All the same, there was a kind of agreement between them, even a sort of familiar warmth, which they enjoyed in silence for a moment.

“Why are you here, Agnes? I trust Valentine keeps well?”

“Oh yes, the fits have passed entirely these last few months. I think Hubert sent you word of him? Valentine is like any other six-year old child now, God be praised.”

“God be praised,” agreed the parson, his dark eyes shining, unable to look away from the woman who stood before him.

“And that is why I must go to St Thomas, the blessed martyr, to give him thanks.”

Here the parson sighed, laughed mirthlessly, shook his head, and started to pace around the room.

“You are a foolish headstrong woman, Agnes. If you want to thank St Thomas, why not thank him here? Your husband is an officer of St Thomas’ own altar gild, here in this parish, for heaven’s sake! Also, why are you so certain it’s St Thomas you should thank? Why not Withburga or Walstan? Or Felix? Or Our Lady of Walsingham, as far as that goes — although if you wish to bother her yet again, I’d advise you, in all confidence, to do so sooner rather than later?

“No, Agnes, you’ve troubled every saint between here and the German Ocean and some besides with Valentine and his business. I have no time for a theology lecture this morning, my sweetheart, my darling, but you also know very well that the grace that healed Valentine — assuming that it was Becket that healed him, which seems debatable to me — flows ultimately from our Lord. You really needn’t travel all the way down to Canterbury — unless you simply want a holiday from Master Wright, which I could well imagine.

“Speaking of which, send him to me, won’t you? I wasn’t entirely in jest when I spoke at the door. The roof over the curate’s room is letting in water every time it rains here. He complains of it endlessly. They are very wearisome to me, the curate’s eloquent, unanswerable complaints. And the floor in the buttery is always wet.”

Agnes simply looked at the parson, who eventually stopped pacing about.

“Agnes, my dearest, my heart, don’t go to Canterbury. Not now.”

“I must go.” Calmly, she told the parson about the dream.

“Oh, very well then. I suppose you want some money for the journey?”

“No, I need no money, thank you,” she replied. “My husband has enough. We’ve done well these past few years. God has been merciful to us. I am only here to seek your blessing.”

“And what will you do about Valentine while you are away?” the parson asked. “Will you leave him with your sister?”

“No, I will take him with me,” Agnes replied. “He must thank St Thomas too! He’s well enough now. Valentine and I will go together.”

So the parson, formally and in Latin — although they were already in a season when Latin prayers had fallen out of favour — offered Agnes his blessing. Then, as she had known he would, rather gently at first — later rather less so — he folded her into his arms and began to kiss her.

Sir John smelled of oranges and cloves, civet and vetiver. The marten fur of his robe was very soft.

* * *

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25/04/2024

Naming names: in search of Martha Moore

This is not a ghost story, at least not in any normal sense of that term. Nor is it much of a history. It answers no important questions. Nor does it make a satisfying progress from A to C, stopping smartly upon arrival, with B folded neatly into the middle.

Instead, what follows is an attempt to know something about a woman who bore the name Martha Moore. She was born in 1603 and died in 1669. She lived in various places, including but not limited to Norfolk.

I can tell you now that her story is not a remarkable one. She interests me, for various reasons, but I know for a fact that others find this sort of thing infinitely tedious. They may well be correct.

A few years ago, I wrote a story in which someone very like her plays a central role, which you can read here.

Yet because Martha Moore interests me, I have continued, ever since, to find out all I could about her — and, having done so, it seemed wrong simply to close away my notes, such as they were, forever. To quote (as I’m well aware that I do far too often) a favourite passage from an essay by one of Martha Moore’s near-contemporaries, Sir Thomas Browne, in his Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk,

We were hinted by the occasion, not catched the opportunity to write of old things, or intrude upon the antiquary. We are coldly drawn unto discourses of antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, or make out learned novelties. But seeing they arose, as they lay almost in silence among us, at least in short account suddenly passed over, we were very unwilling they should die again, and be buried twice among us.

This is exactly what I feel about the various scattered fragments I’ve gathered together while looking for Martha Moore.

Here, then, for what it’s worth, is an attempt to piece together her story.

* * *

Let us consider the parish church of Wiggenhall St Germans, a little village four miles south of the port of King’s Lynn.

Wiggenhall St Germans is in Norfolk, but it straddles the Great Ouse, a large and at that point strongly tidal river. West of the Great Ouse are the parishes of Freebridge Marshland. The “free bridge” stood, and stands, in Wiggenhall St Germans — unlike the ferry service that also conveyed people across the river from at least the 13th century onward, there was, at least at an early point, no charge for it.

Marshland, in turn, was previously a vast, flat, mysterious realm of what might were they not saline, casually be termed fens. Reclaimed by drainage projects in the 17th century, the area is now composed mostly of arable farms and nondescript hamlets.

Until the 1950s, Marshland flooded frequently and catastrophically. Perhaps it will again.

The parish church of Wiggenhall St Germans, with its graceful little tower and decayed brick porch, perches just east of the river bank, a good eight feet or so below the normal high tide mark of the river.

Although located in Norfolk, it’s part of the diocese of Ely. As with most Church of England churches in the area, it’s the community’s deep memory expressed in physical form: a pleasingly unconsidered jumble of absolutely first-rate late medieval bench ends, stairs winding up towards a rood loft that hasn’t existed for almost half a millennium, raunchy mass-market paperbacks sold four-for-£1 in aid of the church fabric, and a light-soaked chapel where veneration of St Thomas of Canterbury has now given way to a pragmatic little galley kitchen suitable for sustaining long meetings on the part of the PCC. This is a village that used to be extremely prosperous and rather self-important, but that is now peripheral, friendly and, often, apparently slightly sleepy. I don’t get the sense that anyone minds this very much.

We will pass by the book stall, the table carefully stocked with informative leaflets, those bench ends with their entirely recognisable depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins enacted in the gaping mouths of large fish, and — as the PCC meeting commences in the chapel next door — make our way into the relative dark of the chancel.

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09/06/2023

Some thoughts on the chancel at St Nicholas, Blakeney

The enshrining of historical ‘facts’ is a curious business.

It is generally believed these days — by all sorts of people, which is to say, those who know very little about the Norfolk village of Blakeney and those who know quite a lot — that the chancel of the church of St Nicholas was built and used by the Carmelite friars who were at that time established in our village. This explains why the chancel and nave appear unrelated, why the standard of work in the chancel is so good, even why the priests’ door faces northward. But when pressed for additional details, silence descends. In truth, the case for Carmelite involvement with the chancel makes very little sense, isn’t supported by the evidence, and is almost certainly wrong.

My purpose here is to spell out why the Carmelite explanation doesn’t really work, and also to provide what seems to me a far more likely alternative backstory for the chancel at St Nicholas, Blakeney.

St Nicholas, Blakeney as seen from the east

The origins of the Carmelite theory

Let’s look first, though, at how the Carmelite story got started.

The first evidence I have seen for this line of argument appears in the Blakeney church guide prepared in 1954 by the Rev. C. L. S. Linnell, incumbent of the nearby parish of Lethringsett. In this he acknowledges help from, inter alia, John Page ARIBA, architect of Blakeney’s newer rectory, built in 1924 and demolished in 2019, all which tells us something about Blakeney’s unsentimental attitude towards its own ecclesiastical heritage.

The Rev. Charles Laurence Scruton Linnell, for his part, was no casual clerical scribbler.

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03/03/2023

The reformation of Langham, Norfolk: notes regarding an enigmatic object of devotion, a church that vanished, and the so-called “Langham Madonna”

In 1086, when the Domesday Book was composed, what is now the little village of Langham in Norfolk — in our own time, a small place of fewer than 400 souls — already had two churches. These two churches stood only about 300 meters distant from each other. Langham had long been divided into two main manors, which probably explains the two churches and their foundation well before the date of the Conquest.

One of these churches — St Andrew, associated with the manor variously called Langham Magna, Langham Episcopi or Langham Bishop — still exists today, under the dedication St Andrew & St Mary. The building stands on a little ridge at the centre of the present-day village, with the land sloping away to the sea to the north, towards a little stream to the south. The other — St Mary, associated with Langham Parva — was located a short distance down the road towards Binham, apparently always outside the main settlement. It was probably the fact of this ridge and the road running along it that gave the village its unremarkable name, shared with parishes in Essex, Suffolk, Rutland and Dorset.

Yet St Mary disappears from the records at some point between the creation of the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, where it features, and the national inventory of church goods of 1552, where it does not.

What happened? Of these two churches, St Andrew seems always to have been the more prominent. By the twelfth century it was a vicarage, under the control of the bishop of Norwich. The bishop also had a “palace” in the parish, to the west of the road to Field Dalling alongside what is now known as the Ford, which may — if one accepts local opinion on these things — have previously been the site of a Roman villa. Certainly Roman material has been found at the site. Meanwhile part of the flooded moat of the bishop’s palace is still visible, set in a damp sort of meadow with horses grazing nearby and some working farm buildings immediately next to it. (Peter Tolhurst, Norfolk Parish Treasures: North and West Norfolk, Black Dog Books (2014), p. 91.)

The ecclesiastical taxation of 1291-92 assessed the bishop’s church, St Andrew, at £3 10s 0d. St Mary, in contrast, where Sir John Cokefield, a layman, was patron, was only worth at 10s. (See here) As for the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, it assessed the value of St Andrew at £4 11s 8d per annum, while St Mary was worth £3 10s 5d. These were, incidentally, both relatively poor livings by wealthy north Norfolk standards. The Valor Ecclesiasticus assessed neighbouring Blakeney, for instance, as worth a clear £27 13s 4d per annum. But then Blakeney was, at the time, one of a trio of thriving Glaven ports, while Langham remained, as it always has been, primarily agricultural.

For a small village, Langham St Andrew is an impressive church. The current structure was (re)built in flint in the fourteenth century, then enlarged and enriched throughout the course of the fifteenth century, with major restoration campaigns in 1868, 1900, 1906, the mid 1980s and doubtless at other times as well. From the tall tower with its late fifteenth century crenelated parapet, on the right sort of day, one can, allegedly, see all the way to Norwich. There is a general feeling, expressed by Pevsner among others, that the 1868 renovation left the church looking “lifeless”, but this seems unkind to me. On a bright spring morning, when the snowdrops are in bloom and the sunlight catches the flintwork and the old render, it’s a wholly delightful, atmospheric place, both inside and out.

Langham St Andrew, as seen from the road running from the direction of Blakeney towards Binham and Walsingham

But let us consider, for a moment, the interior of the church. One of its most striking features of St Andrew these days is its bold asymmetry. While the nave has a south aisle complete with a chapel at the end, there is no north aisle whatsoever. What there is, however, is a strange, slightly wonky filled-in arch, larger than a normal doorway, in the north wall, just east of the present entrance. On the outside, meanwhile, someone has scored into the (1980s?) render the outline of a roofline, and then a door within that. Pevsner thought that the “mysterious, shapeless” arch might signal the existence of a vanished chapel. (Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson, Norfolk I: Norwich and North-East, Yale University Press (2002) p. 584.)

Such “missing” portions of medieval churches are, of course, more usual than otherwise. The parish next door, Cockthorpe, had its chancel shortened, probably in the seventeenth century, and has blocked-up south-facing wall openings. The church of Cley-next-the-Sea, in its current form built during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, straddling as it did so the trauma of the Black Death, now has both its massive, ornate transepts blocked off — indeed, it’s possible that this may have happened soon after they were built, well before the reformation, due to the loss of a third or more of the local parishioners. And as we’ve seen, St Mary’s Langham vanished altogether.

The filled-in arch on the north wall of Langham St Andrew

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17/11/2022

On William Gale Breene

What follows is unlikely to be of interest to anyone who isn’t at the very least a cousin of mine, and indeed might not be very fascinating in that case, either.

This has nothing to do with Norfolk, nor is it a ghost story. It’s family history, and not very good family history at that, because it’s more about what I couldn’t find than what I could. To the extent it posits any conclusions, these are entirely speculative and quite possibly incorrect.

I should add, in case it isn’t obvious, that I’m not an expert on Irish or US history, that this is a casual blog post rather than a substantial and serious piece of research, that I can and will alter it without notice or compunction if new facts come to light, and that while I’m hugely grateful for the generous help and advice I received in the course of putting this all together, the mistakes — and I’m sure there are plenty — remain entirely my own.

The only reason, then, that I’m posting any of this here at all is that, having done the research that underpins what I’ve written, it seemed a bit wasteful not to make this material available in the unlikely event that someone, somewhere, might perhaps be able to derive some benefit from it.

Finally, I am aware that I have not supplied footnotes. In truth, I do have these, in a working draft, but it is so hard to make them work on WordPress that I gave up. If, for some reason, you’re desperate for a reference, track me down and I’ll do the best I can to help.

Finding William Gale Breene

This is the story of my thrice great grandfather, William Gale Breene (1820-1896).

William Gale Breene’s life was not, as far as I know, any more remarkable than most lives are. All the same, he preoccupies me. In part, this is because he’s a problem for my sporadic attempts at cultivating a family tree.

On more or less every other side of the family, I can trace my origins back into the early eighteenth century — and in many cases, far earlier than that. But with William Gale Breene, the trail stops dead. I have no idea who his parents were. I don’t even know the name of the town or village where his story started. And yet this was a man who was alive within the lifetimes of two of my own grandparents. He’s not some creature of the distant, mythic past — the world in which he died, at least, was not entirely unlike the one into which I was born. There is so much I cannot discover about him. Yet at the same time, there are points at which his life may well parallel my own.

Anyway, this is my attempt to tell his story, in which there will be more silences than declarations, several strange digressions, many halting suggestions and few definitive answers.

Making a start

Where do we begin? The first piece of evidence that establishes the existence of William Gale Breene is a slightly unexpected one. In 1845, the American Colonisation Society, reporting on progress made on the purchase of land in Liberia, announced that between 22 October and 31 December 1844, they had received a donation from one W.G. Breene of Dayton Ohio to the value of 50 cents. The movement to send free black Americans to Liberia was opposed by abolitionists, by many black Americans, and even at the time was criticised as being possibly fraudulent, probably racist, and certainly supportive of slavery as an institution. By the 1840s it would have been obvious to most that the effect of supporting ‘repatriation’, as it was called, was anti-abolitionist — clearly so in a politically polarised state such as Ohio. So here we find William Gale Breene spending fifty cents on nailing his political colours firmly to a particularly discreditable mast.

More benign is the next record. Five years later, on 3 September 1849, two children were baptised at the Third Street Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio: William Henry Breene and Martha Jane Breene. Martha Jane, known as Jennie, was to become my twice-great grandmother. The children’s parents were listed as W. G. and Margaret Breene. Their older sibling, Francis M. Breene, had been laid to rest at the Woodland Cemetery in Dayton on 20 April 1847, at the age of only three years.

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20/01/2022

In search of Sarah Harvie

For those of us who feel compelled to imagine our own familiar places in past times, the release of the 1921 census data was inevitably an exciting day. Yet I doubted the new material would tell me much that I didn’t already know about my home, an old rectory in Blakeney, on the north coast of Norfolk.

I knew, for example, that the incumbent at the time was the Rev Robert Gordon Roe, a Cambridge-educated, art-loving Anglo-Catholic who was rector from 1915-1923, so assumed that he would be living here with his wife, perhaps a child or two, and some servants. And indeed, so it proved. Two of his servants were members of the Gooch family, a name that looms large in the later history of the house — a pleasingly familiar note.

Hence a flash of amazement and joyful discovery when I encountered the third of the live-in servants of the Roe family. The census return describes her thus: Sarah Harvie, aged 77 years and 6 months, female, single, born in Antigua in the West Indies — and also, in the language of the census, a ‘negress’.

In recent years, historical and archaeological research has done much to alert us to the presence of black individuals in England, from at least Roman times to the more recent past. Norfolk is very much part of this story. Famously, a skull recovered from a 10th century burial at North Elmham in Norfolk has been identified as that of a young black woman.

Blakeney is a coastal village, and until well into the nineteenth century it was still a port of some significance — not out on a limb geographically, as it to some extent is in our own automobile-dependent era, but instead connected by sea with a much wider world. So I have always assumed that there were black people visiting or living in Blakeney from time to time, whether as sailors, artisans, servants, enslaved people or something else entirely. Few records, after all, even where they exist, are as explicit about ethnicity as the is the 1921 census return mentioned above. So while I very much doubt that Sarah Harvie was the first black inhabitant of our village, the fact remains that she is the first about whom I, at least, have any specific information.

What, though, could I discover about Sarah Harvie, an elderly woman who lived in this house a century ago?

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21/01/2020

Killing places

This is an iron boot-scraper. For the better part of a century, it stood outside the front door of a Church of England rectory in a Norfolk village perched on the cusp of the eastern England, a liminal place where a vastness of greyish-lavender salt marsh softens the edges of the North Sea.

The rectory sat on a hill above the rest of the village. Next to it was the late medieval ex-rectory it had superseded in 1924, and which its design consciously echoed. Across the way and slightly to the north, on the highest ground in the village, was the parish church, a 13th century building altered by major rebuilding campaigns in the 15th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Nearby were the old schoolhouse and the newer, early 19th century parish school with modest 20th century additions. Another neighbour was a house called Highfields, an ordinary Victorian farmhouse that had been enlarged and re-ordered in the 1930s by the same architect who built the rectory — a local man named John Page, who lived in or near the village for nearly all his long life. John Page had also worked on the older rectory, just as he would go on to work on many, perhaps even dozens of other houses and buildings in the village.

Anyone traveling to the village either from the nearby market town of Holt, or indeed from the fine cathedral city of Norwich, necessarily passed between these buildings. The rectory was, more or less, the southern-most building in the village. As such, its tall chimneys, sloping tiled roof and distinctive 1920s Queen Anne roofline provided visitors with their first impression of the place they were about to experience.

In 2016, however, the rector decided that the rectory in which she and her children had lived, apparently happily, for a few years was no longer required. The diocese agreed. In 2017, the ex-rectory was sold to private owners for £1m. After local objections that went all the way to the High Court, the necessary planning permissions were obtained.

And so it happened that a year ago today — 21 January 2019, at 3.14 in the afternoon — a lone hydraulic excavator tore down the central tall chimney of the rectory. As holes were smashed into the distinctive 1920s Queen Anne roof, throwing its red sand faced Hartshill rooftiles everywhere, a strangely sweet, fresh smell settled over the area. It was the resin, suddenly released from all those 1920s softwood battens, making contact with the sharp damp air of a winter evening on the north Norfolk coast.

The smell persisted for days. It was actually very pleasant, as long as one tried to forget the act of senseless, irreparable violence that had created it.

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Category: history