Between the 10th and the 19th centuries the hundreds of Norfolk and the

boroughs A borough is an administrative division in various English-speaking countries. In principle, the term ''borough'' designates a self-governing walled town, although in practice, official use of the term varies widely. History In the Middle A ...

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

, King's Lynn,

Thetford Thetford is a market town and civil parish in the Breckland District of Norfolk, England. It is on the A11 road between Norwich and London, just east of Thetford Forest. The civil parish, covering an area of , in 2015 had a population of 24, ...

and Great Yarmouth were the administrative units of the English county of

Norfolk Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...

. Each

hundred 100 or one hundred (Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101. In medieval contexts, it may be described as the short hundred or five score in order to differentiate the English and Germanic use of "hundred" to des ...

had a separate council that met each month to rule on local judicial and taxation matters. The system of dividing shires into hundreds was established in East Anglia following the conquest by Wessex in the early 10th century. The boundaries described at the time of the

Domesday Survey Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manusc ...

of 1086 remained largely unchanged up to the 1970s. The 36 Domesday hundreds were subdivided into ''leets'', now lost, and the boroughs of Norwich and Thetford ranked as separate hundreds, while Great Yarmouth was the chief town of three hundreds. Two of Thetford's parishes now lie partially in Norfolk with the remainder in Suffolk. The Domesday hundred of Emneth is now included in Freebridge, which was split into Freebridge-Lynn and Freebridge-Marshland. Docking hundred was then incorporated into Smithdon, and the boundary between Brothercross and Gallow hundreds was changed. By the 19th century there were 33 hundreds. The leet court boundaries were more fluid and transient than the hundred court boundaries. At the time of Domesday, the parishes of the hundreds of Brothercross and Gallow "were strangely intermixed".

Sites of hundred courts

The hundred courts were held at various sites across the county:

Parishes

In 1845 the hundreds of Norfolk contained the following parishes. In addition the following four towns were considered as separate boroughs.

Sites of hundred courts

Parishes

References

See also