Today’s photo is of a bed of lady’s bedstraw, or maybe crosswort. It is said to have been a medieval mattress stuffing or just strewn on the top-sheet as it is soft to the touch and has a mild fragrance, a present from the groom to his bride on their wedding night.
Historically Marfleet was the eastern part of the large parish of Paull and the church (see later) was a chapel-of-ease for the parishioners of St. Andrew’s church, who would otherwise have had to walk a considerable distance, probably along the then Humber flood-bank top as did parishioners of All Saints, Hessle living in Wyke until Holy Trinity was established.
Marfleet, like Drypool and Southcoates, was recorded in the Domesday Survey of 1086 and by 1344 was recorded by the name ‘Mereflete in Holdernesse’, ‘mere’ being the predecessor of ‘mar’ and generally considered to mean a pool or stream. Nicholson in his Place-names of the East Riding of Yorkshire (Journal of the East Riding Archaeological Society, xxv, 1926) interprets early spellings of the name coupled with circumstances at the time to mean ‘There is a small stream flowing from the mere, now a bog, into the R. Hull’. Certainly the drainage pattern of Holderness was east to west to the R. Hull and with Marfleet being on the edge of Holderness the topography had been determined more floodwaters from the R. Hull and from the Humber Estuary.
There seems little evidence that Marfleet ever had a nucleated settlement and that the church served a dispersed community. The Marfleet area would have provided rich pastureland for the medieval flocks of sheep (s.p.b.s) which formed the basis of the wealth of Cistercian Abbey at Meaux and the Augustinian Abbey at Thornton (north Lincolnshire).
Despite the existence of the Hull – Hedon Turnpike road (s.p.b.) and the excavation of Alexandra Dock by the Hull- Barnsley Railway in the 1870s Marfleet’s residential development was mostly a product of post-war development of the housing estates of Greatfield, Bilton Grange and Longhill.
St. Giles’ church, Marfleet, standing just east of Marfleet Lane, was built in 1884, it being the third church to be built on the same, or nearby, site.
(to be continued)