Today’s photo shows the underside of a misericord cleverly carved to show a seasonal scene, such carvings often showed a scene for each season, even a scene for each month of the year. Here an autumnal scene – a man knocking acorns from an oak tree to feed the swine (pigs) grazing on the floor of the woodland. Given that this is a medieval carving the tree would have been an English Oak, a native species, there are a number of varieties of oak tree (three different varieties were recently identified in Pearson Park, Hull), the non-native varieties have been introduced since the time of this carving.
How is this relevant to Holderness? In its primevil state the post-glacial clay soils beyond the meres would have sustained many self-sown oak trees, it would have been one of the flora that colonised the undulating land as the climate warmed after the retreat of the Devensian ice sheets. Moving forward, by the Middle Ages Holderness was almost certainly one of the most densely populated areas of England so any then remaining oak trees would have been ‘harvested’ as above.
Professor English (s.p.b.s) presents a detailed analysis of Holderness at the time of the Norman Conquest by analysing the evidence from the Domesday Survey, 1086 (and credits her sources) but for our purpose the main point is that Holderness has always been a region of villages, with Hedon as the one exception (see later). By the 11th century the villages seen today and more (before some were ‘lost’) were almost all in existance with, on average, scarcely a mile between one and the next. So an intriguing question is; over how long and by what processes did the region transform from it being covered with post-glacial climax flora and fauna and it becoming densely populated by an agrarian human population?
(to be continued).