The above picture is an aerial photo. of most of Barrow on Humber village as shown on the cover of ‘John Harrison’s Village’, published by Barrow W.E.A. branch, 1999.
All the monastic sites in Hull and the East Riding are products of the post-Norman Conquest waves of monastic revival. This is not to state that there were no Anglo-Saxon monastic sites in the East Riding but that none have been discovered. Anglo-Saxon monastic sites were not like the formally ordered complex of connected buildings associated with medieval monastic sites but were rather a random collection of small (by later standards) buildings following no formal pattern, this, maybe, reflecting the fact that collective bodies of religious persons evolved from the devotions of individual hermits.
That said, there was certainly (almost) a nearby Anglo-Saxon monastic site at Barrow on Humber on the south bank of the Estuary. The site is quite well documented and was the subject of an archaeological excavation in the 1970s. The site of the excavation is just off the top right of the aerial photo. above beside a street called St. Chad where pensioners’ bungalows now stand (built after the excavation). The excavation revealed the foundation of a small 10th century square building, almost certainly a church as it had a narrow apsidal east end. Random inhumations scattered around the site pre-dated the building. Bede, writing in the early eighth century, tells us much about St. Chad and, to a lesser extent, about a site in the Kingdom of Lindsey which he calls ‘ad Barvae’ ( the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey covered roughly the same area as the later County of Lindsey, a ‘thirding’/riding of Lincolnshire). The story goes that Chad was given land in Lindsey which equates roughly to the modern-day parishes of Barton and Barrow on which to establish his monastery, one of a number across the Kingdom of Mercia, he being Bishop of Mercia and Lindsey, his burial-place was on the site of the later Lichfield cathedral.
(to be continued).