Time Team at Thetford Grammar School
Web site designed by Adam Fielding & Sam Gothorp
Photographers: Alex Blundell, James Kybird, Alex Bloomfield, Matt Green, & Gemma Rainer
The Time Team crew came to Thetford Grammar School, hoping to find a Norman Cathedral and many more archaeological treats.
THETFORD – A Brief History
Most people travelling through Thetford today fail to appreciate its fascinating history, but those prepared to explore the place will soon discover the town’s rich legacy from the past which includes defensive earthworks and monastic ruins of national importance.
During the Saxon period Thetford grew rapidly until, by the Norman conquest, it had become the sixth largest town in England, and for a short time in the 11th Century it was the seat of the East Anglian bishops. Little survives from that period except some Thetford Ware pottery in the local museum and two richly carved panels set into the walls of the Grammar School library which stands on the site of the Norman cathedral in Bridge Street.
The Norman’s left more tangible evidence in the form of earthworks at either end of the town commanding the main river crossing points. Visitors can still find Red Castle, just off the Brandon Road, overgrown and indistinct, but at the other end Castle Hill rises impressively from the ramparts of an earlier Iron Age Fort.
With the foundation of the Cluniac Priority in the early 12th Century, Thetford soon became a religious centre of major importance with six monastic foundations and no less than 22 churches. Most of the churches were in small, impoverished parishes and had been abandoned by the late Middle Ages.
Following the Dissolution, the large religious houses provided a valuable source of building materials especially the worked freestone which became incorporated in some of the town’s most important secular buildings such as the Fulmerston Almshouses (1613) and the Romanesque carvings built into King’s House.
Elsewhere, monastic ruins became converted into outbuildings attached to new Jacobean farmhouses. The courtyard plans of Abbey Farm, Canon’s Farm and Place Farm are all depicted on Burrell’s 1807 map of Thetford and remained in that form until quite recently.
It was only during the late 18th century with the growth of new agricultural industries, that the town emerged from a prolonged period of economical stagnation. This coincided with the a new interest in the picturesque, and Thetford, with its wealth of Medieval ruins, seemed well placed to become a place of pilgrimage once more.
Whereas the river Ouse provided a new economical lifeline, the surrounding Brecks were still a vast track of inhospitable heathland. With the exception of Euson Hall, it was not until the late 19th Century when large shooting estates were laid out at Elveden Hall and Shadwell Court, that the gentry came to live nearby. Earlier attempts to transform Thetford into a spa town and social centre with its own theatre and horse racing, were inevitably short lived.
With the closure of Burrell’s traction engine works in 1923, Thetford was once again plunged into economical decline which required drastic action. It came in the form of London overspill and from 1951 to 1981 the population quadrupled. Thetford’s revival was assured but it paid a heavy price.
The historic fabric of the town centre was ripped apart by insensitive redevelopment and elaborate road schemes, whilst on the outskirts brash new housing estates with names such like Abbeygate and Canon’s Close were wrapped around monuments of national importance. Thetford had been destroyed before by the Danes in 1004 and 1011, and with the Dissolution of the monasteries themselves, but this time the town embraced the new invasion almost without question.
Further Information
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Finds
Chronology of the site