The Hope & Anchor Beneath the Bear

The Serpent-Line of the Humber

South Ferriby, Alkborough, Hull, Paull, and the River That Remembered

There are places that explain themselves with documents.

And then there are places that make you live inside them first.

South Ferriby was like that for me.

I did not arrive there with a theory.

I did not arrive looking for the old families, the river-rights, the ferries, the monks, the staters, the boats, the lost chapels, the bishop-stone, or the trading powers of Hull.

I arrived with a life to repair.

The village sat beneath St Nicholas, half-way up the chalk edge, watching the Ancholme valley and the Humber beyond it.

The Viking Way ran above the churchyard.

The river opened below.

The cliff gave up fossils.

The woods and paths held the boys’ footsteps.

Far Ings, the Humber edge, the Viking Way, and the surrounding lanes became places of healing, memory and return.

St Nicholas at South Ferriby is recorded as Grade II, with a 13th-century or earlier nave, later medieval windows, rebuilding in 1578–80 and 1889, and a reset 11th-century tympanum showing a bishop with staff between cross-roundels.

At sunset, sometimes, the Great Bear seemed to stand over the place.

That is why this scroll cannot be only history.

It has to be memory too.

Because South Ferriby is not just a village on the south bank of the Humber.

It is a threshold.

A crossing-place.

A water-gate.

A place where the island’s old stories pass from stone into river, from river into trade, from trade into family, from family into wound, and from wound into healing.

And when the line is followed properly, it does not stop at South Ferriby.

It moves.

Alkborough → South Ferriby → Hull → Paull.

A serpent-line through the Humber.

Not one secret ownership.

Not one hidden bloodline controlling everything.

Something older and more honest than that: a chain of custody-sites where power keeps returning as ferry, fishery, church, toll, wool, ship, debt, chapel, boatyard, and memory.

The river was never background.

The river was the moving body of the story.

I. Before the Church: Boats, Coins, Horses and Stars

Before St Nicholas stood above the village, before the Domesday scribes wrote down the church, mill and ferries, before de Gant, Tison, Malet, Slaney, Swan or de la Pole, the Humber was already carrying people, goods and meaning.

Across the water at North Ferriby, the Bronze Age Ferriby boats were found on the foreshore: plank-built vessels about sixteen metres long, made from wood, willow and moss, and used for importing and exporting goods.

They show that the Ferriby crossing-world was already a place of skilled river and estuary movement long before written history.

So the first South Ferriby truth is this:

The ferry did not begin with the Vikings.

The river-road was older.

Older than the name.

Older than the church.

Older than the manor.

Older than the Norman families who later divided the land.

Then comes the Iron Age sign — the gold.

The British Museum holds South Ferriby-type gold staters from the South Ferriby hoard.

One is dated about 40–20 BC and described as having an abstract design derived from the

head of Apollo on one side, and a stylised horse facing left with a star below on the other.

That image matters.

A horse.

A star.

Gold from the Humber edge.

A symbol struck before Rome fully claimed the island, before the Christian bishop-stone, before the ferry-village became Ferebi, before the monks, merchants and mayors came to the water.

It would be too much to say the coin “explains” the later story.

But it gives the place a language before the scroll begins:

animal, sky, wealth, crossing.

The horse moves.

The star watches.

The river carries.

II. The Roman and Fossil Ground

South Ferriby’s depth is not only human.

It is geological.

The foreshore and cliff-edge carry ancient sea-life: ammonites, belemnites, oysters, bivalves and chalk/clay exposures from deep time.

That fits the lived experience of finding fossils along the cliff and beach edges.

The place gives up older worlds in your hand.

Then the human record returns.

Excavations off Horkstow Road found Roman building foundations, boundary features, pits, postholes and pottery showing settlement in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, with an inhumation radiocarbon dated to AD 230–410.

So before we even reach the medieval custody-line, South Ferriby is already layered:

deep sea-life in the cliff, Iron Age coinage in the soil, Roman settlement beside the Humber, and a river-mouth that never stopped inviting movement.

This is why the village feels strange.

It is not empty countryside.

It is a page written over and over.

III. Ferriby: The Viking Name

The name itself remembers the crossing.

Ferriby comes from Old Norse elements: ferja, meaning ferry, and by, meaning farm or settlement.

Both North and South Ferriby were recorded by 1086, and the South Humber Heritage Trail also links the village name to Viking-age settlement and the old ferry crossing.

That means the name is not decorative.

It is a function.

South Ferriby means, in its bones:

the settlement by the ferry.

The village does not merely stand beside the Humber.

It exists because the Humber could be crossed.

This matters to the wider story because a ferry is never just a boat.

A ferry is control.

A ferry is toll.

A ferry is contact.

A ferry is danger.

A ferry is permission.

A ferry is the point where one shore speaks to the other.

And that is the first shape of the serpent-line.

IV. Domesday: Two Hands on the Ferriby Gate

By Domesday, South Ferriby was already important. Open Domesday records it as a large settlement of 70 households in 1086, in the largest 20% of recorded Domesday settlements, split between two major owners: Gilbert Tison and Gilbert of Ghent/de Gant.

This is important because South Ferriby was not one simple manor.

It was divided.

Tison held the church-centred side. De Gant held the northern/Barton-soke current.

One side seems to gather around St Nicholas; the other leans toward the older Barton/Barrow/Humber field.

The North Lincolnshire HER also preserves the memory of a chaplain at “the Hirne of South Ferriby” in 14th-century documents, with circumstantial evidence for a religious site extending back toward the St Chad landscape and an area later eroded by the Humber.

That gives us one of the deepest images in the scroll:

One church remains on the slope.

One chapel may have vanished into the river.

The visible church became St Nicholas.

The lost chapel became memory.

The Humber took the edge, but not the signal.

V. The Bishop Stone

St Nicholas is the visible witness.

Historic England records the church’s reset 11th-century tympanum: a bishop with a staff, flanked by crosses in roundels.

The church itself has older medieval fabric, later rebuilding, and a strange north–south orientation, while the local church source places it on the chalk edge above the Ancholme valley, with the Viking Way running along the top of the churchyard.

For the scroll, the tympanum is not merely architectural.

It is the threshold-sign.

A bishop above the door.

A staff.

Two crosses.

A church dedicated to St Nicholas, patron of sailors and children, standing over a ferry-village.

And beneath it — Old House, High Street.

The lived layer matters here.

From 2019 to 2025, I lived beneath that church moving to the village from hull.

I lived under the bishop-stone, under the slope, under the strange turned building, inside the village core where the High Street, church, paths, cliff, river and memories all met.

That is not historical proof.

It is field-note.

But field-notes matter in this work.

They do not replace evidence.

They explain why evidence begins to speak.

VI. Alkborough: The Ground That Speaks

West along the Humber sits Alkborough.

This is where the custody-line thickens.

Domesday records one Alkborough holding where the lord in 1066 was William Malet, while by 1086 Ivo Tallboys appears as lord and tenant-in-chief.

That gives Alkborough a real Malet footprint, even if we keep the larger Malet-Lucy line as careful hypothesis rather than proof.

Alkborough is not South Ferriby’s twin.

It is its neighbour in the same river-body.

South Ferriby holds ferry, church, lost chapel, bishop-stone, Roman settlement, Viking name and Ancholme gate.

Alkborough holds maze, well, church, Humber edge, Walcot, Malet, Swan/Denman, Goulton-Constable preservation, and later Slaney’s fishery-world.

One is the crossing-field.

One is the custody-field.

Together, they form the south-bank hinge.

VII. Ferries, Wool, Tolls and Watchers

In the medieval river-world, power did not always look like a castle.

Sometimes power looked like a ferry.

A study of South Ferriby’s coin finds and port history places the village where the Ancholme met the Humber, records ferry and toll activity, notes the commercial value of goods such as fish, hides, bread and other things, and shows South Ferriby later connected to monastic holdings, wool movement, royal provisions and customs watchers.

This is the real custody system.

Not fantasy.

Not one family secretly owning everything.

But a practical river-chain:

fishery, ferry, toll, wool, hides, ships, provisions, customs, crossing-rights.

That is why the Humber mattered.

It made movement possible.

Whoever controlled movement controlled value.

And whoever controlled value could become something else.

A merchant.

A mayor.

A lender to kings.

A noble.

A house.

VIII. Hull: De la Pole and the New Power

Then the serpent-line bends toward Hull.

William de la Pole is the great medieval example of Humber power changing form.

Hull History Centre describes him as a Hull-based merchant who imported wine, exported wool and corn, lent money to Edward III for wars in Scotland and France, and became Hull’s first mayor in 1331.

He matters because he rises after the old crusading world begins to break.

Not as a Templar.

Not as proof of a hidden handover.

But as a new kind of man in a new kind of age.

The old sacred-military finance collapses.

Royal war still needs money. The Crown turns to ports, wool, customs, credit and ships.

And out of the Humber mist comes de la Pole.

Of the pool.

At the water.

From Hull, Ravenser tradition, Myton, Hessle, Burstwick, wool, wine, ships and debt.

This is why he belongs in the South Ferriby scroll. He proves the Humber could do more than carry boats.

It could create power.

And once Hull merchant power existed, it did not stay in Hull.

It crossed.

IX. Swan, Slaney and Walcot: The Later Echo

Centuries later, the pattern repeats.

Thomas Swan of Hull, alderman and more than once mayor, died in 1629.

Lincolnshire Notes and Queries records that his daughter Faith married Nicholas Denman, alderman and twice mayor of Hull, and that Denman and his brother-in-law Thomas Swan purchased the hamlet of Walcot, in the parish of Alkborough.

That is a key bridge.

Hull civic-merchant power physically enters the Alkborough parish field.

Then Stephen Slaney enters the same larger Humber pattern from the London side.

His known record includes the 1568 purchase arrangement involving the manors of Staynton and Awkborough/Alkborough, lands there, and a free fishery in the waters of the River Humber.

Again, we do not need to force a single bloodline.

The structure is enough:

de la Pole shows Hull merchant power becoming national power.

Slaney shows London merchant/Skinners power touching the Humber fishery field.

Swan and Denman show Hull mayoral power buying into Walcot, inside Alkborough parish.

The same river keeps attracting the same kind of custody.

X. Paull: Edna’s Chapel on the North Bank

Then the line crosses north.

Paull is not a side-note. It is the north-bank witness.

Paull Parish Council says the village is listed in Domesday as part of the manor of Burstwick, and that Low Paull had the duty to provide men to row the Lord and Lady of the Manor across the Humber from Holderness to Lindsey.

That is extraordinary.

Paull’s old service was literally river-crossing into Lindsey.

So when we place Paull opposite the south-bank memory of South Ferriby and Alkborough, it becomes more than family geography.

It becomes part of the old crossing-system.

And then the personal sign arrives.

My grandmother Edna Slaney/conman lived in Paull, in what appears to have been an old chapel at the front of the village, now two houses, opposite or near Paull Boatyard.

The strongest working identification is the former Primitive Methodist Chapel:

Paull Parish Council records a Primitive Methodist chapel built in 1871 and later converted into two cottages, while Paull’s shipbuilding current includes major boatyard activity and the launching of HMS Anson from Paull shipyard in 1812.

This is where history becomes tender.

A grandmother in an old chapel-house.

Facing a boatyard.

On the north bank of a river whose old duty was to row lordship across to Lindsey.

Across the water-line: South Ferriby, Alkborough, Walcot, St Nicholas, the fishery, the ferry, the maze.

It is not proof of a secret design.

It is a beautiful family bridge.

And sometimes that is exactly what a scroll needs.

XI. Read’s Island, Hope & Anchor, Far Ings

The Humber keeps making and unmaking land.

Read’s Island sits nearby, reclaimed from a sandbank in the 19th century and inhabited by tenant farmers until 1989; the South Humber Heritage Trail describes it as a wildlife haven, while the same trail records the St Chad’s Well edge, South Ferriby-type Iron Age coinage, Roman occupation and Viking name-memory in the village landscape.

This is the river’s other lesson:

nothing here is fixed.

Sandbank becomes island.

Island becomes farm.

Farm becomes wildlife haven.

Clay pits become reedbeds.

Industry becomes healing walk.

The Hope & Anchor carries that same symbol. The pub was badly flooded in the 2013 tidal surge, closed for eighteen months, restored and reopened as a maritime-themed riverside pub.

Hope.

Anchor.

Flood.

Return.

It is almost too perfect, but it is real.

And that is why it belongs in the title.

Because South Ferriby, for me, was exactly that: hope and anchor.

A place to hold on.

A place to heal.

A place where the boys and I walked, explored, breathed and repaired.

A place where Anna’s presence belongs in the memory.

A place where the bear Beat was and the music was born, where cliff fires burned in image and feeling, where fossils came out of the edge, where the Great Bear ursa major watched over the village at sunset.

The history is not separate from that.

The history gives the healing a ground.

XII. The Serpent-Line

So now the line can be named.

Alkborough → South Ferriby → Hull → Paull.

Not a straight line.

A river line.

A serpent-line.

Alkborough is the place where the ground speaks.

South Ferriby is the place where the river answers.

Hull is the place where water becomes merchant power.

Paull is the north-bank chapel and boatyard witness, looking back toward Lindsey.

And between them all moves the Humber:

brown, tidal, difficult, ancient, practical, holy in the old way of useful things.

It carried Bronze Age boats.

It carried Iron Age wealth.

It carried Roman settlement.

It carried Viking names.

It carried Norman lordship.

It carried monks, wool, hides, fish, tolls and royal provisions.

It carried de la Pole into power.

It carried Swan and Denman toward Walcot.

It carried Slaney’s fishery echo.

It carried Edna’s chapel memory.

It carried me, the boys, Anna, the bear, the fossils, the cliff, the pub, the path, the healing.

The Humber was never background.

It was the moving body of the story.

And South Ferriby was where I finally began to hear it.