To say exactly the date of birth of the city which to-day the inhabitants proudly call ‘The Third Port’ is one of the things that are beyond man’s power. It used to be thought that Hull was founded by King Edward I., but we know now that this was wrong; for there are in existence old title deeds which show that the city goes back in point of time more than one hundred years before ‘Edward of the Long Shanks’ became King of England.

On the other hand, we are certain that there was no town of Hull in the time of William the Conqueror. Had there been, we should find mention of it in the Domesday Book. Hessle is mentioned in this, and so is Ferriby. But, though we find in the Domesday Book no mention of Hull, we do find mention of Myton, a hamlet belonging to the Manor of North Ferriby, and recorded at the time of the survey as ‘waste.’

Later on we find this hamlet grown into a manor, and meanwhile there was growing up alongside it another small settlement to which became attached the names Wyke, Wyke-upon-Hull, and Hull. Its position was the angle formed where the small river Hull empties itself into the mighty Humber, and its first inhabitants would doubtless be fishers and other sea-faring men, who found the place convenient for beaching their boats. Whether they were Angles or Danes we cannot definitely tell, for its name, Wyke, might have been given by either of these peoples.

The first mention of Wyke is in a grant of land made in the year 1160, and after this date its growth must have been rapid. Less than forty years later it was one of the ports to which was given the privilege of exporting wool; and in 1203 the taxes collected on wool and other exported goods at Hull amounted to no less than £344, while those collected in London amounted to only £836.

The export trade in wool grew by leaps and bounds during the thirteenth century, and Hull was the port in the north of England that derived most benefit from this growth. At the close of the century there were ‘some sixty houses in the town, mostly built of clay and timber, and one-storied, with perhaps a chamber or two in the thatched roof; a gaol; a court-house; a church^[28] ...; a monastery of White Friars; with some seven acres of land set apart for markets and fairs, and lying around and about where the Market-place now runs.’

Such was Wyke, or Hull, when in 1293 the monks of Meaux Abbey, its owners, sold the greater part of it to King Edward I., in exchange for other lands. Its annual value was £81 12s. 4d., and that of the part sold was £78 14s. 8d. With it were sold some farm lands and buildings at Myton, worth not quite half as much.

When the town thus passed into the King’s hands, he had to appoint a Warden to collect his rents, and the first King’s Warden rejoiced in the name of Richard Oysel. Six years later the townsmen obtained from the King a charter granting them all the privileges belonging to the inhabitants of a ‘Free Borough.’ Among these was the right of holding a market twice weekly, and a fair lasting for thirty days each year.

Under its new name of the King’s Town upon Hull the port naturally drew to itself merchants from the less-privileged towns of the neighbourhood, and among those who came to take advantage of its privileges was a wealthy merchant of Ravenser named William de la Pole. With the migration of this Ravenser merchant began an uninterrupted course of prosperity both for his family and for the King’s Town.

William de la Pole’s two elder sons, Richard and William, came into great prominence as merchants. The ‘great Hull Firm of De la Pole Brothers’ has been a modern description of their business enterprise, and the adjective ‘great’ is rightly used. For not only was Richard de la Pole King Edward III.’s wine merchant, but the two brothers were also for many years the King’s bankers. As royal wine merchant, Richard had some twenty deputies in other ports of England, and as royal bankers the ‘Firm’ lent large sums of money to the King for the carrying on of his wars with Scotland and France.

In 1327, for instance, these Hull merchants lent the King sums amounting to £10,200; and in February of the next year the King, while at York, paid two wine bills, one of two thousand marks and the other of £1,200. Later on in this year, the brothers undertook to find £20 per day for the upkeep of the King’s household, and as much wine as was necessary.

In 1337 Edward declared war against France, and that war was carried on mainly with supplies of money provided by the De la Pole Brothers.

Within two years of the opening of war, the King had borrowed money on the crown jewels, on the crown itself, and even on his own person. Edward was actually stranded in France unable to move for lack of money, when his ‘beloved merchant,’ William de la Pole, came to his assistance with new supplies; and the King acknowledged himself bound to him for the astonishing sum of £76,180, a sum equal to more than a million pounds in our money.

‘How was this immense sum raised?’ we may quite naturally ask. Probably a large portion of it was borrowed by the lender from others who were quite ready to put their spare cash into the hands of such a far-sighted and reliable man of business as William de la Pole. And how was the loan repaid by the King?

The answer to the second of these questions gives the secret of the wealth of the ‘Hull Firm.’ Edward repaid his loans not with money but by grants of the customs and duties payable on exported goods at the various ports of the kingdom. In other words, if the King borrowed £1000, he gave to the lender of this sum permission to collect all the dues at, say, the port of Bristol, for the next five years; and as the trade of Bristol was then rapidly growing, the lender very probably received during those five years twice as much value in dues as he had lent in money to the King.

Such services as these, rendered at a critical moment, did not go unrewarded in other ways. In 1332 Edward visited his new ‘King’s Town’ on his way to Scotland, and was the guest of William de la Pole, whom he knighted before his departure.

At the same time the townsfolk were granted the dignity of having a Mayor and four Bailiffs instead of a Warden, and Sir William was, naturally, the man chosen by them to hold this office.office. Thus the long line of Mayors of the city of Hull goes back to Sir William de la Pole, who was Mayor for three years, 1332–1335. Later on other honours were showered upon him, and when he died his body was buried in the church of the Holy Trinity, where the alabaster effigies of himself and Dame Katherine his wife may still be seen.

As William de la Pole was a great favourite of King Edward III.Edward III., so his son Michael was equally a favourite of Edward’s grandson, King Richard II. Michael de la Pole had gone to Spain in the train of John of Gaunt, Edward’s third son, and his retinue had consisted of 140 men-at-arms, 140 archers, 1 knight banneret, 8 knights bachelor, and 130 esquires.

In 1376 Michael was not only Mayor of Hull but also ‘Admiral of the King’s Fleets in the Northern Parts.’ Seven years later he became a Knight of the Garter and Lord Chancellor of England. In another two years he was raised to the peerage as Earl of Suffolk, the first example in our history of a prosperous merchant becoming a peer of the realm. As Earl of Suffolk, Michael began the building at Kingston-upon-Hull of a mansion which was known when finished as Suffolk Palace, and which stood on the ground where has recently been built the General Post Office.

But the first Earl of Suffolk was by no means a favourite with Parliament, whatever he might be with the young King; and though he had as Lord Chancellor advised the members of Parliament to ‘avoid all corruptions,’ he was accused by them of enriching himself at the expense of the nation. As the result of the charges laid against him by his many and powerful enemies he was exiled, and died at Paris four years after the creation of his peerage.

Richard II.’s deposition by Parliament followed ten years after his favourite’s death, and Henry IV. became King. This King’s son, Henry V., attempted to rival in France the exploits of his great-grandfather; and in his retinue when the English army sailed from Harfleur were two Michael de la Poles, father and son. Both were of high honour in the King’s train, both set out in hopes of winning still higher honour in the glorious conquest that was to be, but both were fated to die a soldier’s death on the soil of the country which they had hoped to conquer. The elder Michael, second Earl of Suffolk, died of dysentery before the walls of Harfleur in September 1415; the younger Michael, third Earl of Suffolk, fell mortally wounded in the battle of Agincourt, five weeks after the death of his father. His body was brought home to England, and lay in state in Saint Paul’s Cathedral before it was buried in Oxfordshire.

You will find an account of the Earl of Suffolk’s death in Act IV., Scene 6, of Shakspeare’s playplay Henry the Fifth; and when you next read of the wars of Edward III. and Henry V. in France, do not fail to remember, if you yourself belong to the city of Hull, that good silver crowns from Kingston-upon-Hull provided the wherewithal for the battle of Crecy, and that good honest men from Kingston-upon-Hull fought, and—in one case at least—died in the battle of Agincourt.

Two years after this battle, King Henry was again fighting in France, and in his retinue was again an Earl of Suffolk. This was William, the fourth Earl, brother of him who had been slain at Agincourt. ‘Thirty lancers and four score and ten archers’ was the portion of the army furnished by this Earl, and for seventeen consecutive years he served in France as a soldier of the King. While Henry VI. was the infant King of England, Suffolk was in command of the English army in France, and it was his misfortune to be beaten by the ‘Maid of Orleans.’ In this war he was taken prisoner by the French, and ransomed for the sum of £20,000.

After Suffolk’s return home as a defeated soldier we find him playing the part of a successful ambassador. The marriage of King Henry with Princess Margaret of Anjou was arranged by him, and for his services he was raised to the dignity first of a Marquis and secondly of a Duke. At the same time his heirs were granted the privilege of carrying at the coronation of all the King’s successors a golden sceptre with a dove upon the top—a privilege embodied in the design of the Common Seal of the Corporation of Kingston-upon-Hull.

But this marriage brought the newly-created Duke of Suffolk into great disfavour with Parliament; for he was accused of having delivered the important province of Maine into the hands of the French, this being one of the conditions of the marriage treaty. His enemies also accused him of having murdered the Duke of Gloucester.

To save his favourite Duke the King banished him for five years, but his enemies were determined that he should not escape their vengeance. Realizing the danger he was in, he set sail from Ipswich, and hoped to reach Calais in safety. Before his departure he wrote, on the 30th of April, 1450, the following letter to his young son:—

My dere and only welbeloved sone, I beseche oure Lord in Heven, the Maker of alle the world, to blesse you, and to sende you ever grace to love hym, and to drede hym; to the which, as ferre as a fader may charge his child, I both charge you and prei you to ... do no thyng for love nor drede of any erthely creature that shuld displese hym....

Secondly, next hym, above alle erthely thyng, to be trewe liege man in hert, in wille, in thought, in dede, unto the Kyng ... to whom bothe ye and I been so moche bounde to....

Thirdly, in the same wyse, I charge you, my dere sone, alwey, as ye be bounden by the commaundement of God to do, to love, to worshepe youre lady and moder, and also that ye obey alwey hyr commaundements, and to beleve hyr councelles and advises in all youre werks....

It was indeed the day of Suffolk’s ‘departyng fro this land,’ as the following portion of a letter written in London on the 5th of May of that year will show. The writer tells first how news had then reached London that on April 31 the Duke of Suffolk had been captured off Dover by a ‘shippe callyd Nicolas of the Towre,’ whose master ‘badde hym “Welcom, Traitor.”’ Then—

Yn the syght of all his men he was drawyn ought of the grete shippe yn to the bote ... and oon of the lewdeste of the shippe badde hym ley down his hedde, and he should be fair ferd wyth, and dye on a swerd; and toke a rusty swerd, and smotte of his hedde withyn halfe a doseyn strokes, and toke awey his gown of russet, and his dobelette of velvet mayled, and leyde his body on the sonds of Dover.

Although the first Duke of Suffolk suffered this ignominious death, the tide of fortune for his family still rose. John, his son, the second Duke, married the sister of King Edward IV.; and in the year 1484 their son John, Earl of Lincoln, was declared heir-presumptive to the throne of England.

This is the high-water mark of the family fortunes. The battle of Bosworth, and the accession of King Henry VII. a year later, altered everything. The Earl of Lincoln took up arms against King Henry on behalf of the pretender, Lambert Simnel, and was killed at the battle of Stoke in 1487. His younger brother, Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was considered a man too dangerous to be allowed to live and was beheaded by Henry VIII. in 1513; and his remaining brother, Sir Richard de la Pole, having fled to Italy, was killed in the battle of Pavia in 1525.