Short answers, pulled from the story.
Norwich was designated England's first UNESCO City of Literature in May 2012. The city has a long literary tradition, including Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love (1395), the first book written in English by a woman, and the first provincial newspaper in England, the Norwich Post, founded in 1701.
Norwich is the only complete English city ever to have been excommunicated by the Pope. The excommunication followed a riot between the city's citizens and monks in 1274.
Kett's Rebellion was an uprising in the summer of 1549 led by Robert Kett, in which thousands of rebels camped on Mousehold Heath and took control of Norwich on the 29th of July. The rebellion was a response to the enclosure of common grazing land by landlords. It ended on the 27th of August when an army defeated the rebels; Kett was convicted of treason and hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle.
The great stranger immigration of 1567 brought a large community of Flemish and Walloon Protestant weavers to Norwich, eventually making up as many as one-third of the city's population. They boosted trade with mainland Europe, introduced printing to the city via Anthony de Solempne, and brought the Norwich canary, which became the emblem of Norwich City F.C.
Thomas Bignold, a thirty-six-year-old wine merchant and banker, founded the Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire in 1797. After moving from Kent to Norwich, Bignold had been unable to find anyone willing to insure him against highwaymen, which prompted him to create a mutual fire insurance enterprise that eventually became the country's largest insurance company.
Norwich suffered its heaviest bombing during the Baedeker raids on the nights of the 27th-28th and 29th-the 30th of April 1942. Two hundred and twenty-nine citizens were killed and a thousand injured in those two raids alone, with a total of three hundred and forty deaths from bombing across the entire war, giving Norwich the highest air raid casualties in eastern England. Out of thirty-five thousand dwellings, two thousand were destroyed and twenty-seven thousand suffered some damage.