Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 308

This is the latest volume of the Victoria County History for York and the East Riding and describes the liberty and wapentake of Howdenshire, excluding the town of Howden itself, which will be covered in part 2, due in early 2021. Until 1836 Howdenshire was an ‘exempt franchise’ of the Bishop of Durham, an enclave which survived the Reformation and the Civil War. Occupying the south-western portion of east Yorkshire its ownership is a complicated story and the editor has taken the decision to organize this volume not by parish as is usually the case but with a separate description of each of the nineteen townships. Each section is divided into similar headings: landscape, land ownership, economic history, river defence and drainage, social history, religious history and local government.

The earliest record of Howdenshire is in a grant of King Edgar in 959 when it was a waterlogged island, an area of wetland carrs within a fenland landscape. It occupies an area of some 48 square miles on the left bank of the Yorkshire Ouse between the Derwent in the west and the Foulness stream to the east, the northern boundary formed by the old Derwent and associated drainage channels. Reclamation and water management began in the 1160s organized by Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham, with the construction of several major drains and sluices. Early riparian settlements were along the raised alluvial banks but the perpetual threat of inundation meant that this water management system was maintained with little change until the mid-seventeenth century.

The sluices were known as clows, clowers, or cloughs while structures known as staiths, paired timber-framed earthworks with stapled faggots of thorn and brushwood (yedders) jutting into the river, deflected the scouring effect of the current at ebb and flow and prevented it undermining the raised flood banks. The use of the term staith suggests these were also used as convenient landing and loading stages for small boats, as allowed by the water level. Between the staiths were pikes or hobs, lengths of reinforced bank strengthened with timbers and yedders. The inhabitants had customary obligations to raise and fortify the banks and costs were shared by the endangered townships, fines being imposed for lack of maintenance. The temporary abolition of the episcopal liberty in the 1640s during the Civil War and Interregnum was disastrous. By 1660, the system was in serious decay and the waters of the Ouse breached its banks resulting in its course shifting eastwards, and at Skelton the left bank had to be entirely reconstructed.

The damp sticky clay soil was usually more suitable for plantation and pasture than for cereals, but oats were grown. Flax and hemp were important crops, while sheep provided wool, all providing the raw materials for local weaving. In the eighteenth century the more successful yeoman farmers and gentry were able to improve the land by warping. Deep warping drains allowed the land to be deliberately flooded. The alluvial deposits greatly improved fertility to a steadily increasing area of land as the process was completed over the years, and allowed the cultivation of wheat, barley and oats. This method was employed until 1950 when the £20 cost per acre meant that it was cheaper to use a combination of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This was the modern and progressive approach to farming but with the environmental costs that have become apparent, nitrate run off into our waterways and declining fertility of the soil. The farming collapse in the 1880s had resulted in abandonment of significant areas to grass until mechanization, combined with chemical treatments, made arable profitable again.

The late medieval common field system at Asselby survived as a working concern until the reign of Queen Victoria, but Barmby preserves the fullest evidence of a township’s common fields. Blacktoft developed where the Ouse debouches into the Humber and began as a marginal fishing village. It provided a mooring point for river traders venturing from Trent Falls and in modern times safe anchorage at low tide and in fog for the traffic to and from Goole. Metham, though one of the smaller townships, was the seat of one of Yorkshires principal gentry families, the Saltmarshe family, who possessed the eponymous village until the death in 1941, without an heir, of Philip Saltmarshe whose photograph appears as a frontispiece.

The story of Howdenshire is very pertinent in the circumstances we now find ourselves in, with the increasing flood risk from extreme weather events. It is also evident that the more generalized approach to water control of current river authorities is inadequate and inferior to the detailed local response that was once the norm. The balance between the level of protection of urban and rural communities also needs to be addressed because of the large-scale housing developments on the flood plains of our major rivers.