Morningthorpe (sometimes Morning Thorpe) is a village and former

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

, now in the parish of ''Morningthorpe and Fritton'' in the

South Norfolk South Norfolk is a local government district in Norfolk, England. The largest town is Wymondham, and the district also includes the towns of Costessey, Diss, Harleston, Hingham, Loddon and Long Stratton. The council was based in Long S ...

district, in the county of

Norfolk Norfolk ( ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in England, located in East Anglia and officially part of the East of England region. It borders Lincolnshire and The Wash to the north-west, the North Sea to the north and eas ...

, England. It is situated some south of the city of

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of the county of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. It lies by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. The population of the Norwich ...

. The parish includes the villages of Morningthorpe and Fritton. The two villages are 1 km apart (about half a mile) The village's name origin is uncertain perhaps, 'outlying farm/settlement of the pool dwellers', 'outlying farm/settlement of the boundary dwellers' or 'outlying farm/settlement of Maera's people'. The civil parish has an area of and in the 2001 census had a population of 253 in 94 households the population increasing to 267 at the 2011 Census. The churches of Morningthorpe St John the Baptist and Fritton St Catherine are two of 124 existing

round-tower church Round-tower churches are a type of church found mainly in England, mostly in East Anglia; of about 185 surviving examples in the country, 124 are in Norfolk, 38 in Suffolk, six in Essex, three in Sussex and two each in Cambridgeshire and Berks ...

es in

. The village was struck by an F1/T2 tornado on 23 November 1981, as part of the record-breaking nationwide tornado outbreak on that day.

Morningthorpe round tower

Morningthorpe has a round tower rather larger than that at neighbouring

Long Stratton Long Stratton is a town and civil parish in Norfolk, England. It historically consisted of two villages; the larger, Stratton St. Mary, is to the south, and the other, Stratton St. Michael, is to the north. It had a population of 4,424 in the ...

: the tower appears to bulge out about halfway up, which, according to the article in ''Round Tower'' magazine September 2004, may be evidence of an octagonal tower built inside a round one. The article has photographs of repair work done to the tower in 1988 - one shows a corner of an "octagon" inner tower core, not bonded to the outside, while another suggests a bonded, and rounded, core. There are narrow openings in the tower with monolithic heads in worn pale stone, the openings filled with old-looking wooden boards pierced with vertical rows of round holes. Taylor & Taylor, ''Anglo-Saxon Architecture'' seek to assign this tower to the later Saxon period (or earlier Norman).

Civil parish

On 1 April 1935, the parish of Fritton was merged with Morning Thorpe. The new parish was renamed from "Morning Thorpe" to "Morningthorpe and Fritton" on 1 May 2012. In 1931 the parish of Morning Thorpe (prior to the merge) had a population of 110.

Notable people

The ornithologist Howard Irby was born here in 1833 at Boyland Hall.H. M. Vibart, ‘Irby, Leonard Howard Loyd (1836–1905)’, rev. Alex May, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 200
accessed 27 Feb 2013
/ref> The hall was demolished in 1947.

Paulina Irby Adeline Paulina Irby (19 December 1831 – 15 September 1911) was a British travel writer and suffragist who founded an early girls' school in Sarajevo and organized relief to thousands of refugees. The centenary of her death was commemorated th ...

, the campaigner for Bosnian Serb refugees was born here in 1831. British racing driver St. John Horsfall was born here in 1910. The author Joseph Dickerson was born here in 1943. Tommy Hicks – later the entertainer

Tommy Steele Sir Thomas Hicks (born 17 December 1936), known professionally as Tommy Steele, is an English entertainer, regarded as Britain's first teen idol and rock and roll star. After being discovered at the 2i's Coffee Bar in Soho, London, Steele recor ...

, and his family, were evacuated here from London during World War Two.

References

* Ordnance Survey (1999). ''OS Explorer Map 237 - Norwich''. . * Office for National Statistics & Norfolk County Council (2001).
Census population and household counts for unparished urban areas and all parishes
'. Retrieved 2 December 2005.
Morningthorpe parish information
South Norfolk Council * http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Norfolk/Morning%20Thorpe

External links

* for Morningthorpe village * for Fritton village
Information from Genuki Norfolk
on Morningthorpe.
Information from Genuki Norfolk
on Fritton.
St John the Baptist's on the European Round Tower Churches Website

St Catherine's on the European Round Tower Churches Website
{{authority control Villages in Norfolk South Norfolk