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

The Parish

The parish of Worstead lies in northeastern Norfolk roughly 3 miles south of the market town of North Walsham. Worstead sits about a mile southwest of the A149 road which connects North Walsham with the port of Great Yarmouth. Today's Worstead is a much diminished place, famous in early medieval times as the centre for manufacturing the cloth that came to bear its name, an early appellation controlee if you will, Worstead was a small market town but trade was usurped by the burghers of nearby Norwich and Worstead sank into village status. Today Worstead is merely a mid-sized crossroads village built largely around the church and its plain. Whilst the trade in cloth was enabled by the swathe of sheep that once characterised the county, today and also at the time of this transcript Worstead would have been an arable parish, early gazetteers estimate as much as 80% of the parish acreage as set to arable. Modern developments have come to Worstead, the railway line linking the city of Norwich with the twin coastal resorts of Cromer & Sheringham passes just west granting Worstead a station. Worstead is drained eastwards by the headwaters of the river Ant, one of Broadlands rivers, the Ant eventually turns south, meets the Bure and reaches the North Sea through the combined estuary of Breydon Water and the port of Great Yarmouth. Worstead is sited at around 15 metres above the sea in gentle terrain where land rises modestly northwards reaching 43 metres on the way to North Walsham. Worstead parish was extensive for a Norfolk parish at 2,600 acres within that acreage it would have supported a population of around 850 parishioners. Worstead's early status is recognised in Domesday Book where its population was of sufficient size as to place it amongst the top 20% of settlements by population, shared between Count Alan of Brittany and St Benet's Abbey its assets were more modest mustering 11 ploughs, the usual meadows & woodland and there was a mill.

The Church

St Mary's church sits at the central crossroads of the village where Front Street meets Westwick Road at the enlarged plain that is Church Plain, the ancient site of the vanished market place. At 130 feet in length and with a western tower at 109 feet in height it is certainly an impressive tribute to the cloth-wealth that first built Worstead. Pevsner rightly calls it "externally on of the grandest in the county". The church is a mixture of the classic styles of the late-medieval period, begun in the early 14th century in the Decorated style and finished by the middle of the 15th in the Perpendicular that followed. That western tower, a landmark across this relatively gentle terrain, is a grand example of the Decorated style with flushwork friezes as decoration and battlemented at the top. The main body of nave and chancel is a mixture of the two styles reflecting both the lengthy build period but also some inventive changes during the inevitable Victorian modifications. The latest medieval pieces are the vestry of c1460 and the clerestory of c1480 and contemporary with the chancel roofing, as documented in the church's accounts. The Victorian restoration was done largely in the 1860s and made the usual changes mainly to windows and roofs, the addition of pinnacles to the top of the tower was an affectation too far and they were quickly removed. The ancient market place of Church Plain has ample but busy parking allowing an extended visit. The size of the church is the main challenge to the photographer as there is little space to the church's southern aspects due to neighbouring properties.