King's Lynn, town (1991 pop. 37,323), Norfolk, E England, on the Great Ouse River near its influx into The Wash, an inlet of the North Sea. Its large harbor serves foreign as well as coastal trade and is the base for a fishing fleet. A farm market, King's Lynn is a center for fertilizer production, canning, flour milling, beet-sugar refining, shipbuilding, metalworking, and light engineering. The town dates from Saxon times. Red Mount Chapel was visited by pilgrims in the 15th and 16th cent. Noteworthy are the many ancient buildings, in addition to the fairs that are still held there. A Norman church also remains, as do relics of a moat that surrounded the town in the 15th cent. King's Lynn was the birthplace of the novelist Fanny Burney and the mystic Margery Kempe.
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