Swaffham is a market town and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. The town is situated 20 km east of King's Lynn and 50 km west of Norwich.
The civil parish has an area of 29.57 km² and in the 2001 census had a population of 6,935 in 3,130 households. For the purposes of local government, the parish falls within the district of Breckland.
Its name came from Old English Swǣfa hām = "the homestead of the Swabians"; some of them presumably came with the Angles and Saxons. In Domesday Book three lords were associated with Swaffham: Walter Giffard, with the largest manor; his tenant Hugh Bolebec, who held all of the Giffard land there; and Aubrey de Vere I, who held a smaller manor at Swaffham which the Domesday jurors said Aubrey had seized without the king's permission. As the Bolebec estates passed into Vere hands through two marriages of Bolebec heiresses to Vere males in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the two manors were combined and held by the Vere Earls of Oxford for several centuries.
A Benedictine priory for female religious was founded at Swaffham Bolebec between circa 1150 and 1163, probably by the Bolebecs. About 8 km to the north of Swaffham can be found the ruins of the formerly important Castle Acre Priory and Castle Acre Castle.
By the 14th and 15th centuries Swaffham had a flourishing sheep and wool industry. As a result of this prosperity, the town has a large market place. The Market Cross here was built by George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford and presented to the town in 1783. On the top is the statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest.
On the west side of Swaffham Market Place are several old buildings which for many years housed the historic Hamond's Grammar School, as a plaque on the wall of the main building explains. The Hamond's grammar school building now serves as the sixth form for the Hamond's high school. Harry Carter, the school's art teacher, was responsible for a great number of the carved village signs that are now found in many of Norfolk's towns and villages, most notably perhaps Swaffham's own sign commemorating the legendary Pedlar of Swaffham, which is in the corner of the market place just opposite the old school's gates. Harry was the nephew of the archaeologist Howard Carter.
Until 1968 it had a railway station on the Great Eastern Railway line from King's Lynn. Just after Swaffham, the line split into two, one branch heading south to Thetford, and the other west towards Dereham. The railways were closed as part of the Beeching Axe, through the possibility of rebuilding a direct rail link from Norwich to King's Lynn via Swaffham is occasionally raised.
Today the town is known for the presence of two large wind turbines, and the associated Ecotech Centre. The turbines are owned and operated by Ecotricity, and together generate more than 3 Megawatts. These have now been joined now by a further eight turbines at North Pickenham.
In the summer of 2006, location filming was done in the town for the ITV1 series Kingdom, starring Stephen Fry. In Kingdom the town is called Market Shipborough. The pub "The Startled Duck" in the TV series is better known as "The Greyhound Inn" in which the Earl of Orford created the first coursing club open to the public in 1776.
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