Gresham is a village and civil parish in North Norfolk, England, five miles (8 km) south-west of Cromer.
A predominantly rural parish, Gresham centres on its medieval church of All Saints. The village also once had a square 14th century castle, a watermill and a windmill. The moat and some ruins of the castle survive.
History
The name of Gresham is derived from a local stream known as the Gur Beck, plus -ham, meaning a settlement.
In the Domesday Book of 1086, Gresham is recorded as one of the holdings of William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey.
Sir Edmund Bacon of Baconsthorpe held the manor. After his death in 1336 or 1337, there was much fighting over his property, which included the manor of Gresham. A William Moleyns married Bacon's daughter Margery and tried unsuccessfully to deprive John Burghersh, the son of Bacon's other daughter and heiress Margaret, of his inheritance. A partition of Bacon's property was made between his heirs in the 35th year of King Edward III, and when the division between Moleyns and Burghersh was complete, Gresham went to Margery, who died in 1399. She granted Gresham to Sir Philip Vache for nine years after her death, but in 1414 his widow still held it and Sir William Moleyns agreed to buy it from Margery's executors for 920 marks. He held it for two years, but did not complete the payment. The manor then fell into a complicated contract for the future marriage of Moleyns's daughter Katherine which did not take place, and Thomas Chaucer (c. 1367–1434), Speaker of the House of Commons, and the son of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, acquired the manor of Gresham and sold it to William Paston. (Thomas Chaucer was married to a granddaughter of Maud Bacon, almost certainly another daughter of Edmund Bacon.) However, Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, then claimed it and seized it by force.
Margaret Paston, in one of the Paston Letters, writing to her husband John Paston in a letter dated 19 May 1448, says:
The James Gresham here referred to is James Gresham, gentleman, of Holt, who appears often in the Paston Letters as a confidential agent.
Eight months later, when Paston's attempts to recover the manor through negotiation and legal action had failed, he sent his wife to occupy "a mansion" in the parish. In response, Moleyns sent an armed force which the Pastons claimed amounted to a thousand men, attacked the house, which was badly damaged, and expelled Margaret Paston.
Writing to her husband in a letter dated 28 September, Margaret Paston says:
Moleyns was able to hold onto possession of Gresham for three years.
In 1620, the manor was sold to the Batt family, in which it has remained ever since. The present lord of the manor is Robert Batt.
A curious case of 1786 in the Court of King's Bench called The King against the Inhabitants of Gresham was to do with the master-servant relationship in the case of William Thompson, a settled inhabitant of Gresham until 1780, who had entered the service of a Mr Creemer of Beeston Regis and later became a pauper.
The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870–1872) described Gresham:
Twelve men of Gresham were killed in the First World War, of whom five were members of the Norfolk Regiment. Of the six men of the village killed in the Second World War, three were sons of Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Cossley Batt. A war memorial stands in the churchyard.
The records of the Aylmerton and Gresham School from 1874 to 1991 are held in the Norfolk Record Office.
Governance
An electoral ward in the same name exists. This ward had a population of 8,584 at the 2011 Census.
Church
The parish church of All Saints is one of 124 round-tower churches in Norfolk.
The church contains one of the East Anglian seven sacrament fonts, in which there is much interest. Scenes represented on it include a baptism, a holy eucharist, and parishioners clustering around a neighbour's deathbed.
The church was built on a pagan site, and in 1910 the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia was shown an ancient polished axe which had been dug up in the churchyard and a chipped celt which had been built into the church tower. Walter Johnson, in Byways in British Archaeology, comments that "Its presence there was probably accidental, but it is well to recall the Breton practice of building stone axes into chimneys to ward off lightning".
In 1940, the executors of Joseph Cox of Gresham presented Norwich Castle Museum with a prehistoric handled beaker of the Bronze Age which had been found near Gresham.