The name Brantingham possibly derives from an
Old English or
Old Norse personal name, like
Brant or
Brenti, the Old English
ingas meaning 'the people of' and
hām meaning 'village'. It may perhaps be derived simply from the Old English
brantinghām meaning the 'village at the steep place' or the 'village of the dwellers of the steep place'. The
noble family of
Brantingham (or de Brantingham), which included
Ralph de Brantingham,
King's Chamberlain to
King Edward III, and
Thomas de Brantingham,
Lord Treasurer under the same king and later
Bishop of Exeter, originally came from the village. In 1333,
Lewis de Beaumont, a French-born
Bishop of Durham described by a chronicler as "semi-literate, avaricious, and fitfully prodigal", died in the village. He had played some part in defending North-East England from Scottish incursions. The Church of All Saints was designated a Grade II*
listed building in 1966 and is recorded in the
National Heritage List for England maintained by
Historic England. The village has a duck pond, and one pub, the
Triton Inn, formerly a
coaching inn on the road west out of Hull, which was then an important staging post on the road between
Welton and
South Cave. At the time the inn was called
The Tiger and had a wheelwrights and an agricultural engineer (Mr Watson) in the yard at the front. The name became the
Wounded Tiger in the 1850s, but took its present name in the 1860s after the triton in the family crest of the
Sykes family, who bought nearby
Brantingham Thorpe. They owned the pub and another
Triton Inn on their
Sledmere estate just north of
Driffield. In the 1950s the village gave its name to
HMS Brantingham, a
Ham class minesweeper.
Roman remains The site of Brantingham Roman villa is found at the other end of the long lane leading south-east from the village, known as Brantingham Outgang. The villa would have been associated with the Roman town at
Petuaria Civitas Parisiorum (
Brough-on-Humber) until the latter burnt down some time in the mid-4th century. In what is nowadays a flat, gated area located next to a large wood overlooking the main road between South Cave and Elloughton, traces of the villa (in the form of mosaic floors and
hypocaust-heated rooms) were first discovered in late September 1941 (in what had been a working quarry since the Middle Ages and into the 1980s). As a result of the quarrying there is now no trace today, but an aerial survey made during the war confirmed the presence of Roman buildings associated with the villa on the other side of the modern road. This Roman site attracted later notoriety in 1948, when a team of archaeologists from the
Hull and East Riding Museum prepared the first of a group of mosaic pavements found at the villa site during the war, for removal. Overnight it was stolen and although the rest were safely recovered to the museum and are on display to this day, the missing first one has never been found. Neither has it ever been established exactly how it was stolen. This
art theft was later taken by the historical novelist Clive Ashman as the basis for his novel
MOSAIC – the Pavement that Walked (Voreda Books) which provides a fictionalised account of both the 1941 discoveries, police investigations into the 1948 theft, and the original fate of the Roman villa. Today, only a full-colour scale drawing of the reconstruction, done by the mosaic expert David Neal from black-and-white photographs shows what the stolen mosaic would have looked like. ==Transport and sights==