Delphi collected works o.., p.988
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 988
And now we come to the difficult portion of Cumbrian history — the portion most beset by those questions of nationality which have always kept alive a smouldering antiquarian feud between Scotch and English historical writers. What becomes of the native Strathclyde Welsh it is hard to say; but certainly at some time during the Scandinavian invasions, possibly in the reign of Athelstan, a large body of Norwegians (not Danes) settled down in the whole of the Lake District. Perhaps they enslaved the native Welsh; perhaps they killed them off: at any rate, the local nomenclature of the county, as Mr. Isaac Taylor has pointed out, is now almost more largely Norse than it is Celtic. Thwaites, fells, forces, [waters], and thorpes everywhere abound; while the memory of Ketyll, Hall, Ormr, and Gils are preserved by Kettlewell, Hallthwaite, Ormathwaite, and Gellstone. At what exact time this colonisation took place we do not know for certain; but under Edmund, the successor of Athelstan, we may take it for granted that the Lake District had already become a hostile country; since Edmund “harried all Cumberland and let it all to Malcolm, King of Scots, on the rede that he became his fellow-worker either by sea or by land.” Even before, Cumberland in the wide sense had been dependent on the kings of the Scots, and from this time forth it remained an appanage of the heir to the Scottish throne, as Wales still does in modern England. But it is certain that in Strathclyde proper the Welsh population survived unchanged; while even in the restricted Cumberland south of Solway the Norse element of the statesmen or dalesmen was not strong enough to prevent the country as a whole from retaining the name of the Cymry, its aboriginal inhabitants.
From the time of Edmund till the time of William Rufus, Carlisle and the surrounding district at least formed part of this Scotch principality of Strathclyde. It is possible, however, that the southern part of the county, known as Copeland, may have been reckoned as English territory; though all this border region was always in a most disturbed state, so much so that even Lancashire was not yet a shire at the date of Domesday, and “the land between Ribble and Mersey” was not reckoned as part of any county as late as the time of Henry II. Be this as it may, Carlisle and the vale of Eden at any rate — the only large and fertile lowland district in the county — continued to form part of Scotland till the reign of William Rufus. Perhaps as an outlying Scandinavian dependency it may have had a sort of independence of its own; certainly it seems to have been practically ruled by a Scandinavian earl. But when William had enlarged the New Forest around the old nucleus of Netley, he was anxious to get rid of the villagers whom he had dispossessed, and at the same time to strengthen his frontier against the Scotch subjects in Strathclyde. So “he fared north with a mickle host to Carleol,” and took the town and wrought a castle; and at the same time “he drove out Dolfin, who ere that had wealded the land there.” It has been ingeniously conjectured that the mysterious name Dolfin, which belongs to no known system of nomenclature, Celtic or Teutonic, is a wild shot of the chronicler for Thorfinn, which might very well have been the name of the Scandinavian earl. In his place King William manned the town with the dispossessed Hampshire folk, whom he removed, families and all. From that day to this Cumberland has remained a component part of the English realm, with its local capital at King William’s castle-town of Carlisle. But both shire and capital still keep their Celtic names, only slightly disguised under English spelling. When Lancashire was finally erected into a regular county palatine, Cumberland lost its extreme southern portion, the peninsula of Furness, which was handed over to the new and heterogeneous shire; but with that exception, its boundaries seem to have varied very little since its first organisation as a Norman-English county.
VI. SOUTH MIDLANDS
OXFORDSHIRE
No other county named after its chief town stands so curiously on one side of it as Oxfordshire. Leicester, Warwick, Worcester, Huntingdon, Stafford, and most others of their sort, occupy the very centre of their respective shires; and though Hertford, Northampton, and Nottingham are slightly eccentric (in the geometrical sense), yet they stand well within the county border, which spreads for the most part in a rude circle around them, while the few outlying spurs are all easily explained by their former condition as forest or fen-land. But Oxford lies so very one-sidedly with reference to its shire that one need only cross Folly Bridge to find oneself in Berks; and the new suburb which is growing up along the Abingdon road actually belongs to the latter county. So strange an arrangement must obviously have some sufficient reason in the growth and development of the original shire.
From a geographical point of view Oxfordshire has no separate existence at all. It has been called into being by circumstances alone. After the Romans left Britain, the upper valley of the Thames seems for a century and a half to have remained in the hands of independent Welsh tribes, who had towns at Cirencester, Eynsham, Aylesbury, and Bensington. South of them, the intrusive English colony of the West Saxons had settled in Hampshire and Berks, which they occupied, apparently, up to the southern bank of the Thames itself. Wealinga-ford or Wallingford, the ford of the Wealas or Welshmen, seems to mark the primitive boundary of the two races, as Dr. Guest has pointed out. It is the lowest spot at which the Thames is fordable, and therefore the little town was always of great importance in early English history. For eighty years after their first arrival at Southampton Water, the West Saxons appear never to have ventured northward beyond the bounds of their original principality; and, indeed, the Welsh of Old Sarum gave them enough to do nearer home during the first half-century of their settlement in Britain. So far, the Saxon emblem of the White Horse cut in the Berkshire hills, and still reverently scoured by the descendants of these early English colonists, overlooked the farthest northerly limit of the West Saxon advance. But at the end of eighty years, an atheling of the Winchester kingly house, by name Cuthwulf, marched northward to conquer the upper valley of the Thames, previously blocked to the English from eastward by the Roman fortress of London. No doubt he crossed the river at Wallingford, as William the Conqueror did just five centuries later; and he then turned north-eastward as far as Bedford, so as to cut off London in the rear. There, says the brief Chronicle of the Winchester Kings, “Cuthwell fought with the Bret-Welsh, and took four towns, Lygean-burh, and Aegeles-burh, and Benesing-tun, and Egones-ham.” The first is now Lenbury, near Buckingham; the second is Aylesbury; the third is Bensington (locally pronounced Benson), not far from Wallingford; and the fourth is Eynsham, a well-known picnic excursion a few miles up the river from Oxford. As yet, however, Oxford itself was not. Thus the English first established themselves in what is now Oxfordshire; but for six years more the Welsh kept possession of Cirencester and the extreme upper valley of the Thames.
The newly-conquered territory became a favourite seat of the West Saxon kings. The lower Severn vale, which they subdued six years later, grew into the independent principality of the Hwiccas in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire; but the future Oxfordshire itself remained closely connected with the Winchester family. They made their chief home at Dorchester-on-Thames, a little town now remarkable principally for its splendid and disproportionately large abbey church, but which once stood a fair chance of growing into the capital of all England. Caer Dauri, as the Welsh [are said to have] called it, had been a place of importance in ancient Britain: above it rises the great prehistoric hill-fortress of Sinodun, and around it still stretch the immense native embankments of the Dykes. Under the Romans, Dorocina had been almost the only important station in Oxfordshire; and the rough West Saxon princes, who rather affected the traditions of Roman culture, turned Dorcic-ceaster, Dorces-ceaster as they called it, into an alternative capital with Winchester, their other Roman seat. Indeed, all the early history of the county is entirely bound up with this Dorchester-on-Thames. Even then, however, all Oxfordshire was not yet subdued, for, forty years later, Cynegils and Cwichelm fought with the Britons at Bampton, “and offslew two thousand Welsh.” It is only by carefully following up such scattered entries in the old Chronicle that we can rightly appreciate the extreme slowness of the English conquest of Britain; for we thus find that there were still independent Welshmen as far east as Oxfordshire more than a century and a half after Hengest and Horsa had conquered Kent. The Cynegils of this war became the first Christian king of the West Saxons; and he was baptized by Birinus, a Roman missionary, in the Thames at Dorchester, St. Oswald of Northumbria standing as his sponsor. Dorchester itself was immediately made the first seat of the West Saxon bishopric; and, indeed, the quiet little riverside village has three times grown into the episcopal capital of three separate dioceses, while from it the three modern sees of Lincoln, Winchester, and Oxford have taken their rise. All the succeeding West Saxon kings and princes seem to have been baptized at the same place as long as Oxfordshire remained in their hands: among them Cwichelm himself, whose barrow or tomb at Cwichelm’s-law still preserves his memory in the modern Cuckhamsley [or Scutchamsley], one of the tallest among the opposite Berkshire downs.
How the country around Dorchester passed from the hands of the West Saxons into those of the Mercians is not exactly known. But before the end of the seventh century, it seems clear that the great aggressive midland kingdom had begun to encroach on the dominions of Wessex. One Mercian king, Penda, conquered the land of the Hwiccas along the Severn; his son Wulfhere harried Wessex as far as Ashdown in Berks. About the same time, the first minster at Winchester was built; and the third West Saxon bishop certainly removed his see from Dorchester to that town. Still, this step may merely have been necessitated because Oxfordshire was now too near the debateable border. But we are also told that a new Mercian bishopric was set up at Dorchester, with a diocese extending over the country of the South English — that is to say, the modern counties of Bedford, Buckingham, Herts, and Oxford. At any rate, part of Oxfordshire was still West Saxon a century later, when “Cynewulf and Offa fought about Bensington, and Offa took the town.” Thenceforth Oxfordshire was always accounted a part of Mercia, and so remained till the Danish invasions. Ecclesiastically, it then formed part of the great Mercian diocese of Lincoln, which stretched from the Humber to the Thames. Politically, it may even then have formed a separate shire; but if so, the shire must have centred round Dorchester, not round Oxford which had as yet no existence.
It was the Danish invasion which gave the city of Oxford its importance and the shire of Oxford its present shape. During the ninth century the Thames was the boundary between Mercia and Wessex, and Berks was regularly constituted as a West Saxon shire. For this reason the river forms the limit between neighbouring counties along its whole course. But the Danes never fully succeeded in conquering the south-western half of Mercia; and the Bishops of Lincoln, driven by the heathen from their own cathedral town, took refuge at Dorchester, close to the border of still Christian Wessex. About the same time Oxford began to grow into importance. The Oxena-ford [oxen-ford, a cattle-] drovers’ ford over the river Thames, [was formerly supposed to] derive its name from the same root as Osen-ey; and the old Welsh word Usk, Ux, Exe, or Ax, which appears in so many other of our rivers. After the first brunt of the attack, when the Danes had driven Burgred of Mercia over sea, and Alfred of Wessex into the Somerset marshes, the West Saxons began their manly attempt to recover the soil of England; and Alfred not only chased the heathen out of Wessex, but also by his treaty with Guthrum regained all the Mercian country south-west of Watling Street, including the modern Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Shropshire, together with London. He seems at once to have mapped out this new acquisition — now first added to the West Saxon realm since its conquest by Mercia — into regular shires on the West Saxon model, each dependent on a chief town or fort. Berks was already a recognised shire, bounded by the Thames; and the opposite country had to be erected into a new county round some burg or other. It was made dependent on Oxford, probably because that rising town had now grown into an important strategical point as commanding the chief Danish land road into Wessex. Certainly, in all the later Danish wars Oxnaford appears as one of the chief English fortresses. Doubtless, Alfred (though he did not found the university) [planned or] erected a rough fort on the site of Oxford Castle. Still, during Alfred’s own time we have no distinct mention of Oxfordshire as such, nor was the new territory yet fully incorporated with the West Saxon dominions. The King still left the fragmentary Christian Mercia in the hands of a separate ealdorman, to whom he gave his daughter Athelfled in marriage. But on the death of this ealdorman, shortly after Alfred’s own death, King Edward at once resumed “Lunden-bury, and Oxnaford, and all the lands that thereto belonged,” leaving his sister Athelfled, the Lady of the Mercians, only the northern midlands for her share of the kingdom. Oxfordshire thus practically represents all the English territory between the Chilterns (which seem to have depended on London), the land of the heathen Danish host in Northampton, and the Lady’s real Mercian dominions in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. It consists, so to speak, of the leavings between the symmetrical Danish shires and the old tribal West Saxon or Hwiccian shires. This it is, no doubt, that accounts for its odd and irregular configuration. The first distinct mention of “Oxnaford-scir” occurs during the reign of Ethelred the Unready.
BEDFORDSHIRE
The history of the shires which lie between the Humber and the Thames is far more complicated than the history of the shires which lie north and south respectively of those two main boundary rivers. For the district thus roughly demarcated answers on the whole to the old English Kingdom of Mercia; and the annals of Mercia are the most confused and fluctuating of any in all Britain. The counties of the Midlands, indeed, owe their origin, not to primitive Anglo-Saxon divisions, but to mere accidents of conquest or reconquest from the Danish intruders. In Wessex and the south our shires are still original English principalities, like Sussex, Kent, and Surrey, or early semi-independent colonies from such, like Wilts, Dorset, and Devon. Here, the shire is the once autonomous tribe, the ealdorman is the old tribal chieftain, and the sheriff is the reeve or steward of the central authority at Winchester, representing either the mother State or the conquering overlord, as the case may be. But in Mercia the old divisions were so utterly swept away by the Danes that it is almost impossible to restore their boundaries, even conjecturally, at the present day. Mr. Kemble prints an extremely ancient list of Mercian shires, filled with such unfamiliar names as Westerna, East and West Wixna, Wigesta, Witheringa, and so forth, whose very memory has now wholly died away. The Wilsæte, the Dorsæte, and the Defnsæte of Wessex, are all easily recognisable in their ancient dress; but our best antiquarians [have as yet made] little of such forgotten Mercian divisions as Sweordora and Ohta-ga. The Danish invasion, in fact, has obliterated for us in all smaller matters the map of the early Midlands; and only the old dioceses of Leicester, Lichfield, and Worcester still preserve some memory of the larger amalgamated principalities of the Middle English, the Mercians proper, and the Hwiccas. Thus the existing Midland shires as we now know them date only from the reconquest of Mercia from the Danes by the West Saxons; and in this reconquest Bedford was the scene of the earliest English triumph, and therefore the capital of the first reconstituted Mercian shire.
Though Bedfordshire as a county, however, only traces back its history to the tenth century, yet it had passed through many vicissitudes as part of earlier territories in remoter times. Even before the English settlement in South Britain, Bedford had apparently been a Welsh town; and late in the sixth century Cuthwulf the West Saxon, then king of a petty principality in Hants and Berks, marched north of the Thames at Wallingford, and took four towns in a battle at “Bedcanforda.” But though the West Saxons held the country which now makes up the shires of Oxford and Buckingham for a considerable time after this victory, they do not appear to have made any permanent settlement in Bedfordshire itself. This flat and fenny district was first really occupied by the Middle English — a tribe of Teutonic colonists who effected their entry into Britain by the Wash, and advanced towards the interior by the marshy basins of the Nene and the Ouse. Coalescing a little later with the Southumbrians of the Trent, these Middle English settlers had their capital and afterwards their bishopric at the old Roman city of Leicester. In time, however, they were absorbed by the more warlike and aggressive Mercians of Lichfield and Tamworth, who finally became the lords of all the Midlands, from the Humber and the Ribble on the north to the Thames and the Avon on the south. Of the original native organisation of this great stretch of country we can now recover few if any particulars. The Danish invasion swept away all the old annals of Mercia; and we have to rely entirely for our knowledge of its constitution upon the scanty side-allusions of ill-informed West Saxon or Northumbrian writers.
