In the meanwhile that most famous and most legendary East Anglian Christian king, the sainted Edmund, had succeeded to the throne, and had reigned ten years when the terrible invasion of 866 befell. Then was fought the battle of Snarehill, which lasted for several days, and whose bloody memories were so vivid, even a hundred and fifty-four years later, that the Abbot of St. Edmundsbury founded a monastery on the spot, in honour of the thousands who fell on both sides. This, the Battle Abbey of its era, was in Henry VIII.’s time granted to Sir Richard Fulmerstone. The “Place” farm, an ecclesiastical building now used as a barn, and a training-stable for horses now occupy the site of what is locally called “The Nunnery.”
The Battle of Snarehill was not conclusive. The invading Danes certainly occupied the town for the winter, but they would appear to have afterwards retired, and it was not until 870 that the crowning disaster came. In the spring of that year the Danes again returned, destroyed Thetford, and utterly defeated the army Edmund had drawn from every nook and corner of his kingdom. Edmund himself did not fall in that tremendous slaughter, but met with his martyrdom, as we have already seen, at Hoxne, some twenty miles away.
All over England the Danish invasion then spread. In Wessex even, where the reign of Alfred then began, that heroic king was for a time overborne by the heathen hordes; while Eastern England, with but few intervals, was for many years subject to fire and sword. Only the payment of a heavy tribute kept these pirates away. When at length a number of Danish settlements had been made and the two races at last had begun to forget the bygone years, the mad folly of that King of All England, whom men called Ethelred “the Unready,” devised in 1002, on November 14th, the feast of St. Brice, a general massacre of those Danish settlers. It was no worse measure than, time and again, those Northern foes had meted out to the Saxon people; but the folly was criminal, if the deed was not, for from those shores of Denmark came avenging hosts with Sweyn at their head. It was almost two years before he came, but with his advent the old miseries began to be re-enacted. Norwich was burnt, and Thetford felt the full force of his onslaught. But for the military genius of one Ulfcytel, himself the owner of a Danish name, but acting as the bulwark of East Anglia, Sweyn would at once have marched through the land. Ulfcytel, however, drove him back to his ships, and it was not until 1010 that he returned, and, defeating the still active Ulfcytel at the battle of Ringmere, burnt Thetford again to the ground. Elsewhere in England Sweyn was even more successful, and penetrating to Winchester and Bath, was proclaimed King in London in 1013. That same year he died and was succeeded by that Canute, who in the moral story of the flattering courtiers and the advancing tide has been made hateful in every elementary schoolroom. It was in battle with Canute in 1016, at Ashingdon, in South Essex, the valiant Ulfcytel at last fell.
With Canute’s accession, however, the early blood-dyed history of Thetford reached its last page, and when the Saxon line of kings was restored with Edward the Confessor in 1041, the oft-burned town numbered 944 burgesses.
GATEWAY, THETFORD PRIORY.
From that time, with but one short period in the reign of William the Conqueror, the town rapidly grew in importance. It became the site of the East Anglian bishopric in 1075, when the see was removed from Elmham, and although that much-moved Bishop’s chair was again removed, to Norwich, nineteen years later, Thetford suffered little from that circumstance. If it ceased to be technically a city, it was a great town and a very stronghold of the Church. Although it has now but three churches, it owned twenty, so late as the time of Edward III., and the ruins of many of them can still be traced, proving the truth of those old records that tell of them. Seven were on the Suffolk side. These we might call suburban, but of them only that of St. Mary-the-Less is now extant. Its big sister, St. Mary-the-Great, stood adjoining the Grammar School, but only fragmentary walls remain. This was converted by Bishop Arfast into the cathedral of those nineteen years. Elsewhere in and around the town the shattered and shapeless walls of old-time ecclesiastical buildings abound, and the ploughman who drives his furrow across fields that were once streets, turns up mediæval tiles with the lack of interest that comes of constant use, or fervently damns the occasional abbot’s sarcophagus that dints his ploughshare.
With the Crusades Thetford declined in population and fortune. Why, we do not know. It is not reasonable to suppose that the people went off in a body to fight the Paynim in the Holy Land.
But the monasteries remained in being. Like the clinging ivy that flourishes even when the tree it has ruined is dead, they continued until Henry swept them away. They were four: that monastery, founded to commemorate the battle of Snarehill, which afterwards became a Benedictine nunnery; the Abbey, or Priory, founded by Roger Bigod in 1104; the Monastery of the Holy Sepulchre, Earl Warren’s foundation of five years later; and the Friary of St. Augustine, established by John o’ Gaunt in 1387. Besides these were numerous hospitals, together with the Manor House and the King’s Palace, used by sovereigns from Henry I. to James I.
The only approach to Thetford in very distant times was doubtless by the Icknield Way, and for many centuries later that ancient track continued to be the chief road into and through the town on to Larlingford, where the existing highway from Thetford to Norwich falls into it. If we take up the line of the Icknield Way where, on page 189, we left it, we shall find it pointing straight through the Gasworks to the three bridges that now span the parallel stream of the Thet, a nameless intermediate rivulet, and the Little Ouse. These are (doubtless from the immediate neighbourhood of what is even now called “the Nunnery”) known as the “Nuns’ Bridges,” but one of them was formerly known as “Incelland” Bridge, and in that name we may perhaps find a distorted echo of “Icknield.”