120 TIIK SEA-COAST. 



Meaux Abbey. The merchants removed to Hull ; the dead were 

 transferred from Ravenspurn to Easington; and after the un- 

 usually high tides in 1357 and following years, little of the 

 ancient and renowned port remained ; yet in 1399 Bolingbroke 

 landed here, and found Matthew Danthorp, a hermit priest, en- 

 gaged in building an oratory without royal permission. As 

 Henry IV. he confirmed the worthy man in his possession, and 

 added for its maintenance the rights of wreck and waif, and 

 other profits of the shore, except the Chief Lord's Royal fishes, 

 for two leagues round the place for ever ! We next hear of 

 Richard Reedbarowe, the hermit, building a tower at Ravenser- 

 sporne the first lighthouse or ' Beken ' " at the entrance of 

 Humbre," in 1428. In 1471 Edward IV. landed within Hum- 

 her on Holdernesse side, at a place called Ravenspurgh *." After 

 this, Ravensburg is mentioned by Leland as ten miles from 

 Patrington, at " the very point on York side of the mouth of 

 Humber," and from this time it disappears from history and 

 tradition. Compensation was made, a century later, in the time 

 of Charles I., when the formation of Sunk Island began farther 

 up the Humber. 



There appears little room to doubt that the site of Aid Ra- 

 venser which, by the Chartulary of Meaux, quoted by Thompson, 

 was accessible from Easington by a road on the pebbly beach, 

 was within and near to the Spurn Point of that day (which may 

 have been since driven inward as the clay cliffs of Kilnsea on the 

 north decayed), and that the villages which were mentioned as 

 belonging to Meaux, and those noticed by Camden, were chiefly 

 on the Humber bank, where now broad sands appear overspread- 

 ing a basis of peat and clay which the tide sometimes lays bare. 

 Judging from the injury to Ravenspurn which 4 feet of extra 

 height in the tide occasioned in 1357, and from the character of 

 the region, it must have been founded on a low silty and marshy 

 tract, the gift of the Humber floods in some earlier time, which 



* Most of these notices of Rnvenspurn are taken from Thompson's 

 ' Ocellum Promontorium,' 1824. 



