Author name: Richard Clarke

Following the petition to the king in 1344 Edward III appointed an ‘inquisition’ to investigate the matter the result being that those given the task confirmed the Frismersk residents petition. Consequently king Edward ordered the ‘Barons of his Exchequer’ to reduce the level of taxation imposed on the parishioners of Patrington living in the township

Another settlement/area of an earlier Sunk Island the evidence for which was studied by Boyle (Lost Towns of the Humber, s.p.b.s) was Frismersk. His map, reproduced above, locates it towards the eastern side of the early medieval Sunk Island. Etymologically the element ‘mersk’, Boyle argues, meant ‘marsh’, an opinion confirmed by Mawer, A. and Stenton,

Boyle (s.p.b.) quotes from the Meaux Abbey Chronicle to the effect that in the 1240s ‘the sea inundated and passed over its coasts almost throughout the whole eastern part of England; and the Humber exceeding its limits’ with the result that in the manor of Tharlsthorp the land was ‘decreased’ and the grange (farm) buildings there

The above map, self-drawn by the author Boyle, J.R. Lost Towns of the Humber (1889), shows Sunk Island having much the same extent as today. However the point of the map is to show that today’s Sunk Island had an early medieval ancestor, mostly lost to marine erosion in the 14th century and then to

I was recently given a postcard showing the above aerial photo of Spurn Point. A detailed study of the photo shows that the picture was taken years ago, the postcard being produced for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. However, the picture does show, more obviously than is apparent walking the spit, how easily the area of land

David Neave, Yorkshire: York and the East Riding (Yale University Press, 2005, 715), concludes the section on Sunk Island by stating that the Crown Colony was ‘a short-lived venture but some of the brick and tile cottages remain’. I have not researched the inter-war years for Sunk Island but the final source reproduced in Meadley, J.