A note on Great Colden
Great Colden is described in the main page as a hamlet rather than a village. Traditionally, the prime distinction is that the latter has a church and the former does not. Variations include: ‘has a church or other place of worship’; ‘has a church or general meeting place’; ‘has a church and other facilities (e.g. shops, a school)’. In some cases, population and number of dwellings are pertinent.
The Ordnance Survey map published 1855 shows a community close to an approaching cliff line. Much land had already been lost before the map’s date. For example:
“Colden or Great Golden seems to have suffered severely. In the Domesday Survey (1086) there were 1920 acres in Colden. In the year 1800 there were 1100 acres — a loss of 820 acres in 714 years.”
[ Thomas Sheppard (1912), The Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast, p163. Sheppard’s use of the term ‘towns’ in the title to refer to communities that were no more than villages, hamlets or even extended granges should perhaps be viewed in the context of associated lands which, as his estimates suggest, might cover some area. These lands would constitute the ‘townships’ of the Enclosure Acts.]
With regard to the residential core of Great Colden, it may have been a little larger in the past but not appreciably so. Was there ever a church, possibly raising it to village status? On this point there is potential for confusion. To the south-east of Great Colden at a distance of perhaps two kilometres was Little Colden, or Colden Parva, which did possess a chapel or church. The following snippets should provide some clarity.
From almost two hundred years ago:
“Cowden, or Colden, Great and Little, E. R. ... Little Cowden had once a church, now swallowed up by the sea, and the village is reduced to a few farm houses.”
[ Stephen Reynolds Clarke (1828), The New Yorkshire Gazetteer, or Topographical Dictionary, p63. ]
Adding a name to the lost church:
“The Parochial Chapel of Colden Parva, dedicated to St. John the evangelist ... This chapel, with a portion of the village, has suffered from the devastations of the sea; it was swept away about a century and a half since.”
[ George Poulson (1840), The History and Antiquities of the Seigniory of Holderness in the East Riding of the County of York, Volume 1, p371. ]
Also:
Colden Parva – Saint John Baptist – An ancient parochial Chapel, sometimes called a Church, now swallowed up by the sea, together with a great tract of land ...
[ George Lawton (1842), Collectio Rerum Ecclesiasticarum de Diœcesi Eboracensi, or Collections relative to churches and chapels within the Diocese of York, p374; Poulson as cited source, p613. ]
As Sheppard points out [p161], if Poulson records a church being swept away ‘about a century and a half since’ and his book was published in 1840, then the loss of the church would have occurred around 1690.
The matter of a church once existing at the smaller Colden/Cowden looks to be conclusive. No reference to such at the larger. Until:
COWDEN, Little. This hamlet, like its parent village, has suffered from sea as well as sheep. In 1428 there were fewer than ten householders. In 1313 there had been at least that number of houses, and extents quoted by Poulson, show that the hamlet was there in 1400. A church at Great Cowden was swallowed by the sea in c.1690.
[ Maurice Warwick Beresford (1952), ‘The Lost Villages of Yorkshire, Part II’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, Volume 38, pp59-60. ]
In the entry, Little Cowden is a hamlet and Great Cowden, the ‘parent village’, possesses a church. It would appear that:
Beresford attributed Poulson‘s statement [regarding a chapel being swept away] to the chapel of Great Cowden, seemingly in error.
[ Department of History at the University of Hull (no date), ‘Beresford’s Lost Villages’. ]
Indeed, there was a chapel at Great Colden:
Missionary visits were paid by members of Fish Street chapel, Hull, to Cowden c.1800, and protestant dissenters registered a house at Great Cowden in 1813. The Wesleyans built a chapel on waste land there in 1835 and had transferred it to the Primitive Methodists by 1877. It was closed in 1942 by the military authorities, to whom the building was then sold because of the probability of its future destruction by the sea.
[ K J Allison, A P Baggs, T N Cooper, C Davidson-Cragoe and J Walker, ‘North division: Mappleton’ (2002), in G H R Kent (ed), A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 7, Holderness Wapentake, Middle and North Divisions, pp306-321 – see
British History Online under ‘Nonconformity’. ]
This, though, is a comparably late establishment and not connected with Poulson’s statement. It was not ‘swallowed by the sea in c.1690’. A back-projection based on known rates of coastal recession places the cliff line around 1690 at about 440 metres from where the Methodist Chapel in Great Colden was erected.
The chapel built in the 1830s is not enough to elevate Great Colden to village status. Nor is the existence of a public house (trading from the previous decade). In the middle of the century, the diminishing bounds of the two communities were combined for civil purposes to form the Cowdens Ambo township (‘Ambo’ is Latin for ‘both’). Again, insufficient for promotion to a village.
Great Colden, then, was by modern convention ever a hamlet. However, it may be argued that no real harm is done when suggested otherwise.