Norfolk still has 659 medieval churches, the densest cluster on Earth
Medieval Norfolk grew so rich on farming and wool that it built more than a thousand churches. Some 659 still stand, more than in any other British county and reportedly the greatest concentration anywhere in the world. The county's name is older still, a leftover from the Angles who called themselves the north folk.
Norfolk sits in East Anglia, bordered by the North Sea, The Wash, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, whose name comes from the south folk. It covers about 5,370 square kilometres and held an estimated 940,359 people in 2024, mostly in countryside, with Norwich as its city. The east holds part of the Broads, a network of rivers and lakes protected much like a national park; the west reaches into the Fens; and soft clay and chalk leave the coast prone to erosion.
People were here remarkably early, perhaps 950,000 years ago. In Roman times the land belonged to the Iceni, whose queen Boudica led a great revolt in AD 60; its defeat opened the region to Roman roads and ports. Angles settled early and on a large scale, founding the kingdom of East Anglia, and Danish raids in the 9th century left place names ending in by and thorpe. By the Domesday survey it was among the most densely populated parts of the British Isles.
Hard times followed. The Black Death struck in 1349. In 1549 a yeoman farmer, Robert Kett, led some 16,000 people angered by landlords fencing off common grazing; they took Norwich on 29 July before royal forces crushed them at Dussindale in August, and Kett was tried for treason. Norwich became England's second-largest city by the late 16th century, but plague in 1579 and again in 1665 each killed about a third of its people, and the Industrial Revolution largely passed the county by.
The 20th century brought airfields, especially in the Second World War when the American Eighth Air Force flew from many of them, and farming intensified into big fields of cereals and oilseed rape. Sugar beet, wheat and brewing barley remain staples, and in 2017 tourism was worth 3.25 billion pounds a year and supported about 65,000 jobs.
Source: Norfolk
