A coastal town home to pirates and murderers disappeared as surprisingly and suddenly as it had appeared 100 years before.
It is fair to say that few British towns have been founded in as unusual a way as Ravenser Odd.
One day, sometime in the middle of the 12th century, a small patch of island rose from the falling sea. And then, a ship was wrecked on that island, which crested above the waves in the mouth of the River Humber. Not wanting a good structure to go to waste, a resourceful local decided to move into the bones of the wreck. That man, the first permanent resident of this new land, began to sell food and drink to passing sailors, according to the National Archives.
Within a few short years, the newly formed patch of earth in the water had grown into a bustling port town. It had a market square, two MPs, a court and served 100 merchant ships – it even held an annual fair.
What Ravenser Odd also managed to do, in quite an impressively quick fashion, is turn people in neighbouring towns against them.
Documents from a medieval court case show how furious the people of nearby Grimsby were about their new neighbour. They lodged an official complaint to King Edward I that the new island was preventing people coming to Grimsby to trade.
They told the king’s investigators that in the time of King Henry III ‘a certain small island was born’, the distance of ‘one tide’ from Grimsby, and fishermen began to dry their nets there.
Fast forward a few years, they said, and the Grimsby folk were out of pocket because the new island was arresting merchants and compelling them to go to Ravenser Odd rather than Grimsby.
Not only did the people of Ravenser Odd win the court case and rejoice in seeing their local foes slapped with a fine for making a false claim, King Edward I granted the town borough status on 1 April 1299. That was the exact same day that the then diminutive Kingston-upon-Hull received the same status.
Today, Ravenser Odd has been wiped from the map, while Hull is home to 329,000 people and has been named one of 25 global destinations to visit in 2026 by National Geographic.
Having won their court case and become a borough, Ravenser Odd embarked upon a prosperous and slightly criminal half century. Complaints flooded in from foreign nobles and merchants about the island’s behaviour. Among others, the King of Norway accused the people of the island of stealing goods from a shipwreck and a German merchant complained that the master of his ship had been killed and its goods stolen.
The island also assisted the crown. Ravenser Odd took part in England’s 14th-century wars with Scotland, sending ships to join the naval forces of both Edward II and Edward III.
But by the early 1300s, it was clear not all was well on Ravenser Odd. The sea had already begun to reclaim the island, eroding the coastline and smashing apart the quay throughout the first half of the century.
“By 1343, the town was in dire straits. The king wrote to local officials asking them to conduct an inquisition to see if the people of Ravenser Odd could continue to pay their taxes, as he had heard that many houses had been washed away by the sea. In 1346, he repeated his request, saying that the town was greatly impoverished and many of the inhabitants had left as living there continued to become more dangerous,” the National Archives writes.
As of 1346, only a third of the townsfolk remained on the island, and two-thirds of the land had been washed away. One landlord had seen 145 of her buildings dragged into the sea.
The Meaux Abbey Chronicle, a history of a local abbey, recorded the watery fate that befell Ravenser Odd. Floods had destroyed the foundations of the chapel on Ravenser Odd and the bodies of the dead had been washed out of their graves. This destruction, the chronicler claimed, was a punishment from God for the islanders’ evildoing and piracy.
By 1359, an inquisition into the property of a deceased inhabitant of Ravenser Odd said that the town had been ‘completely annihilated’ by the sea.
In recent years, experts have made progress in the search for Ravenser Odd, which is thought to be located somewhere off Spurn Point. Prof Dan Parsons, a geoscientist at the University of Hull, has been leading a search to find what has been dubbed “Yorkshire’s lost Atlantis”.
Using the same echo-sounding equipment that helped to discover the Titanic, he has been guided by local fishing crews who have noticed subtle differences in the water surface around the area the town is thought to lie. “They’ve described underwater disturbances so we’ve been carrying out scans,” Dan told Hull Daily Mail in 2022.
In 2024, as the search continued, a new exhibition at Hull History Centre is telling the story of Ravenser Odd. It includes the original charters for Hull and Ravenser Odd, dating back to 1299, which were on display for the first time outside of London.
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
