I wish that R. W. Elliot of Clifton, whom I recognise as a former inhabitant of Hull, had given the authority on which he states, that "It is so called from the sale of ginger having been chiefly carried on there in early times." The name of this street has much puzzled the local antiquaries; and having been for several years engaged on a work relative to the derivations, &c., of the names of the streets of Hull, I have spared no pains to ascertain the history and derivation of the singular name of this street.
I offer then a conjecture as to its derivation as follows:—The ground on which this street stands was originally the property of De la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, on which he had built his stately manor-house. On the attainder of the family it was seized by the king; and Henry VIII. several times held his court here, on one of his visits having presented his sword to the corporation. It was then, 1538, called Old Beverley Street, as seen in the survey made of the estates of Sir William Sydney, Kt. In a romance called Piraute el Blanco, it is stated "The morning collation at the English Court was green ginger with good Malmsey, which was their custom, because of the coldness of the land." And in the Fœdera, vii. 233., it is stated that, among other things, the cargo of a Genoese ship, which was driven ashore at Dunster, in Somersetshire, in 1380, consisted of green ginger (ginger cured with lemon-juice). In Hollar's Map of Hull, 1640, the street is there laid out as built upon, but without any name attached to it. No other plans of Hull are at present known to exist from the time of Hollar, 1640, to Gent, 1735. In Gent's plan of Hull, it is there called "The Land of Green Ginger;" so that probably, between the years 1640 and 1735, it received its peculiar name.
I therefore conjecture that, as Henry VIII. kept his Court here with his usual regal magnificence, green ginger would be one of the luxuries of his table; that this portion of his royal property being laid out as a garden, was peculiarly suitable for the growth of ginger—the same as Pontefract was for the growth of the liquorice plant; and that, upon the property being built upon, the remembrance of this spot being so suitable for the growth of ginger for the Court, would eventually give the peculiar name, in the same way that the adjoining street of Bowl-Alley-Lane received its title from the bowling-green near to it.
John Richardson.
13. Savile Street, Hull.
This has long been a puzzle to the Hull antiquaries. I have often inquired of old persons likely to know the origin of such names of places at that sea-port as "The Land of Green Ginger," "Pig Alley," "Mucky-south-end," and "Rotten Herring Staith;" and I have come to the conclusion, that "The Land of Green Ginger" was a very dirty place where horses were kept: a mews, in short, which none of the Muses, not even with Homer as an exponent, could exalt ("Ἔπεα πτεροέντα ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι") into the regions of poesy.
Ginger has been cultivated in this country as a stove exotic for about two hundred and fifty years. In one of the histories of Hull, ginger is supposed to have grown in this street, where, to a recent period, the stables of the George Inn, and those of a person named Foster opposite, occupied the principal portion of the short lane called "Land of Green Ginger." It is hardly possible that the true zingiber can have grown here, even in the manure heaps; but a plant of the same order (Zingiberaceæ) may have been mistaken for it. Some of the old women or marine school-boys of the Trinity House, in the adjoining lane named from that guild, or some druggist, may have dropped, either accidentally or experimentally, a root, if not of the ginger, yet of some kindred plant. The magnificent Fuchsia was first noticed in the possession of a seaman's wife by Fuchs in 1501, a century prior to the introduction of the ginger plant into England.
T. J. Buckton.
Birmingham.