Stand at the mouth of the river Hull and you can watch the
water slowly flowing out into the vast expanse of the Humber estuary. On the horizon it wends its way past Spurn
Point and out into the North Sea. The
breadth of this view gives a sense of awe but can’t really be called
picturesque. One glance downwards brings
into vision murky liquid lapping against a sticky brown mud that is calling for
items to swallow up. This is a functional,
practical river not one on which to mess about in boats or enjoy a delightful
picnic.
During the time of the Anglo-Saxons a thousand years ago
this spot was even less appealing. Back
then the river Hull had two channels and where Hull’s city centre now stands
was just a bleak, marshy, uninhabited island between the two. It wasn’t until the 1200s that the river
began to flow as a single stream and the land drained enough to settle on. Before that any hamlets or farms could only
be found further upriver where the land was slightly higher and drier.
The Anglo-Saxons kings established a system of counties,
each of which was subdivided into hundreds. The future site of Hull was placed
in Hessle Hundred, part of the East Riding of Yorkshire. Hundreds were then further split up usually
into hides or carucates. The size of
both of these was determined by farming.
One hide was the amount of land needed to support a family while a
carucate was the amount of land that could be cultivated using a team of eight
oxen.
All this organisation was not just for neatness but allowed kings
to raise substantial amounts of cash via a land tax called the Geld. In every county a Sheriff, or ‘Shire-Reeve’, collected
money from each hundred with the amount depending on how many hides or
carucates the hundred contained. Originally
this money was used for the specific threat of paying off invading Danes
but it continued to be levied for various military uses afterwards including by the early Norman kings after 1066.
The counties left by the Anglo-Saxons existed largely
unchanged for the next 900 years. It was
only in the local government reorganisation of 1974 that they were swept
away. New counties were needed for a 20th Century full of technology, equality, flares and shoulder pads. Civil servants hunched over maps drawing
precise new boundaries and placed Hull in the shiny new county of
Humberside. Humberside was the product
of the best of modern technology, calculation and logic. It lasted just 22 years.
