Years ago, someone told me Norwich had 52 churches (one for each Sunday of the year) and 365 pubs (one for each day of the year).  An interesting fact I probably would have thought no more of, had it not been for discovering my own ancestral roots in that beautiful city.

My 3xG grandfather, Thomas, was from Norwich, and it was there that he met and married my 3xG grandmother (not a local).  They had five children before moving to Yorkshire, where a further nine children would follow.  In the 1861 census their daughter Emily, now in Leeds, gave what at first I considered a strange response to the question about place of birth: ‘Norfolk St Martin Norwich’.  A church…?  Why on earth would she give as her birthplace the name of the church where, presumably, she was baptised?

I suspect some of you will already know the answer – particularly if you have ancestral or other connections to historic towns like Winchester, York and Exeter.  But to me it was a puzzle; and to find the explanation we first have to go back to the 11^th century.  It seems towns which developed at that time tend to have many small parishes, while those developing just 100 years later are more likely to have one large parish.

Norwich dates from Saxon times.  At the time of the Norman Conquest it was one of the largest towns in England with a population of over 5,000.  When the city walls were built (1280-1340), enclosing an area a little over one square mile, the population had increased to 10,000 people.  And yet, records show that there were around 58 churches – far more than required to accommodate the worshipping needs of a population that size.  A fascinating map, created using contemporary documents, shows the original churches of Norwich existing during the 13^th century or earlier.

This was of course before the English Reformation.  The Church of Rome had taken hold, but the old ways of thinking were not yet forgotten.  This preference for many parishes may be explained by the practice of cults of specific saints, each bringing protection in the event of specific circumstances.  Hence the greater the number of saints venerated, the greater the protection.  Note too, the number of churches dedicated to Anglo Saxon or Celtic saints – e.g. Edmund, Etheldreda and Ethelbert (actually East Anglian), Cuthbert, Swithun.  There is comfort and strength in familiarity.

Those pre-13^th century churches are not the same buildings that exist today.  Their present-day counterparts were mostly built in the 15th century.  I’ll say more about them in a later post, but an 1819 map shows that they were built on the same sites and tended to retain the same dedications.  As you can see, as at 1819, only 36 churches are shown.  Several had been demolished in the 16^th century.  Prior to that there had at one time or other been as many as 63.  The number of pubs given in that old local saying is inaccurate too: there were, at one time, more than 500.  So, for balance, I give you an 1892 Drinker’s Map!

Of course none of this explains why my 3xG aunt Emily felt the need to record the scene of her baptism on the census.

The answer is all connected with the topic of my last post: the parish.  If I had only known it back then, Emily was flagging up that, at the time of her birth – 1829 – it was the parish that had responsibility for recording the population, and in so doing it exercised not only spiritual but also secular control.  In Norwich, as in Lincoln and York (47 parishes each), Oxford (20 parishes), Exeter (29), Thetford (22), Winchester (57), Canterbury (17) and the City of London (a whopping 126 parishes in the square mile!) it really would have mattered which parish you had been born in, or had in some other way since birth achieved legal ‘settled’ status.  It was the parish where you had settlement rights that had a duty to provide if you fell on hard times.  Even though my 3xG aunt Emily had long since left Norwich, it would have been natural to think of her origins not in the city as a whole but in the Norwich parish of St Martin at Oak.

That list of towns in the paragraph above is not exhaustive.  You may have ancestral ties to another town with a similar parish arrangement; and if so, what follows applies to your research too.

For us as genealogists, there are two points to come out of this:
The first is a bit of a pain.  It was the individual parishes that kept records, and these records are still arranged at county record offices by parish.  Therefore if you find yourself in the local archives looking for 18^th century records relating to an ancestor from Norwich, York, Lincoln, Exeter, London, etc you may have to look through many sets of parish records before you find them.  (I do indeed have an ancestor known only to have been born in ‘London, Middlesex’, circa 1816….. horrors!)  Even if you have information, if your ancestor moved around within the city, you may have to look at the records of several parishes.

The second point is much nicer.  Clearly, these parishes covered a very small, if densely populated, geographical area.  In the absence of records with street names and addresses, through these various sets of parish records we can see more or less where our ancestors lived at different stages of their lives.  Hence I can use baptism, marriage and burial records to see that my 4xG grandmother, Hannah, was born in Norwich in St James Pockthorpe, was living in St Peter Mancroft when she married, and thereafter lived in a total of five parishes all within a quarter of a mile of that, eventually dying in the parish of All Saints.

One final point – and maybe it’s just me – but I love the names of these old churches!  They tell us so much about the history of the place, from the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic saints outlined above; to St Mary Unbrent: properly called ‘St Mary in combusto loco’, or ‘in that part of the city burnt in the great fire of 1004’; to St John Maddermarket – one of my favourites, since it refers to the market selling madder and other natural dyestuffs for use in the local production of woollen cloth.

PS. I’ve started a new category with this post: Intermediate genealogy skills, since I think if you get to the stage of researching parish records in the county archives you’ve definitely moved on from Beginner.  Whatever stage you’re at in your family research – happy hunting!