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. 310
