Burnham Sutton

Blomefield (1805-1810) writes: "The Church has a square tower, with one bell, dedicated to St. Albert, or Ethelbert [...] 1278, John de Wethersfield occurs rector" [i.e., first recorded rector], but this church was mentioned already in a 1265 confirmation of its tithes by Simon, Bishop of Norwich. The last rector listed in Blomefield (ibid.) is "Edmund Nelson, in 1755", and there is no further information on the fate of this church. Knott (2005) writes: "The modern town of Burnham Market is an amalgam of three historic parishes, Burnhams Sutton, Ulph and Westgate. St Ethelbert was the parish church of Sutton, and sat about 400 metres south of the green in the centre of Burnham Market, beside the road to Fakenham. The Parishes of Sutton and Ulph were united under one Priest in the 15th century - probably, the two villages had already grown into each other by then. However, this state of affairs virtually guaranteed that resources would become rather stretched once the Reformation turned them into preaching houses. In the middle of the 18th century, both churches had, in common with many in East Anglia, fallen into disrepair. Their Rector, the go-ahead young Edmund Nelson, who just happened to be the father of Horatio, oversaw the demolition of St Ethelbert and the use of its materials to repair All Saints, Burnham Ulph. What survives are the walls of the aisle-less nave to a height of half a metre or so, and the tower walls to about a metre. Curiously, the tower was built within the body of the earlier nave, as at Thurton in east Norfolk. The chancel is now lost beneath the adjacent road. The tower remains were higher, but were thought to be dangerous in 1966 and reduced." [NB: we have no information on the font of the medieval church here].