In 1964, archaeologists excavating the courtyard of Thoresby College in King’s Lynn made a remarkable discovery. Buried beneath centuries of accumulated soil and later buildings were the remains of a wooden wharf dating from the late thirteenth century. Nothing particularly unusual about that, perhaps, in a town famous for its medieval port. Except that the wharf lay some 55 metres from the present bank of the River Great Ouse.
The discovery revealed something extraordinary about Lynn’s history. Much of the land between Queen Street and the modern waterfront did not exist when the town was founded. What we now regard as the historic centre was once a very different landscape, with tidal channels penetrating deep into the settlement and the river lapping close to buildings that today stand well inland.
This forgotten geography is one of the most fascinating stories to emerge from the King’s Lynn Urban Archaeological Database Project Report, published by archaeologists Richard Hoggett and Alice Cattermole in 2022. Drawing together decades of excavations, historical research, and architectural investigations, the report reconstructs how a modest settlement on the edge of the Wash became one of medieval England’s great trading ports.
It also offers a rather different starting point for the history of Lynn. Before the merchants and wealthy bishops came the marshes, and before the town came the salt-makers.
A Town Built on Salt and Mud
A thousand years ago, the landscape around Lynn would have been almost unrecognisable. Instead of streets and houses, much of the area was occupied by tidal marshes, mudflats, and waterways. The land was low-lying, frequently waterlogged, and unsuitable for extensive permanent settlement.
There had, of course, been people living in the surrounding countryside for thousands of years. Prehistoric flint tools have been found around North Wootton and elsewhere on the higher ground to the east. At Reffley Wood, a Bronze Age burial mound excavated in 1937–38 contained two inhumations and seven cremations. The Romans later established settlements and industrial activities on the nearby higher ground, including substantial iron-working operations at North Runcton. Yet there is little evidence that the marshy site of the future medieval town supported significant permanent occupation before the later Anglo-Saxon period.
Its transformation was closely connected with salt.
By the eleventh century, salt production was an important industry along the Wash coast. The Domesday evidence discussed in the archaeological report indicates that approximately 180 salterns were operating in the Lynn area in 1066. Salt was an extremely valuable commodity, not least because of its importance in preserving meat and fish.
Salt-making involved considerable labour. In the medieval process, workers collected salt-rich sand and silt, washed them to extract the brine, and boiled the resulting liquid to produce salt. The discarded sand accumulated in enormous heaps. Some eventually extended for 200 metres and rose more than five metres above the surrounding marshes.
These great mounds altered the landscape. Archaeological surveys have identified nearly 300 medieval saltern mounds along the Norfolk coast of the Wash, with substantial groups around North Lynn and South Wootton. Many remain identifiable through aerial photography and modern surveys of ground levels.
The earliest inhabitants of Lynn may have benefited directly from this activity. The archaeologists suggest that the raised banks upon which parts of the medieval town developed were produced by a combination of natural processes and human activity, including salt-making. In an environment where even a small increase in elevation could make settlement possible, these artificial mounds may have provided valuable areas of firmer ground.
It is an appealing thought that one of England’s great medieval ports owed something of its eventual location to generations of workers producing salt beside the Wash. The exact contribution of the saltern mounds remains uncertain, but their influence upon the changing coastline is well established.
The Bishop Who Saw an Opportunity
By 1086, when the Domesday Book was compiled, several small settlements existed around the mouth of the Great Ouse. They were recorded under names including Lena and Lun, with communities at North, South, and West Lynn. None appears to have been a substantial town.
That began to change around 1090, when Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, established St Margaret’s Church, a Benedictine priory, and an associated market. His foundation would become the centre of Bishop’s Lynn, the settlement from which modern King’s Lynn developed.
Herbert’s choice of location was far from accidental. The Great Ouse provided a route into the agricultural and commercial heartland of eastern England, while the Wash opened the way to the North Sea. A settlement controlling the movement of goods between these waterways could become extremely profitable.
The bishop already possessed substantial interests in the surrounding area, including the estate at Gaywood and rights connected with salt production. By establishing a religious house and market beside the river, he extended that influence into a strategically valuable trading location.
The earliest town developed on relatively raised ground between the Millfleet and Purfleet. St Margaret’s Church stood near the river, with the Saturday Market immediately to its north. The priory occupied land to the south of the church, while streets and properties developed along the available ridges of firmer ground.
There is an intriguing uncertainty about this foundation. Some historians have suggested that Herbert was formalising an existing commercial settlement rather than creating an entirely new town. That would be understandable given the area’s position on important waterways, but the archaeological evidence has not yet demonstrated the existence of a substantial trading community before his intervention.
Whatever existed before 1090, the bishop’s foundation gave Lynn a permanent religious and commercial centre. Within a relatively short period, the settlement began expanding beyond its original boundaries.
The Remarkable Growth of the Newland
By the middle of the twelfth century, Bishop’s Lynn was already growing northwards across the Purfleet. Between 1146 and 1150, Bishop William de Turbe made land available for an extension known as the Newland. In 1146, he founded St Nicholas’s Chapel to serve the expanding population, and the Tuesday Market Place developed as the principal commercial centre of the northern settlement.
The Newland was not entirely unoccupied before the bishop’s initiative. A hospital dedicated to St John the Baptist had already been founded near Dampgate around 1135, and bridges probably connected the area with the older town. Nevertheless, the mid-twelfth-century development marked a significant stage in Lynn’s transformation from a modest settlement into a thriving commercial community.
Archaeology has provided remarkable confirmation of this expansion. Between 2003 and 2005, extensive investigations accompanying the redevelopment of the Vancouver Shopping Centre and the construction of the Clough Lane car park examined an area equivalent to approximately 12 per cent of the historic town centre.
The excavators found little evidence of occupation in the Newland during the eleventh or early twelfth centuries. Instead, the ground had been largely open, marshy land crossed by natural channels. The later settlement developed gradually, with activity concentrated towards the river rather than spreading evenly across the whole area.
An especially revealing discovery was made near Surrey Street, where archaeological investigations showed that property boundaries established during the thirteenth century remained largely unchanged until the 1960s. Buildings had come and gone, but the underlying pattern of medieval plots had survived for about seven hundred years.
Written evidence tells a similar story. A remarkable document dating from about 1279, known as the Newelond Survey, records the owners and occupiers of properties in the northern town. It allows historians to reconstruct much of the medieval street layout and offers glimpses of how different trades were distributed within the growing settlement.
The town’s medieval plan was therefore remarkably persistent. Beneath the modern shopping streets, and sometimes beneath the buildings themselves, lay patterns of landholding established when Lynn was developing into one of England’s busiest ports.
How Lynn Pushed the River Back
As trade expanded, the medieval town faced a problem. Its riverside position was the source of its prosperity, but space beside the water was limited. Merchants needed warehouses and quays, while valuable commercial properties increasingly occupied the available waterfront.
The solution was gradually to create more land.
Originally, the western edge of Lynn lay approximately along the lines of Queen Street and King Street. Farther north, the Tuesday Market Place was open towards the river on two sides. To the south, St Margaret’s Church stood much closer to the water than it does today.
Over the following centuries, the waterfront crept westwards as the inhabitants reclaimed land along the river. Waste material was deposited beyond existing quays, surfaces were raised, and new structures were built upon the accumulated ground. Natural silting contributed to the process, but human activity substantially changed the shape of the river frontage.
The timber wharf discovered at Thoresby College provides a particularly clear example. Constructed in the late thirteenth century, it was subsequently covered by deposits of silt. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the ground was deliberately raised and a brick building constructed above the former waterfront. When Thoresby College itself was built between 1508 and 1511, the land had already undergone several stages of transformation.
Elsewhere, the same process can be traced in surviving buildings. During the later medieval period, wealthy merchants established substantial houses facing Queen Street and King Street, with warehouses extending behind them towards the river. As more land became available, properties expanded westwards, producing some of the exceptionally long, narrow plots that remain characteristic of Lynn’s historic waterfront.
By the fourteenth century, Lynn had become one of England’s wealthiest towns. Its merchants were connected with trading networks extending across northern Europe, particularly those associated with the Hanseatic League. Ships arriving through the Wash carried timber, iron, wine, furs, and numerous other commodities. Outward cargoes included wool, grain, cloth, and lead.
This international commerce left a lasting mark upon the town. The surviving Hanse House, built in 1475, is an outstanding reminder of Lynn’s European connections. Other buildings, including Clifton House, preserve evidence of the changing relationship between merchants’ residences and the river.
Yet much of the most revealing material lies underground.
The wet conditions along the former waterfront have helped preserve timber structures and other organic remains that would normally decay. Excavations can therefore uncover not simply the foundations of buildings but the remnants of their working environment, sometimes including objects that reveal how ordinary people lived.
At the Common Staithe, archaeological investigations have identified evidence of activity along the foreshore and the dumping of material between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries, followed by substantial reclamation by the middle of the sixteenth century. The discovery confirms that Lynn’s changing waterfront was the result of many separate episodes of development rather than one great engineering project.
For centuries, the inhabitants of Lynn had been quietly remaking the land upon which their town stood.
Friaries, Walls, and a Changing Town
Prosperity also brought changes farther from the waterfront. During the thirteenth century, several religious communities established friaries on the relatively marginal ground towards the eastern edges of Lynn.
The Franciscans, or Greyfriars, built their friary east of St Margaret’s Church. The Dominicans founded Blackfriars in 1256 on land now occupied partly by the bus station and King’s Lynn Museum. By the 1270s, their establishment was large enough to accommodate forty friars. Other religious communities included the Augustinians near the Tuesday Market and the Carmelites in South Lynn.
These were substantial establishments, with churches, accommodation, and burial grounds occupying considerable areas. Although most disappeared following the Dissolution in the 1530s, their former sites continue to influence the town’s layout. The surviving Greyfriars Tower and Whitefriars Gateway are reminders of religious precincts that once dominated their surroundings.
The town’s defences were also shaped by its unusual geography. From the thirteenth century, banks and ditches enclosed a large area, incorporating the original settlement and the Newland as well as South Lynn. Rather than following the boundaries of the built-up town alone, the defensive system made extensive use of natural banks and watercourses.
This explains a feature that once puzzled historians. Lynn’s medieval defensive circuit enclosed a much larger area than its densely occupied streets, leading to suggestions that the town had subsequently shrunk. Archaeology offers a different explanation. The defences followed the most useful natural features, enclosing marshy land that was only lightly developed.
The defensive system was strengthened over the centuries and altered extensively during the Civil War. Although the famous siege of 1643 is now remembered principally through written accounts, archaeological investigations have identified remains of the seventeenth-century fortifications beneath the modern suburbs, including evidence west of Raby Avenue.
Lynn’s history is not confined to the buildings that survived above ground. Even where the town’s fortifications have vanished, their foundations and buried earthworks can still reveal their former position.
The Medieval Town That Refuses to Disappear
Perhaps the most surprising finding of the archaeological report is how much of medieval Lynn may still survive beneath the modern town.
At Chapel Street Car Park, borehole investigations uncovered waterlogged medieval occupation deposits approximately one to two metres below the present surface. Beneath these were much deeper deposits associated with the former tidal environment. Elsewhere, medieval remains have survived beneath modern commercial premises, including Marks and Spencer.
These discoveries are striking because the town has undergone so much redevelopment. The nineteenth century brought new streets and industrial expansion, while the twentieth century saw substantial demolition and rebuilding. Yet in many places, later construction has left significant earlier deposits undisturbed.
Not everything has survived. In January 1977, the demolition of buildings at 28–34 Queen Street exposed features of a substantial medieval house dating from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Much of its early masonry had been concealed beneath later render, and its significance only became apparent as the building was being destroyed.
Such losses helped demonstrate the need for systematic archaeological investigation before redevelopment. The King’s Lynn Archaeological Survey, undertaken between 1963 and 1971, had already transformed understanding of the town, but subsequent discoveries continued to add to that knowledge.
The 2022 Urban Archaeological Database project brought much of this evidence together. Covering approximately 26.5 square kilometres, it incorporated 1,201 monument records and 549 records of archaeological investigations or discoveries. It provided a detailed resource for understanding not only the historic centre but also the surrounding settlements and the changing landscape within which Lynn developed.
The database helps archaeologists identify places where important buried remains may survive, enabling better-informed decisions about development and conservation. It also opens up a wealth of information for anyone interested in the history of the town.
But perhaps its greatest achievement is to change how we see familiar places.
Stand in Queen Street and imagine the river flowing close beside you, with medieval ships unloading cargo nearby. Walk through the Tuesday Market Place and picture the shoreline extending across part of the open space. Beneath the streets, consider the traces of timber buildings and property boundaries established centuries before the present townscape emerged.
Lynn’s remarkable history is written not only in the stonework of its churches or the impressive façades of its merchants’ houses. It is preserved in the ground beneath them, where the remains of salt workings and medieval wharves tell the story of a settlement that continually adapted to its watery surroundings.
The river may have retreated from Queen Street, but the evidence of its former presence has not disappeared. Beneath the modern town lies another Lynn, one that archaeologists are still helping us to discover.
© James Rye 2026
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References
Albone, James, Sarah Massey, and Sarah Tremlett. The Archaeology of Norfolk’s Coastal Zone. Historic England Report No. 114/2007. 2007. https://research.historicengland.org.uk/Report.aspx?i=15700
Brown, Richard, and Andrew Hardy. Archaeology of the Newland: Excavations in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, 2003–5. East Anglian Archaeology Report 140. Oxford: Oxford Archaeology, 2011. https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/eaa/contents.cfm?volume_id=1262
Hoggett, Richard, and Alice Cattermole. King’s Lynn Urban Archaeological Database Project Report. Historic England Project No. 7656. Alice Cattermole Heritage Consultancy, March 2022. https://www.west-norfolk.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/7178/kings_lynn_urban_archaeological_database_project_report_-_march_2022.pdf
Hutcheson, Andrew R. J. “The Origins of King’s Lynn? Control of Wealth on the Wash Prior to the Norman Conquest.” Medieval Archaeology 50 (2006): 71–104. https://doi.org/10.1179/174581706×124220
Newsome, Sarah. Chapel Street, King’s Lynn, Norfolk: The History and Archaeology of the Chapel Street Car Park. Historic England Research Report 2/2018. 2018. https://historicengland.org.uk/research/results/reports/2-2018
The principal historical details are grounded in Hoggett and Cattermole’s report, which is available from the Borough Council’s website. March 2022