History
[edit]Roman
The Romans had their regional capital at Venta Icenorum on the River Tas, about 5 miles (8.0 km) to the south of Norwich next to modern-day Caistor St Edmund, which fell into disuse around 450 AD. The Anglo-Saxons settled on the site of the modern city from around the 5th - 7th centuries[2] founding the towns of Northwic (from which Norwich gets its name), Westwic (at Norwich-over-the-Water) and the secondary settlement at Thorpe.[citation needed]
[edit]Early English and Norman Conquest
There are two suggested models of development for Norwich. It is possible that three separate early Anglo-Saxon settlements, one on the north of the river and two either side on the south, joined together as they grew or that one Anglo-Saxon settlement, on the north of the river, emerged in the mid-7th century after the abandonment of the previous three. The ancient city was a thriving centre for trade and commerce in East Anglia in 1004 AD when it was raided and burnt by Swein Forkbeard the Viking. Mercian coins and shards of pottery from the Rhineland dating to the 8th century suggest that long distance trade was happening long before this. Between 924-939 AD Norwich became fully established as a town due to the fact that it had its own mint. The word Norvic appears on coins across Europe minted during this period, in the reign of King Athelstan. The Vikings were a strong cultural influence in Norwich for 40–50 years at the end of the 9th century, setting up an Anglo-Scandinavian district towards the north end of present day King Street. At the time of the Norman Conquest the city was one of the largest in England. The Domesday Book states that it had approximately twenty five churches and a population of between five and ten thousand. It also records the site of an Anglo-Saxon church in Tombland, the site of the Saxon market place and the later Norman cathedral. Norwich continued to be a major centre for trade, the River Wensum being a convenient export route to the River Yare and Great Yarmouth, which served as the port for Norwich. Quern stones, and other artefacts from Scandinavia and the Rhineland have been found during excavations in Norwich city centre which date from the 11th century onwards.
Norwich Castle was founded soon after the Norman Conquest.[3] The Domesday Book records that 98 Saxon homes were demolished to make way for the castle.[4]The Normans established a new focus of settlement around the Castle and the area to the west of it: this became known as the "New" or "French" borough, centred on the Normans' own market place which survives to the present day as Norwich Market.
In 1096, Herbert de Losinga, the Bishop of Thetford, began construction of Norwich Cathedral. The chief building material for the Cathedral was limestone, imported from Caen in Normandy. To transport the building stone to the cathedral site, a canal was cut from the river (from the site of present-day Pulls Ferry), all the way up to the east wall. Herbert de Losinga then moved his See there to what became the cathedral church for the Diocese of Norwich. The bishop of Norwich still signs himself Norvic.
Norwich received a royal charter from Henry II in 1158, and another one from Richardthe Lionheart in 1194.
[edit]Middle Ages
In 1144, the Jews of Norwich were accused of ritual murder after a boy (William of Norwich) was found dead with stab wounds. This was the first incidence of blood libel against Jews in England. The story was turned into a cult, William acquiring the status of martyr and subsequently being canonized. The cult of St. William attracted large numbers of pilgrims, bringing wealth to the local church. On 6 February 1190, all the Jews of Norwich were massacred except for a few who found refuge in the castle.
The engine of trade was wool from Norfolk's sheepwalks. Wool made England rich, and the staple port of Norwich "in her state doth stand With towns of high'st regard the fourth of all the land", as Michael Drayton noted in Poly-Olbion (1612). The wealth generated by the wool trade throughout the Middle Ages financed the construction of many fine churches; consequently, Norwich still has more medieval churches than any other city in Western Europe north of the Alps. Throughout this period Norwich established wide-ranging trading links with other parts of Europe, its markets stretching from Scandinavia to Spain. To organise and control its export to the Low Countries, Great Yarmouth, as the port for Norwich, was designated one of the staple ports under terms of the 1353 Statute of the Staple.
By the middle of the 14th century the city walls, about two and a half miles (4 km) long, had been completed. These, along with the river, enclosed a larger area than that of the City of London. However, when the city walls were constructed it was made illegal to build outside them, inhibiting expansion of the city.
Around this time, the city was made a county corporate and became capital of one of the most densely populated and prosperous counties of England.
[edit]Early Modern Period (1485-1640)
Hand-in-hand with the wool industry, this key religious centre experienced a Reformation significantly different to other parts of England. Muriel McClendon describes a Tudor Norwich whose magistracy unusually found ways of managing religious discord whilst maintaining civic harmony.[5]
The year 1549 saw an unprecedented urban rebellion, which unlike popular challenges elsewhere in the Tudor period, appears to have been Protestant in nature. For several weeks Kett's rebels took control of industrial Norwich in support of cloth workers suffering the hunger associated with a deep trade recession. Unusually in England it divided a city and appears to have linked Protestantism with the plight of the urban poor. In the case of Norwich this process was underscored by the arrival of Dutch and Flemish 'Strangers' fleeing Catholic persecution and eventually numbering as many as one third of the city's population.[6] Perhaps in response to Kett, Norwich became the first provincial town to initiate compulsory payments for a civic scheme of poor relief, which Pound claims led to its wider introduction, forming the basis of the later Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597-8.[7]
The great 'Stranger' immigration of 1567 brought a substantial Flemish and Walloon community of Protestant weavers to Norwich, where they are said to have been made welcome.[8] Norwich has traditionally been the home of various dissident minorities, notably the French Huguenotand the Belgian Walloon communities in the 16th and 17th centuries. The merchant's house—now a museum—which was their earliest base in the city is still known as 'Strangers' Hall'. It seems that the Strangers were integrated into the local community without a great deal of animosity, at least among the business fraternity who had the most to gain from their skills. The arrival of the Strangers in Norwich bolstered trade with mainland Europe, fostering a movement toward religious reform and radical politics in the city.
The Norwich Canary was first introduced into England by Flemish refugees fleeing from Spanish persecution in the 16th century. They brought with them not only advanced techniques in textile working but also their pet canaries, which they began to breed locally,the little yellow bird eventually to become, in the 20th century, the city's most beloved mascot. The canary is the emblem of the city's football club, Norwich City F.C., nicknamed "The Canaries".
Printing was introduced to the city by Anthony de Solempne, one of the 'Strangers' in 1567 but did not become established and had died out by about 1572.[9]
[edit]English Civil Wars to Victorian Era
Across the Eastern Counties Cromwell's powerful Eastern Association was eventually dominant. However, to begin with, there had been a large element of Royalist sympathy within Norwich, which seems to have experienced a continuity of its two-sided political tradition throughout the civil-war period. Bishop Matthew Wrenn was a forceful supporter of Charles I; nonetheless Parliamentary recruitment took hold, and a strong Royalist party was stifled by a lack of commitment from the aldermen, and isolation from Royalist-held regions.[10] Serious inter-factional disturbances culminated in 'The Great Blow' of 1648 when Parliamentary forces tried to quell a Royalist riot. The latter's gunpowder was set off by accident in the city centre, causing mayhem. (According to Hopper qv, the explosion 'ranks among the largest of the century'.)Stoutly defended though East Anglia was by the parliamentary army, there are said to have been pubs in Norwich where the King's health was still drunk and the name of the Protector sung to ribald verse.
At the cost of some discomfort to the Mayor, a Royalist, and the bishop, Joseph Hall, a moderate, was targeted because of his position as bishop.[citation needed]
Distinguishing Norwich in the period following the Restoration of 1660 and throughout the ensuing century was that it was the golden age of its cloth industry, comparable only to those of the West Country and Yorkshire.[11] But unlike other cloth-manufacturing regions, Norwich weaving brought greater urbanisation; being substantially concentrated in the surrounds of the city itself, creating an urban society, with features such as leisure time, alehouses, and other public fora which provided opportunities for debate and argument.[12]
Writing of the early-18th century Pound describes the city's rich cultural life, the winter-theatre season, the festivities accompanying the summer assizes, and other popular entertainments. Norwich was the wealthiest town in England with a sophisticated poor-relief system, and a large influx of foreign refugees.[13] Despite having suffered severe episodes of plague, the city had a population of almost 30,000. Whilst this made Norwich unique in England it placed her in the company of about fifty cities in Europe. In some, like Lyon or Dresden, this was, as in the case of Norwich, linked to an important proto-industry, such as textiles or china pottery; in some, such as Vienna, Madrid or Dublin,to the city's status as an administrative capital; in others such as Antwerp, Marseilles or Cologne to its positioning on an important trade route of sea or river.[14]
However Norwich of the late-17th century was as ever riven politically. Humphrey Prideaux, dean of the cathedral in 1681, described 'two factions, Whig and Tory...and both contend for their way with the utmost violence'.[15] Nor did the city accept the outcome of the 1688Glorious Revolution with a unified voice. The pre-eminent citizen, Bishop William Lloyd, would not take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs. One report has it that in 1704 the landlord of Fowler's alehouse 'with a glass of beer in hand, went down on his knees and drank a health to James the third, wishing the Crowne (sic) well and settled on his head'[16] 'Never was a city in the miserable kingdom so wretchedly divided as this' said the London Post.[17]
In 1716, at a play at the New Inn, the Pretender was cheered and the audience booed and hissed every time King George's name was mentioned. In 1722 supporters of the king were said to be 'hiss'd at and curst as they go in the streets', and in 1731 'a Tory mobb, in a great body, went through several parts of this city, in a riotous manner, cursing and abusing such as they knew to be friends of the government'.[18]But the Whigs gradually gained control and by the 1720s they had successfully petitioned parliament to allow all adult males working in the textile industry to take up the freedom, on the correct assumption that they would vote Whig. But it had the effect of boosting the city's popular Jacobitism, says Knights (qv),and contests of the kind described continued in Norwich well into a period in which political stability had been discerned at a national level, and the city's Jacobitism perhaps only ended from 1745, well after it had ceased to be a significant movement outside of Scotland.[19] Despite the Highlanders reaching Derby, and Norwich citizens mustering themselves into an association to protect the city, some Tories refused and the vestry of St Peter Mancroft resolved that it would not ring its bells to summon the defence. But it was the end of the road for Norwich Jacobites, and the Whigs organised a massive celebration following Culloden.[20]
What the events of this period illustrate is that precursory to an organised radical movement Norwich had had a strong tradition of popular protest favouring Church and Stuarts and attached to the street and alehouse. Knights qv tells how in 1716 the mayoral election had ended in a riot, 'with both sides throwing 'brick-ends and great paving stones' at each other.[21] A renowned Jacobite watering-hole, the Blue Bell Inn(nowadays The Bell Hotel), owned in the early-18th century by the high-church Helwys family, in the 1790s became the central rendez-vouspoint of the Norwich Revolution Society![22]
Britain's first provincial newspaper, the Norwich Post , had been published in 1701. By 1726 there were rival Whig and Tory presses and even in mid-century some parishes had three quarters of the males as literate.[23] In Norwich alehouses 281 clubs and societies met in 1701, and at least 138 more were formed before 1758. The Theatre Royal had opened in 1758 adding to the city's stage productions in inns, and puppet shows in rowdy alehouses.[24] In 1750 Norwich could boast nine booksellers and after 1780 a 'growing number of circulating and subscription libraries'.[25] Knights says: '[All this] made for a lively political culture, in which independence from governmental lines was particularly strong, evident in campaigns against the war with America and for reform...in which trade and the impact of war with Revolutionary France were key ingredients. The open and contestable structure of local government, the press, the clubs and societies, and dissent all ensured that politics overlapped with communities bound by economics, religion, ideology and print in a world in which public opinion could not be ignored.'[26]
Amidst this metropolitan culture the city burghers had built a sophisticated political structure. Freemen, who not only had the right to trade but to vote at elections, numbered about 2,000 in 1690, rising to over 3,300 by the mid-1730s. With growth partly the result of political manipulation, their numbers did at one point reach one third of the adult male population.[27] This was notoriously the age of 'rotten' and 'pocket' boroughs, and Norwich was unusual in having such a high proportion of its citizens able to vote. 'Of the political centres where the Jacobin propaganda had penetrated most deeply', says E.P.Thompson, 'only Norwich and Nottingham had a franchise deep enough to allow radicals to make use of the electoral process.'[28] 'Apart from London, Norwich was probably still the largest of those boroughs which were democratically governed', says Jewson, describing other towns under the control of a single fiefdom. In Norwich, he says, a powerful Anglican Establishment, symbolised by the Cathedral and the great church of St Peter Mancroft was matched by scarcely less powerful congeries of Dissenters headed by the wealthy literate body [of Unitarians] worshipping at the Octagon Chapel.'[29]
Moreover in the midst of political disorders of the late-18th century, Norwich intellectual life flourished. And it contained one, so far unmentioned, characteristic. Harriet Martineau writes of the city's literati of the period, which included such people as William Taylor, one of the first German scholars in England. The city 'boasted of her intellectual supper-parties, where, amidst a pedantry which would now make laughter hold both his sides, there was much that was pleasant and salutary: and finally she called herself The Athens of England.[30]
Notwithstanding Norwich's hitherto industrial prosperity, by the 1790s the wool trade was experiencing intense competition. It came from both Yorkshire woollens, and increasingly from Lancashire cottons. The effects were aggravated by the loss of continental markets after Britain went to war with France in 1793.[31] The early-19th century would see deindustrialisation accompanied by bitter squabbles. The 1820s would be marked with wage cuts and personal recrimination against owners. Thus amid the rich commercial and cultural heritage that was its recent past, there lurked in the alleys of 1790s Norwich an unwelcome stranger, incipient decline; exacerbated by a serious trade recession.
As early in the war as 1793 a major city manufacturer and government supporter, Robert Harvey, had complained of low order books, languid trade and a doubling of the poor rate.[32] As with many generations of their Norwich forbears, the hungry poor took their complaints on to the streets. Hayes describes a meeting of 200 people in a Norwich public house, at which 'Citizen Stanhope' spoke.[33] The gathering is said to have '[roared its] applause at Stanhope's declaration that the Ministers, unless they changed their policy ' deserved to have their heads brought to the block; - and if there was a people still in England, the event might turn out to be so.' Hayes says that 'the outbreak of war, in bringing the worsted manufacture almost to a standstill and so plunging the mass of the Norwich weavers into sudden distress made it almost inevitable that a crude appeal to working-class resentment should take the place of a temperate process of education which the earliest reformers had intended'.[34]
However by 1795 it was not just the Norwich rabble which was causing the government concern. In April that year the Norwich Patriotic Society was established, its manifesto declaring 'that the great end of civil society was general happiness; that every individual...had a right to share in the government...'[35] In December the price of bread reached its highest yet, and in May 1796, when William Windham was forced to seek re-election following his appointment as war secretary, he only just held his seat.[36] Amid the same disorder and violence as was often the case with Norwich elections, it was only by the narrowest of margins that the radical Bartlett Gurney, campaigning on the platform of: 'Peace and Gurney - No More War - No more Barley Bread'failed to unseat him.[37]
Though informed by issues of recent national importance, the vibrant two-sided political culture of Norwich in the 1790s cannot be totally disconnected from local tradition.Two features stand out from a political continuum of three centuries. The first is the dichotomous power balance. From at least the time of the Reformation, there is a record of Norwich as a 'two-party city'. In the mid-16th century the weaving parishes actually fell under the control of opposition forces, as Kett's rebels held the north of the river, in support of poor cloth workers.
Secondly there does seem to be some case for saying that with this tradition of two-sided disputation, the city had over a long period of time developed an infrastructure, evident in her many cultural and institutional networks of politics, religion, society, news media and the arts, whereby argument could be managed short of outright confrontation. indeed at a time of hunger and tension on the Norwich streets, with the alehouse crowds ready to have 'a Minister's head brought to the block', that, unusually in England, the Anglican and Dissenting clergy were doing their best to conduct a collegiate dialogue, seeking common ground, and reinforcing the same well-mannered civic tradition of consensus as that illustrated by historians of earlier periods.
In 1797 Thomas Bignold, a 36-year-old wine merchant and banker, founded the first Norwich Union Society. Some years earlier, when he moved from Kent to Norwich, Bignold had been unable to find anyone willing to insure him against the threat from highwaymen. With the entrepreneurial thought that nothing was impossible, and aware that in a city built largely of wood the threat of fire was uppermost in people's minds, Bignold formed the "Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire". The new business, which became known as the Norwich Union Fire Insurance Office, was a "mutual" enterprise. Norwich Union was later to become the country's largest insurance giant.
From earliest times, Norwich was a centre of textile manufacture. Towards the end of the 18th century, in the 1780s, the manufacture of Norwich shawls became an important industry[38] and remained so for nearly one hundred years. The shawls were a high-quality fashion product and rivalled those made in other towns such as Paisley (which entered shawl manufacture in about 1805, some 20 or more years after Norwich). With changes in women's fashion in the later Victorian period, the popularity of shawls declined and eventually manufacture ceased. Examples of Norwich shawls are now highly sought after by collectors of textiles.[39]
Until the Industrial Revolution, as the capital of England's most populous and prosperous county, Norwich vied with Bristol as England'ssecond city.
Norwich's geographical isolation was such that until 1845 when a railway connection was established, it was often quicker to travel toAmsterdam by boat than to London.<citation needed> The railway was introduced to Norwich by Morton Peto, who also built the line to Great Yarmouth.
From 1808 to 1814 Norwich hosted a station in the shutter telegraph chain which connected the Admiralty in London to its naval ships in the port of Great Yarmouth.
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