Norwich is the only whole English city ever excommunicated by a pope
After citizens rioted against the cathedral monks in 1274, the Pope excommunicated all of Norwich. The punishment fell on a place that was then among England's richest, second only to London for much of the medieval era, and wool money left it with more medieval churches than any city north of the Alps.
The area's story starts with the Iceni. After Boudica's revolt around 60 AD, the Romans built Venta Icenorum, the marketplace of the Iceni, about five miles south of today's city; it faded by around 450 AD. Anglo-Saxons then founded Northwic, the north harbour that gave Norwich its name. Vikings shaped a quarter near King Street late in the 9th century, and under King Æthelstan the town gained a mint whose coins stamped with Norvic travelled across Europe. Sweyn Forkbeard burned it in 1004.
The Normans left the biggest mark. The Domesday Book records 98 Saxon homes cleared for the castle, and a new French borough grew around a market that survives as Norwich Market. In 1096 Bishop Herbert de Losinga began the cathedral in limestone shipped from Caen, cutting a canal to bring the stone to the site; the bishop still signs as Norvic. Walls built between 1280 and 1340 enclosed more ground than the City of London.
Darker episodes stand out too. In 1144 local Jews were falsely accused of ritual murder after a boy, William, was found dead, and in February 1190 nearly all the city's Jews were massacred. Bones of 17 people found in a medieval well in 2004 were later judged to be one Ashkenazi family, and a 2022 paper argued their genetics pushed back the date of an Ashkenazi population bottleneck.
In 1549 Robert Kett led rebels angry at land enclosure to seize the city before an army crushed them; he was hanged from the castle walls. Norwich then became the first provincial city to levy compulsory poor relief, a scheme said to have fed into the Elizabethan Poor Law. Flemish and Walloon Protestant weavers arrived in 1567, eventually making up perhaps a third of the population, and their first home is still called Strangers' Hall. In 2012 Norwich became England's first UNESCO City of Literature.
Source: Norwich
