A brief history of the village
In about 1145 the powerful Norman baron William d’Albini moved the castle of Buckenham to a
prominent position on the southern edge of his territory and before his death in 1176 he founded
a town at its gates. He needed to establish a market and trading centre to supply his garrison and
he must also have hoped that the town would attract merchants and craftsmen and so flourish.
He provided the burgesses with a large common (which however they had to share with Carleton
Rode) and to the south a small town field called Bishop’s Haugh that originally belonged to the
Bishop’s manor of Eccles. His grandson, also William, granted the burgesses a charter of
privileges at some time between 1193 and his death in 1221.
The first William laid out the small town, which soon became to be known as New Buckenham,
on a grid pattern of main streets and back lanes with a large market place. The town was
defended by a square moat or town ditch and there may have been a stone gate on the Norwich
side. It was originally served by the Norman chapel which stood in the castle precinct, but in the
late 1240s Sir Robert de Tateshale founded St Martin’s Church on what was perhaps an
undeveloped area within the borough itself. Between about 1480 and 1530 the church was
splendidly rebuilt by the townsfolk and the Knyvett family of Buckenham Castle.
By the 1600s New Buckenham was small but moderately prosperous. The main trades were cloth
finishing, butchering, tanning and associated industries, and inn keeping and brewing. In the
17th and 18th centuries there was also a number of grocers and apothecaries. There was a very
large butchery on the market place - thirty stalls in 1542 - and there were leather-workers’ stalls
and a poultry market. Cloth stretching frames, tenters, were on the edge of the common where
there was also a game place, an area set aside for sports and plays. Inns on or near the market
place included the Bull, the Crown, the White Hart, the Three Feathers and the George. The
King’s Head, originally in the Broadgate, followed in the 18th century. There was a tollhouse or
market cross, rebuilt in its present form, probably in the 1690s. The tanneries lay mainly on the
eastern and southern sides of the town where they could make use of the water from the town
ditch, and the number of inns reflected the importance of the Norwich road, which was
turnpiked in 1779.
The abandonment of the castle by the Knyvetts during the Civil War in 1649 does not seem to
have damaged the economy of the town. Though woollen cloth manufacture declined in the 18th
century it was replaced to some extent by linen weaving, and the tanneries continued in
production into the 19th century. It lost its market, but New Buckenham remained a retail centre
for the neighbouring villages into the 20th century. Fears of decline and an ageing population in
the mid 20th century, underlined by the closure of the village school, have largely been allayed by
new arrivals and by much renovation of ancient buildings, with some in-filling, in the 1970s to
1990s.
Today the village is celebrated as a medieval planned town which has preserved its original
layout with very little change. The town ditch survives on the northern side where it links into
the castle defences, and its line forms the effective edge of the settlements on the other sides.
New Buckenham still looks north onto ploughed fields, south over willow lined meadows, west
to the castle’s eastern bailey preserved under permanent pasture, and east over unenclosed and
managed common land. Its designation as an Outstanding Conservation Area and the ceding of
the soil of the common to the Norfolk Naturalists Trust gives it a special status.
Besides the church and the market cross the town has a high density of listed buildings ranging
in date from the 15th century guild hall (the Old Vicarage) to the almshouses of 1861 and
including a rare Wealden type house. A number of houses incorporate substantial remains of
16th and 17th century timber framing. Many of New Buckenham’s ancient buildings hide
modestly behind Victorian brick fronts, but jettied (overhanging) and thatched houses survive
and the impression is still of compact cheek-by-jowl town houses in the main street with quiet
back lanes behind.
By Paul Rutledge, 1998
Editor’s notes: The Norfolk Naturalists Trust later became Norfolk Wildlife Trust. English
Heritage designates forty buildings as listed, comprising some sixty individual dwellings.
© The New Buckenham Society 2015 (rev 2023)
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