Ravenser Odd, whose name comes from the Old Norse for Raven's tongue, was built on shifting sandbanks at the mouth of the Humber estuary near Kilnsea, and by the mid-thirteenth century it had grown into a port of genuine national importance. At its height it held more than a hundred houses, a market, a court, a prison, and its own seawall and harbour, prospering from fishing, trade, and shipping in a way that briefly and genuinely rivalled the young town of Hull then developing nearby on more solid ground.
The town's own location, built on unstable sand rather than any solid foundation, was also ultimately its undoing. During the winter storms of 1356 to 57, now remembered by historians as the Great Drowning of Men, unusually high tides combined with a genuine storm surge that shifted the sandbanks and flooded the entire town outright, beginning a slow, unstoppable decline from which it would never recover.
The Meaux Abbey chronicle records what followed in the town's own slow final years: by the end of the fourteenth century, bodies buried in the churchyard were being exposed by the steadily encroaching sea, and there were reports of looting at the chapel by what the chronicle itself calls sacrilegious persons, scavenging a town that was quite literally disappearing beneath them as they worked. The last stones of Ravenser Odd were finally swept away for good in January 1362. Nearby settlements at Sunthorpe, Kilnsea itself in an earlier location than today's village, and Hoton met broadly similar fates, all victims of the same fast-eroding Holderness coastline, which still retreats at an average of around two metres a year even today, making Ravenser Odd's own story one of the best documented, if largely undated in strictly folklore-specific terms, lost-village accounts recorded anywhere in this collection, genuinely grounded in a real medieval chronicle's own account of the drowning's grim aftermath.
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