"A panic room for Despenser the despised?" Topic

First Saxon and then Norman, North Elmham chapel became a rare thing in England – a fortified church. The despised Henry le Despenser (NOT Hugh as I said) was so worried about his safety that he fitted a country church with a drawbridge and defences.

YouTube link

Known as the fighting bishop, the ex-soldier once led a crusade against an anti-pope, violently crushed the Peasants' Revolt at the Battle of North Walsham and repressed English religious reformers and heretics called Lollards.

An image of Henry in a King's Lynn church has its nose hacked off so clearly he was not a popular man. What does an unpopular man need? A private panic room.

More here:
Henry le Despenser:
link

Battle of North Walsham:
link

Barry

I have been doing some further checking on this site's history. The structure had completely disappeared until it was dug out in the 1970s by archaeologists. What you see is as the result of excavation.

A Saxon cathedral is recorded on or near this site around 900AD but this was probably timber and not stone. My copy of Pevsner (the British architecture historian) suggests that the tree-covered mound (visible at 6.08 behind the people) is the remains of a Norman motte which might then date the outer ditch as being much earlier than Henry Despenser's work.

A complicated site chopped about by a complicated man.

See: link

Barry