Excavations at the Skipwith Manor, Habrough, South Humberside

Abstract

Excavations in advance of a new gas pipe-line provided a section through the moated manor of the Skipwith family on the eastern side of the village of Habrough, South Humberside. Tenth-century pottery was sealed beneath the moat platform. The enclosure ditches had been water-filled, but had been kept clean by regular scouring until the later 16th century.Documentary evidence suggests that this moat can be identified with the manorial site of the de Saltfletby family during the 13th and 14th centuries. It was subsequently granted to a branch of the Skipwith family in 1365 who were to continue living here as lords of the manor until the end of the 16th century, when they are reputed to have died out.At some stage in the later 16th or early 17th century the site of the medieval manor was abandoned in favour of a new location. Large quarries were dug into the now disused moat platform, to provide clay for the construction of the new buildings. In the field to the south, the first of a series of three crop-drying kilns was built on the edge of the redundant moat ditch.After the building work had been completed, the site of the medieval manor was deliberately slighted in the early to mid 17th century: both the clay quarries and the moat ditch were infilled with a mixture of discarded building materials, rubble from the now demolished medieval buildings, and large quantities of domestic rubbish. Finds from these contexts serve as a useful guide to the contents of a middle-ranking gentry household in the later 16th and early 17th centuries. Once the site had been cleared, it was incorporated into the adjacent field system and ploughed.