Works of grant allen, p.985
Works of Grant Allen, page 985
The very name of Cornwall is, however, thoroughly significant of its real history. The people are to this day Cornwealas, Welshmen by blood and character, with an extremely slight Teutonic admixture. They were the last Britons of Wessex to be conquered, and they were far the longest in being assimilated by their English lords. Though Egbert “harried among them from east to west,” he did not succeed in subduing the people; and of the two solitary villages in the county bearing English clan titles, one, that of Callington, lies close to the site of his later victory at Hingston. Ten years after, the now Saxonised men of Devon fought against their old fellow-countrymen at Camelford, but with what success we are not told. When the Danish invasions set in, the Cornish joined even the heathen pirates against their West Saxon foe, and Egbert put them both to flight at Hengestesdun, now Hingston. About the same time with this defeat the schismatical Cornish Bishops made a profession of obedience to Canterbury. Under Athelstan, Howel, King of the West Welsh, finally acknowledged the English supremacy; as did also Constantine King of Scots, Owen King of Gwent, and Ealdred of Bamborough, lord of the Northumbrian English. Cornwall becomes thenceforward a mere English shire. Still, it was another quarter of a century before an Englishman was appointed as Bishop to the see of Cornwall. From that time forth English names began to be adopted by the Cornish, though we still meet with plenty of true Celtic Griffiths, and Owens, and Riols among the serfs whose manumissions are recorded in the mass-book of St. Petrocs or Padstow. Even after the fashionable Norman Roberts and Henrys and Williams began to drive out the local Cymric Christian names, the Cornish of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took to themselves those native surnames in Tre-, Pol-, and Pen- by which the true Cornu-Briton may still often be detected in Teutonic England. The Cymric language continued to be spoken over the whole county down to the time of Henry VIII. By Queen Anne’s reign it was confined to five or six villages in the western portion of the shire. Even now it is not wholly extinct. It is usual, indeed, to say that Dolly Pentreath was “the last that jabbered Cornish”; but in truth several phrases of the old tongue are still current at the present day in the mouths of a few aged country people near Penzance.
The Celtic imagination of the people lingers rather upon an earlier and less certain history. As miners and fishermen the Cornish are naturally prone to superstition and poetry. The long backbone of granite hills, the gray moors, the jagged and water-eaten crags of the Land’s End, the serpentine caves and rocky islets of the Lizard, the sheer cliffs of the north coast, inhabited by the cormorant and the sea-eagle, have all helped to mould the Cornish fancy into weird and curious shapes. The tin mines worked under the sea [gave to this island the name of] Cassiterides [a form used by] the old Greek chroniclers, the earliest part of Britain brought into connection with the Mediterranean culture by the Phœnician merchantmen. Ictis, whither the ingots of metal were conveyed at low water for shipment to the Continent, was not Vectis or Wight, the patriotic Cornish antiquarians tell us, but St. Michael’s Mount itself. Cornish tin undoubtedly went to make up the bronze of the great bronze age, and the armour of the Homeric Achæans. Marazion or Market Jew is a Phœnician name, say these bold philologists; and the modern Cornish surname of Honeyball is really a latter-day corruption of a long-surviving Hannibal. Such vitality is a little too much for the critical Teutonic mind. Then, coming down to a later though still mythical date, if there was ever an Arthur, it was here that he lived. He was (if anybody) a prince of the Damnonian Welsh, and he fought against the heathen West Saxons who invaded his lands. Cornwall, the last fragment of the old Damnonian realm, is full of his memory; his castle still stands on the cliffs of Tintagel, and his spirit still haunts Dozmary Pool. It is thus to Cornish fancy, handed down in part through Breton and Welsh sources, that we owe indirectly much of our most beautiful English poetry and romance — [Tristram and Isolt] Merlin and Arthur, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad, Guinevere and Elaine, the Round Table and the Holy Grail, Malory’s Mort Arthur and Shakespeare’s Lear, Spenser’s Faërie Queene and Tennyson’s Idylls. All these stories, now an integral part of English literature, are in their origin dim traditions or myths [circling about] the resistance offered by a Cornish or Damnonian prince to an English invader. Our national epic cycle is at bottom a Cornish legend. Arthur is the hero of the conquered race, adopted and naturalised by the conquerors. But it is to the Welshmen Geoffrey of Monmouth and Walter Map that we owe the introduction of these British tales into English literature; while Breton, Welsh, and Cornish alike are but different varieties of the same Cmyric Celtic stock.
IV. WEST MIDLANDS
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
Along the level lower reaches of the Severn, the great oolitic range of the Cotswolds subsides by a steep escarpment (well shown at Leckhampton Hill) into the broad cheese-growing vale of Gloucester and Cheltenham. On the western edge of this lias region, again, the river has cut its channel almost along the very line of junction with the red marl formations which compose the outlying portion of Gloucestershire on the opposite bank. Still farther to the west, however, in the Forest of Dean, we come upon a little island of the coal measures, surrounded by a considerable belt of other primary rocks. A good agricultural country, situated in a great river valley, is sure to be thickly peopled in a primitive civilisation; and so it is no wonder that the Roman station of Glevum should have been one of the most important in western Britain, and that Roman villas should have clustered thickly all along the edge of the Severn and Avon valleys. The main road ran from Corinium or Cirencester, the strategical centre of the west, to Glevum, and from Glevum on to the mines in the Forest of Dean; whose huge refuse-piles still mark at once the extensive scale and the insufficient smelting of the Roman works. The capital of the lower Severn was also the junction for the road leading to the Silurian country in South Wales, and for that which ran northward by Uriconium or Wroxeter to Chester and York.
After the departure of the Romans, Glevum became apparently the capital of a little Welsh principality, which seems to have been leagued with Aquæ [Sulis] and Corinium (Bath and Cirencester) against the aggressive heathen West Saxons on the south. For nearly a century after the first West Saxon hordes landed in Britain they were engaged in slowly building up the nucleus of their power in Hampshire, and in worming their way up the river valleys into Wilts, Berks, and Dorset. But when at last, towards the close of the sixth century, the two filibustering Saxon princes Cuthwine and Ceawlin boldly marched over the downs at Chippenham, and met the British confederation at Dyrham Park, near Bristol, a king of Glevum was one among the three Welsh princes left dead upon the field of battle. Conmagil is the corrupt form of name given to him in the brief chronicle of the conquerors; and his town of Gleawanceaster, as the early English note calls it, fell at once, with Bath and Cirencester, into the hands of the West Saxons. The fall of Bath separated the Damnonian Welsh of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall from their brethren in Wales proper: the fall of Gloucester, the great fortress of the lower Severn, left the whole basin of the main western river open to the English advance. The heathen invaders marched up the valley to Uriconium, which they utterly destroyed, so that it lies waste to this day; and having thus burned to the ground the other great key of Powysland, they settled quietly down as colonists and slaveholders in the conquered district. The West Saxons of this remote dependency, however, seem hardly to have done more than acknowledge the bare supremacy of the great overlord at Winchester. They were known by the name of Hwiccas (a name [thought by some to be] curiously preserved under a very clipped form in that of Wigra-ceastor or Worcester), and they were ruled by under-kings of their own who must have been practically almost independent of the mother State. Only fourteen years after the settlement of the valley, indeed, we find its inhabitants conspiring with the Welsh to drive out the West Saxon king; and a few years later, when Augustine of Canterbury met the Welsh bishops in synod at Aust, that place is described by Bede as being “on the borders of the Hwiccas and the West Saxons,” so that the two powers must then have been regarded as distinct from one another. The country occupied by the Hwiccas did not yet extend to the west of the Severn; for half Worcestershire, half Gloucestershire, and all Herefordshire were still in the hands of the Welsh; while Monmouth, of course, is even now only an English county “by Act of Parliament.” Thus the primitive territory of the Hwiccas really consisted only of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire east of Severn, together with a small piece of Warwickshire.
The connection of Gloucestershire with the West Saxons, such as it was, did not last long. Early in the seventh century, and still during the heathen period, Penda of Mercia, the real founder of the Mercian kingdom, attacked “Ciren-ceaster,” and there decisively defeated the two West Saxon kings. The Chronicle tells us that they “came to terms” with him; and though we do not know exactly what the terms were, we know that from that moment the Hwiccas ceased to be counted as West Saxons and began to be considered as Mercians. When Mercia, last of all the English kingdoms save only Sussex, received the Christian religion, Oshere, the under-king of the Hwiccas, obtained leave from his suzerain, King Wulfhere of Mercia, to erect his own principality into a bishopric; and this bishopric had its see at Worcester, the ceaster of the Hwiccas, as its name is believed literally to mean; whence we may infer that that town, rather than Gloucester, was considered the capital of the entire tribe. For many ages afterwards the diocese of Worcester consisted of the original Hwiccan principality only — that is to say, of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and a bit of Warwickshire. Osric, king of the Hwiccas, was also founder of Bath Abbey, which looks as though his power may even have extended into north Somerset. Under Offa, the greatest of all the Mercian kings, the English border was pushed forward from the Severn to the Wye, so as to include all the modern shires of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford; but the last-named territory was not incorporated with that of the Hwiccas, its own Anglicised Welsh inhabitants, the Hecanas, continuing to rank as a separate tribe and having their separate bishopric at Hereford. Down to the days of Egbert in Wessex the Hwiccas were still regarded as one undivided people, and no mention of Gloucestershire or Worcestershire as distinct Mercian counties yet occurs. Nevertheless, their king had sunk to the position of a mere ealdorman: for in the year of Egbert’s accession we read for the first time that “Athelmund, ealdorman of the Hwiccas, rode over at Kemsford; and there Weoxtan the ealdorman met him with the Wilsetan (or Wilts men), and there was a muckle fight.”
There is every reason to believe, therefore, that so long as Mercia remained independent the country of the Hwiccas was still one and indivisible, and Worcestershire or Gloucestershire had no separate existence. Under Egbert, however, the West Saxon overlordship was extended over all Mercia; and the Danish invasion soon came, utterly to disintegrate the whole native organisation of the north and the midlands. In the beginning of Alfred’s reign, Burgred, the under-king of Mercia, after a vain resistance, fled over sea to Rome; and the Danes, after making over the kingdom for a while to “an unwise thegn” as their ally, soon took the greater part of it back into their own hands. There are some grounds for supposing, however, that they never settled largely in the Severn valley, as they did in all the northern and eastern districts: certainly Gloucester and Worcester never were held, like Nottingham or Derby, by Danish “hosts”; and though we often hear of the Danes “sitting” at Cirencester, they seem seldom to have “sat” in the other towns of the Hwiccas. Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum, by which the Danes gave up all Wessex, also stipulated that the West Saxon king was to hold half Mercia south-west of Watling Street, as the old English called the Roman road from London to Chester. By this arrangement, all the land of the Hwiccas, together with Oxfordshire, Bucks, and London itself, fell once more into Alfred’s hands. In fact, he now recovered as immediate king all that district which had originally been colonised by West Saxons, but had fallen later on into Mercian hands. It was now, probably, that “King Alfred divided England into counties”; at any rate, he seems to have led the way to the universal establishment of the shire system by cutting up this recovered strip of Mercia into shires on the familiar West Saxon model. What he really did was to divide half Mercia. Almost immediately after the recovery we read of “Oxford and all that depended on it” — that is to say, Oxfordshire: while, instead of meeting any longer with the Hwiccas as a tribal name, we hear in the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward, that a Danish host endeavoured to plunder Ircinga-feld (the forest of Dean), whereupon “the men of Hereford and of Gleaweceaster met them, and fought with them, and put them to flight.” This mode of speech is exactly analogous to what we find said elsewhere of the recognised counties: doubtless Alfred had put an ealdorman in each town to lead its local levy, as his son afterward did in the Danish burgs. The earliest definite mention of “Gleawe-ceaster-scir,” however, occurs a century later, during the wars of Cnut; while a few years after it is coupled with “Wigra-ceaster-scir” (Worcestershire) in a very unmistakable manner. There can be but little doubt that the county was really demarcated in pretty much its present form by Alfred; and, as might be naturally expected, it holds a middle place between the purely natural shires of Wessex and the purely artificial shires of north-eastern Mercia. Roughly speaking, it contains just one-half of the old Hwiccas territory — the southern half between the two Avons; and it extends westward so as to include the Forest of Dean, up to the borders of Monmouth, then a part of the Welsh principality of Gwent, and up to the boundary of Herefordshire, then the region held by the Anglicised Welsh tribe of the Hecanas. Why it should cross the Cotswolds so as to include Cirencester and a part of the Thames Valley is more difficult to see; but perhaps this country may really have belonged from the first to the Hwiccas — the historical connection of Cirencester with the Severn vale is certainly strong — while even if it did not, Alfred may reasonably enough have chosen the existing boundary-line, running along the bleak region of the Wold, and about equidistant from his two selected centres at Oxford and Gloucester. It is important to notice, too, that these new shires, like those of Danish Mercia, show traces of their comparatively artificial origin in the fact that they are called after their capital towns, and not after the name of a tribe or kingdom.
HEREFORDSHIRE
The valley of the Wye and the beautiful broken hill-country west of the Malvern range have one of the most confused and uncertain histories among all the English shires. Naturally a district of Gwent, in South Wales, and still inhabited for the most part by a peasantry of Welsh descent, many of whom even now employ their ancestral Cymric tongue, it was yet early attached to the English interest, and has been counted, in its eastern half at least, as a part of England from the very first days of the Teutonic conquest. Long before that period Herefordshire, with several of the surrounding shires, formed the old principality of the Silures, the British race that held out with fiercest energy against the invading Roman legionaries. Modern anthropological investigations have tended to show that the Silurians were not a pure Celtic race, but a dark, long-skulled, non-Aryan people, allied to the primitive neolithic inhabitants of Britain, and perhaps also to the modern Basques of the Pyrenean region. To this day the type of physique usually identified with the remnants of the prehistoric Euskarian stock is exceptionally common among the men of Hereford; and even the casual visitor can hardly fail to be struck by the dark complexions, oval heads, and prominent cheek-bones so frequently noticed in the country districts about Ross and Monmouth. Be this as it may, however, it is at least certain that the Silurians, even if originally Euskarian by race, must have adopted the Celtic tongue at a very early date, as their brethren the so-called Black Celts have long done in Ireland and Scotland. During the Roman invasion these Celticised aborigines offered a peculiarly sturdy resistance to the southern conquerors. Herefordshire, indeed, is the classic country of Caractacus, the land celebrated in the vigorous rhetoric of Tacitus as the last home of British freedom. The great range of late pre-Roman earthworks which caps the Malvern hills probably marks the first line of defence thrown up by the Silurian chief against the advance of Ostorius, who had crossed the Severn to attack him with all the troops collected from the numerous stations that dot the surface of the Cotswolds. The camps at Whitborne, Croft-Ambrey, Thornbury, and Wapley seem to belong to a later campaign, when the line of the Malverns was abandoned, and Caractacus was forced to fall back upon his secondary range of fortresses in the rear. Finally, Coxwall Knoll is held, with great probability, to be the scene of the last desperate defence, immortalised in the vague and rather theatrical description of Tacitus.
After Frontinus had at length pacified the whole district from the Forest of Dean to the banks of Usk, we hear for the first time the name around which the whole subsequent history of the county centres — that of Ariconium. The important station so styled lay either at Ross itself or at Weston-under-Penyard, two miles distant. Just as the root-syllable of Uriconium, variously disguised, crops up over and over again in the history of the Wrekin district, so the root-syllable of the very similar Ariconium perpetually occurs in the history of ancient and mediæval Herefordshire. Long after the Romans had left the country, the dubious Welsh writer quoted as Nennius speaks of this region under the name of Ercing, a word whose connection with Ariconium is not particularly clear until we recollect that the first was pronounced hard like Erking, while the second was a Latinised variation of some crude form, Aricon or Arcon. Geoffrey of Monmouth, a writer of local knowledge, calls it Hergin; and indeed the lively and romantic Archdeacon is never very remarkable for correctness in the use of aspirates. In the English Chronicle and other Anglo-Saxon documents the name is converted into a typical Teutonic clan-title, as Ircinga-feld; and from that corrupt form it has been finally modernised into Archenfield, a clear product of sound local etymological instinct still preserving for us in a fairly recognisable shape the old root of Ariconium.
