Humberside Wetlands 5.

The Meaux Abbey Chronicle further records that in the 1340s Burstall Priory suffered the ‘ruin of much of their property by inundation’. Burstall Priory was an ‘alien cell’ (monastic site belonging to a foreign order) in the parish of Skeffling between Patrington and Kilnsea. Despite the above it was still mentioned in the documents covering the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. The site now is almost certainly under the Humber foreshore in an area like that shown above.

Also recorded is the fact that by the 1530s Ravenser Odd had been washed away. Ravenser Odd was an ‘island’ in the Humber Estuary, towards the north bank, where a community and port was developed on a mudflat just above high tide level between 1280s and the 1350s. It rapidly became important at this time being granted a royal charter at the same time as that of Hull in the late 1290s. However, the moving currents of the Estuary began to erode the ‘island’ by the 1330s, this continuing to the point made above. Recently English Heritage has revived interest in this once upon a time place and further discussion on its possible location.

In 1393 the whole land was ‘inundated’. As the Meaux Abbey Chronicle was written in 1401 this is the last record of medieval Humberside floods. Subsequent evidence comes from other sources; for example, in 1646 the clay bank was ‘broken’ at Drypool. Drypool was a village on the east side of the lower River Hull opposite Hull’s ‘Old Port’ (the west bank of the lower River), so here we are onto the lowland River Hull floodplain. About the same time it is recorded that ‘Stoneferry drowned by the force of ye waters for the time of 26 weeks’, people here and at Marfleet had to ‘either leavetheir houses or take themselves to their chambers’ … ‘for a long time all people were deprived of going to any market but with boates’.

Marfleet was a community on the north bank of the Estuary sited where today stands Hull’s King George and Queen Elizabeth Docks. Stoneferry, now a suburb was then a community north of Hull beside the River Hull and four miles inland.

(to be continued).