News from Norfolk

Tag: history

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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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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21/12/2020

A note on Sir Christopher Heydon and the Great Conjunction

Not much is left of one of my very favourite no-longer-extant neighbours, Sir Christopher Heydon of Baconsthorpe and Saxlingham in the county of Norfolk, who was born in 1561 and died at the start of 1623.

Heydon was the son and grandson of Norfolk landowners — the culmination of intermarried lines of ambitious lawyers and local political figures, in that sense not unlike the Townshends of Raynham or the Cokes of Holkham, except that in Sir Christopher’s case, the upward trajectory was due to receive a correction in the very near future.

Heydon studied first at Gresham’s School in Holt, and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge. As someone who lives in the Old Rectory, Blakeney, it’s quite striking to me that while Heydon matriculated at Peterhouse at Easter 1576, both James Calthorpe — another north Norfolk landowner and patron of the living at Blakeney — and James Poynter, soon to serve as the controversial incumbent at Blakeney and Wiveton 1584-1621 — matriculated at Cambridge (Trinity Hall and Corpus Christi, respectively) the year before, in Easter 1575. Cambridge wasn’t a big place then, so it’s hard to imagine these young men with their north Norfolk connections wouldn’t have known each other.

Heydon’s university education was presumably intended to equip him further to advance his family’s status in local and national politics, but for some reason, after he took his degree in 1578/9 at the age of 18, it’s reported that he ‘travelled widely on the continent’. Once he returned, he attempted a parliamentary career. It was not an immediate success. In 1586, he stood for the Norfolk county seat against another local gentleman and lost. His father Sir William Heydon, who must have been pretty influential at this point, somehow convinced the privy council to call a fresh poll, in which Heydon was duly elected. Unfortunately the House of Commons then embarked on a dispute with the privy council about its right to overturn electoral results, quashing the second poll result. In 1588, when there was another election, Heydon managed to win properly on the first try — but made little impact on the national scene, remaining more interested in travelling across continental Europe, where restless Englishmen could play out the era’s great doctrinal tensions in actual battlefield engagements. This seems to have suited Heydon, whose zeal for reformed religion was consistent throughout his life.

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