The historic town of Hedon is dominated by the magnificent eight hundred year old church of St Augustine on Market Hill. With its one hundred and thirty foot high tower, the church overlooks East Yorkshire's Holderness plain and, as a landmark for very many miles around, has long been known as the "King of Holderness." At Hedon, church and town have grown together in a remarkably close relationship ever since the Norman Conquest. Prior to that time, Anglo-Saxon England was a rural landscape of rich Manor Houses, peasant cottages and small villages or hamlets. A placid stream, Humbleton Beck, eased its way across the Holderness plain to the River Humber, its lower course or Fleet providing a haven for river and sea-going craft that was to make Hedon a major Humber port, well before the neighbouring settlement at Hull came into existence. On one side of the beck the rich and powerful lords of Preston held eight Manors, while the manors of Burstwick and Paull occupied the other bank. Here, by the twelfth century, a town had developed bounded by the beck to the east and south and by a deeply dug moat on its western and northern sides. In the centre of the town was a single hill which became the focus of its life, with church, school, market, Town Hall and prison. The oldest part of the present hilltop church dates from around 1190 but there are clear signs of a large building having occupied the site before that. King Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1187, granted a charter to the burgesses of Hedon, so the town was already well established by that time. Successive monarchs renewed that charter but it was from Edward III, in 1348, that Hedon received its "Magna Charta," the second oldest Charter of Incorporation in the country, and sent two members to Parliament in Westminster right up to the Reform Bill in 1832, despite its loss of status as a seaport through the growth of Hull and Grimsby and the unsuitability of its Haven for larger vessels. So church and town grew up together, parish and borough coinciding, independent of the surrounding rural lands, yet providing for them a religious focus and place of worship as well as a commercial and trading centre. So close was the link between Church and Municipality that up to 1660 the church wardens were appointed and sworn in at the annual burgess court held before the mayor and bailiffs, while for many centuries the town records were kept in St Augustine's where, unfortunately, rain entering through a leaking vestry roof spoiled many of the documents, probably in the late eighteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century Hedon had less than a thousand inhabitants, while Hull had grown to 250,000. Not surprisingly it has been difficult for the parishioners of Hedon to maintain a church the size of St Augustine's, for it is recognised as one of England's great parish churches and in the first three in the North of England for architecture. |