King’s Lynn All Saints, Norfolk Genealogy

History
King's Lynn All Saints is an Ancient parish in the Diocese of Norfolk.

It is possibly the earliest church in Lynn and serves South Lynn. The site was occupied and the church incorporates an anchorite chapel where a group of anchoresses lived in seclusion as a hermitage in the 14th century when a tower was also added. This fell down in 1763 and the present church has been heavily damged by vandalism in recent years.

Nevertheless the Church is still a centre for Anglo-catholic worship and has a 1,000 year tradition of worship on the site.

Church Records
Images of the parish register for this parish are available on Record Search and are found under the waypoint South Lynn.

The name "Lynn" has an ancient derivation, perhaps from a Celtic term meaning "pool" or from an Anglo-Saxon word for "torrent" both references to the estuary lake which emptied into the Wash. By the 14th century, the town ranked as the third port of England and is considered as important to England in Medieval times as Liverpool was during the Industrial Revolution. It retains two buildings that were warehouses of the Hanseatic League that were in use between the 15th and 17th centuries. They are the only remaining building structures of the Hanseatic League in England.

The town now known as King's Lynn was, in medieval times, rather Bishop's Lynn. This is because it was taken under the wing of the Bishop of Norwich in the late eleventh century, one of the earliest of numerous deliberate seigneurial foundations of "new towns" that took place between that time and the mid-thirteenth century. When Henry VIII took over the lordship of the town it was renamed King's Lynn However it is still referred to as Lynn locally and records often refer to it as Lynn Bishop's Lynn, Lynn Regis and later as King's Lynn.

The parish is catalogued South Lynn by the Norfolk Record Office and the records are reference PD607/1-8, 14-21, 27-31