Only a decade before Abraham de la Pryme, s.p.b., came to Hull the events of 1688 had taken place whereby King James II fled England and was replaced by William Duke of Orange and Anne Stuart (James’ daughter) as joint monarchs (married couple). Presumably Abraham approved of these events as he had been brought-up as a protestant, under the influence of his Huguenot father (who had come from the Low Countries where later William was at war resisting Spanish/Catholic control). The statue in Hull of William on horseback was created after Abraham’s death.
To return to our main theme – on the first page of his manuscript Abraham wrote ‘All the ground where the town of Kingston upon Hull now (c.1700) stands was nothing in former ages but a low point of land running into an acute angle between the two rivers of the Humber and Hull, subject to continual inundation until along the process of time ye said rivers by their continual overflowing had warped and cast up so much sand and earth upon the same as raised it to a competent height and dryness’. So, Abraham explains that levees are a resolution to the basic question. He goes on to state that only when the levees had reached this height was the land ‘useful …. to man or beast’, a pre-environmental age opinion.
Hull’s Old Port developed on the west bank of the lower R. Hull, right at the River’s side, and as there is not a perceptible slope inland to Lowgate I don’t find this proposal convincing (further up-river the original site of the hamlet of Sculcoates at the base of the levee does have more credibility). The hypothesis that the lower course of the River Hull was not the original one but that the River broke into a drainage canal (this previously discussed on this site) may offer more credibility because the River would have scoured-out a deeper channel than the canal had, this reducing the risk of the River over-topping near its mouth.
Covering the passage of time between 1066 and the early 15th century Abraham doesn’t give as much information about particularly bad episodes of flooding as does the Meaux Abbey Chronicle. However, Abraham does write about a great inundation in 1360 when an ‘extraordinary tyde … broke down all the Humber banks’, this making it clear that to hold back tides in the Humber Estuary clay banks had to be constructed. This flood ‘drowned a great many people’ Abraham claims, and ‘drove away all the cattle that were grazing there’.
In turn, this last phrase is interesting in that the Meaux Abbey Chronicle often records flocks of sheep grazing on the Humber flood plain, but rarely cattle.
(to be continued).