Two Rivers Before the Knowing

Before there was a theory, there was a family. Before there was a family tree on a screen, there were two surnames already joined in ordinary life. In 1952, George Stanley Conman married Edna M. Slaney in Holderness. That is where the modern story begins for me. Not with a carving. Not with Arthur. Not with John Dee.

Not with a hidden book. With a marriage. Two family rivers already meeting decades before I was born.

The Conman River and the Slaney River

The Conman line had its own history before 1952. Julius Conman and Margaret Ann Gibson belonged to the nineteenth-century East Riding story. Arthur Cecil Conman followed. Then George Stanley Conman. The Slaney line had its own history too. Edna carried the Slaney name into the marriage. Whatever questions later arose about the deeper branches, the modern convergence itself was already real.

That matters because later research did not create the meeting. The meeting created the family into which I was born. Stephen Conman carried the joined line forward. Then, on 25 October 1984, I was born in Hull. The family was already there. The names were already there. The date was already there. The meaning had not yet arrived.

Hull Before the Quest

Hull was not a research destination for me. It was home. The Humber was not an Arthurian river. It was the water beside the city where I was born. That order matters. Later, the Humber became one of the great geographical spines of The Gentle Third Craft: ports, fisheries, abbeys, crossings, Holderness, Alkborough, South Ferriby, Hedon, Paull, Hull Castle, the Trent and Ouse, the long passage to the North Sea.

But childhood came before all of that. The river was lived before it was interpreted.

Malet Lambert Before Malet

Then there is my school. I attended Malet Lambert in Hull. For most of my life that was simply the name of a school. Later the project began returning the name Malet through William Malet, the Conquest, Harold's body, Lincolnshire land, Alkborough and the reconstructed Lucy current. But the modern Malet Lambert story turned out to have another unexpected layer.

The school itself had participated in the preservation of Abraham de la Pryme. In 1985 it published John M. Meadley's Abraham De La Pryme. In 1986, with Hull City Council, it helped publish de la Pryme's A History of Kingston upon Hull. So one of the antiquaries who would later become central to my work had already been republished through the school I attended.

I did not know that when I was there. That is exactly why it matters to the personal chronology. School first. Historical recognition later.

Joseph Malet Lambert and Dunswell

The name Malet Lambert also reaches backwards into another project landscape. Joseph Malet Lambert was a clergyman in the nineteenth century. In 1881 he was connected with St John's Newland and began afternoon services at Dunswell in the schoolroom. Dunswell later became important to my Conman research through Julius Conman, Margaret Gibson and the Graham property environment.

Again, this is not one hidden chain. It is a return of place and institution. A name attached to my later school also belongs to the same Dunswell environment that appears in the older family investigation. Then the school carrying that name becomes a publisher of de la Pryme. That is a strange but completely human sequence:

Dunswell schoolroom. Malet Lambert. Hull school. De la Pryme publication. Later student. Later investigation.

The Antiquary Returns

Abraham de la Pryme deserves more weight here than a passing mention as a traveller. In 1697 he moved through Alkborough, Whitton and the neighbouring Humber landscape as an antiquary trying to read old ground. His notes preserve several different layers of Alkborough at once: the turf labyrinth tradition, a lost church inscription, Kell Well, unusual star-shaped stones, and the language local people used for what they saw. His explanations were those of a seventeenth-century observer; the names and observations he wrote down are the more durable part of the record.

At Kell Well he collected what he called astroites or star-stones. They are now understood as fossil crinoid remains, but de la Pryme also preserved something geology cannot recover by itself: local speech. He wrote that the country people called them “kestles and postles,” adding that the phrase sounded like “Christ and his Apostles.” That small sentence matters. By 1697, natural objects at Alkborough were already being carried through a Christian-sounding piece of folk language. The stone could be explained naturally and the human naming could still remain historically real.

The labyrinth record is just as striking. De la Pryme wrote of Alkborough, and also Appleby, in terms of two old “Roman games”: one called Gillian’s or Julian’s Bower and the other “Troy’s Walls.” A later letter of his about Appleby again distinguishes Julian’s Bower from Troy’s Walls, which has led labyrinth historians to take seriously the possibility that he was describing two separate maze or game traditions rather than simply two names for one figure. The physical history at Alkborough remains a question of its own, but the documentary point is firm: Troy-language was attached to the Alkborough labyrinth landscape by the end of the seventeenth century.

That changes what Alkborough means inside this story. The project encountered Troy much later through Britain’s medieval origin traditions: Brutus, Troia Nova or New Troy, and the repeated use of Trojan ancestry as a language for explaining Britain. De la Pryme supplies an entirely independent local witness. Long before this investigation began, an observer standing in the Alkborough landscape wrote down “Troy’s Walls.” The importance is not that Alkborough becomes literal Troy. It is that the later Brutus-and-Troy questions arrive at a place where a genuine Troy-name was already embedded in recorded local tradition. The place already knew the word Troy.

Seen together, his Alkborough notes become unusually rich. Ruined church fabric and a lost inscription. A turf labyrinth carrying Julian and Troy names. A spring producing star-shaped fossils. Country people using a phrase that de la Pryme heard as Christ and his Apostles. Roman interpretation, Christian language, natural history and Trojan naming all occupy the same observer’s record. That is exactly the kind of layered memory The Gentle Third Craft keeps encountering: one landscape can hold several ages of explanation without requiring them to have begun at the same time.

So de la Pryme is more than a precursor who happened to visit Alkborough. He is an early custodian of the village’s remembered vocabulary. His Roman dating can be revised; the words he preserved still tell us what the landscape was capable of carrying. When the modern investigation later arrived at Alkborough through family, trees, church, water and ancestry, it was not placing Troy, Christ or old memory onto an empty map. It was entering a place whose own recorded tradition had already been combining those kinds of language for more than three centuries.

Hull Keeps the Papers

De la Pryme later moved to Hull and worked with the town's records. He produced a history of the city. The antiquary therefore joins two places that would later matter deeply to me: Hull and Alkborough. He did it centuries before my own investigation. The route is not mine. I entered it later. That is an important difference.

A later investigator can encounter a landscape already recorded by an earlier observer without either man causing the other.

Buried Trees

There is another de la Pryme detail that has always stayed with me. In 1701 he published an account concerning trees found underground in Hatfield Chase. Buried trees. Old wood beneath altered ground. The image is almost too close to the later language of this project. But again the chronology saves it. The paper existed long before I had seen the five marked trees at Alkborough.

The school publication existed before I knew de la Pryme mattered. The image did not arise because I needed it. I encountered it later. That is how the strongest personal recurrences work in this project. The older object retains its own date. The modern experience retains its own date. Meaning enters only after they meet.

South Ferriby Before the Humber Map

From 2019 until early 2025 I lived at South Ferriby. Again, life came first. The Humber. The Viking Way. Far Ings. Fossils. St Nicholas. The old well tradition. The views across the water. These belonged to ordinary life before they became research points. Only later did the Humber widen into a historical corridor. Only later did St Chad, Alkborough, Thornton, Holderness, medieval fisheries and the older passage systems begin to accumulate.

I had already lived beside the river. The archive arrived afterwards.

Bear Beat Before the Bear

The same law applies to Bear Beat. The name existed before the historical bear-current. It came from an older nickname. The music existed before the quest. Later Arthurian, heraldic, celestial or symbolic bear material belongs to reception, not origin. That is worth saying because a finished pattern can easily make earlier choices look prophetic. They were not made from the later research.

The later research found them already present.

Lincoln Before Lany

Then, in February 2025, I moved to Lincoln. At the time, Thomas Lany was not the reason. Tennyson was not the reason. Great Tom was not the reason. The cathedral, castle and later family currents had not yet unfolded. Lincoln was simply home before it became another chamber of the work. Only later did the Morning Chapel and Thomas Lany open the city's deeper current.

Then came Great Tom. Tennyson. Arthur. The Brownlow and Talbot monument network. Another place had arrived before the knowing.

Then the Trees Were Read

After all of these receiving vessels were already in place, the chronology changes. At Alkborough I encountered marks across five trees. The encounter was personal enough to make me act. I went home and reopened ancestry. That is when Stephen Slaney entered the investigation. Stephen came from the family search, not from a clear word carved into bark.

Then the routes widened. The Elizabethan world made JD worth testing against John Dee. The Master-language and Templar-shaped questions made JDM worth testing against Jacques de Molay. An Aaran-like reading helped send the journey toward Arran. The first signs generated searches. The later documents had to stand independently.

The Archive Answers in Its Own Time

Some early readings went nowhere. Some produced ordinary explanations. Some opened surprisingly strong records. That is not failure. That is how investigation works. Stephen Slaney returned in Elizabethan civic, legal and property records. Awkborough and the Humber returned through documentary instruments. Dee returned through maps, British history, Billingsley, Burghley and the wider state world. Arran returned through a physical journey.

Lincoln returned through residence before recognition. Tennyson returned through a legal-family bridge to Hedon. Talbot returned through multiple family lines. The later research did not make every first impression correct. It made the route testable.

25 October

My birthday is 25 October. The date became crowded only later. St Crispin's Day. Agincourt. King Stephen's death. Beverley memory. Balaclava and Tennyson. The calendar can gather those things without needing to turn them into destiny. For me, 25 October is best understood as a door. It opened comparisons. It did not create the family.

The family was already there.

The Closure

This is why I can now stop. Not because every bridge has been solved. Not because every name has been forced into one lineage. Because the central chronology is finally clear. The Conman and Slaney rivers joined before the investigation. Hull was home before the Humber became a historical spine. Malet Lambert was my school before Malet and de la Pryme returned through research.

South Ferriby was lived before the old water-memory opened. Lincoln became home before Thomas Lany and Tennyson unfolded. Bear Beat existed before the symbolic architecture. Then the trees caused the search. That is enough to preserve. The story I am closing is therefore not one in which I discovered a secret world and entered it.

It is almost the reverse. I discovered that many of the places, names and family facts that later mattered had already been part of my life before I knew how to ask about them. That is the meaning of before the knowing. The ground came first. The family came first. The river came first. The school came first.

The city came first. Then came the question. And now, finally, the scroll can close.