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MARKET TOWNS OF ESSEX (from SDUK Penny Cyclopedia)

Writtle in 1837

Writtle is a large village, in Chelmsford hundred, about 3 miles west from the town of Chelmsford. It was formerly a market-town, but dwindled as Chelmsford rose into importance. Morant was inclined to place the Caesaromagus of the Itineraries here ; but there is no proof of its having ever been a Roman station. King John is said to have had a palace here, and a square plot of ground, with a mead round it, in which the foundations of a building were dug up about the middle of the last century, is thought to have been the site of it. The church contains a number of monuments, some of them elaborate and elegant. There was, before the Reformation, a hermitage in this parish, attached to St. John’s Abbey, Colchester. The population in 1831 was 2,348, nearly two-thirds agricultural.