England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Norton St Mary

The Parish

The parish of Norton lies in northern Kent roughly 3 miles west of the market town of Faversham. Norton sits around a half mile south of the busy A2 (London to Canterbury & Dover) road. There is very little to modern day Norton not even a village so named on modern Ordnance Survey maps, the most populous portion of the parish is the strip of properties to the west of the church named as Lewson Street. It is clear that the parish was a closed parish with most land in the hands of a single landholder who restricted inbound migration resulting in no village developing. All was not always so, the Domesday entry below illustrates that there has been considerable de-population of the parish over the centuries. Whilst farming is the mainstay of the local economy it is in recent times that the development of orchards has almost totally taken over the parish acreage, previously as much as just under 80% of the acreage would have been arable, nowadays those proportions are reversed with orchards dominant. Norton is drained northwards by small streams and field drains towards the marshes that line the North Kent coast eventually reaching the nearby outer Swale estuary and thence that of the outer Thames. Norton is sited at around 30 metres above the sea in gentle terrain, toward the southeast a low escarpment rises to provide the local high points reaching 79 metres to the west of Painter's Forstal. Norton parish was one of the county's smaller parishes at a mere 902 acres it would have supported a population of close to 100 parishioners. In Domesday times Norton was altogether a more important settlement, held by Bishop Odo of Bayeux it offered just 8 ploughs and a small patch of woodland but its wealth came from 3 mills and 2 fisheries which made it wealthy holding indeed.

The Church

St Mary's church is one which is only readily reachable on foot, a 250 metre amble along a well-walked footpath eastwards from Lewson Street. Like many small rural churches there are original and extremely ancient features left untouched by later modification, The nave, for example, is a good example of 12th century Norman Romanesque work with a quoin in its southeastern corner of tufa and similar tufa rere-arches in the centre of both northern and southern walls, there is also a similarly dated northern doorway of Caen limestone. Slightly later one finds the 13th century Early English Gothic chancel, a long version of three bays showing the characteristic lancet windows of that period. The latest piece of the main fabric is the western tower, a Perpendicular style addition of the late 14th or early 15th century. The church was not wholly untouched by later work, however, in 1872 a timber porch was added by the Victorian restorers and at or closely allied date is a vestry to the north of the chancel. Parking should be south in Lewson Street from where a footpath sign accompanied by a small notice board indicates the footpath running alongside a hedged orchard to the churchyard. Once within there are no obstacles for the photographer making for a straightforward church to view.