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Like the one in London, the Eleanor Cross at Sledmere is not a 13th-century original but a Victorian replica. It was commissioned in the 1890s by Sir Tatton Sykes, the local squire, and converted into a war memorial by his son Sir Mark, he of the Sykes-Picot agreement, who served as a colonel in the Green Howards and as Conservative MP for Kingston upon Hull Central. He was at Versailles for the peace conference but contracted the Spanish influenza and died in February 1919. It was because of its links to him rather than to Queen Eleanor that the cross was listed at grade 2 in 1966 and upgraded to grade 1 only in 2016, making it eligible for the Government’s protection.