Works of grant allen, p.990
Works of Grant Allen, page 990
With the Scandinavian invasions the town of Nottingham itself first comes prominently into notice. When the Danes under Ingwar and Ubba had settled down in Northumbria and divided its lands among themselves, they began to turn towards the Mercian territories beyond the Humber; and Nottingham lay naturally right in their path as they pushed south-westward along the Trent water-way. “That ilk host,” says the English Chronicle, “fared into Mercia to Snotinga-ham, and there took its winter seat. And Burhred, King of Mercians, and his witan begged Athelred, King of West Saxons, and Alfred his brother, that they should succour them to fight against the host. And there they fared with a West Saxon levy into Mercia to Snotinga-ham, and met the host at the work.” For a time the Danes made peace with the Mercians; but some years later they returned once more from Tureces-ey (Torksey) in Lindsey to Repton, a Mercian royal ham, and “drove King Burhred over sea, and won all that land.” In the division of spoils which followed, Nottingham and the Southumbrian country fell to the lot of a separate “host” under some nameless Danish earl, and became thenceforward one of the most powerful States in the Danish confederacy of the Five Burghs. For nearly fifty years the Danes held undisputed possession of the town and district; till Edward the Elder, in his victorious northern advance, had won back the whole of Danish Mercia as far as Stamford, Leicester, Derby, and Tamworth. At that point the Scandinavian host in Nottingham thought it wiser to give in, completely isolated as they were in England south of Humber. Thereupon the West Saxon king “fared thence to Snotinga-ham, and entered the burg, and bade better it, and set it both with English men and eke with Danish.” Two years later he returned again and “bade work the burgh on the south half the river, over against the other, and the bridge over Trent betwixt the two burghs.” This move put all the north at his feet; and immediately after we read accordingly that the Danes in Northumbria, the Welsh of Strathclyde, and even the kings of Scots, at once chose Edward “for father and for lord.” The occupation of Nottingham really settled the position of the princes of Winchester as central kings of all Britain.
Of course, in the fluctuations which followed, “Snotingaham” fell over and over again into the hands of the Danes; and we read of it as a Danish burgh in the fragmentary later ballad of Edmund’s northern victories. But it is probable from the analogy of the other Mercian counties that the shire was at this time first definitely organised as such on the ordinary West Saxon model. The earliest distinct mention of the county occurs ninety years after its recovery by the English, at the time when Cnut was overrunning all the midlands. “He wended out through Buccinga-ham-scir,” says the Chronicle, “into Bedan-ford-scir, and thence to Huntandun-scir, so into Hamtun-scir, along the fen to Stanford” — then apparently a county in itself, the old territory of the Gyrwas,— “and then into Lindcolne-scir, thence on to Snotingaham-scir, and so to Northumbria to Eoforwic-ward,” or York-ward. At the time of Domesday the boundaries of the shire stood approximately as at the present day. On the whole, we may believe that Nottinghamshire (the initial letter dropped out soon after the Norman Conquest) is somewhat less artificial than the other Mercian shires, and fairly represents the original dominions of the Southumbrians, as well as the territories of the later Danish host. Its boundaries are certainly quite natural, with an old mark of forest, fen, or river. In shape, it lies centrally round the town of Nottingham, as regards the cultivable land during early English times; but it also includes a great northward extension along the crest of the triassic region, and this district was long covered by Sherwood Forest, and is even now very largely wooded from place to place. In fact, the common forestine termination field, in old English feld, meaning a place where the trees have been felled — or, as we now say, a “clearing” — runs through most of the names of old towns in all this district, from Wakefield, Huddersfield, and Sheffield, by Chesterfield and Mansfield, to Duffield in Derbyshire, and recalls the time when only a few Roman roads penetrated the timbered uplands, and only a few outlying hamlets interrupted the deer-frith around. The valley of the Trent was the one really settled part of the whole county, with Nottingham itself, the Old Wark, or fort, in its centre, and New-Wark defending its key a little farther down. Throughout the north and the Dukeries, almost all the local names are of mediæval types: only around Nottingham itself do Danish and Anglo-Saxon villages cluster in any numbers.
RUTLAND
Near the heart of England, among the lowlands which slope slowly downward to the fen country, lies a little unnoticed agricultural county, whose existence as a separate shire even Mr. Freeman pronounces an insoluble problem. Its name of Rutland has generally been explained as meaning the Red Land. But, setting aside the philological doubtfulness of such an explanation, it may be fairly objected that the soil of the county is not particularly ruddy, except in a single small corner; while the analogy of other shires looks unfavourable to the theory in question, since the rest all bear territorial rather than descriptive names. On the other hand, it is observable that the Romans had a station of Ratæ somewhere in these eastern midlands of England — most probably at Leicester; and the mere plural form of the word marks it out at once as a tribal title, like so many of the Roman town-names in Northern Gaul. If these Ratæ were the inhabitants of the country between Leicester and Oakham, it would not be surprising that their name should afterwards be confined to a part only of their original territory in the form of Roteland, exactly as the name of Devon was at last confined to the eastern portion of Damnonia, or as the name of Cumberland was at last confined to a mere fragment of the old Cumbrian kingdom of Strathclyde. At first sight, no doubt, modern inquirers are prone to reject cavalierly all etymologies which imply unbroken historical connection with Celtic times. But, after all, it is just as likely that Rutland should bear the name of the Ratæ as that Kent should be called from the Cantii, or that London and Lincoln should retain their Roman names to the present day. Eighteen out of the forty English counties are acknowledged still to bear designations compounded with Celtic or Roman roots; and the addition of a nineteenth need not disturb the equanimity of the fiercest Teutonist among us all. The suggestion is of course merely conjectural: still it is at least more likely to be true than the astonishing theory that Rutland may be so called from its circular shape, quasi Rotundalandia, as though our ancestors usually spoke bad mediæval Latin; or from roet, the old Romance word for a wheel, as though they spoke Norman French in the days of Alfred and Athelstan.
However this may be, thus much at any rate is certain — that the name of “Roteland” is earlier than the Norman Conquest; and that the district so called was not yet a shire at the date of Domesday. It was settled, in all probability, at the English colonisation of Britain, not by the Lindisware of Lincoln, not by the Gyrwas of the Fens, but by the same Middle English tribe which colonised Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and Northamptonshire. For before it became a county in itself it was generally reckoned as a part of those shires, while it never seems to have had any connection with Lincolnshire. Only four town or village names of the English clan type, however, occur in the entire district, of which Uppingham and Empingham alone are known outside their own neighbourhood: so that the English colonisation in this outlying corner would seem to have been scanty. It is known that the fen-land long held out as a stronghold of the Welsh against the Teutonic pirates, just as it afterwards held out as the refuge of the last independent English against the Norman conquerors; and it is possible that “Roteland” may similarly have been the retreat of the Leicestershire Ratæ, which would account for the restriction of the name to the eastern portion of their original dominions. A mark of woodland long formed the western boundary of the shire towards Leicester. Except the fertile Vale of Catmoss, indeed, in which Oakham stands, a great part of the shire was long covered with such woods as Leafield Forest and Beaumont Chase; while even now Burley, Exton, and Normanton Parks occupy a considerable fraction of its little surface. Probably the name, as well as the district, is far older than the division of Mercia into shires by Edward the Elder; for it belongs to a class common in the north and the midlands — like Holland, Cleveland, Copeland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland — representing the old native division of the soil prior to the Danish conquest or the West Saxon recovery of the Denalagu. None of these was a shire at the time of Domesday but Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Rutland became so later on, while Cleveland and Holland remain mere popular names to the present day.
Perhaps the earliest mention of Rutland by name occurs in the will of King Edward the Confessor. He there bequeaths “Roteland” to his Queen Edith for her life, with remainder to his new abbey at Westminster. The village of Edith-Weston, near Normanton, still preserves “the Lady’s” name. The district thus bequeathed certainly included Oakham at least, and the surrounding parishes. In Domesday, it appears as “the King’s soc of Roteland”; but the manors now comprised in the county are partly entered under Northamptonshire and partly under Nottinghamshire, which is actually separated from Rutland, as it now stands, by a large arm of Leicestershire, including all the country round Melton Mowbray. To complicate the difficulty, it is quite clear from the English Chronicle that Stamford, which now lies on the very verge of modern Rutland, was the capital of a county in Cnut’s time, as it had before been one of the Danish Five Burgs; and this older Stamfordshire, the original territory of the Scandinavian host, must almost certainly have comprised the eastern and flatter portion of Rutland. After the Conquest the district remained closely connected with the royal demesnes, and it was probably this fact which caused it at last to be erected into a separate county. The first mention of it as such occurs in the reign of King John, when “the county of Roteland and town of Rockingham” were assigned as a dowry to his Queen Isabella. Even after this time, however, the difficulties which beset the local historian are by no means exhausted; for Mr. Hartshorne points out that the expenses of the shrievalty, instead of being entered in the Pipe Rolls on a separate rotulet by themselves, like those of other shires, are usually appended to the rotulet for the counties of Northampton, Nottingham, Leicester, or even Derby. All this uncertainty, however, as to the neighbouring county with which Rutland should be associated, in itself perhaps marks out its position as an old independent community, now annexed to this artificial division and now to that, but always retaining an underlying sense of its own separateness, just as Cleveland and Pickering do in Yorkshire, or as the little district of the Rodings still does in Essex. Of course nobody in the county ever says Rutlandshire, any more than they say Cumberlandshire or Westmorelandshire. Everything, indeed, seems to show that the district, as a popular division, goes back to a far earlier time than the artificial arrangement which made it into a recognised administrative unit. One mark of its real origin may, perhaps, be seen in the fact that alone among Mercian shires it is not named after its county town. Apparently it remains a solitary example of an old native Mercian division which has outlived the West Saxon redistribution of the country into shires on the southern model, rudely mapped out around the chief Danish burghs. In this connection it is interesting to note that Danish local names are unknown in the county, and that the subdivisions of the soil, though sometimes described by their Scandinavian appellation of wapentakes, are far oftener designated in the true old English style as hundreds. Oakham Castle, the real metropolis round which the little shire has always centred, still encloses the mound of an old Roman or British fortress.
DERBYSHIRE
From the summit of the Cheviots on the Scotch border, a long range of broken primary hills, with no other common title than the purely artificial and geographical one of the Pennine chain, runs down due southward into the heart of England, and finally reaches its last dying undulation in the beautiful wooded uplands of the Peak. On either side, this central boss of millstone grit or carboniferous strata subsides gently into the fertile triassic vales of York and the Humber tributaries to eastward, and the similar, though smaller, valleys of the Eden, the Ribble, and the Mersey on the west. In our own time the thickest seats of population in all England have gathered over the coal-bearing outskirts of this rugged primary tract, from Newcastle and Durham, through Burnley, Blackburn, Bolton, Wigan, Oldham, and Manchester, to Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley, Sheffield, and Nottingham. But before the immense modern employment of coal and iron for manufacturing purposes, the relative importance of the primary and secondary regions was exactly the converse of their importance at the present day. While the broad agricultural valleys of the Ouse and the Trent were the home of a comparatively dense population, the wooded dales of the upper tributaries were still given over to the wild boar and the red deer. If in the primitive period before the Roman occupation any scattered British tribe held any part of the modern Derbyshire, it could only have been in the very lowest portion of the watershed, the glen of the Derwent, Dovedale, and the Trent basin, forming a small circle around the then non-existent town of Derby itself; while the Peak and the slopes which lead down from its summit toward the plain must still have been covered, as they were covered long after, by an unbroken growth of primæval forest. But it is far more probable that Derbyshire was almost uninhabited until long after the English settlement of Britain, with the solitary exception of a few isolated Roman stations on the network of roads which kept up communications through the southern fringe of that trackless wild.
When the heathen English settled in Northumbria, a new element contributed to prevent the reclamation of the Pennine range. It became a border district between two hostile races, differing in habits, tongue, and creed; and no paths traversed its winding glens save, perhaps, the few war-trails through the passes, when the Welsh descended on a raid to plunder the English villages in the vales of Ouse and Trent. East of the central range lived the Northumbrians of Deira and Bernicia; west of it lived the Britons of Strathclyde and Cumbria; and the whole intermediate dividing ridge, from the Forth to the Peak, was known for many centuries as the Desert or the Wilderness. For a century and a half after the English occupation, however, the Welsh still retained not only Derbyshire, but also the districts of Elmet and Loidis around the modern town of Leeds. At the end of that time, Athelfrith, the last heathen King of Northumbria, rounded the Peakland, as men then called it, and by a great victory at Chester (rendered memorable by the massacre of the Welsh monks of Bangor-ys-coed) extended the English dominions to the Mersey and the Dee. Even so, Elmet, and no doubt Derbyshire as well, retained their independence for another twenty years. The little northern Welsh principality succumbed at last to Edwin of York; but of the conquest of this unimportant forest region, the Peakland, no distinct notice has come down to our days. Probably it was never actually overrun by force of arms at all: as in the case of the other Welsh refugees in the Fens and the Weald, the scanty aboriginal inhabitants were doubtless slowly and insensibly amalgamated with the surrounding English population. The local nomenclature of the county is still strongly Celtic: tors are nearly as frequent as in Devon or Cornwall, and every river or hill in Derbyshire still bears a Welsh name. Even now, the popular dialect of the upper dales abounds in curious words of Cymric origin.
Under the early English, the settlement of Derbyshire must have proceeded but very slowly. The Hundred is supposed everywhere to represent the original holding of one hundred free English families among the servile Welsh population; and in Derbyshire (as Mr. Isaac Taylor notes) each Hundred contains an average of 162 square miles, against an average of 23 in Sussex, 24 in Kent, and 30 in Dorset. Clan villages of the English type are also extremely rare. The scattered colonists in this desolate region were Mercians by race, and they bore the local name of Pecsæte or Peak-settlers; so that the county has narrowly escaped being called Pecsetshire in our own time, on the analogy of Dorsetshire and Somersetshire. Indeed, any name might once have seemed more probable than the one it actually bears; for while the inhabitants were known as Pecsæte, the district was known as Peac-lond or Peakland, which would have been quite analogous to Cumberland and Rutland. Failing either of these, the natural title would be Norworthyshire; for the old English name of the present county town was Northweorthig, which on the usual analogies would be modernised into Norworthy or Norworth. The very word is significant: it means the homestead on the island in the north; and it probably marks the farthest northerly settlement of the Mercian colonists towards the Peak Forest, inhabited only by wild beasts and fugitive Britons, like the Maroons of Jamaica in a later day. Here, no doubt, a solitary English family had taken up their abode on a marshy islet formed by a bend of the Derwent, while all around them spread the pathless woods which stretched away in unbroken succession to the distant valleys of the Clyde and the Forth.
It is to the Danes that Derby owes its modern name, as well as its importance, and Derbyshire its assured existence as an English shire. When the Scandinavian hordes first overran Northumbria and Mercia, they divided out the soil among themselves in their frankly piratical fashion “with a rope,” and a separate “host” under its own earl took up its abode in all the chief towns. North-eastern Mercia fell into the hands of five such hosts, who settled down in the Five Burghs, and formed a sort of rude confederacy for offence and defence. The other four Danish cities of the league — Lincoln, Leicester, Stamford, and Nottingham — had all been important places long before the arrival of the Danes; but, for some unknown reason, the host which occupied the country in the Trent valley did not settle down in Tamworth, the old royal town of the Mercian kings, but in the outlying hamlet of Northweorthig instead. As in many other cases, they changed the name of the village, which was henceforth known by the Danish title of Deora-by. The last syllable always marks Scandinavian occupation, as at Whitby, Grimsby, and Appleby: the first element is the same as the English word deer, which, however, was then applied to all wild animals, and was only later restricted to its narrower modern meaning. The name is thus equivalent to “Deer-town,” or still more strictly to “the hunting quarters” [?]; and it sufficiently shows how wild must have been the state of the surrounding country at the period when it was first applied. The Danes built a fort at Derby, as it may now be called; and the post soon became their chief station in the northern midlands. Meanwhile, Alfred’s daughter Athelfled, the Lady of the Mercians, was recovering her dominions from the heathen invaders, and had built border fortresses at Stafford and Tamworth. A few years later she stormed Derby, “though four of her best thanes were slain fighting at the city gate”; and, says Florence of Worcester, “she became mistress of that province” — in other words, of the district which comprised the territory of the Derby host. The allusion to the gate shows that under its Danish masters the town had grown into considerable importance, and the invaders had doubtless cleared and tilled all the cultivable land in the Trent basin. As yet, however, it would seem that only the southern part of the shire was recovered by the English; for some years later, when Athelfled was dead, we read in the Chronicle that her brother Edward the Elder, the West Saxon King, who had annexed her dominions, “fared into Peac-lond to Badecan-wyll (Bakewell) and bade work a burgh there.” No doubt the county was organised as a Mercian shire on its first occupation by Athelfled, who had already demarcated the neighbouring territories of Staffordshire and Warwickshire; and when it passed into Edward’s hands it would probably become one of the West Saxon shires without further alteration, the King merely putting his own ealdorman and sheriff in the place of the Danish earl, but allowing the twelve Danish lawmen to manage internal affairs on their own system. Like all the other Mercian shires in the Scandinavian region, Derbyshire takes its name from its chief town. It does not lie so evenly around it, however, as in most other cases; but the want of symmetry is, in fact, more apparent than real, historically speaking. The town stands in the exact centre of the plain portion of the county: the Forest of the Peak, stretching away to the north, was long regarded as a mere wild outlying appendage, a “deer-frith” or preserve of wild beasts, whose memory is still perpetuated by such names as Chapel-en-le-Frith. Though in the later Danish difficulties Derby often rebelled from its West Saxon masters and called in the aid of some wicking prince, there is no reason to suppose that the boundaries of the county ever varied much. Still, no quite distinct mention of “Deorbiscir” occurs till two years before the Norman Conquest.
