Hingham, Norfolk
Hingham, Norfolk
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1758354

Hingham, Norfolk

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1758354

Hingham, Norfolk

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Hingham, Norfolk

Hingham is a market town and civil parish in mid-Norfolk, England. The civil parish covers an area of 14.98 km2 (5.78 sq mi) and had a population of 2,543 in 1,184 households at the 2021 census.

Grand architecture surrounds the historic market place and town greens. According to an 18th-century source, a fire destroyed many of the town's buildings, leading the better-off local families to build the handsome Georgian homes for which the town is known. The same source claims that the Hingham gentry were "so fashionable in their dress that the town is called by the neighbours 'Little London'".

Hingham is 13 miles (21 km) west from Norwich, Norfolk's county town. While many Hingham people now work in Norwich, commuting by car or bus, the town has maintained a range of shops and businesses in its historic streets and an industrial estate on Ironside Way. Despite the influence and attractions of Norwich, an active and independent town life continues to thrive and grow in Hingham. A fair visits every year, setting up on the historic Fairlands (an area of several triangular greens). There is a state-run school, providing education for children from the ages of 4–11.

The town's name derives from the homestead or village of "Hega's people".

The town, originally spelled "Hengham", is an ancient settlement, as its Saxon name denotes. It was the property of King Athelstan, in 925, and of William the Conqueror in 1066 and 1086 as a well populated parish in the hundred of Forehoe, and retained many privileges coming from its royal ownership, including "the grandeur of ... St Andrew's," a parish church rebuilt in the 1300s. Thomas de Morley, 5th Baron Morley is buried in its chancel. In the years that followed, the town was a clear royal domain, for William the Conqueror and many others.

In 1414 the town was exempted from an English toll and in 1610, the town was granted a royal charter by James I. Over the years, from 1154 to 1887, the town's church is recorded as having had 32 rectors.

By the 1600s, the town of Hingham was still agricultural. John Speed's maps of the Kingdom of England during the Jacobean period in 1610 and 1611 showed that the town was near Wymondham (also called Wimundham or Windham). This town was, at the time, situated in the countryside with diverse terrain, profuse windmills, well-watered soil, a large degree of inland water traffic, and few urban centres apart from Norwich, where a thriving cloth industry boomed. With Speed's drawing of a castle at the location of Hingham, the town must have been of some stature.

Many Puritans refused to conform to the wishes of the King (Charles I) and his loyal Archbishop (William Laud), so they fled to the Plymouth Bay or Massachusetts Bay colonies, in what has been labelled the "Great Migration". In 1633, migration from England to the Americas began with a number of participants on a ship named the Bonaventure. Robert Peck, the Rector of St Andrew's Church, and his associate Peter Hobart, emigrated to the new colony of Massachusetts with half of his congregation, most likely all of the 133 people on the Diligent, which departed in June 1638 from Ipswich, England. Peck had been censured by religious authorities for his Puritan practices, and his daughter had married the son of another well-known Puritan minister named John Rogers.

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