Southwards in one huge curve of nearly forty miles stretches the low coast of Holderness, seemingly continued into infinitude. There is nothing comparable to it on the coasts of the British Isles for its featureless monotony and for the unbroken front it presents to the sea. The low brown cliffs of hard clay seem to have no more resisting power to the capacious appetite of the waves than if they were of gingerbread. The progress of the sea has been continued for centuries, and stories of lost villages and of overwhelmed churches are met with all the way to Spurn Head. Four or five miles south of Bridlington we come to a point on the shore where, looking out among the lines of breaking waves, we are including the sides of the two demolished villages of Auburn and Hartburn. There is no good road close to the sea, for it would scarcely be a wise policy to spend money on a highway that would year by year be brought nearer to the edge of the low cliffs, and another significant fact is the shyness the railways show to this vanishing coast. Two lines from Hull venture down to the sea, but neither has been continued to the north or south along the coast, although the joining of Hornsea with Bridlington would be eminently convenient.
From a casual glance at Skipsea no one would attribute any importance to it in the past. It was, nevertheless, the chief place in the lordship of Holderness in Norman times, and from that we may also infer that it was the most well-defended stronghold. On a level plain having practically no defensible sites, great earthworks would be necessary, and these we find at Skipsea Brough. There is a high mound surrounded by a ditch, and a segment of the great outer circle of defences exists on the south-west side. No masonry of any description can be seen on the grass-covered embankment, but on the artificial hillock, once crowned, it is surmised, by a Norman keep, there is one small piece of stonework. These earthworks have been considered Saxon, but later opinion labels them post-Conquest.[C] In the time of the Domesday Survey the Seigniory of Holderness was held by Drogo de Bevere, a Flemish adventurer who joined in the Norman invasion of England and received this extensive fief from the Conqueror. He also was given the King’s niece in marriage as a mark of special favour; but having for some reason seen fit to poison her, he fled from England, it is said, during the last few months of William’s reign. The Barony of Holderness was forfeited, but Drogo was never captured.
Poulson, the historian of Holderness, states that Henry III. gave orders for the destruction of Skipsea Castle about 1220, the Earl of Albemarle, its owner at that time, having been in rebellion. When Edward II. ascended the throne, he recalled his profligate companion Piers Gaveston, and besides creating him Baron of Wallingford and Earl of Cornwall, he presented this ill-chosen favourite with the great Seigniory of Holderness. Owing to the distractions in England caused by Edward’s stubborn refusal to give up his favourite, Robert Bruce successfully drove the English out of Scotland. The need of men to resist the victorious Scots is shown by the levies raised in Holderness at this time, on all men between the ages of twenty and sixty, who were, according to their means, to act either as men-at-arms, on heavy horses, fully armed cap-à-pie, or as light cavalry for skirmishing and for harassing the enemy’s flanks.
Going southwards from Skipsea, we pass through Atwick, with a cross on a large base in the centre of the village, and two miles further on come to Hornsea, an old-fashioned little town standing between the sea and the Mere. This beautiful sheet of fresh water comes as a surprise to the stranger, for no one but a geologist expects to discover a lake in a perfectly level country where only tidal creeks are usually to be found. Hornsea Mere may eventually be reached by the sea, and yet that day is likely to be put further off year by year on account of the growth of a new town on the shore, and the increased rateable value of the place when large sums of money are required for sea-defence. A verse, according to Poulson, inscribed on the old steeple of the church, which collapsed in 1733, gives a sensational impression of the encroachments of the ocean in the past:
‘Hornsea steeple, when I builded thee,
Thou was ten miles off Burlington,
Ten miles off Beverley, and ten miles off sea.’
But when we find that Hornsea Church is thirteen miles from Bridlington and twelve from Beverley as the crow flies, inductive reasoning would suggest that a similar freedom may have been taken with the third measurement, this time expanding the result liberally to round off the last line impressively. It may be remarked that ten miles out to sea from Hornsea Church is more than a mile outside the ten-fathoms line, and far beyond the outermost point of Flamborough Head. It has been calculated from the present rate of erosion that, since the Norman Conquest, a strip of land a mile in width has been washed away.
The scenery of the Mere is quietly beautiful. Where the road to Beverley skirts its margin there are glimpses of the shimmering surface seen through gaps in the trees that grow almost in the water, many of them having lost their balance and subsided into the lake, being supported in a horizontal position by their branches. The picture given here was drawn on a wintry day when the sun was struggling through mist and making a golden path across the rippling waters. The islands and the swampy margins form secure breeding-places for the countless water-fowl, and the lake abounds with pike, perch, eel, and roach.
It was the excellent supply of fish yielded by Hornsea Mere that led to a hot discussion between the neighbouring Abbey of Meaux and St. Mary’s Abbey at York. In the year 1260 William, eleventh Abbot of Meaux, laid claim to fishing rights in the southern half of the lake, only to find his brother Abbot of York determined to resist the claim. The cloisters of the two abbeys must have buzzed with excitement over the impasse, and relations became so strained that the only method of determining the issue was by each side agreeing to submit to the result of a judicial combat between champions selected by the two monasteries. Where the fight took place I do not know, and the number of champions is not mentioned in the record. It is stated that a horse was first swum across the lake,
