Norfolk

Norfolk is a shire of East Anglia. The county town is Norwich and other major towns include the ports of Great Yarmouth and Kings Lynn, and the seaside resorts of Cromer, Sheringham and Hunstanton. Norfolk is bound by the North Sea to the north and east, with the north-west of the county being located on the Wash, and it has land borders with Lincolnshire to the north and west, Suffolk to the south and Cambridgeshire to the south-west. Hunstanon in the far north-west of the county is around 45 miles as the crow flies from the Spurn Head peninsula in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Norfolk has a population of around 800,000.

Norfolk is renowned for its flatness, Noel Coward for example declaring emphatically of the county, "Very flat, Norfolk". Although it is not quite as low lying as Cambridgeshire, large areas of Norfolk would be threatened by a rise in sea level.

Long stretches of the Norfolk coast is comparatively unspoiled, there are several important nature reserves, and extensive areas of saltmarsh and sand dunes. The Norfolk Broads are an area of ancient flooded peat-diggings in the county, connected by rivers, that are a popular holiday destination for boating holidays, and were recently declared a National Park. Breckland, in the south of the county around Thetford, is a thinly-populated area of poor, sandy soil, heathland and pine plantations; much of it is given over to air bases and a battle training area for the British Army.

Norfolk is quite sparsely inhabited by British standards (by contrast with the Middle Ages, when it was one of the richest and most densely-populated areas of England), and important industries include agriculture and tourism.

During the British Iron Age (c. 800 BC - 43 AD) and the early years of Roman Britain, present-day Norfolk was the heartland of the territory of the Iceni people. Boudica (died c. 60 AD) was a Queen of the Iceni, and led a revolt against the Roman invasion of Britain in 47 AD. The Iceni's capital city was known to the Latin-speaking Romans as Venta Icenorum ("marketplace of the Iceni") and its remnants now form a part of the village and civil parish Caistor St Edmund (around 5 miles south of Norwich).

During the 5th century, Germanic-speaking peoples had established control of modern-day Norfolk. In the 6th century, the Kingdom of East Anglia (Old English: Ēastengla Rīċe) was established. Its territory broadly consisted of the modern counties Norfolk and Suffolk, and perhaps areas of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Its name reflected the Angles, the Germanic tribe thought to have originated in the Angeln peninsula of modern-day Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. Their tribal name would ultimately give rise to the name of England itself.

Norfolk, along with the rest of East Anglia, was conquered by the Danes under Ivar the Boneless in 869 AD following the defeat of Edmund of East Anglia, who is commemorated by name in the Norfolk place-name Caistor St Edmund). There is significant place-name evidence for a Scandinavian presence in Norfolk, with numerous settlements ending in -by (from Old Norse byr meaning "farm") are found on the former island of Flegg on the Norfolk Broads (e.g. Billockby, Clippesby, Scratby, Ormesby, Scratby, Thrigby, Mautby, Rollesby, Herringsby, Ashby, Oby, Filby and Hemsby) and many street-names in Norwich end in -gate (from Old Norse gata).^[2] Tombland, an area near modern-day Norwich Cathedral, is a place-name derived from the Scandinavian word for "empty". Some East Anglian dialect words are believed to be of Scandinavian origin, including staithe ("landing stage"), dag ("dew"), dow ("pigeon"), grup ("small trench") and stroop ("throat").^[3]

In the late 16th century, Norfolk and especially the county town Norwich, saw a significant influx of Protestant refugees from the Netherlands and Wallonia. The Protestant Reformation had been particularly violent in the Netherlands, as Spanish rulers sought to suppress Calvinism through the Inquisition and harsh laws, leading to numerous executions and exile, ultimately acting as a cause for the Eighty Years War. The first settlers arrived in the city in 1565 and were referred to as Strangers (sometimes known in a historical context as "Elizabethan Strangers"); 30 households (roughly 300 people) were invited to settle in Norwich with the hopes that they would boost textile manufacture in the city. By c. 1600, there were over 4000 Dutch refugees in Norwich, comprising a third of that city's population.^[4]

During the late 17th century, around 50% of manufacturing in England was in rural areas, and Norfolk was likely England's most industrialised county, with over 65% of men in the country working in industry in 1700.^[5] However, the Industrial Revolution of the late-18th and early-19th centuries was a relatively quiet time for Norfolk, which had few mineral resources and as such developed little heavy industry. During this time, it's likely that much of southern and eastern England's workforce returned to agriculture; with the share of Norfolk's male workforce in manufacturing dropping to under 40% and the share in farming increasing from 28% to 51% during the 18th century. Ports such as King's Lynn, which had been important centres of commerce in the Middle Ages, were now far eclipsed by ports such as Liverpool in the industrial north of England. Railways did not arrive in Norfolk until the mid-19th century (over 20 year after the advent of passenger rail in the UK), when the line from London to Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, was extended via Cambridge to Norwich.

The council area of Norfolk County Council (NCC) covers essentially the entire county of Norfolk (although the two are legally distinct). NCC also covers an area of Suffolk, namely that around Gorleston-on-Sea, south of Great Yarmouth.