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

The Parish

The parish of Gayton Thorpe lies in western Norfolk roughly 8 miles northwest of the market town of Swaffham. Gayton Thorpe sits a quarter mile east of the B1153, a linking road which connects the A47 (King's Lynn to Norwich road) with the A148 (King's Lynn to Fakenham road). Gayton Thorpe is a tiny place today, a mere hamlet with just a few farms and cottages clustered west of the church whilst the wider parish sees similar farms and cottages across the landscape. The land here is fertile and Gayton Thorpe would have almost entirely have earned its income from arable farming, early gazetteers estimate as much as 85% of the parish acreage as set to arable, cereals in the main supplemented by beet and oil seed today, much of the remainder consisted of a 200 acre common. Gayton Thorpe is drained westwards by small streams which quickly become man-influenced emerging as the Middleton Stop Drain which reaches the Great Ouse in southern King's Lynn from whence the Wash is only a matter of a few miles northwards. Gayton Thorpe parish was large for a Norfolk parish, covering a little over 2,300 acres it would have supported a population of around 150 parishioners. In Domesday times, however, Gayton Thorpe was large enough to be recorded in the largest 20% of settlements by population, stark contrast to today's hamlet, shared between 4 landholders its assets totalled 9 ploughs and the usual meadows & woodland but more profitably there was a mill and a third share in a fishery. It is clear that during medieval times Gayton Thorpe shrank to have become almost a "lost village".

The Church

St Mary's church sits just south of the notional centre of Gayton Thorpe accessed along one of the roughly surfaced tracks that lead away from the duck-pond. The presence of a round tower in Norfolk is usually indicative of an early church and in this case St Mary does not disappoint, Pevsner points to the two-light bell-openings as being Norman Romanesque and 12th century in origin, below them, however, the lancet window shows the somewhat later Early English style. The main body of the church is, however, later still, the chancel with its intersecting tracery is in the Decorated style and given a tentative date of c1300 whilst the nave is in the later 14th century style of the Perpendicular, albeit it does show quoins of the local carrstone at its western end indicating a rebuild in the 14th century of an earlier nave. Restoration came late to St Mary being completed in 1900 and not making many significant changes to the overall fabric. From the triangular area holding the duck-pond a gravelled track heads southeast the hundred metres or so to a parking area outside an open and uncluttered churchyard with no obstacles for the photographer.