England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Welborne All Saints

The Parish

The parish of Welborne lies in central Norfolk roughly 6 miles southeast of the market town of East Dereham. Welborne sits about 2 1/2 miles south of the A47 cross-Norfolk road linking King's Lynn with the city of Norwich. Welborne is a tiny place, little more than a hamlet and these days has become little more than a southeastern extension of its larger neighbour Mattishall which has expanded in modern times. Most properties are gathered around a T-junction at the western end of Church Road with a few more at its eastern end wherein sits the church and school. Like most Norfolk villages Welborne is an arable farming settlement with cereals augmented by beet and oil-seed dominant crops today whereas a rotational system would have applied at the time of this transcript. Welborne sits upon a gentle rise which forms the watershed between the Yare and Tud rivers both of which take water east, the Tud joining the Wensum, before merging east of Norwich, the Yare heads to the eastern coast and the North Sea arriving through the port of Great Yarmouth. Welborne is sited at around 50 metres above the sea in gentle terrain where a local spot-height of 63 metres to its southwest marks the highest ground for some distance. Covering just 738 acres Welborne parish was one of a number of smaller parishes in this area which was more densely populated in early medieval times than today, that acreage supported a population of around 200 parishioners at the time of this transcript. In Domesday times Welborne was a holding of William de Warenne and a typical small rural settlement of those times offering just 4 ploughs and small meadow as assets.

The Church

All Saints' church sits at the eastern end of the west to east running Church Road tucked away behind its church-like village school in flint of 1847. The presence of a round tower in East Anglia is usually indicative of an early church and Pevsner tells us that this is the case here with the round western tower dateable to the 12th century Norman Romanesque period. Its blank walls, broken only by two lancet windows necessitated the odd piercing of the conical top by 4 lucarnes to act as sound-holes for the bells, work done in Victorian times. Pevsner indicates that the western wall of the nave probably even pre-dates the tower the walling being rather thick which would possibly place it to the 11th century. Dating of the rest of the nave is rather uncertain but 15th century work can be found with the southern porch in a Perpendicular styling. The eastern end has had a more chequered history, the medieval version having been replaced in 1671 before that too was replaced by the Victorian restoration of 1874-6. Parking for the church is simple around a small triangular green outside the lychgate, for the photographer, however, matters become rather more complicated as the churchyard is extremely compact and tightly surrounded by close-set trees removing most of the favoured angles from the portfolio and making for much head-scratching to obtain adequate images.