The Holderness Historian

Tag: Hedon

  • A Medieval Timeslip at Hedon?

    An unplanned detour with this post, thanks to a serendipitous find in a box of books from an auction. “Chance found me at Hedon”, indeed! My friend Greg has an incurable addiction to buying cheap job lots, and I get to rake through them for the good stuff. By which I mean not the expensive stuff (in the unlikely event there is any), but the obscure little gems that fit the Holderness Historian’s remit. Greg’s latest purchase was a musty-smelling cardboard box filled with scrapbooks of newspaper clippings dating from the early 1900s. The pages are covered with annotations and corrections by the author: Mr Hiram P Bailey, or “American Citizen” as he dubbed himself for the British press.

    Bailey wrote the laboriously-titled Shanghaied Out of ‘Frisco in the ‘Nineties (Lauriat, Boston, 1920), a tale of maritime rogues that purports to be a memoir of his time on the high seas, although I suspect it’s more fiction than fact. He did, however, get about a bit in Britain, sending off his travelogues to newspapers as he went: Cornwall, Scotland, the Lakes, Shakespeare Country… and Holderness. One of the scrapbooks has his address on the cover; somehow, Bailey ended up living in Hull, which explains his forays into the flatlands of East Yorkshire.

    Bailey wrote a lot about his love of history. It’s clear he had a deep yearning for the ability to see into the past, to open his eyes and find himself in landscapes a long time out of mind. Hidden in the haul of clippings, amid much purple prose discussing “Is There a Hell?” and “Psychology: the Danger of Bestowing Too Much Attention”, is a piece entitled “A Few American Thoughts on The Medieval at Hedon” in which our hero sets out to explore the site of St Sepulchre’s leper hospital.

    The Hospital of St. Sepulchre, a place for the housing and care of lepers, and later the infirm and elderly, was built in the late 12th century on a rare patch of high ground to the north of Hedon, near the ancient Sepulchre boundary cross. Until its closure during Henry VIII’s Reformation, it was run by an Abbess and a Prior overseeing nuns and an order of Carthusian monks. Although Carthusian philosophy hinged on a total withdrawal from the world, it’s said that St Sepulchre’s Brother John Coomber couldn’t resist Sister Alice, and together they betrayed their Holy Orders in more ways than one…

    This tale of lust, jealousy, murder and suicide is in the pantheon of Hedon’s ghost stories. The site of the hospital is alleged to be walked by the spectre of a white-clad Sister Alice, while Brother John haunts the spot where the boundary cross used to be. The historical and cultural context of this legend, particularly when seen through a folkloric lens, is fascinating — you’ll have to wait for my next post for that!

    1895 map showing the site of St Sepulchre’s, Pomona House, Birkholme, the railway line and the boundary cross1

    The hospital’s location was well-known in the area, due its terrifying reputation and medieval significance (but mainly its terrifying reputation), and is shown on most Victorian maps. In the early 20th century, it formed part of the land belonging to James Soutter’s house The Chestnuts (named Pomona House when built in 1874) and in a 1908 letter to the Hull and East Yorkshire Times2 Soutter says that all traces of St Sepulchre’s — which he confirms was situated in his garden — have “now vanished off the face of the earth”.

    Here, Hiram P Bailey enters the chat. Bailey spends a happy hour in Hedon one October afternoon, “wandering over cobbled streets and byways shaded with quaint little dwellings, ruddily roofed with pantiles” before setting off to find “the ruins” of St Sepulchre’s, which he’s been told (by an unnamed party) lay in the grounds of a house somewhere to the left of the road leading to Preston.

    “Could it be that this ‘desirable residence’ sacrilegiously encumbered the site of the ancient monastery? To eliminate doubt, I turned up an adjacent lane, and discovered that it did. Suddenly, without the least preliminary, my eye alighted greedily upon the ruins — or rather the remains of the ruins. Little there to be seen — just two Gothic windows — but, oh, their beauty in the evening light!… A poem in stone! Their halo was one of boughs, their footstool was one of flowers.”

    The American then falls into a reverie of fanciful musings on late 12th century architecture, the hospitality of medieval monks, and his (rather less fanciful) hatred for Thomas Cromwell, arch nemesis of St Sepulchre’s.

    Now, I’ve traced the original publication of Bailey’s article to the Hull Times, November 30th, 1912 — four years after James Soutter categorically stated that there was nothing left of the hospital. Yet Hiram P Bailey sees otherwise! Hmmm… perhaps Bailey had visited Hedon before the last of the ruins had collapsed, and was writing this much later? Or perhaps Soutter didn’t publicise the fact that there was still something there in case he got hordes of American writers hanging around his garden? Bailey’s view is indeed blocked by “a tall, unfriendly hedge”, but even this doesn’t dampen his excitement, given that “the distance robbed the spot of its harsher details, and accentuated its sweeter ones.” Or has Bailey unwittingly fulfilled his ambition of being able to gaze into the past? Is this a “timeslip”?3. All something of a mystery…

    Live detective work alert!

    In true Scooby Doo style, my dog and I went for a walk to try and solve the puzzle by retracing Bailey’s route and vantage point. The Chestnuts has also disappeared, replaced by several relatively modern houses. I realised that the “adjacent lane” Bailey turned down is now a private road leading to these houses, one of which is guarded by a large Rottweiler, so I thought it prudent not to follow Bailey’s footsteps that far.

    Chance pampered me once again, though, as the lovely ladies who live in the Lodge at the top of the lane stopped to chat. Not only did they give Mac a chunk of sausage pasty, they gave me some very useful pointers as to the location of various houses over the years and confirmed that the hospital site was definitely in a paddock behind one of the gardens. The only way to catch a public glimpse of it today is to walk down the railway line (now a bridlepath — I wasn’t about to become the heroine of a silent melodrama) and climb into a bramble thicket4. So that’s what I did.

    Site of St Sepulchre’s seen (not very clearly) from the bridlepath

    Definitely no Gothic windows in sight.

    Back home, in search of further clues, I turned to an old faithful: Dr Martin Craven’s A New and Complete History of the Borough of Hedon (The Ridings, 1972). And lo, the medieval mists cleared and I solved the conundrum of Hiram P Bailey’s ghostly ruins.

    Bailey was peering through the wrong hedge. Instead of looking left into the garden of The Chestnuts, where the hospital had been, he looked right, into the grounds of the house opposite: Birkholme, built by the Todd family in 1888. And at this point, chance didn’t so much pamper him as punch him in the face. For Mr Todd had erected in his garden two Gothic windows, taken from Hull Minster during its restoration in 1859, as a decorative feature.

    Private road be damned. I marched back down Souttergate to see how far I could get to where Bailey had stood without someone performing a citizen’s arrest. Luckily, the homeowners I came across were benign; special mention must go to Peter Crombie, who provided some cracking new information that requires a post of its own5. I carried on up the lane and there, only just visible behind a tall, unfriendly hedge, was part of the “poem in stone”6.

    Bailey was not seeing the remains of St Sepulchre’s leper hospital, but a Victorian gentleman’s folly.

    A glimpse of the stones in what was Mr Todd’s garden

    This realisation, while being one of those moments that make a historian laugh out loud, was a poignant one. I imagined our American friend with his head in the evergreens, lost in his dream of lepers and monks and Thomas Cromwell, blissfully unaware that he was looking the wrong way. But Hiram P Bailey died, aged 65, in 1949 so he will never read this, never know that a 21st century woman followed in his footsteps one hot August afternoon and blew his dream to bits. We shall leave him be on that lonely lane in 1912, staring at the stones:

    “A last, long, lingering look of thanks I cast to them. Then they faded amidst the trees, and I beat my steps back towards the town.”

    Hiram P Bailey, 1884 – 1949

    Acknowledgments

    Thanks must go to Gregory Butterworth, Esq., for spending a whole £16 on the box of books that inspired this post. Dr Martin Craven has my eternal gratitude for his lifelong dedication to Hedon’s history. And huge thanks to Mr Peter Crombie for his kindness and knowledge — I will be pestering him again! Mac and I also very much appreciated the help and snacks from the Lodge ladies (Mac might be pestering them again).

    A note on the title of this piece, “A Medieval Timeslip at Hedon?” — The answer to any title posed as a question is, almost invariably, “no.” See also: “Is There a Hell?”

    1. Boyle, J.R., The Early History of the Town and Port of Hedon, Brown & Sons, 1895 ↩︎
    2. Hull and East Yorkshire Times, 26th December, 1908 ↩︎
    3. For a good overview of the recent timeslip reports from Bold Street, Liverpool, see 46:19 of https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rckl/uncanny-series-1-1-case-1-miss-howard ↩︎
    4. St Sepulchre’s Hill is part of the Scheduled Ancient Monument, Hedon Medieval Town, so metal detecting or disturbing the site in any way is illegal https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1003779?section=official-list-entry ↩︎
    5. There will be a Part II for this case, and it’s going to be a banger! ↩︎
    6. Mr Todd installed this structure and an 18ft high Gothic window that I couldn’t see from the lane — no wonder Bailey was smitten! The stones are Grade II Listed https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1346597 ↩︎

  • It’s Showtime!

    It’s my turn this month for the Hedon History Talk, and we’re going to the Magdalen Fair!

    What began as a medieval feast day for the Blessed Mary Magdalen turned into a week of the most amazing sights you could wish to see in Georgian England: death-defying feats, giants and dwarves, waxwork spectaculars, anarchic puppet theatres and much more. All the fun of the fair… and plenty of things that weren’t so much fun, from murderous coppers to anti-semitism.

    Using an 18th century Hedon ballad, contemporary newspaper reports and archive material, we’ll look at the rise and fall of Hedon’s most famous fair. No need to book, just turn up and pay £5 on the night at the Royal British Legion, Magdalen Gate (fittingly!), Hedon, HU12 8JP, 7pm.

    “In words all the wonders could never be told — the way to enjoy is to come and behold!”

  • “Begotten in Fornication”

    Thanks to everyone that came to my talk on sin last month! I thoroughly enjoyed researching it, particularly the evidence for women bearing illegitimate children. This rabbit hole produced a ton of material that there wasn’t time to cover, so here are the stories behind some of the  “troublesome” women of Hedon, their fate and that of their children. Just a few words in the parish registers illustrate the divide between those who abided by the accepted laws of public morality and those who deviated from them, and nowhere is this divide starker than in matters of sex. Despite their modern unpalatability, I’ll use the terms that were written in the parish registers; alongside illegitimate, we also see fornication (specifically meaning sex outside marriage) and base-born. The most common, however, is bastard, so forgive me if this post sounds like a Sean Bean YouTube compilation.

    Spoiler alert: unmarried people have sex, sex sometimes results in pregnancy, and ’twas ever thus. While this hardly raises a 21st century eyebrow, in the past it could see you — if “you” were a woman — shunned and shamed by your church and community, even imprisoned and whipped. Primitive methods of contraception were risky, and abortion was both unreliable and dangerous. For the poor, a wedding was often financially out of reach. Reading the banns, paying the minister and parish clerk, even buying a ring, were expenses that many couldn’t afford. As marriage laws became stricter in the 18th century, it’s no surprise that we see illegitimacy rates in Hedon almost double to 1 in 17 births1. 

    Fornication and illegitimate births were punished by the state as well as the church. They threatened the orderliness of a society and, if a father wasn’t named or wouldn’t accept responsibility, supporting poor women with bastard children fell to the parish. In 1587, the government gave secular courts the right to punish bastardy, including the whipping of mothers, alongside the usual religious sanctions. An unmarried woman must have felt petrified when her period didn’t arrive. This fear was enough for one woman to give birth in secret and bury her daughter in a paper box in St Augustine’s graveyard in April 1828; the mother was never identified.

    Excommunication was the nuclear punishment employed by St Augustine’s.  The victim was banned from services and taking Communion until they repented and did penance, a form of public shaming where they had to confess their supposed sins to the priest and congregation. In a world where the church was the focal point of a community, this was no trifle.   

    It’s relatively well-documented2 that three Hedon women were excommunicated in the early 1700s for bearing bastards: Elizabeth Hodgson in 1713, and Anne Jackson and Elizabeth Bradley (who, it’s noted, “did penance and was absolved”) in 1715. My research has also uncovered a much earlier case. Mary Wetherell died on the 26th February 1591 “beinge excommunycate.”. The register doesn’t tell us why she’d been shunned, but an entry from the following year provides the most likely explanation with the burial of a bastard named Tabitha Wetherell.

    Burials of Mary Wetherell, “excommunycate”, and her bastard daughter Tabitha

    These are the only mentions of the surname in the registers so I think we can safely assume that Tabitha was the reason for her mother’s excommunication. Mary had not done the penance needed to be absolved in life so she likely died not long after childbirth, and she would have been buried in the “devil’s portion” of St Augustine’s graveyard on the north side (this remained the haunt of the unwanted dead until its consecration in 1869).

    We can see from these entries that shameful labels were attached to the fallen forever. Ordinarily in the baptism and burial registers, women and children were described by their relation to men: wife of/child of/widow of/spinster. One woman, Ellen Grimston, in 1620 is even called a “virg.” (no prizes for guessing what that means) on her burial record! There is a marked contrast in the treatment of the illegitimate and their mothers. The child is always referred to by its unfortunate status and, in the vast majority of cases, only the mother’s name is given, suggesting that the men behind these pregnancies rarely took responsibility.

    The fascinating and tragic tale of Elizabeth Hodgson is worth looking at in more detail. She is mentioned in several secondary sources3 but I’ve followed the threads and been able to construct a more detailed picture of her turbulent life. On February 21st 1713, Hedon’s minister Richard Sissison excommunicated Elizabeth and the “reputed father” (he probably denied it) William Reeston for “bearing a bastard child and contempt”. This punishment was clearly not effective enough, as in July 1714 the minutes of the Justices of the Peace at Hedon Quarter Sessions4 tell us that:

    The said Elizabeth shall be strip’d unto her naked skin from her Wast upward & be whip’d [round the town]… with birch or willows… and brought back to the Gaol where she is now, and is to remain there until she find Sufficient Securitie for her good behaviour. To be kept at hard labour.

    This punishment was for Elizabeth’s fourth illegitimate child but I’ve discovered there was at least one more. All were out of wedlock and none had an officially-named father. Her first child, Henry, was born in August 1698 and thus began the series of events that culminated in her very public humiliation sixteen years later. A second son, Gedney, was born in September 1704 and his name gives a tantalising hint as to his father; Gedney was a common Hedon surname of the day but this is the only instance of it being used as a first name…

    Baptism of Gedney, bastard son of Elizabeth Hodgson — note how every entry but this one gives the father’s name!

    Next came Edward in 1709 and William in 1712. Gedney died aged six and William died at just one day old, which perhaps explains why he wasn’t counted by the JPs. There then arrived another William in January 1713 — likely named after his father, William Reeston, and the reason for Elizabeth’s excommunication.

    While it was not uncommon for women to bear one or two illegitimate children (fellow excommunicate Elizabeth Bradley had two, both of whom died in infancy), five is unusual. That Elizabeth was imprisoned and whipped more than a year after the second William’s birth implies that she was still flouting the rules, pregnant again or that she was known to be fornicating. It’s thought that unmarried women bearing multiple illegitimate children by nameless fathers could have been sex workers5 and this would certainly explain Hedon’s treatment of Elizabeth. She was buried at St Augustine’s on the 19th September 1718, described only as a spinster, and her children’s records refer to them all as bastards.

    Illegitimate children often had as tough a ride as their mothers. Many died in childhood or shortly after birth, no doubt hastened by poverty and a lack of support from the community. Two particularly brutal entries were recorded on March 17th 1655, with the birth and burial on the same day of male twins — “bastard children begotten in fornication” — born to a widow, Anne Collinson, whose husband Marmaduke had died the year before, and a man named John Davison.

    Record of the birth of two boys “begotten in fornication” to Anne Collinson

    The boys were not even given names so were likely stillborn and unbaptised. Like Mary Wetherell, they might have been buried on the north side of the churchyard reserved for social and religious outcasts. There is a happier ending for Anne, though, with a second marriage to a John Dennison (given the vagaries of transcription, this was possibly the same man that fathered the twins) in April 1656 to which “noe opposicon” was made. Hurray!

    At least the children we’ve discussed so far had at least one parent in their lives. Others were not so lucky. The 18th century saw the rise of Foundling Hospitals in England, the most famous being the London hospital set up by Thomas Coram in 17396. These took in children from poor and often unmarried mothers but in smaller towns like Hedon, such establishments were non-existent and the fate of such babies — if they survived — fell to the state. A single line in the burial register for January 19th 1747 suggests that the parish employed wet-nurses to care for infants:

    Farmer Kitchen, a nursed Child. Father and Mother not known. 

    18th century wet-nurse (courtesy of the Wellcome Trust)

    Rural women (in this case, a farmer’s wife) often took up wet-nursing as a job and were highly thought of due to the assumed beneficial effects of country air.  Some sold their services to the urban middle class, but this entry hints that Mrs Kitchen was employed by Hedon Corporation to take in an abandoned, anonymous baby who was most probably illegitimate and didn’t live long enough to know the shame of being a bastard.

    The grandees of St Augustine’s west door

    When I pass the grand memorials of the important men of this parish, men whose social worth is forever set in stone, I often think of these women and children whose “disgrace” was recorded even in death. Many of them would never have had a proper funeral or grave marker, and some would have been unceremoniously interred in the darkest corner of the churchyard. Centuries later, in Hedon’s parish registers, their shame lives on.

    1. Craven, Martin, A Very Troublesome Woman, Highgate, 2003 ↩︎
    2. eg. Park, G.R., The History of the Ancient Borough of Hedon, W.G.B. Page, 1895 ↩︎
    3. eg. https://hulleastyorkshistorycalendar.com/tag/riot/page/3/ ↩︎
    4. East Riding Archives DDHE/5/1 ↩︎
    5. https://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/bastardy.pdf ↩︎
    6. Cruickshank, Dan & Burton, Neil, Life in the Georgian City, Penguin, 1990 ↩︎

  • The Wages of Sin

    I’m back at the British Legion tomorrow night to talk about sin! We’ll be looking at what St Augustine’s church can tell us about the medieval concept of sin (including an exciting new discovery I’ve made), the history behind the stories of Hedon’s wrongdoers, and the punishments that were meted out from public humiliation to the House of Correction.

    Come along to hear about gargoyles, murderous monks, troublesome women and a shoot-out at the Town Hall — the Devil lurks around every corner in Hedon!

  • Old Flames

    If anyone is in a romantic mood tonight, my Hedon History Talk this month (tenuously linked to Valentine’s Day) is Old Flames: Love & Lust in Holderness Past.

    Although there is a bit of romance, I’m not really the hearts-and-flowers type, so expect more scandal than soppy stuff: Hedon’s medieval sex workers, our own version of the Tinder Swindler, and a 19th century antiquarian with a dangerous secret life…

    WARNING: contains “adult” language (one word in particular that might cause offence) and subject matter. If this sounds like your sort of thing, come to the Hedon Royal British Legion (Magdalen Lane), 7pm, Thursday 26th February. £5 on the door.

  • A Tomb with a View (of rubble)

    A Tomb with a View (of rubble)

    This is a little companion post to the one that the lovely Folly Flâneuse and I have recently collaborated on. You can read her fantastic piece and subscribe to her blog here:

    Albina’s Tomb, Hedon, East Riding of Yorkshire.

    While Albina’s Tomb is still in a precarious condition, it’s in a vastly better state than it was a couple of years ago and I thought people might be interested in this early stage of the restoration process. 

    I am not unbiased when it comes to this site; it’s my favourite place in Hedon. Once a country squire’s magnificent, mad garden ornament, now a ravaged and haunting spectacle, these stones have an undeniable presence. I first saw Albina’s Tomb up close in 2020 when the new owner of Ivy House, Greg Butterworth, opened the garden for Heritage Open Day (until then, I’d had to make do with trying to stick my head through the hedge on Ivy Lane) and lo, I was smitten.

    Before: spot the Tomb… and the floor (clue: you can’t)

    When Greg bought the house, the folly was completely hidden by a thicket of ivy, elder, brambles and nettles. Decades of neglect, vandalism and Mother Nature had resulted in the roof and upper storey caving in and, after a heroic Greg had removed all the vegetation from the facade, it was clear that Albina’s memorial was in a sorry state. The interior — open to the elements since the collapse — was filled with fallen masonry, broken branches and weeds. So, with naive enthusiasm, I offered to help clear the site… how hard could it be?

    Ah. Very hard, as it turned out. Inside the tomb, the debris was a dismaying thigh-high jumble of stones, roof slates, bricks and glass. It was immediately obvious why no one had yet attempted to tackle it! We had no idea what was underneath the rubble, so it was painstaking work that took many weeks. We didn’t want to miss anything that might be hidden in there and every scrap was carefully sorted.

    First up were the roof slates, which we collected and stacked up outside the Tomb. Then the bricks: again, stored for future use. Any interesting pieces of stonework were put aside and our care paid off, as you will see. The remaining debris was put through a giant sieving machine. It was backbreaking graft shovelling it all in to the sieve and then shovelling the resulting piles into wheelbarrows; the brick fragments etc were collected to use as hardcore and the remaining topsoil and leaf mould were dug into the herbaceous borders. That sieve was the bane of my life and there were definitely moments when my muscles deeply regretted taking this on. We stopped for a lot of tea breaks during this stage!

    Sieving machine on left, tea-stealing machine on right

    But it was worth it. Our first glimpse of the floor was a real highlight (I think we had beer instead of tea that day).

    Finally, we found the floor!

    As work continued, we uncovered the beautiful Norman carved pillar bases, and the steps at the rear entrance. Once the internal ivy was removed, the gap where the early 18th century Pulteney plaque — rescued by Hedon Museum after the roof collapse — had been became visible, and we found Iveson’s ivy leaf crest that was originally set into the archway opposite that of Drogo de Bevrière. 

    Our major discovery among all that smashed stonework was the amazing medieval rose window. Greg brought his jigsaw puzzle skills to the table here and we managed to piece it back together. James Iveson didn’t mention this feature in his manuscript (see the Folly Flâneuse’s piece for more details) so I suspect it was a later addition to the rear of the upper extension of the Tomb. It’s plausible that the window came from a demolished section of St Augustine’s church, just across the green from Ivy House (thanks to Dr Martin Craven for his thoughts on this).

    Some wonderful discoveries

    This is merely the beginning of what is undoubtedly a daunting journey towards restoration, a journey that will require a lot more time, aching muscles and, of course, money. Ironically, the Tomb as it looks today — a simple arch with an open interior — is far closer to Iveson’s original vision than the grand two-storey edifice that it became. To the Georgians, the whole point of a Gothic folly was to conjure an atmosphere of ancient stones, long-dead tales and ruined beauty… an atmosphere that Albina’s Tomb still carries, and I hope it can be preserved it for generations of future Romantics.

    Thanks to Greg and Bruce Butterworth, The Folly Flâneuse, Tony Porter and Dr Martin Craven. And big up to Dr Stephen Campbell for the title — I’d gone for “Tomb Aider” but his idea was better!