Thieves’ Bridge Road is an unsettling name for an otherwise quiet stretch of West Norfolk countryside. The road runs between Watlington and the Tottenhill area, crossing a small watercourse at a bridge that could easily pass unnoticed. Yet the name has spread well beyond the crossing itself. Thieves Bridge Farm and Thieves Bridge Wood preserve it too.
According to local tradition, the thieves in question stole the bells from St Botolph’s Church at Tottenhill. The church stands in an isolated position down a country lane, a little apart from the modern village. The robbers supposedly carried the bells away, discovered that they were too heavy to transport any farther and concealed them beneath the bridge. Their hiding place was found, the bells were recovered and the thieves were eventually caught and hanged.
It is an excellent story. More unusually, part of it can be traced to a genuine Tudor crime.
A robbery on Valentine’s Eve
In 1874, the Norfolk antiquary John L’Estrange published The Church Bells of Norfolk. His entry for St Botolph’s at Tottenhill included a note copied from a church inventory:
“M that the belles in the Steaple were stolen on seynt Valentynes even the xiij daye of ffebruary A° vto E. vjto.”
In modern spelling, the entry records that the bells in the steeple were stolen on St Valentine’s Eve, 13 February, during the fifth regnal year of Edward VI [L’Estrange 1874, 227].
Edward VI became king on 28 January 1547. His fifth regnal year began on 28 January 1551, placing the robbery on 13 February 1551.
The theft therefore happened almost a century earlier than the date of 1642 sometimes given in modern accounts. The older date is not a guess. It comes from an inventory compiled during Edward VI’s reign, close to the time of the crime.
The wording is also revealing. It refers to “belles” in the plural. The thieves were not attempting to remove one small handbell. They had taken the bells hanging in the church tower.
How do you steal a church bell?
Stealing several church bells required planning. They had first to be detached from their fittings and lowered through the tower. The offenders would have needed ropes and tools, as well as enough time to work without attracting attention.
Transport presented an even greater problem. A church bell could weigh several hundredweight. Even a modest bell was far too heavy for one person to carry across the fields. The thieves would have needed a cart, horses or a sizeable group of accomplices.
Bell metal was valuable. Bells were normally made from an alloy containing copper and tin, and their value lay as much in the metal as in the finished object. A stolen bell might be broken up and sold as scrap, although disposing of such a large and recognisable object would have carried obvious risks.
The location of St Botolph’s may have encouraged the attempt. The church still stands apart from the main settlement, reached by a lane off the A134. At night, the thieves might have expected to work without being disturbed. They may have been less successful in calculating how far they could move their prizes.
The bridge and the legend
The story of the bells being hidden beneath a nearby bridge was preserved by the Fenland writer Arthur Randell. It appears in Sixty Years a Fenman, edited by Enid Porter and published in 1966 [Randell 1966, 78].
Randell’s account belongs to oral tradition rather than contemporary documentation. It was recorded more than four centuries after the theft. No known Tudor court record confirms that the bells were placed beneath the bridge, and no evidence has yet been found for the hanging of the thieves.
Even so, the story has a certain practical plausibility. A bridge would have offered a recognisable place at which heavy objects could be concealed temporarily. The thieves could leave the bells beside or beneath the crossing and return with better transport. The bridge lay only a little over a mile from the church, which would fit a journey abandoned because the load had proved unmanageable.
That is not proof. It is simply the point at which the documentary record and the local tradition fit together reasonably well.
The safest conclusion is that the bell theft certainly happened, while the concealment beneath the bridge remains an old and persistent explanation of the place name.
Not 1642
Some recent versions of the story claim that one of the Tottenhill bells was stolen in 1642. That year would place the theft at the beginning of the English Civil War and might appear convincing, since church property was sometimes damaged or removed during the conflict.
The evidence cited by L’Estrange, however, is quite specific. It records the theft on 13 February in the fifth regnal year of Edward VI. That produces a date of 1551, not 1642.
It remains possible that Tottenhill suffered a second loss in the seventeenth century, but no reliable evidence for another theft has yet been identified. Until such a record appears, the Tudor inventory provides the firmest date.
By October 1842, the church had no bell and was badly in need of repair. A faculty [formal church authorisation] permitted the parish to sell roof lead, erect a new roof and install either a second-hand bell weighing at least five hundredweight or a new one weighing at least four. The single bell now hanging at St Botolph’s was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1842.
A crime written into the landscape
The original bells have disappeared from the historical record. We do not know whether they were recovered intact, broken up for their metal or carried away after all. The names of the thieves have also been lost.
Their alleged hiding place proved more enduring. The bridge passed its name to the road, the neighbouring farm and the nearby wood. A brief line in a Tudor inventory became attached to a stretch of countryside for nearly five hundred years.
Today, there is little about the crossing to suggest a notorious crime. Thieves’ Bridge is a modest structure over a narrow stream or drain on the Watlington and Tottenhill parish boundary. Without its name, few people would give it a second glance.
Yet the name leads back to an unusually vivid event. On the night before St Valentine’s Day in 1551, someone entered the isolated church at Tottenhill and removed its bells. The documentary evidence ends there. Local memory completes the journey, carrying the thieves and their impossible burden as far as the bridge.
© James Rye 2026
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References
- L’Estrange, John. The Church Bells of Norfolk: Where, When, and by Whom They Were Made, with the Inscriptions on All the Bells in the County. Norwich: Miller and Leavins, 1874, 227. https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/old-ringing-books/lestrange-norfolk-05.pdf
- Oakley, Ian. “Striding Out: Thieves’ Bridge.” Runcton Holme Parish Newsletter, Spring 2025, 9. https://runctonholme-pc.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Spring-2025-Newsletter-1.pdf
- Pye, Adrian S. “Thieves Bridge Road, Watlington.” Geograph Britain and Ireland. Photograph taken 22 February 2019. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/6067546
- Randell, Arthur. Sixty Years a Fenman. Edited by Enid Porter. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
- West Norfolk Priory Group. “Church Bells.” Accessed 23 June 2026. https://www.westnorfolkpriorygroup.co.uk/Groups/381836/Church_Bells.aspx
- West Norfolk Priory Group. “Tottenhill: St Botolph.” Accessed 23 June 2026. https://www.westnorfolkpriorygroup.co.uk/Groups/381572/Tottenhill.aspx