Search results for ""Author Richard Gurnham""

Hull was first built as a port by the Cistercian monks of Meaux Abbey, to export wool from their rapidly expanding sheep flocks. Before the end of the 13th century Hull had been acquired by Edward I, who developed it as a royal port, and from then on Hull has been one of the country’s most important ports. The port makes Hull a highly defensible strategic position. In the 16th century Hull’s defiance of King Charles I helped drag the country into civil war, while on Town Taking Day, celebrated in Hull for more than a century after the event, Hull’s foiling of a Catholic plot lost James the whole of north England. Hull established a reputation as a centre of Puritanism, condemning theatre-going, gambling, drinking and idleness. The saying ‘From Hull, Hell, and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us’, indicated the ferocious treatment vagrants could expect in the town. For Hull’s puritans, poverty and sin were very closely related and often required similar treatment. By the time of Queen Victoria’s accession Hull was six times as large as it had been in 1700, but after the First World War Hull lost its place as the third largest port in the country, and since the Second World War, in which more than 90 per cent of all Hull’s houses were either damaged or destroyed, Hull could recover only slowly. More recently, unemployment is still about twice the national average, and terrible flooding in 2010 left parts of the city uninhabitable. Nevertheless, Hull remains one of the country’s largest and most important ports and this history of its trade, religious and political controversy, architecture, pirates and de la Poles is well researched, beautifully illustrated, and sure to please both Hull’s inhabitants and visitors alike.

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The earliest settlement beside the Brayford Pool was called Lindon, and this Celtic name was adopted by the Roman conquerors in the first century ad. e fortress established on the hill above the river Witham was later transformed into a provincial capital of the Roman Empire, complete with a forum, basilica and ne houses, and the mighty walls and gates built then would still be standing many hundreds of years later. After the Empire collapsed the city survived as the capital of a minor British realm which later developed into the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey. Prosperity and growth returned with the arrival of the Vikings in the ninth century, and the great cathedral begun by the Normans, the Conqueror’s castle and fine Norman town houses are the jewels in the crown of Lincoln’s modern tourist industry. Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries the city thrived as a major centre for the wool and cloth trades, but even before the Black Death struck in 1349 it was beginning to decline, and Lincoln would remain a sad and decayed echo of its former self until the last years of the 17th century, much damaged following its use as a garrison town in the Civil Wars. Rapid growth, however, came only in the 19th century when this rather sleepy, ancient cathedral city transformed itself – almost literally ‘overnight’ – into a centre for heavy engineering and, in the First World War, the home of the tank. Today this dual legacy of ancient and modern persists. e Siemens engineering works beside the Pelham Bridge is the last indicator of the city’s former engineering greatness, but Lincoln’s older heritage is better preserved than ever before, and a new university has been established beside the Brayford Pool, where it all began. First published in 2009, this fully illustrated book tells the story of the city’s many transformations over two thousand years and, through a wealth of detail, brings to life the events and challenges faced by many generations who have lived and worked in this rather beautiful ‘place by the pool’.

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