This picture is mid Victorian in date and shows St James Church as well as a Grimsby Post Mill.
This mill was, I believe, at Cartergate and was ultimately sold and rebuilt in Tetney !

You may well be right, but as the burial Cordeaux talks of was made under St James’, both churches may have been sited on barrows perhaps (they were often built in close proximity), and (if there was one) the one under St Mary’s destroyed during building in Medieval times??? - We only know about this find because Cordeaux wrote about it fleetingly (I’m going to write a comment about other possible barrows in Grimsby on your post about Grimsby’s origins in a little while BTW…)

This particular burial could perhaps be a case not of a barrow being ploughed out like many were in our area, but rather, the surrounding soil levels rising over time due to silt deposition during the higher sea & river levels during the Roman period, sand blows from the coast (these have been recorded as covering whole villages in the Medieval period!) and later habitation obscuring and covering it over time. Either way the burial ended up being covered quite deeply over the centuries; burials from the early Bronze Age period were usually dug quite shallowly, or in the case of tumuli, sometimes the body was placed at ground level, often on a pebbled or stone surface sometimes called a “dancing floor”, then the burial chamber of wood or stone and the barrow mound was built over it.

Interment of the body in a wooden chamber or hollowed log coffin/chest is known from other British (& European) Tumuli and the wet clay soil of the area would have preserved the wood very well over time. Usually the soils in the UK are pretty merciless when it comes to organic remains which is why so few are found. The crouched or bent double position of the body is mostly found in late Neolithic & early Bronze Age inhumations.

Kate

Taken from Lincolnshire Notes and Queries Vol II, 1890-1891, P17-18

A letter to the editor from John Cordeaux discussing an interment exposed by the sea at Kilnsea of a skeleton in a wooden chest hollowed out of an oak tree trunk– the body was doubled up so that the knees were bent close to the chin: a Bronze Age axe head was found nearby (it may not have dated from the time of the burial though).

“Ancient British Interment
…When the foundations of the enlarged chancel of St James’ Church, Grimsby, were dug, a similar coffin or chest was exposed, partly within and partly without the wall. I remember it was conjectured at the time, from the comparatively small interior, that it had been used for the interment of a child. It is more probable, however that it had once contained an adult packed away in the manner indicated at Kilnsea.”

The full text is available at archive dot org

Sadly there is no indication as to what might have happened to this find and the technology to preserve the wood was not available then. However, does this perhaps mean that the earlier St Mary’s church was sited where once a much earlier barrow burial had been located? Reminds me of the early Bronze Age Gristhorpe Man burial now at Scarborough Rotunda Museum.

Kate

I’m working on a brief history of the church/minster - could we meet?

Lovely photographs - thanks for posting them!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Grimsby-United-Kingdom/Grimsby-Minster/123913940959903?ref=ts&__a=9&v=wall#!/pages/Grimsby-United-Kingdom/Grimsby-Minster/123913940959903?ref=ts&ajaxpipe=1&__a=5