History
Its name came from Old English Swǣfa hām = "the homestead of the Swabians"; some of them presumably came with the Angles and Saxons. In the Domesday Book three lords were associated with Swaffham: Walter Giffard, with the largest manor; his tenant Hugh Bolebec, who held all of the Giffard land there; and Aubrey de Vere I, who held a smaller manor at Swaffham which the Domesday jurors said Aubrey had seized without the king's permission. As the Bolebec estates passed into Vere hands through two marriages of Bolebec heiresses to Vere males in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the two manors were combined and held by the Vere Earls of Oxford for several centuries.
A Benedictine priory for female religious was founded at Swaffham Bolebec between circa 1150 and 1163, probably by the Bolebecs. About 8 km to the north of Swaffham can be found the ruins of the formerly important Castle Acre Priory and Castle Acre Castle.
By the 14th and 15th centuries Swaffham had a flourishing sheep and wool industry As a result of this prosperity, the town has a large market place. The Market Cross here was built by George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford and presented to the town in 1783. On the top is the statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest.
On the west side of Swaffham Market Place are several old buildings which for many years housed the historic Hamond's Grammar School, as a plaque on the wall of the main building explains. The Hamond's Grammar School building latterly came to serve as the sixth form for the Hamond's High School, but that use has since ceased. Harry Carter, the Grammar School's art teacher of the 1960s, was responsible for a great number of the carved village signs that are now found in many of Norfolk's towns and villages, most notably perhaps Swaffham's own sign commemorating the legendary Pedlar of Swaffham, which is in the corner of the market place just opposite the old school's gates. Carter was a distant cousin of the archaeologist and egyptologist Howard Carter who spent much of his childhood in the town.
Until 1968 it had a railway station on the Great Eastern Railway line from King's Lynn. Just after Swaffham, the line split into two, one branch heading south to Thetford, and the other east towards Dereham. The railways were closed as part of the Beeching Axe, through the possibility of rebuilding a direct rail link from Norwich to King's Lynn via Swaffham is occasionally raised.
The Swaffham Museum contains an exhibition on local history and local geology as well as an egyptology room charting the life of Howard Carter.
Read more about this topic: Swaffham
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Free from public debt, at peace with all the world, and with no complicated interests to consult in our intercourse with foreign powers, the present may be hailed as the epoch in our history the most favorable for the settlement of those principles in our domestic policy which shall be best calculated to give stability to our Republic and secure the blessings of freedom to our citizens.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews—Micah, Isaiah, and the rest—who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)