NHER 1161 (Monument record) - Site of medieval building, Ferry Street

Before 1904. Casual discovery, Ferry Street.
During the renovations of buildings here before 1904, the substantial remains of a medieval building were discovered (S1). One wall of this was subsequently re-erected in the garden of the public library (NHER 64024 at TF 6205 1978).
E. Rose (NAU), amended A. Cattermole (King's Lynn UAD), 5 March 2020.

The remains are thought to be those of a wool warehouse, and were removed in 1908. Information from (S2). They stood in what at that time was called Bank Lane (now part of Ferry Street); see copy of photograph (S3) in file (original in KLM).
This site was formerly numbered NHER 13365 in error.
E. Rose (NAU).

(S3) shows the wall of coursed knapped flint with three pointed stone arches with brick infill.
(S4) includes a similar photograph showing two further arches further to the west on this range, also blocked with brick. When Hillen wrote this section of his History of Lynn in 1906 he described at this location a rubble wall, 19.4m (63ft 8in) long and 3.8m (12.5ft) high, faced with worked black flints, the western end terminating in stone quoins. He envisaged that the wall had once extended further east towards the Tuesday Market Place because the original string course is continued along the front of the 'modern' brick buildings. (S4) describes three 'Gothic doorways' , as well as two further arches at the western end of the wall. He noted that these had been 'erroneously' thought to belong to a leper house in Cowgate, but he considered that this 'precious relic of a fast-vanishing past' was in fact 'the back exterior of a substantial private dwelling'. He includes a diagram indicating how these arches might fit the layout of a medieval manor house, as seen in Cambridge colleges, each of the side doors leading to a cellar and to the buttery, while the central arch provided access to a cross-passage which led through the building to a kitchen or outhouses beyond. He suggests that the original building to which these arches belonged was approximately 36m (118 feet) long and 14m (45 feet) wide. This corresponds very closely with the current size of this plot which measures 14m north-south at the Tuesday Market Place frontage and 39m east-west along Ferry Lane. Hillen (S4) suggests that the building may have been converted to a warehouse (its use in 1906) in 1582 when a new warehouse was built in Common Staithe Yard to the south. At the beginning of the 19th century this building was rented by the Corporation as a wool warehouse. See (S4) for further detail, drawing of proposed layout of the building and photograph of all five arches dating from 1906.
This building is shown on (S5) which was surveyed in 1900 and published in 1909 as 'ruins'.
A. Cattermole (King's Lynn UAD), 9 January 2019.