MASTER NEGA TIVE NO. 92-80726 MICROFILMED 1993 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library V • COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or other reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." If a user malces a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: ALLEN, GRANT TITLE: COUNTY AND TOWN IN ENGLAND ... PLACE: LONDON DA TE : 1901 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative # BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARGET Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record k6 Allen, Grant, 1848-1899. County and town in England, together with some an- nals of Ohurnside, by Grant Allen; with an introduction by Frederick York Powell ... London, 6. Ilichards, 1901. XV, 274 p. front, (map) IPJ*". Reprinted, with slight changes, from the Pall Mall gazette, 1881-82. Restrictions on Use: 1. Ct. Brit.—IIistory. ' /f^v^^CiiRland—Descr. & trav.,lJBC(l-JSOO» Locals j ?.\ ??\y TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: j/y_ FILM SIZE: V5 . IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA (UA IB IIB DATE FILMED: ^./W_^3_ INITIALS,. £,kS_ HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODBRrPGE. cf BIBLIOGIIAPHIC UUIEG U L ARll lES MAIN ENTRY! Atlg/^j Cria\r\\- Bibiiographic Irregularities in the Original Document List volumes and pages affected; include name of institution if filming borrowed text. Pagels) missing/ not available: Volumes(s) missing/not available:. Illegible and /or damaged page(s):. , Page(s) or volumes(s) mlsnumbered:. Bound out of sequence:. .Page(s) or illustration(s) filmed from copy borrowed from: pvvv^celovn u to t' vc vs/fy Other: FILMED IN WHOLE OR PART FROM A COPY B ORRO WED FROM PRINCETON UNIVERSITY v c Association for Information and image iManagement 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring. Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 K - J. .*. Centimeter 1 2 3 ujiliuliuiiuuiuuiuui im I I Inches TTT 4 ml 1 n 5 6 7 8 iiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliii i 1 i I I T^ fi 1.0 10 11 12 13 14 15 mm Uil I.I 1.25 |45 ISA 163 m 1 3.2 3.6 4X) 1.4 [un|uuiMM||mlmJp^^ 23 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 1 11 t I MflNUFPCTURED TO PIIM STfiNDflRDS BY APPLIED IMAGE- INC. > ■iirw""f^'P!l";'«'"ip«' ■"'«!; "Hnf"]j;''--i'»m(||nTiii|iP"™i' , ■.iinvmywi'ifiiji-iiii:'- ■"•-f ■■■'■■■ "mimii ^Vl K\^ in the ®itjr of %Utv U^rtt rarg ^pttml g^uwd ®ii;ien ttn^nutiWtt^iB c t* I 4\ 1 I i.H t . COUNTY AND TOWN IN ENGLAND 1 1 i intermezzo. Crown 8vo. Works by Mr. Grant Allen. The Evolution of the Idea of God : An Inquiry into the Origins of Religions. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 7s. 6d. net. {Third Edition.) The European Tour. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. Twelve Tales: With a Head- piece, a Tailpiece, and an Select Stories. Cloth. 68. {Second Edition.) Linnet : A Romance. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. {Fifth Edition:^ Miss Cayley's Adventures. Il- lustrated by Gordon Browne. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 68. {Second Edition.) Hilda Wade. Illustrated by Gordon Browne. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 6s. An African Millionaire. Illus- trated by Gordon Browne. Crown 8vo. Cloth, zs. {Fijih Edition.) A Story for Illustrated by Gertrude M. Bradley. Crown 8vo. Cloth. 58. Grant Allen's Historical Guides. I. Paris. {Second Edition,^ Florence. {Second Edition.) Cities of Belgium. IV. Venice. {Second Edition.) Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, Rounded Corners. 3s. 6d. net each. Tom Unlimited Children. II. III. London : GRANT RICHARDS 9 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. h 1 I -a .1 COUNTY AND TOWN IN ENGLAND TOGETHER WITH SOME ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE BY GRANT ALLEN WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FREDERICK YORK POWELL REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, OXFORD UNIVERSITY LONDON GRANT RICHARDS 9 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. I9OI COUNTY AND TOWN IN ENGLAND TOGETHER WITH SOME ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE BY GRANT ALLEN WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FREDERICK YORK POWELL REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, OXFORD UNIVERSITY LONDON GRANT RICHARDS 9 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. I9OI 4 iatmm MliM ■«B • 4 I A PREFATORY NOTE I j[. 1 jg^ti^x ^(S I" CD 0-) C I The map of England is an epitome of English history, but it wants reading. This little book is an attempt by a man who had studied it lovingly to help others to get in the way of understanding it for themselves. The local story of an English county or town shows one many things that the ordinary history-books do not and often cannot attempt to notice. It makes their dry bones live. It gives meaning to a number of isolated and unconsidered facts. It has a charm of its own that attracts many who have not the opportunity of doing good historical work on a larger scale. Grant Allen had special gifts for writing such a guide to local English history as this book really is. He had a good eye for the ^^ lie of the land " ; he was a per- petual observer, and a born expositor and interpreter. He had a first-hand knowledge of many of the docu- ments on which much of our early history rests. He wrote brightly and clearly without seeking to efface his own individuality. He loved his subject for itself, and had thought it over in his many journeys and resting- places all over England. It was a pleasant thing to go a walk with him. The country was to him a living being, developing under his eyes, and the history of its past was to be discovered from the conditions of its present. He would put 331816 CD iHHri-ilAM COUNTY AND TOWN himself into this past, as an historian must do, and could recognise the lines along which the changes had gone and were going. He could read much of the palimpsest before him. He was keen to note the survivals that are the key to so much that has now disappeared but that once existed. He was persevering and would keep a problem before him for years, watching for fresh evi- dence or seeking for better explanation of the evidence he already possessed. He never forgot or allowed you to forget that there is a great mass of extant historic evidence not to be found in books or even in vellums or papers. The object-lesson was dear to him, and he could make it a real means of education. Plants, trees, birds, beasts, insects, rocks and rivers, braes and banks, moors and marshes, the sea-shore and the high fells, each and all had a tale to tell, and he could translate more of the tale than most men. He had also the charm of being singularly wide-minded in historical matters (for, after all, history is a science, though a science in a rather rudimentary stage), and he was ready to test his most cherished theories and reject them if he found they would not stand the trial. Like Freeman, he was always open to conviction, and grateful to any one who would give him fresh light. None of his books can give the whole effect of his educative quality ; for the good teacher must be face to face with his pupil if he would exert his full influence ; tout they give an idea of the pains he took to see things truly himself and make others see them for themselves. I know that I learnt much from him, and that I shall always regret that we had so few opportunities of late years of talking things over together. He was the first English historian to put forward in a convincing way the fact that the Teutonic element is not the only important A PREFATORY NOTE Vll element (perhaps not even the chief element) in the present population. He welcomed the arrival of the "prae-celtic theory," which he had foreseen. He first showed his generation clearly that the results of archaeology and anthropology must take their due place even in our English school histories and ^^ popular" history books. He had nothing of the acute Teidonismus or Morbus Germanicus that came of the too absolute acceptance as oracles of certain antigallic North German historians. He cared greatly about the economic and social conditions that have such immense weight as determinants in the progress of a nation. His strong political views and his Spencerian religion did not hamper him in historical matters, such as those with which this book is concerned, though they sometimes manifest themselves in a kind of appendicular form, as when he condemns his own college, Merton and Christ- church, — the college of many of his friends (on grounds I consider wholly mistaken), or when he eulogises the imaginary manufacturer at the expense of the equally imaginary landed proprietor, typifying one as a Nabal, the other as an Abigail (a conclusion to the making of which there has obviously gone much debatable matter). But those little "excursions and alarums," idiosyncracies which I have scrupulously left as they stood (though I daresay if Allen had edited his own book he would have left them out in his riper judgment), have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the chapters in which they occur, or with the investigations on which the whole work is based. The first two parts of this book. Towns and Counties, are complete as far as they go, though the tale of a few counties and of many towns is not told, as I hoped while Allen lived that it might have been; but he never f ^ / i ly Vlll COUNTY AND TOWN found time to write more, nor opportunity of making the needful personal acquaintance with the places he had determined to write upon. For he would not write of a place without having seen it, sharing in this the practice of Freeman, who once told me he had never written in detail of a place he had not seen save Arques, where, as he said, he accordingly made mistakes that five minutes* eyesight would have saved him from. But the places Allen had seen were so varied, were, in fact, such *' typical developments," that it will be an easy task for those with the requisite local knowledge and trained enthusiasm to carry out his work on its present scale to the few remaining counties and the rest of the big and famous towns of England. The Chronicles of Chumside, with which this volume ends, is a piece of reconstruction such as VioUet-le-duc once worked out for a t3rpical North French stronghold, but it had never, I think, been attempted for an English district by an English historian. The sketch map will show the reader the particular district chosen by Allen, a district with which he was peculiarly well acquaint. The harmless device of fancy names was necessary to the plan he had formed; which was not to give a history of part of Dorset but to set forth a typical specimen of an English countryside in its gradual development from savage times to Victorian days. To do this in a series of short articles was not at all easy, but it seems to me that this Chronicle is a successful achievement of what it was meant to be — a piece of popular scientific exposition. It is the kind of work that a reader who cares at all about the past of his own country will certainly find stimulating ; if should make him ask himself a lot of questions, it must show him gaps in his local knowledge and in the sources of knowledge he has at his com- / A PREFATORY NOTE IX mand. It is intended, indeed, to make him think, and if it does this it will do what Allen wished it to do. The teacher's office is, as he conceived it, first to make his pupils see and then to make them think correctly on what they see and remember, and he was never weary of teaching. He had his message and he delivered it. He could not help it. Hence his scientific writing never sunk into the second-hand stale stuiF that is so plenti- fully retailed : it was always based on personal convictions acquired by his own work or by his own testing of other men's work, and he would not write in a way or on a thing he did not really care about. He preferred, if money had to be earned, to earn it by regular fiction rather than by second-hand or make-believe science. The ease with which his writing can be read is by no means an index of the amount of work on which these vivid chapters are founded. It cost their author thought and pains to make his readers' task plain and pleasant, and he never grudged taking trouble. He was not a superficial man. Though this present book and his Anslo-Saxon Britain are alone left to attest his interest in the history of his country, one feels sure, that, had he possessed the necessary time and means, he would have materially advanced certain portions of this great and wide subject. I can remember long talks in which he was full of suggestions ; lively discussions wherein difficulties were at least thoroughly faced ; critical dis- quisitions, serious and subtle, upon the authorities ; hard questions eagerly and honestly debated. The stealing hours of time slipped swiftly by with Allen when the talk was of history. He had the real worker's sympathy with any one who was trpng to push on his subject, and things often seemed clearer and more hopeful after an hour or two with him even when he \l f > nr- ({ . fl \ It X COUNTY AND TOWN had been able to give no direct help to the solving of the problem on hand : — My sorrow for the friend that is gone, And there remains to me only his shadow, the memory of him ! The chapters that make up this book were first printed in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1881-82. I asked Grant Allen more than once to reprint them, and he would have done so had he lived to complete them. We must all regret that he has not been able even to prepare them for publication. It has been left to me to see them through the press, and I have done so without making any changes save those marked by brackets. These only touch points which, in my judg- ment, could not have been left in the text without stereot3rping certain errors that the author would surely have corrected as a matter of course. Where theories merely are in question I have left the text as it stood, sometimes adding a bracketed query to warn the reader. I have not even removed a certain number of the repetitions made inevitable by the originally serial mode of production, for to do so would be to recast the work rather than edit it Editmg, like translation, must often be a compromise. I want my friend's work to stand as he left it; but I also want it to stand as he would have left it had he been printing it now. Several sentences, I know, he meant to alter, as I have done, duly marking the change. History moves, hypotheses that hold the field to-day may be overthrown as fancies or established as verities to-morrow; new evidence crops up and compels attention, dim features in our reconstruc- tion of the past become more clear, or fruitful relations between isolated facts are discovered. But "correc- tions" are few. I have not been able to identify every spot in the Chronicles, but the rough map will II 1 A PREFATORY NOTE XI enable the reader to see the general lie of the land, the direction of the roads, and the old sites in the neighbourhood. For an index there is no need, as the table of contents will in this case supply its place exactly enough. Notes I have not added, nor do I see that they are wanted. Allen was careful not to overload his explanations, he liked to make his points sharply and leave a definite impression in each paragraph and chapter. To try and do more than he saw fit to do would, it seems to me, alter the character of the book. He wrote these studies for the general reader, and he knew the general reader well, and esteemed him more than most writers do: and it is to the general reader that I confidently commend his book, which, for my own part, I have found both suggestive and interesting. It is not needful that I should keep the reader, if indeed he be one of the courteous and wise minority that peruses prefaces, any longer from the book itself. I am glad to have done what very slight service I could for the work of a man whose generous, sincere, and unselfish qualities I admired, in whose friendship I delighted, and of whom I shall not cease to cherish the remembrance. "We Men who in our mom of youth defied The elements, must vanish ; — be it so ! Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour. F. YORK POWELL. Christchurch, Oxford, MarcJi 29, 1901. ■SiB" ■iaHPHaaHiE' * 31 i I !' .i ^ > I II '■ -I II '1 u r 111 ;, CONTENTS SHIRES AND COUNTIES PAOE Introduction. What is a County? . . 3 I. South-East — Sussex 8 Kent and Surrey 13 II. Wessex — Hampshire 18 WUts and Berks 22 Dorset 26 The Isle of Portland 31 Somerset ....... 35 lU. South-West — Devon 41 Cornwall 46 IV. West MmLANDS — Gloucestershire 51 Herefordshire .56 Shropshire 61 V. North-West — Cheshire 66 Lancashire 70 Cumberland 75 i I \ It ii' i xiv COUNTY AND TOWN VI. South Midlands — Oxfordshire Bedfordshire VII, North Midlands — Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire Nottinghamshire Rutland ...... Derbyshire VIII. North-East— Lincolnshire ..... Yorkshire Northumberland and Durham IX. East— Norfolk and Suffolk .... Cambridgeshire and Ely PAGE 81 86 91 96 101 104 110 115 120 125 130 CITIES, TOWNS, AND BOROUGHS Introduction. The Origin of English Towns 139 I. East — Si|» Albans 144 Colchester ....... 149 Norwich ....... 155 II. North — York 161 Newcastle-on-Tyue 172 Manchester and Salford .... 177 III. South — Salisbury 133 Maiden Castle and Dorchester . . . I88 I, ) t' CONTENTS XV IV. South-East — p^Qj. Hastings and St. Leonards .... 194 Brighton 199 V. South-West — Bath 204 Wells and Taunton 2O8 Tavistock and Plymouth .... 213 Exeter 217 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE I. King's Peddington . II. Manbury Castle III. The Roman Road IV. The Roman Villa . V. Peddington and Churney VI. Sherborne Lane VIL Danes' Hill VIII. Domesday Book IX. The Stone Pier X. Churney Abbey XI. The Decline and Fall of King's Peddington 225 230 235 239 244 248 253 257 261 265 270 .* I U' SHIRES AND COUNTIES i i ) 1' 8 i ^i Hl f (J INTRODUCTION WHAT IS A COUNTY? Among the many curious fables which pass current for history, one of the most curious is that which attributes to Alfred the Great the division of England into counties. The truth is, however, that all the stories which make up the ordinary idea of his life are, without exception, either false or destitute of authority. Alfred did not win a prize for reading at twelve years old; he did not bum the cakes in the neatherd's cottage ; he did not found the University of Oxford ; and he did not divide England into counties. The bare notion of such a division, indeed, is in itself ridiculous. If any one were to say that St. Louis partitioned France into> provinces, we should at once see the absurdity of the statement; but when the corresponding absurdity is asserted about England, most Englishmen fail to recognise its impossibility. We know that the kingdom of France grew by the gradual absorption of Normandy and Brittany, of Guienne and Burgundy, of Provence and the Dauphine, because the absorption took place late in the Middle Ages; but we forget that the kingdom of England grew through the amalgamation of Kent and Sussex, Cornwall and Devon, Northumbria and Lindsey, because the amalgamation took place almost before the period when most of us begin to feel a living interest in history at all. But to speak of the counties being made is hardly less absurd than it would )' 4 SHIRESsAND COUNTIES be to say that Queen Anne separated Great Britain mto England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The real fact is that the counties were united, not that they were divided : they represent old independent commimities, now merged into a larger whole, not parts artificially cut off fS)m such a whole. They are like the Swiss cantons rather than Uke the French departments Certainly, if any one had ever undertaken to map out England into administrative subdivisions, it could not have been Alfred; for Alfred was never King of more than Wessex and its dependencies south of Thames, with a small fragment of south-western Mercia. All England north of London and Oxford then belonged to the Dane ; the whole west coast still belonged to the Welshman ; and even Devon and ComwaU still remained independent under their own British chiefs. Ihe counties are in part far earlier, and in a few cases a good deal later, than Alfred's time. The truth is that our shires have grown ; and it is tbis natural growth which renders their history so interesting. Their boundaries generally represent the old boundaries of tribes or kingdoms ; and even their irregularities often point back to historical or prehistoric conquests— to isolated colonies of one folk in the territory of another, or to intrusive wedges of invading people cutting off one little comer of a hostile tnbe from the remainder of its lands. Some of them pre- serve for us the frontiers of early English kmgdoms ; some of them keep up the memory of Danish hosts, who settled down in some little principality as mde- pendent commonwealths ; some of them even retam the names and limits of ancient British tribes ; a few date far later, and recall only some administrative regulation Of the Conqueror or his Angevin successors. In the south, many of the shires are coincident with the first Teutonic kingdoms, which were originally far more numerous than seven. Kent keeps the boundanes of two early Jutish principalities ; Sussex is the land of the South Saxons, Middlesex of the Middle Saxons, Essex of the East Saxons. Norfolk and Suffolk are the i INTRODUCTION S North and South Folks of the East English. Surrey, or Suthrige, is the South Kingdom beyond the Thames : often, but no doubt erroneously, supposed to have been a dependency of Sussex ; for in that case we might surely expect it to be called Northrige or Norrey, in reference to the parent State — just as the north-western county of Scotland is called Sutherland, because it lay south from the earldom of Orkney, to which it belonged. Wessex, on the other hand, is portioned out into several shires, which mark the successive conquests of the West Saxon settlers. Hampshire, or the county of Southampton (containing the original capital of Win- chester, long the royal city of England), coincides with the first principality of the Gewissas, the nucleus of the whole West Saxon State. Dorsetshire is the land of the Dorsaete, the settlers among the Durotriges, whose semi-Celtic descendants still occupy the whole county. Somerset and Devonshire are the territories of the Sumorsaete and Defnsaete, Saxon freebooters, who similarly won themselves dominion over the conquered and enslaved Damnonii. Each of these West Saxon counties long preserved its own ealdorman ; and their complete union under a single overlord at Winchester was probably a comparatively late event. Even after Alfred's time they kept up many traces of their original local independence. In the midlands and the north, again, the counties are mostly of Danish or later origin. There the shires group themselves as a rule pretty evenly round their county towns, from which they take their names ; while the town stands about the centre of the roughly circular county. Instead of a square Sussex with Chichester in one comer, instead of an irregular Devonshire with Exeter on its outer verge, instead of an angular Berk- shire with Reading in a bend of its boundary, we get counties like Warwickshire, Derbyshire, and Notting- hamshire, Ijdng around towns of the same names — Warwick, Derby, Nottingham. These shires represent the burgs of the Danes, small hosts of whom settled in the chief towns, and took the surrounding country for f SHIRES AND COUNTIES their domain. Forming loose confederacies, as the Five Burgs and Seven Burgs, they long held out against the West Saxon conquerors; and when at last they sub- mitted to Edward or Edgar, they retained their own lawmen and kept their own boundaries. Yorkshire is the kingdom of the great Danish host in York ; while Northumberland, now so curiously misnamed, represents the last fragment of the old Christian Northumbrian realm which held out successfully under the Lords of Bamborough against the heathen intruders. Once, indeed, it also included the Lothians ; but when that tract was ceded by Dunstan to Kenneth, King of the Gaelic Scots, the name of Northumberland, formerly given to the whole country between Humber and Forth, was restricted to the little central belt between Tyne and Tweed. Durham is even a later creation, the county palatine of the prince-bishop upon whom William bestowed the patrimony of St. Cuthbert. As to the western counties, from Cumberland to Cornwall, they have grown up from sundry conquests over the Welsh, and they mark on the whole the gradual extension of the direct English dominion over the formerly semi- independent chieftains of Cymric Britain. It is curious, too, how irregularly the growth and recognition of the shires has taken place. Wight was long a separate Jutish kingdom, conquered at last by the West Saxons. Another Jutish kingdom, that of the Meon-waras, now forms part of Hampshire. Kent is in modem times a single county ; but it once consisted of two independent principalities — those of the East and West Kentings — which still form two dioceses, with their cathedrals at Canterbury and Rochester respect- ively. The North and South Folk of the East EngUsh have obtained rank as separate shires ; while the people of Lindsey, Holland, and Kesteven, together with the Gainas (who had their own ealdorman and their capital at Gainsborough) have all been rolled into the one modem county of Lincoln, probably because all were united under a single Danish host. Nobody knows when or how httle Rutland became a county; while . w: INTRODUCTION 7 Yorkshire, for all its size and its Ridings, and for all its older principalities, too, of Elmet, Craven, Cleveland, Holdemess, and Hallamshire, remains a single shire to the present day. Westmorland still formed part of the same great coimty at the date of Domesday, and only gained its existing rank at a later period. As a rule, however, every shire represents an old independent commonwealth; and from the coalescence of these commonwealths we get first the kingdoms of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, and afterwards the kingdom of England. Sometimes, indeed, the existing county itself results from the still earlier coalescence of still smaller and more shadowy principalities. Thus the evolution of each county — the steps by which it became a county and the causes which produced it — throws an immense amount of light upon our very earliest and most unwritten history. And as everybody has an interest in at least one county, such an inquiry is also full of personal elements, as helping us better to under- stand the origin and nature of the smaller communities whereof each of us is a product and an outcome. The history of our county is the ethnographical and genea- logical formula for ourselves. It is a valuable fragment of our prehistoric and irrecoverable pedigree. SOUTH-EAST SUSSEX Of all the English counties Sussex is the most typical and the most natural perhaps. Its physical features mark it out at once as a distinct and separate whole ; and its history shows it as always an independent kingdom or a well -demarcated shire, preserving the self- same essential boundaries throughout its entire existence. A great spur of chalk, forming the range of the South Downs, diverges from the main boss of Salisbury Plain near the western limits of the county, and runs through it like a backbone till it topples over at last into the sea at the sheer precipices of Beachy Head. Between the Downs and the coast a narrow line of lowland fringes the shore — a mere sloping belt between the foot of the main range and the sea, ending at Brighton — and this belt, small as it is, comprises the whole of the real historical Sussex : a long line or procession of seaport villages and open meadows or cornfields, jammed in between the ever- narrowing Downs and the ever-encroaching waters of the Channel. On their northern side, again, the Downs descend by a steep escarpment into the wide open valley of the Weald, familiar to most people in the broad view from the summit of the Devil's Dyke. Between the North and South Downs, the chalk which once covered the vallejr has been worn away by denudation, and the i 15 SOUTH-EAST 9 interval is occupied by the soft, muddy, weald clay, and the harder beds of Hastings sand. This wide tract of two wealden formations extends along the whole northern edge of the county from the Downs to the boundaries of Kent and Surrey, and from Petersfield, in Hants, till it slides under the sea at Pevensey, Hast- ings, and the Romney Marshes. For many ages the whole of the Sussex Weald was untilled and uncleared — a great stretch of forest, known to the Romans as the Silva Anderida and to the early English as the Andredes- weald. Its cold clay can support Httle more than trees, and even in our own day it is scantily cultivated. In earlier times, however, the belt of forest which grew above it was dense and trackless ; and it formed a complete barrier to intercourse with all other parts of the country, sweeping round in a great crescent, as it did, from the marshy region about Chichester and HayUng, along the whole northern face of the South Downs, till it met the sea again at Rye and Winchelsea. It is this isolation of Sussex by the Weald and the marshes which makes its history so peculiar and yet so typical. Even the neolithic inhabitants of Sussex, who have left us their polished flint implements at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, must have formed, one would suppose, a single united tribe. Their boundaries must almost necessarily have been determined for them by the Downs and the Weald in the rear, and by the marshy tracts about Chichester and Romney at either end. At any rate, those were the limits of the Celtic Regni at the Roman conquest; and their villages must have been confined to the coastwise slope between Chichester and Brighton, and to the rich little valley of the Ouse about Lewes. So completely isolated was this strip of shore, south of the Weald, that the Romans allowed the native chief to rule over his ancestral dominions, and thus left Sussex pretty much to its original independence. When the English pirates began to attack Britain, Sussex was one of their earliest settlements. Its isolation made it easy to conquer, just as the isolation of East Anglia, cut off from the rest of England by the then impassable 11 C( tc 10 SBIRES AND COUNTIES fens, made it, too, one of the first vanquished regions. The story of the conquest, told us in the myths of the English Chronicle, has yet a certain verisimilitude of its own which gains confidence in spite of critical doubts. Four Saxon chieftains landed from their keels at Keynor in the Bill of Selsea — just one of those peninsular spots (enclosed between Chichester and Pagham harbours) such as the sea-robbers always used for their first attacks — and thence they proceeded to storm and capture the Roman fortress of Regnum, on the site of Chichester. Some of the Welsh they slew," says the Chronicle, and the rest they drave into the wood hight Andredes- lea." For seven years after their coming they kept to the western half of the county, probably to the im- mediate neighbourhood of their new capital, Chichester; but in the eighth year they again fought the Welsh, and took the coast-line, apparently, as far as Brighton and Lewes. Still the Roman fort of Anderida, or Pevensey, held out in the east, guarding the lowlands ; till at last, fourteen years after the first landing, " ^lla and Cissa beset Anderida, and ofFslew all that were therein, nor was there after even one Briton left." From that time forth, in all probability, the whole of Sussex became united under a single overlordship ; and the overlords had their chief seat at Chichester. So much the legend tells us: but the facts them- selves, as enshrined in local nomenclature and in the blood of the people, tell us a great deal more. That the English invaders were Saxons, not Jutes or pure restricted English, is clear from the very name of Suth Seaxe, afterwards softened down into Suth Sexe and Sussex. Here, as elsewhere, too, the name is really the name of a people, not of a district. Suth Seaxe means ^^the South Saxons," and Sussex is merely a corruption of that form. The name of the common- wealth is the name of the folk. That the Saxons settled pretty numerously in Sussex is quite clear from the large number of English clan-names preserved in the names of the modem towns or villages. The extreme eastern comer— practically an island, shut in by the sea, the SOUTH-EAST 11 Romney marshes, the Pevensey marshes, and the Weald — was settled by the Hastingas, whose chief seat is still known as Hastings. No doubt this was at first a separate little principality, only slowly absorbed by the lords of Chichester; and it remains to this day a separate rape. In the western slope, between the downs and the sea, English clan -names are very common. We get them at Worthing, Lancing, Patching, Angmering, Goring, Tarring, and Climping, in the simple form. The tuns of the Rustingas and the Fortingas survive in Rustington and Fortington : the Jiams of other clans in Beddingham, Etchingham, and Pallingham. Among the deans and hoes of the downs, we still find Rotting- dean, Ovingdean, and Piddinghoe. In the Selsea district and around Chichester, the clans clustered thickly : we get their memorials at East and West Wittering, Oving, Donnington, Funtington, and many others. The fertile valley of the Ouse, whose capital at Lewes was always of great importance throughout the Middle Ages, formed another great centre for Teutonic colonisation. There we find Bletchington, Tarring, Beddingham, Mailing, Chillington, and several more of like sort: while the little dale just below Beachy Head contains no fewer than ten village names of the English clan type. Beyond the downs, in the forest of the Weald, the English settled but sparingly ; though even here we get a fair sprinkling of such names as Billinghurst, Itchingfield, and Fletching. Their terminations in Jield, hurst, ley, and den generally show that these outlying settlements were not [regular colonies, hams or tuns, but mere clearings for swineherds and hunters in the great sheet of forest. Taken as a whole, however, Sussex is one of the most purely Teutonic counties in England : though many traces of Celtic blood still survive among the labouring classes, particularly in the Weald. It is usual to look upon the destruction of Anderida as t3rpical of the fate which fell upon all the Britons of Teutonic England ; but even in this, the most Saxon shire of Britain, the dolichocephalic skulls, the dark hair, and the brunette complexions of a n 12 SHIRES AND COUNTIES few at least among the peasantry betoken the survival of some small remnant of the ancient race. The consolidation of the Hastingas with the Chich- ester tribes is quite prehistoric. When first we hear of Sussex we hear of it as an independent and united kingdom. Separated as it was from the rest of Britain, it was the last of the English principalities to receive Christianity, nearly a hundred years after the conversion of Kent. And even when it was finally evangelised, the preachers came, not from the neighbouring Christian kingdoms of Kent or Wessex which hemmed it in on either side, but from over sea. The mark with which every English kingdom was accustomed to protect itself was, in the case of forest-girt and marsh-encircled Sussex, so effectual that the earliest missionaries came from Ireland, and established their monastery at Bosham, near Chichester. As usual, the king and queen were the first converts. Afterguards, Wilfred of York, wrecked upon the Bill of Selsea, completed the conversion of the people — or at least brought them into orthodox com- munion with Rome ; and he placed the first Sussex cathedral at Selsea itself, now covered by the encroach- ment of the sea. After the Norman Conquest it was removed to Chichester, the capital town, in accordance with the Norman habit of combining the centres of ecclesiastical and political organisation. Sussex remained an independent principality till its conquest by Wessex; and even then it continued to have under- kings of its own, until its royal line became extinct. When the kingly House of Wessex raised itself to complete supremacy by its resistance to the Danes, it was still the custom for these smaller kingdoms to be bestowed as titular monarchies upon West Saxon princes, who governed them as vicegerents of the King at Winchester — just as the eldest son of our modem Sovereigns bears the title of Prince of Wales, and is actually Duke of Cornwall. So Sussex dropped gradually from the rank of a kingdom to that of a shire, and came to be amal- gamated with the rest of England. Still, all through the Middle Ages the strip of coast was largely cut off SOUTH-EAST 13 from the inland districts and the capital by the barrier of the Weald ; and it was not till the reign of Elizabeth that that dividing belt began to be largely cleared for the iron-smelting. Thus it is quite clear why Sussex is a separate county, and why its boundaries should be what they are. It may be accepted as the best typical instance of the English shire, as the modem representa- tive of an old independent Teutonic commonwealth, still possessing a certain local independence and integrity of its own. KENT AND SURREY The right of Kent to rank as a county is quite as clear as that of Sussex. Indeed, in some respects Kent has almost a higher claim. By common tradition it is the oldest Teutonic settlement in England. It consists not merely of an old kingdom, but of two old kingdoms united into one ; and it contains the chief metropolitan see of all England — Canterbury. It differs from Sussex in one respect, however, that it is not so naturally demarcated in its physical features, so that its position is rather historical and artificial than essentially de- pendent upon its very form. Kent (like its sister county) consists of a great rudely-central chalk mass, the North Downs, a spur of the main lump which makes up Salisbury Plain ; with a slope to seaward on one side, and a dip into the Weald valley on the other. But the seaward slope descends to the estuary of the Thames; and this, with the fan-shaped expansion of the chalk from Margate to Dover, makes up the greater part of the historical shire. The wild forest tract, from Tunbridge Wells to Cranbrooke and the Dungeness marshes, forming the old mark against Sussex, has never been thickly peopled, nor entered largely into the life of the county. Indeed, the very name of Kent is the Celtic Cainl, the lowlands, and refers originally only to the open stretch of land along the river from Sheppey to London. The submerged bank off Sheemess is still ^ -^ tf< .J i>*t , tf i i 14 SHIRES AND COUNTIES known to sailors as the Cant. This riverside belt alone was the district of the old Cantii, whose name now survives in that of the first Teutonic shire in England. In the extreme east of the county the high chalk mass which culminates in the North Foreland is cut off from the rest of the range by the dip of Minster Level, through which the Stour runs lazily in an obstructed channel to the sea. But in older times the Level was a broad arm of the estuary, known as the Wansum, cutting off the Isle of Thanet (which the Celts called Ruim) from the mainland. In spots like these the Northern pirates always loved to land; and we know that long after, during the Danish invasions, the "heathen men first sat over winter on Thanet," and then on Sheppey. Hence there is nothing improbable in the legend which makes the very mythical Hengest and Horsa land on this island, near Ruim's-gate, the passage or opening through the cliffs into Ruim, at the place which we latter-day English now call Ramsgate. The story goes that the English were invited over as allies by a Romano -British Prince, and were first settled in Thanet. But, getting dissatisfied with their pay, they suddenly crossed to the mainland and drove the Welsh army over the Medway. In some such way, no doubt, the kingdom of East Kent was founded, with its capital at the old Roman station on the Stour, now renamed by the English as Cant-wara-byrig or Kent- men's -bury, which we to-day call Canterbury. This earUest principality extended probably only from Rochester to Sandwich, between the river and the Downs ; and it was some years before the Roman coast fortresses of Dover and Lyrane made terms with the heathen invaders. According to the legend. West Kent must date a little later. Two years after the battle of Aylesford, which gave the English the eastern half of the shire, another horde of pirate Eotes or Jutes crossed the Medway, and drove the Welsh over the Cray. " The Britons then forlet Kentland," says the English Chronicle, " and with mickle awe fled to Lunden-bury." That is to say, they gave up the lowland strip along the river. SOUTH-EAST 15 A and took refuge in the walled Roman city on the Thames. But many of them must still have held out in the woodlands ; while others became slaves of the English conquerors. It is significant that the Jutes who settled in this part of England never took their own name of Jute -kin, but adopted the title of the conquered race and became Kent -men. Their capital was the Kent -men's bury; and their descendants yet possess many traces in their personal appearance of mixed Celtic blood. Nor must we forget that they received Christianity before any other English tribe, and that Augustine on his arrival found their King married to a Christian Prankish Princess, whose Bishop and chaplain performed service in the old Roman church of St. Martin at Canterbury. All these facts seem to show that the heathen English did not entirely kill out the native Christian Britons, as so many of our historians, with not wholly convincing force of reiteration, contend. The East Kentings and the West Kentings are said to have formed separate communities till the days of Ethelbert, the first Christian English King, who united them into a single kingdom. In the eighth century, however, they broke up again into two principalities ; and even during the earlier period the people of the several divisions must have considered themselves as distinct, since each had its separate bishopric, the one at Canter- bury and the other at Rochester. Nay, within these petty principalities themselves we see traces of still earlier and smaller independent chieftainships, each no doubt representing the territory of an original colonising pirate -leader. About the end of the eighth century Kent became merged in Wessex ; but it still retained its separate existence, and formed an appanage of the West Saxon kingdom, bestowed as a fief (to use the convenient terms of later feudalism) upon a son of the royal House of Winchester. Ealhmund, father of Egbert (so-called first king of all England) was thus under-king of Kent. For a time the principality passed beneath the Mercian supremacy, first under a native prince, and then under the Mercian Cynewulf himself; ««»in»a>-jiii in i n i iiii 1 > i|yN i Bi i ii |i|i | |iiiii| i |iii|i|i |iii n | iH i i>« fc, ^ J 1 Qi Hf 16 SHIRES AND COUNTIES but when Egbert made himself overlord of all South- umbrian England, he bestowed the titular sovereignty and real ealdormanship of Kent upon his own son Ethelwulf. During the Danish troubles the petty kingdoms forgot their differences in their common resistance to the heathen; and when Ethelbert, last titular king of the Kentings, was chosen to the kingship of the West Saxons, Kent itself became in reality a mere shire of Wessex. Even during the Danish wars, however, we hear of the East and West Kentings as distinct communities. Of course, the peculiar position of Canterbury as the ecclesiastical metropolis of England is due merely to the accident of Augustine's mission. Gregory the Great originally intended that England should be divided into two archiepiscopal provinces, with their sees at London and York ; but the compara- Mim failure of Augustine's efforts — only Kent itself and Essex were converted during his lifetime — prevented the carrying out of this comprehensive scheme ; so that Augustine was necessarily consecrated to the see of Canterbury alone, which has ever since remained the metropolis of the English Church. The way in which Surrey came to rank as a shire is far more obscure. We know so little about its first settlement, and it passed so early under the dominion of other principalities,* that we can only guess at the mode of its original organisation. A wild hilly tract, for the most part composed of high chalk downs, heathy Bagshot beds, or low Weald clay, it offered few induce- ments to the English settlers, who generally took up their abode in the rich alluvial lowland pastures and cornfields of the river valleys. Accordingly, the marks of Teutonic colonisation in Surrey are few and far between. While Sussex has sixty -eight village names of the English clan-type, and while Kent has sixty, Surrey has only eighteen. The hundreds tell us much the same tale. Each of these originally represented the land occupied by one hundred [120] free Enghsh households: they were guilds of freeholders, for purposes of defence and mutual protection, numbering about one hundred [120] members L SOUTH-EAST 17 each. Now Sussex has 6l hundreds, and Kent has 62 ; but Surrey has only 13. The close coincidence of these two tests would seem to show that the English settled in Surrey but very sparsely. The few clan-villages are mostly in the immediate neighbourhood of London and the river— as at Newington and Kennington ; while of those farther inland some bear the forest terminations % and Jeld. However, Surrey must have been origin- ally an independent Teutonic principality, as its very name of Suthrige or Suthrege shows. Bede calls it Sudergeona terra ; the Charters, Sudregona terra. More- over, the name must have been given it with reference to the position of London, or at least of Middlesex, not to that of Sussex. Yet the folk, as a folk, have no name ; it is not a community, but a district. We never hear distinctly of kings of Surrey ; but it had suhreguli, or ealdormen, in later times, one of whom signed the charter to Chertsey Abbey; and, if we may judge by the analogy of Kent and Sussex, these suhreguh would be the successors of the native kings under a foreign overiordship. When we first hear of the shire, however, it was already ruled by Essex ; and it passed at last, like all the rest of Southern England, under the sway of the West Saxon kings. Indeed, the silence about Surrey is always remarkable, as might be expected from its very wild and rough con- dition. It is only in quite modern times that proximity to London has made it one of the most populous and wealthy of English counties. As a whole, it still remains, so far as we can guess, an example of a shire having its origin in an early kingdom. i II WESSEX HAMPSHIRE The county of Southampton, as legal phraseology still words it, represents to some extent a middle term between the natural shires which were old English kingdoms, like Kent or Sussex, and the artificial shires mapped out arbitrarily by the Danish conquerors round their military posts, like Nottinghamshire and North- amptonshire. In a certain sense, indeed, it may be said that Hampshire is the real original nucleus of the British Empire — the primitive State which has gradually expanded till it spread out from Hants into Wessex, from Wessex into England, from England into the United Kingdom, and from the United Kingdom into that great world-wide organisation, which includes India and South Africa on the one hand, with half North America on the other. For it was the princes of Winchester who grew into the Kings of the West Saxons, and these again who rose to be overlords of the whole Isle of Britain. As late as the days of William the Conqueror, Winchester still remained the royal city, the capital of all England. It is this con- tinuity with the whole story of the past in England that gives Hampshire such a special interest as the real germ of the entire existing British monarchy. Yet even Hampshire itself is a compound of three earlier and somewhat shadowy principalities, whose I WESSEX 19 very memory has now almost died out beyond the reach of antiquarian research. At the date of the English conquest, three separate bodies of Teutonic pirates settled down on this exposed stretch of southern coast. As the first English who colonised Kent seized upon insular Thanet for their earliest conquest, so the first English who colonised Wessex seem, naturally enough, to have begun by occupying the Isle of Wight. They were Jutes from Jutland, like the Kentish men, and they had their capital at Carisbrooke, whose old English name signifies the Bury of the Men of Wight. The great opposite inlet of Southampton Water forms just one of those long and tempting fiords, giving access into the heart of the country, which the northern corsairs loved to use for their landing-places ; and here a second body of Jutes settled down in the forest region then known as Netley, and stretching from Christchurch to the tidal flats of Hayling Island. The county of the Isle of Wight still retains for some purposes the rank of a separate shire ; but this second Jutish princi- pality has now wholly lost every sign of its original independence, and has merged completely into the general mass of modem Hampshire. The name of its people, the Meon-waras, survives at present only in the parishes of East and West Meon and of Meon Stoke. But the third petty kingdom, that of the Gewissas, has had a very different fortune; for its chieftains have gradually risen, by successive stages, to be kings of all England and of the entire British Empire. The Gewissas were English of the Saxon tribe, and arriving in Britain probably at a later date than their Jutish brothers, they pushed inward to the corn-growing plain of the Test and Itchin, guarded by the great Roman city of Win- chester, where Cerdic, their leader, if there ever was a Cerdic, fixed his home. The boundaries of these three Httle pirate tribes must have coincided in the main with those of the existing shire. By slow degrees, however, the princes of Winchester made themselves masters of the two lesser and neighbouring chieftain- ships. The Jutes of the mainland seem soon to have i ■■ ^" "Ill " ^iMt UmiilitliMiiimiiik lifciulllhJUHnMiiH ■Bii:imm,iiyL!h nL L iijmiiU,»i.iuiiM.JL- I: I mi ti 211 SHIRES AND COUNTIES coalesced with them ; while Wight, which maintained its independence longer, was at last annexed after a bloody war. The kings of the West Saxons, as the Winchester princes now began to call themselves, were thus supreme masters of all Hampshire. The county, accordingly, owes its present shape to the conquest of the two minor chieftainships by the leader of the Gewissas. That is why there is now a Hampshire and no Meonshire or Meonfolk, But how does it happen that the county as a whole is called Hampshire, and not Wessex ? This is a real difficulty, and one not easily solved. It is curious that while the names of Sussex, of Essex, of Kent, and of Surrey have survived, the name of Wessex, the dominant State of all, should have passed completely out of sight. The reason may perhaps be found in the very supremacy which made Wessex the leading kingdom of all Britain. Originally, no doubt, as Mr. Freeman suggests, what we now call Hampshire must have been known merely as the West Saxon Land. Gradually, however, the West Saxons sent out colonies of their younger men to the north and west, who spread the English domination over Berkshu-e, Wilts, and Dorset, and who later still established a political supremacy over the Celts of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. All these conquered districts, though they each possessed an ealdorman of their own, were dependent from the first upon the princes of Winchester ; and therefore they were all regarded as equally forming part of the West Saxon Land. Accord- ingly, it was necessary to invent some artificial name for the restricted territory under the immediate rule of the West Saxon Kings ; and the name which people half- unconsciously fixed upon was Hampshire. It occurs for the first time in an entry in the West Saxon royal Chronicle concerning [an event of] the eighth century, when the Moot of the West Saxons deposed an unpopular King, and deprived him of all his dominions, " except Hamptonshire " — that is to say, they restricted him to his old ancestral principality, handing over Wilts, Dorset, Berks, and Somerset to another member of the royal WESSEX 21 V - family. Even so, it is difficult to understand why the county should have been named after the smaller town of Southampton, rather than after the royal city of Winchester. Mr. Freeman can only suggest that some special prerogative of the capital may have excluded it from forming part of the general territory, much as Washington now forms no part of any American State. It may have been regarded as a liberty or county by itself. At any rate, the distinctive title of shire, which we usually give to Hants, shows at once that when the name arose it was looked upon as a division of a larger whole, not as a separate and integral entity. We never add the termination " shire " to the names of real old kingdoms or tribes, such as Kent or Surrey, Sussex or Essex, Norfolk or Cornwall ; but we usually add it to the subdivisions of Wessex, such as Hampshire, Wilt- shire, or Berkshire, with their alternatives of Hants, Wilts, and Berks ; while we always add it to the purely artificial Danish divisions, such as Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Warwickshire, where such abbre- viated forms are not permissible. So far down in the history of England do the commonest usages of every- day speech go for their origin. How Wessex spread from this little nucleus of Hampshire till it included all the country from Hayling Island to the Land's End is a matter to be treated of under the several counties thus included : how it gradu- ally absorbed Surrey, Sussex, Kent, and Essex is a matter of ordinary English history with which every- body is familiar. During the great struggle with the Danes, the Kings of Wessex grew to be Kings of England; and, indeed, what we read in our ordinary histories as early English annals is really little more than the private chronicles of the West Saxon royal House. Every King or Queen who has ever sat upon the English throne, with the exception of the Danes and of [Harold Godwine's son and of] William the Conqueror, has had the blood of Alfred the West Saxon in his veins. Winchester was the capital of England until some time after the Norman Conquest ; and it was only slowly superseded by West- \ [ »l • t 1 !) i 22 SHIRES AND COUNTIES minster through the influence of Edward the Confessor's great abbey, and of WiUiam Rufus's palace, which has grown at last into the Houses of Parliament. As for London, of course that city never has been the real capital, nor was it even so considered until the growth of streets in the intermediate portion caused the dis- tinction between Westminster and the merchant re- public beside it to die out for almost all practical purposes* To this day the people of Winchester them- selves have by no means forgotten that their city was once the metropolis of all England. Moreover, the county itself still shows some signs of having been the original nucleus of English colonisation in Wessex. Local names of the Teutonic clan type cluster thicker here than in any other part of the west country. Even now, thirty-three towns or villages in Hampshire bear titles of the old clans which first settled there — Wjnnerings, Lymings, Pennings, Haylings, Elings, Stubbings, or Bradings — and these clan-colonies would doubtless be somewhat more numerous were it not for the clearance of old villages effected at the time when the New Forest WIS kid out On the other hand, Dorset has but twenty-one, Devon but twenty-four, and Cornwall only two. Nevertheless, if we compare these cases with those of Kent, Sussex, and the East Anglian counties, where Teutonic clan -names occur at every turn, we shall be forced to conclude that even in Hampshire itself the English colonisation was far less complete than on the exposed eastern coasts of England. WILTS AND BERKS From some points of view there is hardly in all England a more curiously artificial county than Wiltshire. Taking them as a whole, most of our true old English shires are real geographical entities, cut off from one another, now or formerly, by mountains, rivers, forests, or morasses. Sussex is the coast strip between the Weald and the sea ; Kent is the promontory between the WESSEX 28 Thames and the Channel ; Hampshire is the basin of the Test and the Itchin. But Wilts is a mere water- shed—a central boss of chalk, forming the great upland mass of Salisbury Plain, and dipping down on every side into the richer basins of the two Avons, the Kennet, and the Thames, on the west, the south, the east, and the north severally. Geographically speaking, it has no raison d'etre whatever : it is only when we come to look at its origin historically that we can see why this high central table-land of the western peninsula should ever have come to rank as a separate shire at all. Everywhere the early English pirates of the fifth century found their way up into the country by the river-mouths. Their very first settlements were on islands like Wight or Thanet ; their next colonies were on practically isolated districts, like East Anglia, between the Fens and the Sea, or like Sussex, between the Weald, the Romney Marshes, and the Channel ; their latest great conquests were up the rich river-valleys of the Thames and the Humber, the tributaries of the Wash, and the streams which unite to form Southampton Water. The water- shed always barred for many years their progress towards the interior. It was easy for them to sail in their long-boats up the open streams into the rich corn-lands of the Hampshire valley or the vale of York ; it was quite another thing for them to force their way over the downs and fells in the face of a steady and organised British resistance. Accordingly, the West Saxons who settled in Hampshire rested on their laurels long enough before they ventured to attack the independent Welsh who held out for themselves among the Roman hill-forts of Wiltshire. Fifty years after the English had conquered the valleys of Hants, Old Sarum and Amesbury still remained in the hands of the British. The square fortress of Sorviodunum, with the great national monument of Stonehenge to its rear, must have been defended by its Welsh inhabitants with unusual vigour. Ambresbury, the longer form of Amesbury, even now in occasional use, recalls the name of Ambrosius h 24 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Aurelianus, the Romanised Briton who long kept off tlli attacks of the West Saxon intruders. All along the old frontier, as Dr. Guest has pointed out, village names like Sherfield English and Britford still point back to a time when English and Welsh met upon the marches of Wilts and Hants as enemies ; and the great earthwork of Grimsdyke has been shown to be the barrier thrown up by the Britons to check the advance nf the aggressive Teutons. The dyke has its vallum turned towards Wilts and its foss towards Hampshire ; thus indicating that the defenders were the men of the inland shire and their presumed enemies the West Saxons of the coast. Half a century after the landing of the English, however, the invaders set out from their capital of Winchester, crossed the downs which divide the basins of the Test and the Avon, and descended upon the vale near where Salisbury now stands. They stormed Old Sarum, and no doubt put to death most of its garrison ; but the town continued to be occupied till after the Norman Conquest, when Bishop Roger moved down the cathedral to New Sarum or Salisbury. About the same time with the capture of Sorviodunum, it seems probable that almost all Wilts passed into the hands of the English, as soon as the great border fortress had fallen; though the part of the country around Malmesbury remained under Welsh rule for a much longer period. The English who came to occupy this newly con- quered territory were known as the Wilsaete — that is to say, the settlers by the Wyly — much as Canadians now talk of the Red River Settlement. The name alone sufficiently shows that the colonists were at first confined to the southern slope of Salisbury Plain. The same termination reappears in the Dorsaete of Dorset, the Sumorsaete of Somerset, and the Defnsaete of Devon. We may infer from it, what seems also likely on other grounds, that the English came into these shires rather as lords of the soil among a body of British serfs than as exterminators and colonisers. To this day the peasantry of the western counties show all the WESSEX 25 anatomical marks of Celtic or semi-Celtic descent. It is noticeable, however, that the modem name of the shire is not Wilset, as one might expect from the analogy of Dorset and Somerset, but Wilts. The change of form is due to the fact that the county had a name of its own, distinct from that of the people : it was called Wiltonshire, from Wilton, the capital of the Wilsaete; and this accounts for the apparently intrusive consonant in the existing word. The men of Wilts, though doubtless subject from the first to the overlordship of the West Saxon kings at Winchester, had originally a certain political autonomy of their own. They were governed by their local ealdorman, and they made war and peace on their own account. As late as the beginning of the ninth century the men of Worcestershire attacked the Wilsaete, and the Wilts men met them under their native ealdorman and put them to flight. At this time the form Wiltonshire was unknown: it was only at a later date, when the county had become thoroughly incorporated with the rest of the West Saxon dominions, that it began to be regarded not as an integral whole but as a shire or subdivision of the West Saxon realm. The existence of a separate bishopric of Salisbury similarly points back to the original independence of the Wilts men ; for in early England the Bishop was always the ecclesiastical counterpart of the king or ealdorman ; and the diocese was only the kingdom or principality viewed from the spiritual side. The origin of Berkshire is not so clear or so certain. The county probably represents the first great northern extension of the West Saxon power, when the English colonists began to cross the ridge of the North Downs and descend into the valleys of the Kennet and the Thames. The white horse formed the standard of the invading Teutons, as it still does both of Hanover, whence they came, and of Kent, where, perhaps, they first landed in Britain ; and a white horse cut into the green side of the chalk downs seems always to have marked the English advance to the north and west. '\ i I 26 SHIRES AND COUNTIES That of Westbury — the very name is significant — appears to point out the farthest outpost of the Wilsaete towards the still unconquered Damnonian Welsh of Somerset ; that of the Berkshire hills appears similarly to bear witness to the frontier of the West Saxons towards the scattered Welsh principalities of the Midlands. Wallingford [whatever Walling means] may mark the spot, as Dr. Guest suggests, where the two races were once conterminous. However this may be, it is certain that Berks formed one of the earliest West Saxon conquests, and that it was very soon incorporated with the main principality in Hampshire. An ealdor- man of Berks is mentioned in the ninth century, but he is mentioned as immediately dependent upon Winchester. There has never been a Bishop of Berkshire. The name of the county, originally Bearrucshire, is [said to be] derived from the forest of Bearruc, which once stretched from Chertsey to Reading ; and the very title shows that the shire as a whole was then relatively unimportant. It was regarded, in fact, merely as the *' back country " of Hampshire : people talked of the Bearruc-wood shire much as they talk now of the hills beyond the Limpopo, or the Australian bush. From the very first Berkshire must have been a mere subdivision of the West Saxon kingdom; and therefore it has no name of its own except as a shire. The towns and villages bearing English clan-names number only twenty-two, of which Reading and Sonning are the best known. DORSET On the whole, Dorsetshire may claim to be considered as a fairly natural and well-defined shire. Its eastern limit is formed by the swampy region at the embouchure df the Stour and the Avon ; its western boundary is now purely artificial, but must originally have coincided with the valley of the Axe ; and its northern extension was long marked by the great forest region of Selwood, which once swept round in an irregular crescent from WESSEX 27 Pillesdon Pen to the watershed of the Thames. Cran- bome Chasse and many other patches of woodland still preserve the memory of its course; and Pen-Selwood even now keeps up the name of its '^ pen," or highest point. Thus surrounded by sea, rivers, and primaeval forest, the plain country of the Stour and the Frome must always have formed almost as natural a division of South Britain as Sussex itself. In the earliest historical times it made up the principality of the Celtic Duro- triges, or men of the water-vale, who had their capital at Dumovaria, or Dorchester. Their great central stronghold was Maiden Castle, one of the finest ancient hill-forts in England ; and the group of border fortresses which ringed round their exposed western frontier, towards the Damnonii of Devonshire, may yet be traced by the eye along all the principal heights overlooking the valley of the Axe. Beginning with the magnificent earthworks on Pillesdon Pen, this great system of tribal defences runs on by Lambert's Castle and Coney Castle, till it reaches the sea at Musbury Castle and Hawksdown Hill, near Seaton. A similar group of Damnonian hill-forts answers to them from Membury to Beer on the opposite side of the valley. At the eastern end of the shire, again, another set of border earthworks, of which Badbury Ring, Hamilton Hill, and Hod Hill are the chief, guarded the open approaches to Dorset from Hampshire, the principality of the Belgae, and in later days of the West Saxon intruders. But along the northern boundary we find no such line of primitive strongholds, because the wild forest region of Selwood itself afforded a sufficient protection. Few hostile tribesmen would have ventured to make their way on the war-trail through the trackless recesses of the great wood — Coit Mawr, the Welsh called it, while Silva Magna seems to have been its Latinised form ; and, indeed, there is no record existing of any invasion of Dorsetshire from the north at any time. Curiously enough, though Dorset was apparently one of the earliest conquests made by the West Saxons after their first settlement in Hampshire, we know little 28 SHIRES AND COUNTIES «ir nothing about the precise time or manner of its subjugation. All that we know for certain is the fact, vouched for by Gildas, the contemporary Welsh author of a little Latin tract whose authenticity is accepted by Mr. Freeman and Dr. Guest, that in the year 520, some twenty-five years after the landing of the West Saxons, they were repelled with great loss from Badbury, the main key of the eastern frontier. Probably this victory of the Romanised Durotriges saved Dorset for more than a quarter of a century. But after the English captured Old Sarum, they must probably have poured down upon Dorsetshire across the high belt of hills in the rear, and established their power in Dumovaria, whose name they corrupted into Dorceceaster or Dorchester. Once within the ring of forts, the whole champaign country must easily have fallen into their hands ; though in the western half of the county the little separate valleys of the Brit, the Char, and the Lym, divided from one another by high hills, may have required to be separately conquered. Whether the English succeeded at once in occupying the valley of the Axe is very doubtful : certainly, the modem limits of the shire are most capricious in this direction. Not only does the lower Axe now belong to Devon, but even the little basin of the Lym is divided between the two counties, Uplyme being within the Devonian border, while Lyme Regis is in Dorset. There must be some good reason for this singular division of a small glen between what were once two independent States ; but what that reason might be it is now perhaps impossible even to guess. The English lords who settled down among the Durotriges in the water vale were known as the Domsaete or Dorsaete, and they are usually spoken of as a people, not as a shire. They had their own ealdor- man or dux, as the " English Chronicle " once Latinised it I which shows that the community possessed a certain local independence of its own. But, so far as we know, they always owed allegiance to the West Saxon kings at Winchester ; and from a very early period they were WESSEX 29 included amongst the West Saxon folk. Onf^fj^ too, the Dors^te had their own bishopnc In the first days of Christianity, we hear that Aldhelm was Bishop "west of Selwood," with his see at Sherborne ; and we know that he made vigorous eflforts to convert the heretical British Christians of the west country to the orthodox faith of Rome. Among them, no doubt, jere many Dorset and Somerset men; for we are told by Bede that he succeeded in persuading those Welshmen who were under English rule. But the mdependent Britons of Devon and Cornwall, the Damnomi under Kins Geraint, he could not succeed in convertmg. it seems almost like a bit of myth suddenly changed mto sober history to read the survivmg epistle of Aldhelm to Geraint-a name which most of us know only from Mr. Tennyson's Idylls - addressed m due form To the most glorious lord of the Western Kingdom, to King Gerontius, Aldhelm the Abbot sends greeting. Ihe name of the first Dorsetshire Bishop still clings m a corrupted form to the boldest headland of the coun^ St Alban's -or, as it should properly be, St. Aldhelm s Head— where a ruined chapel commemorates him Though the English doubtless settled numerously enough in DLet-both their hundreds and their clan villages cluster thickly on the soil-yet it is probable that they spared a large proportion of the Chnstiamsed Welsh inhabitants ; and both the appearance of the peasantry and the local nomenclature bear out this view. People of the dark, long-headed Celtic type abound m all the rural parts, while Pens and other British names are scattered up and down throughout the county. Gradually, however, the Dorssete sank to the posr^ion of a mere shire of Wessex. In the « English Chronicle indeed, their name is always given as that of a people, and it is not till after the Conquest that they come to be generally regarded merely as the inhabitants of Dorsetshire. But the resistance to the Danes broke down the wall of separation between the West Saxon counties ; and when Devon was finally assimilated by the Eng ish in the reign of Athelstan, the importance ll ' 30 SHIRES AND COUNTIES of Dorset waned entirely. For a while Alfred united the bishopric of East Devon (the western half still remaining independent) to the see of Sherborne, to which he appointed his Welsh chaplain, Asser [of St. Davids], a graceful concession to the newly conquered Damnonian Welshmen. But when Athelstan drove out the Welsh chiefs from Exeter, the bishopric of that county was removed to Crediton, and as the main western see of Wessex was fixed at Old Sarum, Sherborne afterwards fell to the position of a mere abbey. Dorset, however, seems always to have been a favourite district with the West Saxon kings, doubtless because of the hunting in Selwood ; and many of the kingly family were buried at Axminster (just across the border in Devon) or at Wimbome Minster. A great agricultural county it has always been ; but it has not, and never had, any other source of wealth. The original historical shire was of course confined to the valleys of the Stour and Frome, the Vale of Marshwood, and the western dales, which form the chief arable and grazing lands ; and as the forest has been cleared away, the downs of the interior have become famous for their sheep-walks. Towns are still few and small : Dorchester, a mere local centre ; Poole and Bridport, two struggling harbours ; and Weymouth, a watering-place of the type beloved and invented by the Georges, in the midst of a chalk country exactly like that round Brighton — these almost complete the little list. Shaftesbury, perched on the hill-top, and Lyme Regis, a deca3ring port artificially manufactured by Edward I., are the only others with any vitality left in them. Indeed, it might almost be said that since the English conquest, the shire, as a shire, has had no history of its own at all. Events in the history of England have of course taken place within it; but the county as a whole has gone on always in its own quiet agricultural and pleasant way. Yorkshire and Lincolnshire have been divided and amalgamated a dozen times over ; but Dorset has con- tinued Dorset alone from time immemorial, with no greater variation in its limits than that implied by an WESSEX 31 ■ exchange with Devon of one isolated hundred or liberty for another. THE ISLE OF PORTLAND A solitary fragment of the submerged tract which once occupied the entire dry bed of the English Channel still stretches in a long line due south of Weymouth to the Bill of Portland, and afterwards runs out for some dis- tance under the sea as a submarine ridge, making for the opposite and corresponding French uplands of the C6tentin and the Cap la Hogue. Though now united to the mainland by a bold curve of accumulated shingle, the Chesil Bank, this solid mass of oohtic limestone nevertheless rightly deserves its ordinary popular name of " the Island " ; for its three sides are all alike worn down into precipitous cliffs by the action of the waves ; and the singular causeway which now joins its western face to the Dorsetshire coast some ten miles lower down, though itself of immemorial antiquity, does not date back by any means so far in geological time as the original isolation of the great triangular rock which forms its terminus. In other words, the modem peninsula was once a real island, and its reunion with the main- land is in fact a matter of comparatively recent physical rearrangement. Seen from the centre of the great West Bay, at Seaton or Lyme Regis, Portland even now resumes its insular appearance ; for the Chesil Bank is there quite lost below the curve of the horizon, and the huge block of stone stands out against the sky-line in shape like a long wedge, with its high blunt end turned towards the mainland, and its sloping point running out seaward till it loses itself imperceptibly in the surging waters of the Race. From this point of view its outline suggests to fancy the notion of a gigantic bask- ing whale, with his back just raised above the sea-level, but with his humped neck well elevated above the calm surface. Looked at from the Nothe directly opposite, however, the island recalls rather the rock of Monaco, \\ V- 32 SJamES AND COUNTIES but on a far larger scale — projected farther afield into a much grimmer, grayer, and more stormy sea. Here the highest portion of the mass, nearly 500 feet above high -tide mark, exactly faces the spectator, who thus looks down on it at once in its biggest and at least characteristic aspect. The tapering shape, which slopes so paradoxically from the land side to seaward, instead of from the sea-cliff to landward, as in most other pro- montories, is indeed entirely lost in this, the most familiar view from the neighbourhood of Weymouth ; it is only from the two comparatively unfrequented bays to east and west, towards Lulworth and Charmouth, that the real contour of the huge slanting rock is seen to anything like advantage* The reason why this solitary block of solid stone has survived the whole of the neighbouring lowland is not far to seek, from the geological point of view. Portland consists of an outlpng mass of harder oolitic strata, which have resisted the waves of the Channel, while the softer surrounding clays and greensands, whose relics form the cliffs and slopes of the two lateral bays, have all been gradually washed away on either side by the ceaseless action of the water. Moreover, the Port- land beds themselves are tilted up in an inclined plane, from the sea landward, so that the surface follows the natural dip of the strata ; and the same beds are found at pretty nearly the same depth below the soil in all parts of the island. Indeed the whole of this Dorset- shire country is everywhere seamed and traversed by numerous faults, which have thrown up the rocks in adjoining places at very different angles. The southern half of Portland still retains something of its primitive apj>earance : a poor, bleak, barren, wind-swept plateau, destitute of tree or hedge, and divided by bare stone walls into small rectangular fields, where the black-faced sheep which become famous as Portland mutton find a scanty herbage under the shelter of these frequent artificial barriers against the omnipresent wind. Each wall is built of thin slate-like layers of stone from the unmerchantable beds (to adopt the local language) : WESSEX 33 and instead of a gate, it is pierced by a broad gap filled in loosely with large round boulders, which can be easily removed by the hand to let in and out the flock or the farmer s cart. Stone, in fact, forms the sub- stratum and the whole raison detre of Portland; it fulfils every function which would elsewhere be fulfilled by wood or any other possible material. Here and there one comes across a little hopeless-looking cultiva- tion ; but the mass of the plateau is down in rock, and the greater part of the population hves entirely by exporting the island piecemeal. The entire northern and higher half is a succession of quarries and stone- works. The very summit of the slope is crowned by the ramparts of the Verne fortifications ; and beyond this spot the convicts from Portland Prison are now busily engaged in levelling the surrounding inequalities, so as to give the guns of Fort Victoria a clean sweep across the entire peninsula. Farther on come the free- labour quarries, where acre after acre has been stripped of its useless surface-strata — the dirt-bed and the other Purbeck layers — in order to arrive at the good building- stone below. A large part of the island has already been shipped away to London and elsewhere: and innumerable tramways in a perplexing network are still employed in carrying off shiploads of what yet remains. Even before the great excavations began to score its soil, Portland must have presented the dreariest and bleakest panorama in the British Isles. At the present day, when prison, military works, and quarries have done their worst, it is one of the most ugly sights be seen in the world. Of course it attracts accordingly vast numbers of excursionists and sight-seers, who spend a happy day in toiling up to the summit of the highest hill in order to see the wretched prisoners working at their endless task under the charge of armed warders. Repulsive as the island is, however, every part of it possesses a singular and melancholy interest of its own. To the south end, near the Bill and the lighthouses, where the ridge stretches seaward in the dangerous submerged bank known by the suggestive title of the 34 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Shambles^ no quarrying has yet marred the native grimness of its rugged and honeycombed cliffs. Here, too, the Portland spurge and other peculiar wild flowers which once covered the island still linger on scantily in a few sheltered or unnoticed crannies. On the east side, again, the ivy-covered pentagonal tower of Rufus's Castle, a rude Norman keep, caps an isolated block of stone and overlooks a fine tumbled mass of broken imdercliff, with a craggy shore on either side and a magnificent view across the Weymouth bay to the white chalk bluffs of Lul worth and the jutting promontory of St. Aldhelm's Head. These undesecrated spots fortu- nately lie well away from the beaten track ; and hither, accordingly, the happy-day order of excursionists seldom penetrates. Even the central plateau itself is not with- out a certain fascination of a dismal sort. On its un- verdured summit stand half-a-dozen considerable hamlets (for the whole population numbers more than 10,000 persons), each grouped around its own spring of water, and completely regardless of shade or shelter. Water, indeed, is the great natural want of the island ; and the very names of the hamlets, such as Fortune's Well and Southwell, clearly show why the houses were first placed in their present very uncomfortable situations. To this day the precious springs are kept religiously under lock and key, while even the rain-water is care- fully hoarded in rough reservoirs. The streets and cottages have a straggling gaunt stony appearance, and withal a certain lost colonial air: one feels as though one had strayed suddenly from an English town into the midst of some broken-down Colorado mining settle- ment. The queer unfinished parish church of St. George's, built in an indescribable quasi-classical style of eighteenth-century architecture, midway between Wren and a Byzantine basilica, helps to keep up this colonial local tone. Its predecessor was destroyed by a landslip at the pretty chine which still bears the memorial name of Church Hope. Yet the island is no new settlement ; it has an ancient history, too : besides its oolitic fossils and its petrified trees, it can boast a British fossway, a WESSEX 35 L\ I ( I Is Roman sarcophagus, and a fair display of [what used to be known as] " Samian " ware ; while in purely English times it finds mention twice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a convenient landing-station for the northern pirates. Rufus's Tower, whether rightly named or not, is at least as old as the days of Stephen ; and Portland Castle dates from the reign of Henry VHI. In those times, however, the island was but a great lonely sheep-walk, held by under-tenants as a royal manor, and inhabited by a small race of peculiar people, who did not intermarry with the distant foreigners of the Dorset mainland. It was not till the seventeenth century that the Portland stone was brought into notice by Inigo Jones as the material for the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall ; and since then it has been abundantly employed for St. Paul's Cathedral and many other well-known buildings. Excavation has now apparently denuded more than half the surface [of the Isle] ; while the heaps of useless upper stone with which it has littered the surrounding fields have made a naturally desolate piece of gray and dusty scenery more gray and more dusty in its outer aspect than ever. SOMERSET No county in England has so much history of its own as Somerset. Perhaps the reason may be found in its complete want of natural boundaries. East Anglia and Sussex, like Spain and Italy, stand off as real physical individualities, which survive and subsist in spite of all ethnographical or political changes; but Somerset rather resembles the Low Countries and the Slavonian marches in being the natural battle-ground of hostile races and languages. For some centuries, the irregular bit of country between the Avon and the Exe formed the debateable border disputed by the English of Wessex and the Damnonian Welsh of Devon and Cornwall; and when at last the county assumed its present shape as an English shire, it would have been impossible to describe its limits except in the meaningless geographical fashion \ If 86 SHIRES AND COUNTIES .. bounded on the east by Wilts, on the souti* by Dorset, and on the west by Devon. It shares the valley of the Avon with Wilts and Gloucester, the valley of the Parrett with Dorset, and the valley of the Axe with Devonshire ; while its part of Exmoor, ot the Black Downs, and of the Exe basin is cut off across country by a purely arbitrary line running at right angles to the hill-ranges and river-courses. Such an artificial division as this must clearly have been created by history, instead of creating history f^ jt^elf. Of Celtic Somerset we know very littie. It seems to have been mainly included in the territoiy of the Damnonians ; but since the greater part of the region then consisted of undrained fens and marshes- moors as local phraseology still has it-there was htt e chance of its filling any large place in early annals On^y the vale of Avon, on its eastern border, afforded any favourable area for primitive agriculture ; and there the hill-forts of the early inhabitants still cluster thickly above the rich lowlands at Caer Badon, Little Sohsbury, Lansdown, Stantonbury, Maes Knoll, and many other isolated heights. Hither, in case of hostile mvasion from the men of Dorset or of Gloucester the Caer Badon people carried up their women and children, their sheep and cattle, and their household goods The rest of the shire was almost wholly occupied by the unbroken forest of Selwood, the bare uplands of Mendip and Exmoor, and the immense marshy wastes around tiie sources of the Axe, the P'ln-ett, and the \eo When the Romans came, Somerset fell into their hands with the first conquest of South Britain ; and the dale of Avon remained the most important part of the shire as it now stands. The hot springs at Bath made the Romans fix their most fashionable station in the valley below Caer Badon ; and to this new city they gave the name of Aqute Sulis from the neighbounng hill-fort ot rSull now Little SoUsbury. From Bath, tiirough the terv heart of the marshland, they drove their great road, the Foss Way, to Exeter and onward, so as to connect the outlying and doubtfully loyal peiunsula of WESSEX 87 Devon and Cornwall with their main strategic centre at Cirencester. But the relics of their occupation remain most thickly only in the immediate vale of Avon, or along the line of the Foss itself ; the wild marshy and hilly country behind probably received little attention from soldiers and administrators who regarded Britain chiefly as a feeder of the empire, and so confined their interests to its corn-growing portions. The rich oolitic dale round Aquae Sulis doubtless stood out like a little oasis or island of Roman civilisation and agriculture, girt round on every side by forest, fen, or down, the wild hiding-places of half-tamed Celts. When the Romans went away, Bath had its own petty British King, whose dominions were perhaps con- fined to the Avon valley; while other Romanised princes ruled independently at Gloucester and Cirencester — the Glevum and Corinium of the Italian settlers. For a while the English conquerors of the east and south coasts left the British kinglets of the western watershed unmolested in their little territories. But after the subjugation of Wilts and Dorset, the West Saxons began to turn towards the basins of the Atlantic slope. Near the close of the sixth century, about a hundred and thirty years after the first landing of the English in Britain, Cuthwine and Ceawlin, princes of the West Saxons, "fought against the Welsh," says the English Chronicle, "and slew three Kings, Conmail and Condidan and Farinraail, at the place cleped Dyrham, and took three chesters from them, Gloucester, and Cirencester, and Bath." In the general history of England this victory at Dyrham Park on the Cotswolds has an immense strategical importance, from the fact that it cut in two the British resistance, dividing the uncon- quered territory into Wales proper on the north and West Wales (that is, Devon and Cornwall) on the south; so that henceforth the West Saxons were able to advance steadily step by step against the Damnonian Welsh, whom they drove to the Axe, to the Parrett, to the Exe, to the Tamar, and at last to the sea ; until in the end all Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall became III i 38 SHIRES AND COUNTIES swaBowecI up in Wessex, without fear of interference from the Welsh proper on the north, who had themselves similarly to retreat before the steady onward advance of English Mercia. But as regards the restricted history of Somerset, the interest of the Battle of Dyrham lies in the fact that then for the first time did Englishmen begin to settle within the limits of the modem shire. As usual, the heathen invaders seized first on the richest and most agricultural portion of the district, the old Romanised lowlands around Bath. This little comer, the nucleus of modem Somerset, extended only from the Avon to the Axe. The English overlords who settled down among the deserted Roman villa homesteads, in the place of the Kings of Bath, called themselves the Sumorsaete — a word which is obviously analogous to Dorsffite and Defnsaete, though the meaning of the first element in the name possibly cannot now be recovered. Perhaps it was the old local Celtic title for the people of the valley ; in which case the word would designate the English overlords as "settlers among the Sumor tribe." Ethnographical researches leave very little doubt that the Romanised British people even of this earliest Somerset must have been largely spared as slaves by the Teutonic conquerors. For many years the English continued to own the Avon dale, while the Welsh still held out for their Damnonian princes in the downs and marshes between the Axe and the Devonshire border. As Mr. Freeman puts it. Wells was then in Welshland, while Wookey, a mile or two off, was in England. The Wansdyke, or Woden's dyke, marks the boundary between the two powers. Moreover, as Dr. Guest has shown, a long spur or wedge of Welsh territory also ran north-eastward along Frome and Avon into the English dominions, back of Bath, as far as Malmesbury — Braden and Selwood Forests forming the mark or border of waste between the two races. Gradually, however, the intrusive Teuton pushed his way westward, subduing or cutting off the conquered Welsh. Three-quarters of a century after the capture of Bath the West Saxons WESSEX 39 advanced to Bradford-on-Avon, thus no doubt complet- ing the conquest of the backward Welsh spur. A few years later a battle was fought at Pen Selwood, in which the Welsh were driven westward as far as the Parrett, so that all Selwood and the marshland fell into the hands of the English. The valley of the Tone was more slowly overrun ; and at last, about the beginning of the eighth century, a hundred and twenty years after the capture of Bath and more than two hundred after the landing of the West Saxons in Britain, the English had pushed their frontier as far as the Exe — in other words, had taken all Somerset. But these later conquests were doubtless, as Mr. Freeman suggests, far less cruel than the earlier ones. In the interval between the capture of Bath and the battle at Bradford- on-Avon the West Saxons had been converted to Christianity, and the struggle was no longer one of creed and race, but simply of race alone. In the earlier wars the Christian Briton seems to have been enslaved and Teutonised by his heathen master; in the later wars he was allowed to retain possession of his land as a rent -paying churl, and for some generations he apparently kept up the use of the Welsh, or Cornish language, much as is the case with the people of Wales, Ireland, and the Scotch Highlands at the present day. In the laws of Ini the West Saxon, the conqueror of Taunton, the Welsh churl has a recognised place, and his life has its fixed price, though not so high as that of the English churl. Even the religious houses seem to have kept up a continuous existence from Welsh into English times. The Damnonian Kings (whose names and reigns Dr. Guest has traced, perhaps with more ingenuity than conclusiveness) had their Westminster Abbey at Glastonbury, a solitary tor which then rose like an island in the midst of the marshes of the Brue. Its Welsh name, preserved for us by William of Malmesbury, was Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Magic [?] ; and it was the re- puted burial-place of Arthur, the Island of Avilion made fiimihar to us by Mr. Tennyson. Ini re-endowed this old Welsh sanctuary ; and even after the Norman \ ) I vX i if 1 li f 40 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Conquest William of Malmesbury still saw there the monuments of the early British abbots. Such continuity with the British and Roman times meets us nowhere else in English history. The Somerset people, half English, half Teutonised Celts, had their own caldorman to a late period ; and they still have their own Bishop at Bath and Wells. It is more important to note, however, that the traditions of Roman days survived strongly in the county for ages after the English con- quest. Edgar, first King of all England, was crowned at Bath ; the Anglo-Saxon princes were buried beside their British predecessors at Glastonbury ; and when Swegen the Dane failed to get himself crowned at London he went to Bath, where he received the submission of the ealdorman of Devon and thanes of the W^est, " and then all folk held him for full King." Ill SOUTH-WEST DEVON From the earliest times of which we have any historical record, a Celtic peoj)le, known as the Damnonii or Dumnonii, occupied the long hilly peninsula which stretches from the Avon to the Land's End. Rising around three centres into three great barren bosses of igneous or primary rock — Exmoor, Dartmoor, and the Cornish heights — the peninsula subsides between them into fertile dales of red triassic soil, threaded by the rapid rivers which take their rise on the intervening ranges. Of these valleys, the widest and richest is that of the Exe ; and in its centre, at the head of navigation for the tidal stream (afterwards fixed at Topsham), the Romans placed their station of Isca Damnoniorum — Englished into Exanceaster and Exeter — the one town in Britain which we know with certainty to have been continuously inhabited from the old pro- vincial period to the present day. Their second chief post was Tamara on the Tamar, near the existing town of Plymouth. From Bath to Isca, the Foss Way ran through the outskirts of the county, and thence pene- trated to Penzance, at once to protect the Cornish tin trade and to guard against insurrections of the Penin- sular Britons. As usual, the main Roman station was planted in the midst of the chief corn-growing vale : just as York, the provincial capital, stood in the middle i 42 SHIRES AND COUNTIES of the Pl^ of Ouse, the largest agricultural level in our island ; while the scarcely less important cities of London, Venilam, Lincoln, and Camalodunum lay in the other great corn-bearing tracts of the Thames valley, the Lincolnshire lowlands, and the flat tertiary levels of the Eastern Counties. Roman agriculture in Britain was wholly confined to alluvial bottoms, and never ventured to climb the high plateau of the Midlands or the upland slopes of Lothian and Lammermoor, which modem scientific tillage has turned into the richest soil of the entire island. Tlius the Devonshire of the Romans was probably confined for the most part to the apple-orchards and cornfields of the immediate Exeter valley. After the Romans left Britain, the tribe of the Damnonii appears as one of the most powerful among the petty principalities which rose at once out of the disorganised provincial people. Gildas, the Romano- British monk who alone preserves for us some dim [notices] of the first English settlements in Britain, mentions among the chief rulers of his time Constantine, ♦* the accursed whelp of the Damnonian lioness." Even after the West Saxons had conquered Dorset and the Bath valley, the Damnonian Welsh princes must have been scarcely, if at all, inferior in power to the lords of Winchester. [Long after Constantine] their King, Geraint, was master of Cornwall, Devon, and half Somerset ; while the West Saxons still spread only from Southampton Water to the Bath Avon. Moreover, the Damnonian Welsh had only one enemy to oppose — the West Saxon —mi their eastern frontier ; while these West Saxons themselves were hemmed in between two Welsh States — the Damnonians on the west and the Welsh of the Midlands on their northern frontier. It might have seemed as though the Welsh were more likely to drive the English intruders into the sea, as the mythical Merlin prophesied, than to be themselves incoinoorated by them. But the Britons abandoned by the Romans were in much the same condition as the modem industrial Hindoos would be if deserted by the British SOUTH-WEST 43 and left to defend themselves by theii- own devices against such untamed enemies as the Afghans and the Ghoorkhas. They had lost the power of organisation and of fightmg [effectually], and allowed themselves to be quietly conquered piecemeal. For a v^rhile the West Saxons let their Damnonian neighbours alone, and contented themselves with securing their main northem trontier from the attacks of the Midland Welsh At the close of the sixth century they had pushed their northern boundary to Wanborough, near Swindon ; early in the seventh they were at Bampton, on the Upper Thames ; and a few years later they joined hands at Cirencester with the other great aggressive English horde, the Mercians, who had been advancing to meet them from the north-east, across the fac^ of the great central plateau. From that time fon^ard the West Saxons were free to direct all their ei'iergies to the subjugation of the Damnonians or West Welsh (as they now began to call them) without fear of interference trom their brethren on the north. Thus for nearly a century the Damnonians appear to have been unmolested in their peninsular home, while the boundary between them and the West Saxons seems to have curved round (as Dr. Guest has shown) trom Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, to MJalmesbury, and trom Malmesbury again to the mouth of the Somersetshire Axe^ But after the West Saxons were left at liberty to push on their conquests towards the west, a new era of aggression set in. Moreover, they had now been con- verted to Christianity ; and the community of religion doubtless made the resistance of the West Welsh far less severe than it had been during the he athen English times No new Arthur could any longer represent himself as the champion of Christenddm against the pagan : on the contrary, the English Bi^shops of Win- chester and Sherbome were now the repiresentatives of Roman orthodoxy, while the Damnoniansl of St. Petrocs were adherents of the isolated and schi4matical Celtic church. They cut their tonsure in a crescent instead ot a circle, and they celebrated Easter at the wrong n 44 SHIRES AND COUNTIES date. Against these dangerous heresies Aldhe,«, fi.t Bishop of Sherborne, wrote a controversial work, and succeeded in converting many of the West Welsh serfs and churls in the English territories from the error of their way ; but the independent Damnonians of uncon- quered Devon and Cornwall remained incorrigible. The secular arm was more successful. In the seventh century the West Saxons overran the whole of Somerset, and by the fii-st year of the eighth they had reached the Exe. Devonshire, or Dyfnaint, however, which they now began to annex piecemeal, was evidently far more slowly Anglicised than the more easterly districts. The name of the people continues in its English dress as Defnas, a slight variation of the native word, and they are almost always so described in the early English chronicles; though occasionally we get the more Teutonic formi, Defnsaete. The fact remains that the Damnonii were Damnonii still : they were not expelled from their naltive land or "driven into Cornwall," as the ordinary histories tell us ; but they survived, with their nationaiity and their language intact, during many generations under English rule, exactly as the Welsh of Wales do to the present day. Up to the beginning of the ninth century the English do not appear to have advanced farther than the Exe. The South Hams and the great wild of Dartmoor re- mained in the hands of the Welsh. In Egbert's reign, however, the (West Saxons "harried among the West Welsh from e^st to west." Ten years later, it is clear that all Devonshire must have become English, or at least have been thoroughly subdued by the English overlords ; foi* we learn that there was then a fight at Camelford, in Cornwall, " between the Defnas and the West Welsh"!; so that the Defnas must now have ceased to be Considered as Welshmen, and must have been acting in the English interest. This fight at Camelford acc^ordingly marks the final subjugation of Devonshire upk to its present boundary of the Tamar. Still, however, (the Welsh blood remained, as it even now remains, in the j ascendant ; and during the Danish wars. SOUTH-WEST 45 when it became important to conciliate the conquered people, Alfred appointed a Welsh-speaking Welshman, Asser of St. David's, as Bishop of Exeter, his diocese to consist of a newly-conquered country, together with the charge of two small districts in Cornwall already annexed. At the same time, the distinction of Welsh- man and Englishman before the law, insisted upon in the code of Ini, has quite dropped out in Alfred's Dooms. Under Athelstan Cornish-Welsh was still spoken in Exeter ; and in remote country places it even lingered on till the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The physique of the ordinary Devonshire folk is now quite as markedly Celtic as that of the Cornish or the undoubted Welsh of Wales proper. In one respect, however, the position of Devonshire differs widely from that of every other shire of Wessex. The Wilsaete, the Dorsaete, and the Sumorsaete were all once independent or semi-dependent tribes of English settlers, which only slowly sank into the condition of mere shires or divisions of the West Saxon kingdom. Probably each of them had once possessed a king of its own, who became in name or fact a simple ealdorman at the same time when his territory was merged as a simple shire into the West Saxon land. Indeed, on one occasion, long after the general consolidation of Wessex, these several principalities fell asunder again for a while, and reverted to their original independence under their separate under-kings. But the Defnas, though they had once formed a distinct Celtic kingdom, were treated from the first moment of their incorporation with the West Saxon realm as a shire alone. The name of Defnascir, or Devonshire, appears in the very earliest years after the English conquest. Yet the Defnas had always their own ealdorman, who is usually spoken of as a person of some imporUnce ; and we know that Edgar, King of all England, considered the daughter of an ealdorman of the Defnas a fitting queen for himself As late as the year 1000, the Defnas assembled in their own army like a semi-independent people to oppose the Danes; and to this day there I 46 SHIRES AND COUNTIES is probably lio shire in all England where county feeling is still so much of a reality, and where the tie of county kinship is so strongly felt. In a certain dim instinctive way, indeed. West-countrymen everywhere recognise themselves as differing in blood from other Englishmen: only 500 years since the difference was still known to be one of Celtic and Teutonic descent. CORNWALL By strict analogy, the name of the extreme south- western county of England ought to be Comwales rather than Cornwall; and, indeed, that regular form made a hard fight for life, though it has long since been finally beaten in the struggle for existence by the modem received name of Cornwall. From the very first period when the English landed in Britain, they knew the Celtic aborigines of the land as W^ealas, or Welshmen. The word, indeed, originally means no more than foreigners, and was the universal term applied by all branches of the Teutonic race to the alien peoples with whom they met in the course of their wanderings. W'dhchland, the German name for Italy, comes from the same root: the walnut is the Welsh or foreign nut, and the turkey and French bean are known in Germany as the W'dlsche Hahn and the W'dlsche Bohne. But all early ethnical names tend in time to become territorial; and just as Suth Seaxe and East Seaxe, which originally meant the South Saxons and the East Saxons, have now come to mean the land itself of Sussex and Essex, so the plural name Wealas, or the Welshmen, has come to be used in its modem shortened form of Wales not for the people, but for the land which they inhabit. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that early history knows nothing of countries and districts, but only of tribes and kindreds. As in the older annals of Rome or Greece we meet merely with Samnites and Tyrrheni, with Achaians and Locrians, so in the most ancient \ SOUTH-WEST 47 annals of England we meet, not with Mercia and Kent, but with the Myrce and the Kentings ; not with Wilt- shire and Derbyshire, but with the Wilsaete and the Pecsaete, the men of the Wyly and the men of the Peak. Place-names as such hardly exist at all in the first period of English history. Even such forms as Hastings and Worthing were originally true plurals — Hastingas and Weorthingas — applied to clans or families; and down to quite a late date we find the Hastingas spoken of as a tribe side by side with the Kentingas and the Suth Seaxe. The modem change of such plural and tribal names into singulars of local meaning is very clearly seen in the case of Cornwall. The Wealas of the West Country, after their isolation from those of the Midlands by the English conquest of Bath, were known as the West Wealas, which we usually modernise as West Wales, but which really means rather the West Welshmen. For we are now in this curious philological predicament, that having come to use the ethnical plural Wealas, or Wales, as the name of a country, we have been obliged to adopt the adjective Wylisc or Welsh as the name of the people. Various kinds of Wealas were, however, recognised by our English ancestors. There were the Bret- Wealas or Britons, and the Gal- Wealas or Gaels, the two main divisions of the Celtic stock. And there were minor local subdivisions of both races. So long as Devonshire remained unconquered the term West Wealas was applied to all the Britons of the western peninsula ; while the Britons of the Cjmaric mountain- land were known as North Wealas, a word used to embrace the people of both North and South Wales in the modem sense. But after the Damnonii, or Defnas, had been finally subdued, and the independent Britons restricted to the west of the Tamar, this last remnant of the West Welsh came gradually to be known as the Com -Wealas, or Welsh of the Horn — that is to say, the peninsula. Cemyw is the true Celtic form of the word. Throughout the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period, the name Com- Wealas was always used as an |:l 48 SHIRES AND COUNTIES ethnical plural — '' this year the Danes harried the Com- Wealas, and the North- Wealas, and the Defhas *' ; or " Lyfing held three bishoprics, one on Devonshire, and one on the Comwealas, and one on Worcestershire." But in later English times, the word got shortened into Comwales ; and then, losing its plural meaning, became finally singular in form as Cornwall. An exactly analogous case occurs in the peninsula of Wirral, in Cheshire, between Dee and Mersey. The original form here is Wirhealas, which is [possibly] a tribal name ; but in later days it was shortened into Wirheale, and finally into Wirrai lie very name of Cornwall is, however, thoroughly significant of its real history. The people are to this day Comwealas, 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-countrjTnen 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 suprem- acy; as did also Constantine King of Scots, Owen King of Gwent, and Ealdred of Bamborough, lord of the Northumbrian English. Cornwall becomes thence- forward a mere English shire. Still, it was another quarter of a century before an Englishman was ap- pointed as Bishop to the see of Cornwall. From that time forth English names began to be adopted by the SOUTH-WEST 49 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 VHI. 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 super- stition 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 ofJCassiterides [a form used by] the old Greek chroniclers, the earliest part of Britain brought into connection with the Mediterranean culture by the Phoenician merchant- men. 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 un- doubtedly went to make up the bronze of the great bronze age, and the armour of the Homeric Achaeans. Marazion or Market Jew is a Phoenician name, say these bold philologists; and the modem Cornish sur- E ■{ mmm 50 SHIRES AND COUNTIES name 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 Dam- nonian 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 Faerie Queene and Tennyson's Idylls. All these stories, now 111 integral part of English literature, are in their origin dim traditions or myths [circling about] the resist- ance 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 Hterature ; 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 escarp- ment (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 X f 52 SHIRES AND COUNTIES 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 Aquae [SuUs] and Corinium (Bath and Cirencester) against the aggressive heathen West Saxons on the south. For nearly a century after the first W'est 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 Dpham 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 WEST MIDLANDS 53 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 Hwictas 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 con- sidered 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 prin- cipality only — that is to say, of Worcestershire, Glou- cestershire, and a bit of Warwickshire. Osric, king of the II I 54 SHIRES AND COUNTIES 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 modem 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 ealdor- man : for in the year of Egbert's accession we read for liie 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 Worcester- shire or Gloucestershire had no separate existence. Under Egbert, however, the W^est 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 Ciren- cester, they seem seldom to have ^' sat " in the other ' WEST MIDLANDS 55 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 else- where 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 demar- cated 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 \ I 56 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Forest of Dean, up to the borders of Monmouth, then a part of the Welsh principahty 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, ix, vas 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, ^vith 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. Modem 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 WEST MIDLANDS 57 •i modem 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 Eus- karian 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 southem conquerors. Herefordshire, indeed, is the classic country of Caractacus, the land celebrated in the vigorous rhetori<; 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 Whit- borne, Croft- Ambrey, Thombury, and Wapley seem to belong to a later campaign, when the line of the Malvems 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 prob- ability, to be the scene of the last desperate defence, immortalised in the vague and rather theatrical descrip- tion 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 I 'A f ( 58 SHIRES AND COUNTIES the very similar Ariconium perpetually occurs in the history of ancient and mediaeval 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 re- collect 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 nl local knowledge, calls it Hergin ; and indeed the lively and romantic Archdeacon is never very remark- able 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. So much for the most primitive name of Hereford- shire itself, regarded as a fixed unit of territory. The liistory of the folk who dwell in it is far more com- plicated. Very soon after the earliest West Saxon brigands had crossed the Q)tswolds and settled down in the rich valley of the lower Severn around Gloucester and W^orcester, a small outlying colony from this young parent state appears to have penetrated still farther westward and conquered for itself from the Welsh of Gwent a petty principality in the hither half of Here- fordshire. The men of the Worcestershire kingdom were called Hwiccas: those of the region beyond the Malvems became known as Magesaete — a name of the same type as the Dorsaete, the Sumorsaete, the Wilsaete, and the Defnsaete of southern Wessex, or as the Wroken- saete and Pec-saete of Shropshire and Derbyshire. The termination seems usually to imply a settlement of a few English overlords among a large conquered and servile Celtic population ; and such was certainly the case in Herefordshire, where the number of slaves recorded in Domesday is unusually high. Perhaps the first syllable of the name may be derived from the WEST MIDLANDS 59 w \ I Roman station of Magna — or the Cymric word which it represents — as that of the Dorsaete is cognate with Dumovaria, and that of the Wrokensaete with Uri- conium. Another small English tribe of West Hecanas seems also to have inhabited old Herefordshire ; yet Florence of Worcester, who is usually remarkable for his accuracy in dealing with his own district and its neighbourhood, apparently identifies them with the Magesaete. When the Mercian kings began to con- solidate the petty principalities of the Midlands, and to drive the West Saxons across the Thames and the Avon, they united the lands of the Hwiccas and Mage- saete to their own overlordship, but left the native princes in possession as subject kings or ealdormen. The town of Hereford, which had acquired its present name in the exact modem form as early as the days of Bede, was made into the see of the Bishop of the Magesaete shortly after the conversion of Mercia. But it must then have been a border fortress of the Teutonic colonists ; for the Wye remained the boundary between Welsh and English long after the days of OfFa, and the portion of Herefordshire beyond that river contains local names almost exclusively of the Welsh type to the present day. At what precise date the whole of the existing shire became English it is perhaps now impossible to decide. Mr. Freeman, indeed, marks it all as Mercian territory in his map of England during the ninth century. But early in the tenth the Chronicle tells us that a Scandi- navian '^ host," on a piratical expedition up the Severn mouth, " harried among the Welsh, and captured Came- leac, the Bishop of Ircinga-feld, and led him with them to their ships.** The Bishop in question was the Welsh- man Cimeliauc of Llandafif; and it would seem as though some part at least of Archenfield was then still Welsh territory, and as such included within the limits of his diocese. On the other hand, Edward the West Saxon ransomed the captive churchman, as though he regarded him as a subject ; but then all the Welsh at that time already acknowledged the suzerainty of the Winchester I BUlliltim.iiMa Vl M) 60 SHIRES AJUB COUNTIES princes. At the same date with this notice we meet for the first time with what seems at least a foreshadow- ing of the later division of the Hwiccan and Magesaetan territory into the existing shires, already, perhaps, introduced by Alfred after his recovery of south-western Mercia. As in so many other cases, the Scandinavian invasion probably produced the new arrangement. The Northmen, we are told, wished still to harry in Ircinga- feld; but '^the men of Hereford and Gloucester met them, and fought with them, and put them to flight." From that time forth the Hwiccas disappear from his- tory, and in their place we get Gloucestershire and Worcestershire; but the Magesaete seem to have had a somewhat greater tribal vitality. A century later, during the wars of Cnut and Edmund, the Magesaete still fight as a separate nation, with an identity of their own. it is during the reign of Edward the Confessor that Hereford-scir is first distinctly mentioned under that name. But perhaps the two forms lingered on for a while side by side, the people being described as Magesaete and their territory as Herefordshire. At any rate, the distinct mention of the men of Hereford and Gloucester shows, by analogy with other cases, that those two burgs were regarded as true shire-centres in the beginning of the tenth century. Perhaps, too, the peninsula beyond the Wye may have been retained by the Hereford folk after they had overrun it in this raid against the Danes: for the border war with the Welsh is one long record of successive annexations, a bit at a time, each conquered part becoming as a rule thoroughly Anglicised before the next was attacked. Thus at the date of Domesday Book Herefordshire included, not only all the existing county, but also the entire stretch of land between Wye and Usk, which by later arrangements was erected into Monmouthshire, with the addition of the still more recent acquisitions as far as the vale of TafF. At the period of the Norman Conquest, Archenfield was still inhabited by a semi- Celtic race, governed by their own laws and customs. From the very first, however, the proportion of English i 4 I WEST MIDLANDS 61 blood throughout the whole county must have been extremely slight ; and beyond the Lugg the population still remains fundamentally identical with the old Silurian liegemen of Caractacus. The name of Here- ford itself, in spite of its temptingly English form, is really an Anglicised corruption of a Welsh original. SHROPSHIRE The people of "proud Salopia" are a proverbially clannish folk ; and their famous toast of " All round the Wrekin " has long been the favourite symbol of local exclusiveness and county feeling throughout the whole shire. But few Shropshiremen probably know how intimately the name of the Wrekin has always been bound up with the tribal name of their ancestors for untold centuries. Long before they were Salopians they were men of the Wrekin ; and to this day the sugar-loaf cone of the great hill remains the visible bond of union for the whole Salopian race. The word which we use in that Teutonic garb would be naturally used by the Roman and the Celt in a form something like Urecon ; and Uriconium was the chief Roman station which collected the com and country produce of the villa homesteads in the upper valley of the Severn. When the legions withdrew from Britain, the Wrekin district formed part of the Welsh principal- ity of Powys, and Uriconium doubtless became the capital of the petty State thus composed. But the Severn valley offered a convenient highway for the aggressive English settlers ; and shortly after the conquest of Bath and Gloucester the West Saxons poured up the old Roman road to Uriconium, slew " K3mdylan the Fair," burned the town, and took up fresh farms in the sur- rounding country. The new colonists called themselves the Wroken-saete, or settlers by the Wrekin; and a late charter in Mr. Kemble's collection describes Plesc (now Plash, in Shropshire) as standing " in provincia Wrocensetna." Uriconium itself was doubtless known i Im 62 SHIRES AND COUNTIES to its English masters as Wroken-ceaster. But, accord- ing to the common usage of the border counties, that inconvenient name has been worn down with time to Wroxeter: just as Exan-ceaster on the West Welsh border has become Exeter, and as Gleawan-ceaster and Wigra-ceaster, after declining into Gloucester and Worcester, have come to be pronounced as they now are. Perhaps the same root reappears in Wrexham, written Wricksam in Queen Elizabeth's reign. The West Saxons, however, only occupied a small strip of land along the Severn shore — the modem Coalbrookdale ; and the greater part of what is now Shropshire, the undulating country about Church Stretton and Oswestry, the Longm3mds and Caer Caradoc, still remained in the hands of the Welsh. The princes of Powys, after the fall of Uriconium, retreated to the forest region in the rear ; and there, in a horse-shoe bend of the Severn, on the site of the existing Shrewsbury, they built their new capital of Pengwem, whose name is preserved for us both by the bard Llywarch Hen, and by the more trustworthy historian Giraldus Cambrensis, the liveliest and wittiest of mediaeval travellers. Meanwhile, the English Mer- cians, or Marchmen, were slowly advancing from the other side along the valley of the Trent, and had fixed their chief seat around Lichfield and Tamworth in the neighbouring shire of Stafford. Under their great King Penda, the last champion of Teutonic heathendom in Britain, they succeeded in uniting all the scattered English chieftainships of the Midlands into a single kingdom ; and after annexing the West Saxon territory along the Severn, they represented thenceforth the aggressive van of the English advance against the Welsh. Offa, the most famous of the Mercian kings, turned upon Powysland, drove the Welsh princes from Pengwem, conquered all modem Shropshire, and probably settled the newly -acquired territory with English military colonists. To protect or rather to demarcate his new dominions, he erected the vast earth- work known by the name of Offa's Dyke, which runs WEST MIDLANDS 63 from Holywell in Flintshire to the Wye : its course in this district still roughly coincides with the western border of Shropshire, and it is well seen between Wynn-stay and Montgomery. At a later date, Harold, Godwin's son, enacted that any independent Welshman found east of this line should have his right hand cut off. We must not suppose, however, that the native Welsh of the county were either exterminated or expatriated ; indeed, they were not even enslaved. Offa's code regulated the relations of the two races in the conquered territory. The Welsh remained on the soil as tributary proprietors under the English overlords, and they learned in time to speak the English language and to consider themselves as Englishmen, exactly as the Cornish did in the south at a much later period. In physique, and to a great extent in their surnames, the Shropshire peasantry still betray their almost un- mixed Welsh descent. The Anglicisation of Wales now taking place is, in the same way, accompanied by hardly any infusion of Teutonic blood. The greater part of Shropshire was still covered with woodland ; and so the new conquest came to be known by the English as the Scrob — that is to say, the Scrub, or as modem Australians would call it, the Bush. The inhabitants were known as Scrob -saete, the Scrub- settlers: though the older name Wroken-saete is sometimes found, perhaps as descriptive of a special sub-district; for here, as elsewhere, nothing is known with certainty as to the organisation of the shire under the Mercian kingdom. Pengwem at the same time acquired its English name of Scrobbes-byrig (or more correctly Scrobbes-burh), the town or bury in the Scrub. The shire as a shire first comes distinctly into notice after the recovery of south-western Mercia by the West Saxons from the Danes, who had built a fort on the Severn, below Bridgnorth. It formed part of the territory assigned to Alfred by the treaty of Wedmore, and it was doubtless definitely erected into a shire at the same time as Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. The earhest mention of the county, however, as an I I 64 SHIRES AND COUNTIES administrative unit, In our existing documents, seems to occur during the wars of Cnut and Edmund. " They fared into Staefford-scir," says the Laudian Chronicle, "and into Scrobbes-byrig, and to Legeceaster," the last-named being the old name of Chester; and the collocation seems to show that Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire were then, as now, three separate counties, especially as the list goes on to mention several other acknowledged shires. Moreover, the Abingdon manu- script has the interesting variant, "Staefford-scir, and Scrob-saetas, and Legceaster," which still more clearly indicates the tribal meaning of the words. Perhaps the distinct form Scrob-scir, or Shropshire, is not to be found before the Norman Conquest. It is observable that the county lay partly in the diocese of Hereford and partly in that of Chester : may not this arrange- ment coincide with the old division into the Wroken- saBte and the Scrobsete.l* Ecclesiastical boundaries often preserve old lines which the lay organisation has otherwise obliterated. Long after the Norman Conquest, the men of Shropshire seem to have remembered that they were Welsh by origin, and to have made common cause with their Welsh brethren, as the equally Celtic men of Hereford on the south also did. In 1087, "the chief people of Hereford and all the shire with them, and the men of Scrob-scyr, and a muckle folk of Bryt-land (Wales), came and harried and burned on Wlgra-ceaster- scir (Worcestershire) forth until they came to the port itself (Worcester)." But under the Norman earls of Shrewsbury of the Montgomery family this feeling gradu- ally died out ; and the people of Salop took to harrying the Welsh instead. Perhaps we may trace to this period the origin of the marked county feeling which still distinguishes Shropshire. The folk must have stood quite alone : on the one hand were the Welsh, whom they had learnt to look upon as enemies ; on the other hand were the men of English Staffordshire, who must still have looked upon them as little other than Welshmen. So Salop, like the equally clannish shire WEST MIDLANDS 65 of Devon in the south, would necessarily have been thrown a great deal upon her own resources. The abbreviated form of the name itself deserves a passing notice. It is a Norman corruption of the native English Scrob-. The Normans could not always pro- nounce the uncouth Teutonic names: they turned Lincoln into Le Nicole, and Sarum or Sares-byrig they dissimilated, as the philologists say, into Salis-bury. On the same analogy, Domesday Book gives Scrob-scir as Salopes-sire, though it gives Scrobbes-byrig as Sciropes- berie. Shropshire and Shrewsbury are now the accepted popular forms. But the contraction Salop, as a name for town and shire alike, has lingered on through the influence of certain legal usages for a few colloquial purposes. Our ordinary speech still bears traces of the distinction of tongues ; for when we use the English form " shire " we say " Shropshire," but when we use the Norman -French word "county" we say "the county of Salop." Like most other Mercian shires, Shropshire lies in a rude circle around its county town. It differs, however, from all the others (except Rutland) in the fact that its name is not derived directly from that of the town, but merely from a cognate form. The only exact analogue elsewhere is that of Kent and Canterbury; though Somerset and Somerton, Wilts and Wilton, Dorset and Dorchester, all present remotely analogous cases in Wessex. i ' 1 NORTH-WEST CHESHIRE AND FLINT The County Palatine of Chester can boast of a history hardly inferior in interest to any among the whole roll of English shires. The " holy Dee " has always been the most sacred river in Britain ; and its port at Chester has been a place of commercial and strategical import- ance ever since the earliest beginnings of our national life. A tribe of Comavi held the region of the salt wyches at the date of the Roman conquest, and doubt- less had their chief village by the flats of the Roodee, on the site of the modem county -town. Agricola first placed a Roman station on the spot at the point where the newly-made road from Uriconium diverged into the North Welsh district on its way to Segontium, now Caer Seiont near Caernarvon. Ancient walls, inscriptions, hypocausts, and coins still occur abundantly wherever excavations are made in the neighbourhood of the town. Diva (not Deva, as commonly written) was the authorised Roman name, and a coin of Geta even gives it the dignity of Colonia Divana. But its after-history clearly shows that it must have been better known to the native Welsh population around as Castra Legionis, from the Twentieth Legion, which lay in garrison here for many years. During the brief period of British independence, after the withdrawal of the Roman forces from the NORTH-WEST 67 island, Cheshire formed part of the native Welsh king- dom of Powys. It held out against the English invaders long enough for its final subjugation to be recorded for us in the historical narrative of Bede : so that, instead of trusting as elsewhere to analogy and conjecture, we stand here upon the sure ground of almost contemporary evidence. A centuiy and a half after the first landing of the English in Britain, Athelfrith, the powerful heathen king of Northumbria, rounded the Peakland of Derbyshire with a large army, and began the long conflict for the possession of the western slopes of England which smouldered on for many hundreds of years as the war of the Welsh marches. Already the West Saxons had penetrated into the lower Severn valley ; but with that exception the whole of Britain beyond the central watershed still remained in the hands of the native Christian Celts, while the heathen Teuton occupied only a long strip of lowland along the eastern and southern coast. Athelfrith laid siege to the City of the Legions, as Bede calls it — Cair Legion is the form assumed by the name in the brief Celtic annals — and the inhabitants ventured to risk a battle with the invader on the open field. Brocmail, king of Powys, had brought a body of monks from the neigh- bouring Welsh monastery of Bangor Iscoed — a different place, of course, from the modem cathedral-town of the same name — to pray for the success of the Christian army against the pagan Englishmen. Athelfrith turned first upon the defenceless monks and massacred all but fifty in cold blood, after which he captured the town and perhaps bumed it to the ground. Centuries later, a mass of ruined walls and cloisters, with two gates a mile apart, bearing even then their Welsh names of Porth Kleis and Porth Wagan, still marked the site of Bangor Iscoed. From that time forth, Cheshire remained in the hands of the English, and was reckoned for a while as a portion of the Northumbrian territory. Athelfrith's victory, apart from its local interest, was memorable even from the point of view of general English history, because it broke the British resistance hi 68 SHIRES AND COUNTIES in the west into two sections, by dividing the Welsh of Wales proper from co-operation with their northern brethren in Strathclyde and Cumbria. At some unknown period, but probably during the vigorous reign of the great Mercian chief Penda, the district which was afterwards to grow into Cheshire passed over from the Northumbrian to the Mercian kings. With it went the part of modem Lancashire between Ribble and Mersey, which had apparently been conquered by Athelfrith about the same time. At any rate, shortly after the conversion of the midlands, a Mercian princess named Werburh or [in its Latinised form] Werburga, a directress of nunneries in her native country, was buried at the City of Legions; and round her shrine grew up the minster of Chester — at first a Welsh monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul, but afterw^ards appropriated to the English lady. The existing cathedral is still dedicated in the name of St. Werburga. Legaceaster is the common old English form of the town name, slightly altered from Legionis Castra ; so that it might easily have assumed a modem English guise as Leicester, like its near namesake [Legraceaster] in the eastern midlands. Circumstances, however, have carried the name in another direction. OfFa's Dyke, the old Mercian boundary against the Welsh, nearly coincides with the western limit of the modem shire. During the early Danish wars the town of Chester, which must have been revived by Werburga, seems to have been once more destroyed ; for we read in the Winchester Chronicle, during Alfred's reign, that a " host " coming from East Anglia " fared until they arrived at a waste ceaster in the Wirhealas ; it is hight Legaceaster." At this time, therefore, the town must have been l3mig in ruins ; and, indeed, the district of the Wirhealas — now the Wirral peninsula, between Dee and Mersey — was one always much exposed to the attacks of the Northmen, owing to the tempting open mouths of its two large navigable rivers. The Danes probably continued to hold the future Cheshire till the reign of Edward the Elder. But when that able West Saxon king had completed the reconquest of the east NORTH-WEST 69 I \ Jl \ midlands, he obtained the submission of the entire west as well ; and a year later he founded a fortress at Thelwall, as his Amazonian sister Athelfled had already done at Eddisbury Hill, in Delamere Forest. It was probably either Edward or Athelfled, the Lady of the Mercians, who erected the country round Chester into a shire on the West Saxon model. As in the case of the other recovered Mercian counties, Cheshire takes its name from its chief town, thus show- ing itself to be an artificial territorial division, mapped out around a military post, the residence of its ealdor- man and scir-gerefa, rather than the dominions of an old independent tribe gradually amalgamated with the Mercian State. Still, the county is [only once, 980] dis- tinctly mentioned as such till after the Norman Conquest. Edgar, the first real king of all England, held at " Laege- ceaster " his famous imperial pageant, when eight subject Celtic and Danish princes rowed him in his royal barge on the Dee — a fact which marks the importance attached to the old Welsh and Roman town ; while tradition asserts that the King had the head- quarters of his fleet for the defence of the Irish Sea at the same place. Athelred made it the rendezvous for the ships to be employed in harrying still Celtic Cumber- land and the Isle of Man. But even so, the only definite notice pointing to the existence of Cheshire as a county under the West Saxon kings is a short entry in the Chronicle in the days of Cnut, when we read that Edmund '^ fared into StaefFord-scir, and into Scrobbesburh, and into Legeceaster.'* Here there can be little doubt from the collocation of words that the counties, not the towns alone, are intended, especially as one manuscript reads ^* into Scrob-saeton," or Shropshire men, instead of "into Scrobbesbyrig," or Shrewsbury. Florence of Worcester and Henry of Huntingdon, Latin transcribers of the Chronicle, both translate the words by Shropshire and Cheshire. From the time of the Norman Conquest, Legeceaster came to be spoken of as Ceaster alone, and the county appears at the close of the Conqueror s reign as Ceaster-scir. ^ 70 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Thence to Cestreshire, Chestreshire, .and Cheshire is an easy transition. In the Domesday survey the county has a much larger area than at the present time. On the north it includes the district of modem Lancashire between Ribble and Mersey, with Manchester, Liverpool, and the cotton country; on the west it extends over the greater part of modem Flintshire. The Con- queror, in fact, had made over these dangerous northern Welsh marches to Hugh Lupus, for whom he erected Ceaster-scir into a county palatine, with leave to add to his palatinate as much land as he could conquer from the Welsh. Hugh made the best of this concession by overrunning and annexing the northern shore as far as Rhuddlan Castle ; and the region thus demarcated is accordingly the only part of Wales described and assessed in Domesday. When the County Palatine of Lancaster was afterwards created for Edmund Crouchback, son of Heniy IIL, the land between Ribble and Mersey was separated from Cheshire and added to the Honour of Lancaster in order to form the new shire. And when the whole of Wales was finally subdued, and divided into artificial counties on the later Norman-English plan, Flintshire was also cut off from the palatinate, and the boundary fell back approximately to the old line of OfFa's Dyke. Under Henry IIL the family of the Earls Palatine of Chester became extinct, and the earldom was immedi- ately annexed to the Crown. By an Act of Richard II. it was made into a principality, limited to the eldest son of the Sovereign; and, though this Act was an- nulled under Henry IV., the earldom has ever since been granted in connection with the principality of Wales. LANCASHIRE The irregular and heterogeneous county which stretches from the Lake District to the estuary of the Mersey is one among the few English shires that date NORTH-WEST 71 ii ■: ^ from a period far subsequent to the Norman Conquest. Geographically speaking, of course, nothing could be more artificial than its existing boundaries. Lancashire consists, in fact, of three distinct and wholly dissimilar portions: first, the mountain region of Fumess, com- pletely isolated from the rest of the county by the great bight of Morecambe Bay, and naturally a mere indistinguishable fraction of the Cumberland hills; secondly, the belt of forest, moor, and lowland between Morecambe and Ribble, anciently known as Amunder- ness ; and, thirdly, the undulating country which slopes slowly down in doughs and dales from the Pennine chain to the bulging shore from Liverpool to Southport, formerly described by the clumsy official title "Between Ribble and Mersey." So indefinite a territorial unit as this could only arise by subdivision from a larger and united whole, not by organic growth from smaller individual principalities; and we might therefore almost conclude a 'priori that Lancashire was due to some artificial arrangement made by an English king, rather than to a process of amalgamation among earlier terri- tories. As a matter of fact, such is really the case. Fumess originally formed part of the Strathclyde Welsh kingdom in Cumberland ; Amundemess was long counted as an outlying district of Yorkshire; and the region between Ribble and Mersey was reckoned, under the old names of Blackbumshire and Salfordshire, as a component portion of the county palatine of Chester. It was not until the Plantagenet period that these three incoherent blocks of territory were bound together by a purely administrative unity, and erected into a county for a member of the reigning family. About the primitive history of Lancashire little or nothing can now be recovered. Presumably at the date of the Roman occupation, the shire [wholly or in part] was in the hands of the Brigantes, the powerful tribe who held the Yorkshire plain; and a few Roman stations have been identified more or less certainly along the line of the Roman roads. Mamucium, or, as it is oftener but less correctly spelt, Mancunium, was the chief of vll m m >' 72 SHIRES AND COUNTIES these, and undoubtedly occupied the site of Manchester. After the breakdown of the imperial power in Britain* the country fell asunder for a while into numerous little native principahties ; and one of the most important among these seems to have spread its supremacy over the whole western coast of mid-Britain, from Alcluyd or Dumbarton to the mouth of the Mersey. The long heather-clad waste of the Pennine range, then known as the Wilderness, formed for a century and a half the boundary between these Welsh of Strathclyde on the one hand, and the English of Bemicia and Deira ©Uf Lothians, Northumberland, and Yorkshire on the other. But when, early in the seventh century, Athelfrith of Northumbria pushed his way round the little Welsh principality of Elmet, near the modem Leeds, and divided the Cymri of the north from their brethren of Wales by his victory at Chester, he retained m his own hands the tract between Ribble and Mersey —then for the most part a vast forest waste, probably considered as closely dependent upon the City of Legions itself Here for the first time the Northumbrian English found themselves face to face with the Irish Sea. Cheshire and South Lancashire, as yet undivided, thus formed for a while part of Northumbria ; while North I^ncashire beyond the Ribble remained in the hands of the Cumbrian Britons. How or when the district between Ribble and Mersey became Mercian territory we do not exactly know; perhaps it was durino- the reign of Penda, perhaps it was not till a much later time. But certainly in the English history of the Norman period it appears as a part of Cheshire, though as late as the days of Edward the Elder Manchester is described as " Mameceaster of the Northumbrians," i.e m Northumbria. Meanwhile, if the Mercians were pushing hard the Northumbrians upon the south, the Northumbrians themselves were pushing hard the Cumbrian Welsh upon the north. By the middle of the seventh century, they had conquered mid-Lancashire— that is to say, the ^^istnct between Morecambe and Ribble — and had NORTH-WEST 73 cooped up the independent Britons of the hill country in Cumberland and Westmoreland. In neither of these two early conquered regions, however, did the English themselves settle in any numbers. The clan -villages are few and far between ; the hundreds are large and straggling ; the physique of the people is, for the most part, purely Celtic; and the popular dialect still contains a great many Cymric words. Indeed, we know from the statement of Bede that in these western tracts the Britons were allowed to survive in large numbers as serfs or tributaries : and even the most thorough-going Teutonic advocates admit that here the aboriginal inhabitants substantially occupy the soil to the present day. Perhaps, too, the Furness district, stretching just opposite the outlying Northumbrian possessions in mid- Lancashire, may have been overrun and Anglicised about the same time, which would account for its later inclusion in the artificial county. Its lower extremity, about Barrow and the Isle of Walney, consists of a low cultivable shore, which might easily have been seized by the holders of the old Roman fortified post at Lancaster ; and the county border still runs just along the line where the hills begin to be inaccessible, and where the native Welsh may long have succeeded in defending the fastnesses of the Lake District from their English assailants. At any rate, we know that the mountain block of Cumberland did so hold out as an independent or semi-dependent Welsh State down to the days of Edmund the West Saxon : who harried the country in return for a rebellion, and handed it over as a fief (if the language of later feudalism may be used thus early) to the safe keeping of Malcolm, King of Scots. Thus, bit by bit, the northern Welsh kingdom fell to pieces ; and that fraction of it which was destined to compose the future Lancashire was parted out between the Mercians on the south, the Northumbrians in the middle, and possibly the King of Scots on the north. But it is perhaps most likely that Furness was still considered as forming an integral part of the Northum- brian realm. 1/1 %M I 74 SHIRES AND COUNTIES The Danish and Norwegian invasions seem to have left little mark territorially upon the map of Lancashire. There was a strong Norwegian colony in the Wirral penin- sula of Cheshire, and Norwegian names are not uncommon between Ribble and Mersey; while farther north the still wilder Norse pirates have left many memorials of their presence. But when the cloud of renewed Scandinavian darkness clears away, the country re- appears much the same as ever in organisation. At tlie date of Domesday there is still no Lancashire, and the future county is still split up into three distinct parts. The southern or Mercian region, between Ribble and Mersey — hiter Ripam et Mersha, as King William*s Norman commissioners phrase it — is in- cluded in Cheshire, and consisted mainly of the great wooded Hundred of West Derby, with Manchester and Salford for its only towns. The middle portion, Amundemess, formerly belonging to Northumbria, is naturally reckoned as part of Yorkshire, which thus stretched uninterruptedly from sea to sea. The north- western and isolated tract, like the rest of the Cumbrian peninsula, forming a disputed march or neutral frontier against the Scots, is not included in Domesday at all : indeed, an independent Norse adventurer seems to have ruled in merry Carlisle as late as the days of William Rufus. Under the Conqueror, Roger de Poictou, son of Roger Montgomery, owned most of the wild region between Ribble and Mersey. He built Lancaster Castle, and held court there in a semi -regal fashion. After various changes, during the stormy period of early feudalism, Henry III. at length resumed all the lands ©f Lancashire, owing to the participation of Robert de Ferrars in Simon de Montfort's rebellion ; and then §m tiie inl time uniting the three divisions into a single county, he made them over to his son, Edmond Crouchback, whom he created Earl of Lancaster. The choice of the title is significant as showing the com- paratively slight importance of the southern district, now the most densely peopled part of England except Middlesex. Manchester was still a small country ii ) 1 I n NORTH-WEST 75 village ; Liverpool is not even mentioned in Domesday as a rural manor ; and the other great Lancashire towns were mere hamlets in little clearings among the scrub or woodland. But the Roman fort and Norman castle had made Lancaster the most important place in the wide stretch of barren coast now erected into a county ; and from it the new shire took its name. The corrup- tion from Lancastershire into Lancashire is exactly analogous to that of Ceastershire into Cheshire, and marks a dialectical peculiarity of the Celtic borderlands ; but the hard sound of Lancaster is Northumbrian English, while the softened initial of Chester [has been thought to] owe its origin to the Mercian dialect, which shows its influence again in the name of Manchester, once a Mercian town. The later Duchy of Lancaster, held by John of Gaunt, has brought about no direct alteration in the limits or nature of the shire, and the intricacies of the County Palatine and the Duchy of Lancaster are of a sort only to be fairly faced by the industrious local antiquarian. CUMBERLAND The land of the Cymry, as we still call the north- western county of England, has had in some respects a more curiously eventful history than almost any other English shire. For, while its very name shows us that it started by being a Welsh territory, there are probably few people even in Cumberland itself who know that it formed for a whole century an integral part of the kingdom of Scotland. Indeed, its early annals are, to say the truth, a little confused, and it is only by piecing together stray bits of evidence from many various sources that we can succeed in producing a fairly consistent mosaic or cento, which must be taken in part at least as only conjectural. From the Roman days onward, an important town has always existed at Carlisle, the natural capital of the mountainous penin- sula between the Solway Frith and Morecambe Bay. I •M ^ y I i If! 76 SHIRES AND COUNTIES After the Romans left the island, we know that during the period of the early English settlements a great Celtic kingdom, known as Reged, occupied the whole western coast from the Clyde to the Mersey; and in this kingdom Cumberland was of course included. The struggle with the heathen Teutonic invaders, every- where far fiercer than most people suppose, burnt fiercest and smouldered longest here in the mountain fastnesses of the north. Urien of Reged besieged Theodric (son and successor of Ida, the first Northum- brian king) in his own royal wooden fort of Bam- borough ; and long after, Cadwallan, a later Cumbrian prince, bore rule for a year in York city — the only Welshman, so far as we know, who ever subdued an English kingdom even temporarily beneath his sway. Indeed, for the first two centuries of English colonisa- tion in Britain it was still doubtful whether the Englishman or the Briton was finally to secure the political supremacy over the whole island. In the end, however, the aggressive Teuton slowly made his way westward. Even before the conversion of Northumbria, its pagan king Athelfrith had rounded the Peakland of Derbyshire, and by his victory at Chester had cut off the Welsh of Cumbria from their brethren of Cambria — the two words are but mispelled variants of the same Cymric root — thus breaking the British power into two weakened and divided halves. South Lancashire henceforth passed as part of the Yorkshire principality, and Manchester was counted II Northumbrian town down to the days of Edward the Elder. From the time of Athelfrith onward, the Britons of Reged were known to their English neigh- bours as the Straecled Wealas, or Welsh of Strathclyde ; and their whole kingdom thus took its later name from the strath or valley of the Clyde, which formed its northern and richest portion, though it extended southward over the wild moorlands at least as far as Morecambe Bay, and possibly even to the mouth of the Ribble. Gradually, however, Amundemess and West- moringaland fell into the hands of the English, while NORTH-WEST 77 the Welsh were confined to the larger Cumberland— that is to say, the modem county so called, together with Strathclyde proper and Ayrshire. The outlying peninsula of Galloway still remained in the hands of its old Gaelic [or prae-Gaelic] inhabitants, the Niduari Picts. In the best days of the Northumbrian kingdom, the Welsh of Strathclyde and Cumbria were forced to acknowledge the supremacy of their English neighbours under Egfrith. Carlisle was erected into an English bishopric, and bestowed upon the holy St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the English apostle of the Lothians. At the same time, another Northumbrian Bishop was placed over the See of the Southern Picts at Whithem, in Galloway. But shortly after, Egfrith died in battle against the Northern Picts of the Highlands, and Northumbria sank into its long decadence of internal anarchy. Both its Celtic dependencies, Gaelic Gallo- way and Cymric Cumberland, threw off the dominion of the foreign overlords, and once more asserted their precarious autonomy. Till the date of the Danish invasions, we hardly hear again of Strathclyde, even by way of incidental mention. But during the course of that great heathen cataclysm, all the hostile princi- palities of Britain, divided from one another by blood and language, began to feel that the tie of their common Christianity, the necessities of their common civilisation, and the need for a common system of defence overrode all their minor differences before the face of the desolating pagan pirates. The overlordship of the ambitious West Saxon kings became a bond of union between the whole Christian population of the island. We hear in the first days of the regular Scandinavian incursions that Halfdan's Danish host in Northumbria "oft harried among the Picts and the Strathclyde Welsh." When Edward the Elder, Alfred's son, began his systematic recovery of the north he took especial pains everyAvhere to conciliate the Welsh race ; and when once the pirates carried off a Bishop of Llandafi; the politic West Saxon ransomed the Celtic prelate out of his own royal bounty. This imperial It Vfi 78 SHIRES AND COUNTIES policy produced its due result. Howel and Idwal kings of Wales proper, first ^^ sought Edward for lord," or acknowledged his suzerainty as we should now say; and a httle later, after his advance on Bakewell the king of the Strathclyde Welsh followed their example. * m \ 98 SHIRES AND COUNTIES was that of the Snottngas^ and from them the town took its new title of Snotinga-ham : just as Ynys Witrin became Glaestinga-byrig or Glastonbury, and as Pengwem became Scrobbesburh or Shrewsbury. Traces of Roman occupation have also been unearthed at Nottingham itself by local antiquaries. For nearly two hundred years after the first English settlement of Britain the Southumbrians retained their independence ; but at the end of that time Penda of Tamworth, the successful leader of the Mercians, united them to his own people, as he also united the Middle English of Leicester and the Lindis-waras of Lincolnshire. Penda was a heathen ; but even before his time Paullinus of York had preached Christianity among the South- umbrians, and had baptized many people in the Trent at a clan village called Tiwulfinga-ceaster — an old Roman station then occupied by the Tiwulfing clan, and identified by Canon Bright with Southwell, where St. Mary's Minster, for ages connected with the see of York, has always claimed St. Paullinus for its founder. Penda's own son Peada, whom the Mercian king had made ealdorman of the Southumbrians and Middle English, became a Christian : and when his brother Wulfhere succeeded him as king of all the Mercians, the distinction between the three tribes seems almost to have died away. ITie see was originally fixed at Leicester, but was afterwards removed to Lichfield: and at a later date Archbishop Theodore divided the diocese into five, one of which had its bishop-stool again placed ftt Leicester, the four others being at Lichfield, Wor- cester, Sidnacester, and Dorchester-on-Thames. With the Scandinavian invasions the town of Not- tingham 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 waterway. " That ilk host," says the English Chronicle, "fared into Mercia to NORTH MIDLANDS 99 11 \ 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 occupa- tion of Nottingham really settled the position of the princes of Winchester as central kings of all Britain. Of course, in the fluctuations which followed, "Snot- ingaham" 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 A I \ i I 100 SHIRES AND COUNTIES 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 Not- tinghamshire (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 Jield, 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 deerfrith 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 mediaeval types : only NORTH MIDLANDS 101 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 explana- tion, 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 Ratae 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 Ratae 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, modem inquirers are prone to reject cavalierly all etymologies which imply unbroken historical connection with Celtic times. But, aft^er all, it is just as likely that Rutland should bear the name of the Ratse 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 ) I 102 SHIRES AND COUNTIES 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 mediaeval 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 fenland 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 Ratae, 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 consider- able fraction of its little surface. Probably the name, NORTH MIDLANDS 103 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 — Hke Holland, Qeveland, Copeland, Westmoreland, and Cum- berland — 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, Cumber- land, 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 West- minster. 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 modem 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 terri- tory 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, how- ever, the difficulties which beset the local historian are V i I It v 104 SHIRES AND COUNTIES by no means exhausted ; for Mr. Hartshome 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 un- certainty, 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 Httle district of the Rodings still does in Essex. Of course nobody in the county ever says Rutlandshire, any more than they say Cumberland- shire 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 mto 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 un- known 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 Enghsh 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 ♦^itle than the purely artificial and geographical NORTH MIDLANDS 105 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, Bamsley, Sheffield, and Nottingham. But before the inunense modem 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 primaeval forest. But it is far more probable that Derbyshire was almost uninhabited until long after the English settle- ment 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 t I IiJ 106 SHIRES AND COUNTIES 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 Bemicia ; 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, how- ever, the Welsh still retained not only Derbyshire, but also the districts of Elmet and Loidis around the modem 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 Peak- land, 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 Cjnnric origin. Under the early English, the settlement of Derby- shire must have proceeded but very slowly. The Hundred is supposed everywhere to represent the original j holding of one hundred [1201 free English families among the servile Welsh population ; and in NORTH MIDLANDS 107 Derbyshire (as Mr. Isaac Taylor notes) each Hundred contains an average of l62 square miles, against an aver- age of 23 in Sussex, 24 in Kent, and 30 in Dorset. Qan 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 PecsaBte 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 Pecsaete, 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 modem 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 — ACM t 108 SHIRES AND COUNTIES 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 North- weorthig instead. As in many other cases, they changed the name of the village, which was henceforth known by the Danish title of Deora-hy. 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, mm then applied to all wild animals, and was only later restricted to its narrower modem 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 Tam- worth. 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 mto Peac-lond to Badecan-wyll (BakeweU) and bade work a burgh there." No doubt the county was NORTH MIDLANDS 109 organised as a Mercian shire on its fet occupation ^^ Athelfled, who had already demarcated the neighbounng teiTitorie of Staff-ordshire and Warwickshire ; and when ItTassed into Edward's hands it would probably become one of the West Saxon shires without further alteration the Kinff merely putting his own ealdorman and sheriff S theXTof tU Danilh earl, but allowing the twelve SaS^hten to manage internal affairs on th^^ system Like all the other Mercian shires m the sSnavian region, Derbyshire takes its name from its c™ own. It does not lie so evenly around it however, as in most other cases ; but the want of S^S is. in fact, more apparent than real, histonc- alh^^peYking. The town stands in the exact centre of the plain portion of the county : the Forest of the Peat s^retchi^ng away to the -rth, was long reg^^^^^^^^ as a mere wild outlying appendage, a " ^^^.^f ^^^^^^ preserve of wild beasts, whose memory is stiH perpetu- J^te^W such names as Chapel-en-le-Frith. Though in the la'er Danish difficulties Derby often r^^^^^^^^ W its West Saxon masters and called m the aid of some wicking prince, there is no reason to s™e tha^^the boundaries of the county ever ^aned much^ Stdl, n^ quite distinct mention of " Deorbiscir occurs till two years before the Norman Conquest. ( ■ VIII llf NORTH-EAST LINCOLNSHIRE Almost as naturally isolated from the rest of Britain as East Anglia, Sussex, or Cornwall, the practical peninsula of Lincolnshire has nearly always formed a separate and easily recognised division of the land, throughout all historical or prehistoric time. It is true, in its present form, now that drainage and reclamation have so largely obliterated the native marches of fen or forest, it seems an unjustifiable stretch of language to speak of Lincolnshire as a peninsula. But while the soil of England still retained its primitive natural features, the case was far otherwise. The great outward bulge of the Wolds was then everywhere cut off from the remainder of the central secondary plateau by a continuous; border of swampy lowland. To the north, the long estuary of Humber separated it from Holder- ness and the rest of Yorkshire; while westward the whole lower basin of the Trent and the Don was occu- pied by the wide fens from which the Isle of Axholme rose as a sohtary habitable oasis in the midst of a vast and desolate mere. Near where Newark now stands, the Trent valley almost interosculates with that of the Witham, whose tributaries again take their rise in the same boggy morass as those of the Welland. Finally, on the south, the great Fen District and the Wash completed the isolation of Lincohishire from the outer 1^ I 1 NORTH-EAST 111 world. In the few spots where the mark of swamps was partially interrupted (if such there were) the wooded region, afterwards known as Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, must have acted practically just as well, so as to afford the primitive inhabitants of Lincoln- shire perfect immunity from the attacks of enemies on the land side. Accordingly, it is not strange that the district of the Wolds should in early times have been regarded as a separate island ; and its old Celtic name of Lindis (which appears once more in Lindis- fama-ee or Lindisfame [the Isle of the Lindis-dwellers], now Holy Island, the chief of the Fame archipelago off the coast of Northumberland) probably contains the Welsh root Ynys, an island, in its terminal syllable [?]. The first half of the word, reappearing [as it seems] in the Roman Lindum, is of uncertain signification. Under the Romans the peninsula or island naturally became a great corn-growing region; and its capital, Lindum, grew into an important commercial and strategical centre. From the modem name, Lincoln, which is apparently a cormption of Lindiun Colonia (mentioned by the Ravenna geographer), it has been supposed that the town even attained the dignity of a colony. But the only colony in Britain distinctly alluded to by Roman writers was Camulodunum; and Bede's intennediate form, Lindocolina, seems to point to some confusion of sound or sense. At any rate, in accordance with the ordinary Roman policy of breaking down local isolation in the provinces, Lincoln was linked to the outer world by four great roads, which must have crossed the intervening fens on laboriously constmcted causeways. Even the main north road, from London and Vemlam to York, passed through Lincoln, avoiding as it did both the fen regions and the wooded midland plateau, and so sweeping round, in two bold curves through the most settled tracts, from London to Lincoln and from Lincoln to York. The station of Ad Pontem marks the point where it crossed the boundary-line of swamp and river. The Roman remains in Lincoln city —[among] the most extensive and best preserved in all f f-. 112 SHIRES AND COUNTIES England — though very interesting in themselves, have little connection with the question how Lincolnshire ultimately grew into a separate English shire. When the Teutonic pirates descended upon the deserted province in the middle of the fifth century, it would seem natural that the isle of Lindiss should be one of their earliest conquests. Isolated peninsular districts like Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia were most easily overrun and defended from recapture ; and Lin- colnshire in particular lay right in the route of a pirate fleet sailing down with a favouring north-easter from the wicks of Sleswick. Hence we may conclude that it was very early occupied ; the more so as we hear no details of the English colonisation either from Bede or from the West Saxon Chronicle. Here, as in many other places, however, it does not seem likely that the English absolutely '' exterminated " the British inhabit- ants. Doubtless they spared the lives of many as slaves. Professor Phillipps long ago pointed out the common occurrence of 4m Celtic type, with all its marked anatomical peculiarities, among the supposed pure Anglians of the modem county; and later anthropo- logists have fully confirmed both his facts and his inferences. Lincoln city was undoubtedly spared, like York and London; and to this day it still preserves in part its Roman walls. Where the cities were left standing, as Canon Stubbs observes, a portion at least of the city population would likewise be allowed to remain ; and this was probably the case at Lincoln. Both town and district retained their old Celtic Romanised titles, the one being known as Lindocolina ami later Lindcylene, and the other as Lindisse, or Lindesse, in the " Anglo-Saxon " period. But Lincolnshire was not at first occupied as a whole by a single English tribe. Though here, as elsewhere, the Danish inundation swept away all the old English land-marks, we can still partially recover the names and boimdaries of the different tribes which colonised the conquered country. The northern half of the modem shire, including probably the whole basin of the Trent, NORTH-EAST 113 ( K\ was held by the Gegnas or Gainas, who had their capital at Gegnesburh, now Gainsborough. The middle district, including Lincoln itself and the basin of the Witham, was settled by a folk who called themselves after the region Lindis-ware, or men of Lindisse. The flat southern district of Holland, the hollow land, was scantily peopled by the Gyrwas, or fenmen, among whom the Celtic blood was probably strong ; for we know that "Welsh robbers " held out in the Fens to a very late period. Their chief clan, the Spaldingas, have given their own name to the town of Spalding. Holland still survives as a recognised popular division of the modem county; Lindisse has taken the old English termination, ig, an island, and so has declined from the pure form into Lindesig, which occurs in the Chronicle, to its existing shape of Lindsey (analogous to Sheppey, Anglesey, and the other coast islands), under which it too lives on as a substantive sub-shire ; while as to the third recognised division, Kesteven — whose name has a S curious antique look] — it is difficult to give any satis- actory account of its origin and meaning. Slowly, how- ever, all the little principalities seem to have partially coalesced with that of the Lindisware ; though even as late as the days of Alfred the Gegnas were still so powerful that a daughter of their ealdorman was con- sidered no unworthy match for the great West Saxon king himself. The people remained heathen till after the conversion of Northumbria, when PauUinus preschcd in Lindsey, where the first convert was "a certain great man Light Blecca, with all his clan " — no doubt some of the same Bleccingas who gave their name to Bletch- ington. The earliest Lincoln minster was built of stone by this Blecca, and was dedicated to PauUinus himself; but its modem representative — a small church on the cathedral platform — is now corruptly known as St. Paul's. Mr. Venables suggests that the number of churches in Lincolnshire dedicated to St. Michael, that favourite Celtic saint, may not improbably betoken some survival of British Christianity through the stormy period of English heathendom. •^ I \\\ ) i \l I i- m SHIRES AND COUNTIES It is to the Scandinavian conquest that we owe our modem Lincobishire in its present form, apparently. The Danes who overran Northumbria in the middle of the ninth century speedily proceeded to annex Mercia ; and with it they also annexed Lindsey, which had acknowledged the Mercian supremacy ever since the days of the great heathen king Penda, two hundred years before. Lincoln became one of the Five Burghs of the Danes, and the bishops of the Lindisware fled before the renewed heathen outburst to Dorchester-on- Thames, near Oxford. Lincoln grew strongly Danish, and ranked next to York as a Scandinavian stronghold. Even as late as the time of Edward the Confessor it retained its twelve Danish lawmen. On it, apparently, all Lincolnshire depended, except the south of Holland, which formed part of the territorj^ belonging to Stamford, another one of the Five Burghs. For forty years the heathen held undisputed possession of Lincoln, till Edward the Elder undertook his great campaigns for the recovery of the midlands and the north. After his conquest of Huntingdon, Northampton, and Cambridge, the vigorous West Saxon king pushed on to Stamford and to Nottingham, where he built forts and manned them with English and submissive Danes. " Then all the folk that sat in Mercia-land turned to him," says the Chronicle ; and though Lincoln is not mentioned by name, we may take it for granted that it was included in the general submission of the Five Burghs. Probably the shire was at once reorganised on the ordinary West Saxon model; but the earliest distinct mention of *^Lindcolne-scir" seems to be during the wars of Edmund and Cnut, three-quarters of a century later. It is diffi- cult to see why the whole modem county should have been made to depend on Lincoln alone ; especially when Stamford, the old capital of the Gyrwas, had been one of the Five Burghs, each of which, in every other instance, was accepted as the nucleus of a new slire. We might naturally have expected the whole Fen country to have been erected into a county as Stamfordshire. Still more difficult is it to discover why Lindsey, Kesteven, and NORTH-EAST 115 Holland were all rolled together into a single shire, when the smaller and less important district of Rutland obtained rank as a distinct county. Probably the geographical unity of Lincolnshire overbore its territorial separation. The Isle of Axholme, however, now a singularly outlying part of the county beyond the natural boundary of the Trent, was not incorporated with the rest of the shire till the reign of Henry II., when the Lincolnshire men attacked it in boats, and forcibly added it to their own territory. By position it belongs rather to Yorkshire; and all its commercial relations have always been with Doncaster and York. YORKSHIRE It is not uimatural that the largest county in England should also possess the most intricate history ; and this is certainly the case with Yorkshire. There could never have been a time when the valley of the Ouse and its tributaries was not the seat of a large agricultural population — ^at least, since man first took to agriculture, and left off subsisting by the chase alone. The plain of York is, in fact, the richest cultivable lowland m all Britain ; and even before the Romans came it formed the territory of the Brigantes, the most powerful and wealthy among the old Celtic tribes. When Britain became for some centuries a mere granary for the crowded cities of Southem Gaul and Italy, it was natural that the prefect of the province should fix his quarters in the centre of the most fertile cornfield region under his command. And when the purely agricultural English colonists began to change their piratical expedi- tions for organised settlements in Britain, it was equally natural that they should early turn to plunder the Roman capital, and to allot themselves manors in the praedial lowlands of the Ouse. Of their first settlement, indeed, we have absolutely no record ; we do not know when or how they came, or where they effected their earliest landing. But when we catch a gUmpse of the I'l V 116 SHIRES AND COUNTIES country again in the pages of Bede, we learn that the lower basin of the Humber had then long been consolidated into a single English kingdom, and that the independent Britons had been driven away into the wooded upper valleys around Leeds and Wharfedale. That the city of York itself had a continuous existence from Roman into Anglo-Saxon times is admitted on all hands. It was not razed to the ground like Anderida, nor burnt down like Uriconium ; but, as Canon Stubbs remarks, it preserved its continuity from one domination to the other, just as London, the mart of the merchants, did in the south, and as Lincoln, the metropolis of the midlands, did in the east. As in those cases, too, it still preserves its ancient name ; for York, or Yorick, is only a corruption of Eurewic, which itself is short for Eoforwic, which, again, is a queer Anglicised form of Eboracum, which, finally, is the Roman pronunciation of what became later the native Ebrauc, The valley of the Ouse proper, and the coast from Tees t5 Humber, formed the kingdom of an early English tribe, the Dere, whose territory we know best under Bede's Latinised name of Deira. It forms one of the most natural divisions of England as it now stands, being exactly coincident with the great northern water- shed of the Humber ; but at this early period the whole of the district thus circumscribed was not yet conquered by the English, two British principalities of Elmet and Loidis still holding out on their own account in the upper valleys. Before the end of the heathen period, however. King ^Elle of the Dere annexed the Beomice of modem Northumberland and the Lothians ; and the united people were thenceforth known under the common name of Northumbrians, though they often split up again into the two original tribes under separate kings. Edwin of York, the first Christian king of the Northumbrians, and founder of the original York Minster, completed the conquest of all modem York- shire by annexing Elmet and expelling Cerdic, its British king. Even so, however, the native resistance to the English invaders was by no means dead ; for I' NORTH-EAST 117 Edwin himself was afterwards killed in battle by Cadwallan, king of the Strathclyde Welsh, who still owned all the western coast from Glasgow to Lancaster. For a year Cadwallan ruled over Northumbria, and the Briton was once more master in York city. At the end of that time, however, Oswald, a native Northumbrian English atheling, aftei-wards canonised, recovered the independence of his country. From Oswald's days onward till the Danish conquest, Deira, or Yorkshire, remained under its native princes, either in conjunction with the northern province of Bemicia or as a separate principality. When the Scandinavian pirates came, however, the open mouth of Humber formed, as it were, a predes- tined port of entry for their predatory long-ships. They fell upon York and the surrounding plain in their earliest expeditions, and overran the whole country at once. Northumbria, indeed, had been weakened both by constant warfare with the Ficts of Scotland and the Welsh of Cumberland, and by the attacks of the en- croaching West Saxon overlords, as well as by continual internal anarchy. For nine years the Danes '' rode over Deira," which they treated simply as a conquered land, and made York the headquarters of their plundering expeditions into Mercia and the south. During all that period, the only settled rule seems to have been that exercised by the English Archbishop. But at the close of this anarchic epoch, the Danish kings Halfdene and Eowils established a regular monarchy at York, which became thenceforth the great centre of the Scandinavian interest in England. For half a century Yorkshire was as much a Scandinavian province as Scania or Zealand. We are too apt to forget this Danish kingdom of the north in our exclusive devotion to the history of Wessex. A regular succession of Scandinavian princes, with such unfamiliar names as Ragnald and Sihtric, can be traced throughout the whole of the Scandinavian domination in Yorkshire, as well by means of their coins as from the scanty existing entries in our own chronicles or the Icelandic sagas. Bernicia, on the other hand (that is i \\' 118 SHIRES AND COUNTIES to say, Northumberland and the Lothians) was left in the hands of a puppet prince belonging to the native d)masty, because its coast is singularly deficient in harboursj and therefore useless for the purposes of a piratical horde. The Danes found it easier to make over this northern district to a tributary king on payment of a sufficient Danegeld, than to collect its revenues themselves or to plunder its wild upland moors on separate expeditions which would have drawn them away from Mercia and Wessex. The fifty years of Danish rule in York form almost a complete blank in the annals of the county. We can only piece out the list of kings from a few meagre hints. With the English reconquest, Yorkshire once more emerges into the full light of history. After Edward tlie Elder had successfully recovered the whole of Mercia, he went northward to Bakewell in Peakland, the English Chronicle tells us, " and there bade a burgh be wrought, and manned it with the folk thereabout.'* All the north at once acknowledged his overlordship. Ragnald, the Danish King of York, "bowed to him," as did also " the sons of Eadwulf," English lords of Bamborough and Bemicia, as well as the King of the Strathclyde Welshmen, who still maintained their separate independence in Cumberland. As yet, how- ever, the Danish princes kept up their state in Yorkshire as subject rulers under the West Saxon overlord ; and when Athelstan succeeded his father Edward, he even acknowledged the high royal rank of Sihtric, the young King of York, by meeting him in state at Tamworth (the old royal town of Mercia) and giving him his own sister in marriage. But a year later Sihtric died, and Athelstan thereupon expelled his successor Guthfrith, uniting all Northumbria, Danish or English, to his own immediate dominions. Yet it was long before the Scandinavian north was thoroughly incorporated with the Saxon south. Again and again the Yorkshire men rebelled, now calling over Anlaf, King of the Dublin Danes, now choosing Ragnald, son of Guthfnth, and now once more setting up a prince of their own, Eric NORTH-EAST 119 Harold's son. Even later, the north elected the West Saxon Edgar, while the south was still under his brother Edwy. In fact, it was only the strong hand of the Norman and Angevin kings which finally consolidated the two great divisions of England ; and the abortive attempt of Cnut against William the Conqueror was really the last final effort of Northumbrian independence. It was under Edgar, first genuine King of all England, that Yorkshire makes its earliest appearance as a single county. Edgar, or to speak more correctly, his great Minister Dunstan, broke up the old Northumbrian realm into three divisions, of which the southern, comprising Danish Yorkshire, was made over to Earl Oslac ; the central, consisting of English Durham and Northumber- land, was left in the hands of its native ruler, Oswulf ; while the northern, the Lothians, was entrusted to the care of the King of Scots. The earliest mention of " Eoforwicscir " occurs in the reign of Edward the Confessor, where it is coupled with "North-hymbra-land" in nearly the modern sense, as including the whole of old Northumbria then left in English hands. In the Domesday Survey, Yorkshire (even now the largest county in England) was still larger than it is at the present day, the West Riding then including all Amunderness Hundred in North Lancashire. The first recorded division of the counties into circuits for Justices in Eyre under Henry II., on the other hand, distributes the north into Yorkshire, Richmondshire, Copeland, Westmoreland, Northumberland, and Cumberland. The slow change by which the neighbouring counties were definitely demarcated from Yorkshire belongs rather to the separate history of those shires themselves. To the present day, however, besides the recognised division into Ridings, there are several popular sub -shires of Yorkshire, such as Cleveland, Richmondshire, Hallam- shire, and Holdemess, which survive in colloquial use long after they have ceased to have any official existence. These probably represent old tribal shires of Deira, as Wilts and Dorset represent old tribal shires of Wessex. But while in the south the subdivisions have lived on .7? no SHIRES AND COUNTIES unchanged, in the north they have almost died out, because of the relatively slight importance of North- umbria under the Norman kings, after the ten-ible harrying of the Conqueror. As a whole, therefore, Yorkshire still represents an old English kingdom, erected afterwards into a Scandinavian principality, and finally shaped into a Noraian county. NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM Probably many people remember the surprise they felt when they first learned that the county called Northum- berland lay north of the Tyne, not of the H umber ; and though the glib explanation usually given — that the name had once a wider signification, but was aftenvards restricted to its present meaning — might quash all the critical doubts of childhood, it cannot certainly be considered a wholly adequate or satisfactory answer for grown-up intelligence. As a matter of fact, the history ©f Northumberland, either as a name or as a county, cannot be got rid of in quite so summary a manner. The tale that hangs thereby is both long and interesting. The earliest English settlement on the Northumbrian coast seems to have been made in the neighbourhood of Bamborough, at some unknown date and by some unknown leader. It is usual to assume, indeed, from a single meagre entry in the English Chronicle, that one Ida was the first king, about a century after the English colonisation of Kent; but in reality the Chronicle merely tells us that at that time "Ida came to the Kingdom," or, as we should now say, ascended the throne; while the assumption that he was the first English conqueror of Northumbria is only a bit of that uncritical guesswork which often passes for superior historical knowledge. It is highly improbable, indeed, that the English pirates would take the trouble to round the Forelands and settle in distant Hampshire before they had attempted a landing on the nearest and least protected shore of Britain in the Lothians and NORTH-EAST 121 Northumberland. What is certain amounts to no more than this : that in the middle of the sixth century an English prince named Ida ruled over a petty principality among the rocky braes of the Northumbrian coast ; that he " timbered Bamborough that was first betyned with a hedge, and thereafter with a wall " ; and gave it its name, Bebbanburh, in honour of Bebba, his Christian Welsh wife. That is the first fixed starting-point in the history of the modem county of Northumberland. As yet, however, the name of Northumberland was quite unknown. The English people of this northern principality, which spread in time from the Tyne through what are now the Scotch Lowlands to the Forth, called themselves the Beomice ; and the native title for their country is most familiar to us in Bede's Latinised form of Bernicia. South of it, from Tyne to Humber, stretched a second considerable principahty that of the Dere, also Latinised as Deira, and comprising the modem counties of Durham and Yorks, though the first-named seems to have fluctuated between the two tribes. Both principalities were themselves doubtless built up by the coalescence of several earlier and minor chieftainships, whose names have in some cases been preserved to us : and under Edwin, the first Christian King at York, if not also under his heathen predecessor, Athelfrith, the two larger principalities were in turn united into a single powerful kingdom, which stretched uninterruptedly from the Humber to the Forth. To this new and important State the name of Northan- hymbra-land came to be appHed— meaning quite strictly, not the land north of the Humber, but the land of the Northan-hymbras or Northumbrians. It is an ethnical, not a territorial title. Similarly, the people beyond the Humber, afterwards known as Myrce or Mercians, were commonly described in early times as Suthan- hymbre, or South-humbrians. But though the two northern principalities were thus politically united, they did not socially coalesce; and from time to time we hear for a while of separate kings reigning once more in Deira and Bernicia respectively. The old Roman ^■^mi 122 SHIRES AND COUNTIES provincial capital of York continued to be the metro- polis of Deira^ while Bemicia had as its chief city Ida's royal stronghold itself. So, too, after the universal introduction of Christianity the northern Archbishop had his see fixed at York, the capital of Edwin ; while the suffragan Bishop of the Beomicas took up his abode at Lindisfame, or Holy Island, not far from the Bemician capital of Bamborough. Up to the period of the Danish invasions Northumbria, as a whole, remained the most flourishing and civilised part of Britain. It had been the seat of the Roman prefecture; it had kept up the traditions of Roman culture ; and the struggle of the English with the natives had not apparently been so severe or so crushing as in Wessex and the south. In the pages of Bede we see Northumbria, including what are now the Lothians, described as the centre of light and learning for the whole island, and the special seat of monasteries and con- vents. Bede himself was a monk of Jarrow ; Caedmon, the great epic poet, was a lay brother at Whitby ; and Cynewulf, the sweetest early English lyrical writer, was a member of some other, though doubtful, Northumbrian religious house. But even before the Danish troubles the position of Northumbria had begun to decline ; and the native kings were at last obliged by force of arms to recognise the supremacy of Egbert of Wessex. Nevertheless, they continued to rule as under-kings in York for a couple of generations longer. When the northern pirates, however, began to fall upon Britain in full force they naturally directed their first attacks against Northumbria, as the English themselves had probably done four centuries before them. Deira fell almost without a blow at the very earliest invasion, and York became the capital of the first Danish kingdom in Britain. Thus Yorkshire was merged for a time in the Denalagu or Danish territory. But the northern part of Northumbria, stretching from the Tees to the Forth, and including the modem counties of Durham and Northumberland, as well as the Lothians, did not fall into the hands of the Danes. A branch of the NORTH-EAST 123 native royal house continued to rule at Bamborough; and the northern pirates, in their eagerness to attack the rich plains of Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex, did not trouble themselves about the rocky upland kingdom of the braes. Hence this northern fragment of the old Northumbrian realm, alone remaining in the hands of its English natives, kept the style and title of Northum- berland, while the Danish kingdom to the south began a little later to be known as Yorkshire. As yet, however, the name Northumberland, even in this restricted sense, appUed to a far wider district than the modern county. When King Edward of Wessex recovered the overlordship of the north, Ragnald, Danish King of York, did homage (to use the familiar term of later feudalism) for Yorkshire ; while Ealdred, English lord of Bamborough, appeared as the under- king of all the rest of old Northumbria. In the reign of Edgar, when the whole of England was first thoroughly united, Northumberland once more under- went a serious clipping. Deira was finally handed over to Earl Oslac ; Oswulf, the representative of the native dynasty, was also compelled to accept the title of earl, and was recognised as ruler of the central portion between Tees and Tweed; while the whole of the northern portion, from Tweed to Forth, was granted as a fief to Kenneth, King of Scots, and has ever since remained an integral portion of the Scottish realm. Such at least is the statement given by the English historians, and accepted by the great authority of Dr. Freeman ; and though the Scotch have a more patriotic version of the affair on their own account, the question is rather one connected with the annals of the Lothians than with the annals of Northumberland. Edinburgh, originally an English border fortress, built by Edwin of Deira, whose name it bears, thus became the capital of the Celtic Scotch kings ; and English Lothian became the richest and most important portion of the later historical Scotland. For another century Northumberland was held to include the whole district between the Tees and the li 124 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Tweed ; tiH after tlie Noraian Conquest it received yet a further mutilation in the loss of its southern half. The See of St Cuthbert and of the Beomice, driven for a while by the Danes from Lindisfame to Melrose, had been restored to Durham. The country between the Tees and the Tyne, the old debateable border of Deira and Bemicia, was now separated as the county palatine of Durham, and the prince-bishop him- self was regarded as the guardian of the frontier against the Scottish kings: for the Lothians, once an integral part of the Bemician realm, had now become the hostile march of an unfriendly power. Durham still retains one noteworthy mark of its post- Norman origin in the fact that it is always spoken of as the county of Durham, and never as Durhamshire. At the date of its creation as a county the French word had officially superseded the native English term. As for Northumberland itself, it was first finally reduced to its modem limits; and as it was cruelly harried by William, partly in retribution for revolt, and partly as a convenient means of creating a waste between himself and his troublesome vassal, the King of Scots, it almost disappears for a while from English history. It was many ages, indeed, before it fully recovered from the blow ; and its comparatively modem rise in its present forai is attested by the curiously latter-day tone of the name borne by its county town, Newcastle. The exist- ing shire thus lineally represents the old Northumbrian kingdom of which it forms the last central fragment ; while, strangely enough, it also contains the original nucleus of Ida's ancient principality, and the primitive Northumbrian capital of Bamborough. 'I IX EAST NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK East Anglia stands alone among the territorial divisions of England in the completeness and the naturalness of its local boundaries. Even popular language clearly testifies to its real isolation ; for in no other case has the old historical name of an early province survived in common use to the present day, in spite of adverse administrative changes, with the vitality only ensured by natural causes. We still speak of Kent and Sussex, it is true, because Kent and Sussex, though originally separate kingdoms, are still English counties in our own time ; but nobody thinks of talking in everyday life about Wessex or Mercia or Northumbria. The North, the West Country, and the Midlands have superseded the old names for every practical purpose. It is not so, however, with East Anglia. Though the kingdom of the Eastern English has long since been divided into the two shires of Norfolk and Suifolk, the original name continues to be employed in ordinary speech as a con- venient common designation for the united district. It answers to a real geographical entity, while the two shires answer only to comparatively artificial administra- tive subdivisions ; and so it has survived to modem times, long after accidental kingdoms Hke Strathclyde or Wessex have wholly dropped out of popular recollection. The Isle of the Icenians originally formed in fact as "^\ 126 SHIRES AND COUNTIES isolated a district as Anglesey or Man at the present day. Before the fens were drained, it lay completely ringed round by a continuous border of sea, marsh, or river on every side, and it was regarded to some extent as a separate little England by itself. From the central morass of the fenland, south of Ely, the Ouse ran north- ward between swampy levels to the great flats of the Wash ; while the Stour flowed eastward through flooded meadow-land to the vast muddy tidal wastes about Harwich and the Naze. Between the fens and the sea, threaded only by the narrow backbone of cretaceous hills which terminates in the interrupted range of low bluffs from Hunstanton to Cromer, a broad level corn- growing plain covers the whole intermediate slope of East Anglia. From the earliest times this fertile plain must have composed the principality of a separate tribe or confederation, practically inaccessible from any side save the seaward, and thus safe from hostile attacks before the age of extended navigation. When the Romans came the island belonged to the tribe of Icenians ; and in the centre of the Gwent or agricultural champaign [?], close to where Norwich now stands, lay their chief town. Latinised into the familiar form of Venta Icenorum. As usual in the non-manufacturing shires, modem changes have left the main features of this primitive arrangement untouched. The boundaries nf the counties are still roughly the boundaries of the Icenian Isle, while Norwich still forms the natural capital nf the whole region and the cathedral town of the existing diocese. The names, indeed, change ; but the things and even the people still remain. Naturally, an isolated district like the Icenian country was one of those least ready to submit to Roman rule ; and the insurrection of the islanders under Boadicea is the most familiar incident of early British history. But when the native resistance was crushed the Romans set to work at their ordinary task of breaking down the local isolation and binding the fen-girt peninsula to their central organisation by roads and military works. A great causeway bridged over the gap between Colchester .-.^■»,„ EAST 127 and the Icenian stations ; while two of the coast fort- resses for the protection of the provincials from the Saxon and English pirates were established at Brancaster and Burgh Castle. Norfolk and Suffolk formed part of the country under the care of that equivocal officer, the Count of the Saxon Shore ; and as they lay right in the track of long-boats sailing before a fair north-easter from Sleswick and Friesland, we may be reasonably sure that they were more often exposed than any other section of the coast to the incursions of the httle pirate fleets. But as to how or when the English actually settled in this the first insular England we have not even a hint. The country disappears from view in Roman writings as the land of the Iceni ; it reappears three centuries later (in Bede) as the land of the East English ; and of the process which turned it from a British into an English land we hear not a w ord. Henry of Huntingdon, indeed, five or six hundred years afterwards, tells us that many separate chieftains came from " Germany," by which he means Sleswick, and occupied bits of East Anglia on their own account. But Henry of Huntingdon had no better means of information than we have ourselves. At any rate, when the Eastern Counties emerge again upon the historical stage, they emerge as a thoroughly Teutonised kingdom. Mr. Freeman calls them "per- haps the most thoroughly Teutonic realm in Britain " ; and certainly the number of villages bearing English clan-names is far greater there than in any other part of England ; whence we may fairly conclude that the Enghsh settled in the Eastern Counties more thickly than anywhere else. The very name of East Anglia points to a thoroughly Teutonic region. On the other hand. Dr. RoUeston, who united in a singular degree the culture and knowledge of a classically educated archae- ologist and historian with the physical training of an anatomist and anthropologist, always lays great stress upon the fact that skulls of the long Celtic type are now very common in Norfolk and Suffolk, where, as he remarks, we do not hear that Teuton and Briton ever met as enemies when East Anglia became a kingdom. 11 i i 128 SHIRES AND COUNTIES Moreover, Sir Francis Palgrave has collected a number of facts which tend to show that separate bodies of Britons long held out as independent tribes or outlaws among the islands of the fenland. On the whole, it seems not improbable that East Anglia, from its exposed and isolated position, was one of the parts of Britain earliest peopled by the English; that it was thickly settled by the invaders, whose barrows still cover the ground, while their clan-villages still occur abundantly in the local nomenclature ; but that large numbers of the Romanised Britons, or at least of their women and children, were spared as serfs, and so became the ancestors of the existing East Anglian peasantry. Here, as in so many other places, the Celtic blood still seems to mingle unmistakably with the dominant Teutonic element. Under the heathen East English the Icenian Isle once more relapsed into its primitive isolation. A mark or border of waste was indispensable to every Teutonic kingdom ; and the East English, not content with the rivers and the fenland, filled up the breaks in the natural line of meres and cranberry marshes with the great earthwork known as the Giant's or the Devil's Dyke, which turns its outer face towards the fenland. It protected the dry plain at first, no doubt, from the "Welsh robbers " of Ely and the islands, and later still from the Middle English and the Mercians of the interior kingdoms. Whether the division of the people into North Folk and South Folk belongs to this early period or to the later Danish principality may perhaps be doubted. Certainly, we hear only of a single king for the whole of East Anglia during all the purely Anglian era. The heathen English of the principality were converted by Bishop Felix, a Burgundian mission- ary, and the see for the little kingdom was originally fixed at Sidnacester. When Mercia rose to be the leading state in Britain, the East Anglian kings became subject to the Mercian rulers ; and when Wessex, in turn, worked its way to the English hegemony, they acknowledged the supremacy of Winchester. But to ad: EAST 129 the end the native princes remained as immediate governors of their own country. It was not until the Danish invasion that the last East Anglian under-king, Edmund, died a martyr in defence of his dominions ; and his tomb at Bury St. Edmunds became in after- days the holiest shrine of England after that of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Under the Danes, East Anglia was the territory of Guthrum, King Alfred's enemy; and there can be little doubt that a large Scandinavian element was then introduced into the population of the district. Till the recovery of the Danish country by Edmund of Wessex, East Anglia remained the domain of an independent Scandinavian ^^host," and even after- wards it was always a stronghold of Danish feeling. Perhaps it was at the reconquest that the divisions for the North and South Folk were first recognised adminis- tratively, like the neighbouring shires of Bedford and Huntingdon, then recovered from their Danish earls. But in any case they must even earlier have been in use as a convenient practical subdivision of the kingdom ; for the boundaries are formed by two rivers which almost cut asunder the northern and southern halves of the Icenian plain— the Waveney, flowing eastward to the sea at Yarmouth, and a tributary of the Ouse running westward past Thetford to join the main stream below Ely. As to the outlying bit of Norfolk beyond the Ouse, that merely represents the East Anglian half of the debateable mark of fenland, now drained and reclaimed ; the portion as far as the Nen being assigned to Norfolk and the remainder to Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. The origin and growth of the latter county, originally a mere strip of the East Anglian marches, and the last refuge of the independent Britons, demand separate consideration. The history of East Anglia as two modem English shires — the rise of Norwich, with its cathedral and castle ; the agricultural and commercial importance of the counties in mediaeval times ; the export trade in wool from Ipswich and the Orwell to Flanders ; the establishment of the Flemish and Huguenot colonies ; the ecclesiastical annals of the 130 SHIRES AND COUNTIES diocese in exile from the Danes at Dorchester-on- Thames, or restored to Elmham and Norwich; the fishing trade of Yarmouth ; the Abbey and the miracles at Bury — these, though all deeply interesting in them- selves, must necessarily be left out of consideration in tlie attempt merely to account for the origin of the two counties as collective administrative units. From this narrower point of view the interest of East Anglia consists in the fact that it lies intermediate between the shires which are old kingdoms, like Kent or Essex, and the shires which are artificial Danish creations, like Derby and Nottingham. Though the principality was conquered by the Danes, its natural geographical unity still preserved its integrity ; and when it became once more an integral part of the English kingdom it only suffered subdivision into the two perfectly natural halves of Norfolk and Suffolk, instead of being split up into irregular circles round central fortresses. In the neigh- bouring Lincolnshire the old lines are so thoroughly swept away that we can now hardly distinguish the original Lindsey, and have wholly lost all knowledge of the Gegnas. In Mercia, too, they are so irretrievably destroyed that we cannot recover a single one of the primitive tribal States. But in East Anglia they still remain plainly fixed by the hand of nature, and even in places clearly demarcated by definite visible human boundaries. CAMBRIDGESHIRE AND THE ISLE OF ELY The great undrained fen region of eastern England, a mere desolate waste of water-logged marsh, interspersed by a few low islets of glacial boulder clay, must long have been one of the least habitable districts in all Great Britain. Nevertheless, its outskirts still contain many important traces of early occupation and of con- siderable primaeval monuments. The tract which now composes Cambridgeshire evidently belongs by historical connection to the East Anglian island, as a western EAST 131 march or borderland of that insulated kingdom. As early as the Celtic times, the dry land of the county — that is to say, the low chalk-hill district in the south — was almost certainly included in the territory of the Iceni. The Devil's Ditch, which crosses Newmarket Racecourse, and three other prehistoric earthworks in the south-west of the county, all have their ramparts turned towards the Icenian territory, while their fosse lies on the outer or western side: thus showing that they were erected to protect the region from the attacks of a nation living farther westward in the interior of England. The old British track known as the Icen- hild or Icknield Way [whether or not its name means as has been guessed], the '' war-path of the Iceni," also crosses the shire from end to end, and its course is marked throughout by the tumuli and pit-dwellings of the primitive inhabitants. Many local names still pre- serve the memory of these earliest historical Cambridge men. The town of Cambridge itself more probably owes its origin to the Romans, though the great British camp or refuge at Wandlebury, on the summit of the stunted Gogmagogs, no doubt implies the existence of an Icenian village in the valley beneath. Whether Cambridge itself or Grantchester, close by, represents the Roman Camboritum, it is at least certain that Roman stations once occupied both the neighbouring sites. When the English pirates overran Norfolk and Suffolk, they must, in all probability, have conquered the dry southern portion of Cambridgeshire as well, including the two Roman posts, which long after lay waste and uninhabited. But in the northern fenland it seems likely that numbers of Britons held out for a while against the heathen invaders, among the islets and morasses of Ely or Thorney, as the native English six centuries later held out in the self- same fastnesses against the Norman conqueror. Sir Francis Palgrave has collected a number of interesting passages which imply the existence of isolated independent Celtic bands in the fen country to a comparatively late period ; and even Mr. Freeman 182 SHIRES AND COUNTIES admits^ in an unobtrusive footnote, the probability of his conclusion. Indeed, the rules of the thanes guild at Cambridge itself, an Anglo-Saxon document of the eleventh century, make mention of a distinct penalty even then for killing a '^Welshman," whose life was held cheaper than that of an English churl. It seems probable that the dry land in the south formed an integral part of the East Anglian kingdom from the time of its first formation ; while the northern islets were more slowly subdued by a separate English tribe, the South Gyrwas — so called in contradistinction to the North Gyrwas of the Lincolnshire fens ; and these settlers in the marshes retained their own petty kinglets at least till after the period of the conversion to Christianity. The early history of the district, not yet a single complete shire, centres rather round the shrine of Ely than round the then ruined Roman station of Cambridge. The great monastery owed its foundation to one Ethel- thryth, an old English queen whose name has been conveniently simplified by our Latin chroniclers into Etheldreda, or more colloquially still into Awdrey. She was daughter of Anna, king of the East Anglians, and she was given in marriage to his subject prince, Tondberht, king of the South Gyrwas. After her llusband's death she raised a little mixed house for monks and nuns, almost on the very site now occupied by the cathedral ; and from this beginning the wealthy Benedictine establishment of later days took its rise. Etheldreda herself was buried within the church in a marble sarcophagus discovered among the ruins of the Roman station, then a " waste Chester " on the banks of Cam. We hear nothing more of the G3n'was or their kings after the death of Bede, dependent as we are for the subsequent period on the scanty annals of the Winchester Chronicle : but there is no reason to doubt that the district was still ruled by its own petty princes, as vassals of the East Anglian overlord, till the date of the Danish irruption. The Scandinavians seized early upon the almost insular region of Norfolk^ Suffolk^ and EAST 133 Cambridgeshire, and fell with special fury upon the rich religious houses of the Fens. The monks, protected by custom during internal wars, had turned the islets into the best -tilled land in England; and the Danes found more booty in these remote shrines than even in royal towns like York and Tamworth. Not Ely alone, but Peterborough, Thomey, Crowland, and Soham as well, were all destroyed in the first onslaught of the heathen; and their sites lay desolate for many years, till the monasteries were refounded by West Saxon kings or bishops after the EngUsh recovery of East Anglia and the Mercian shires. It was the Danes, apparently, who resuscitated the importance of Cambridge town, so long neglected, and who gave approximately to Cambridgeshire its present artificial boundaries. Perhaps the earliest mention in an EngUsh document of " Grantanbrycge " occurs in the Winchester Chronicle during the reign of Alfred ; when three Danish kings, Guthrum, Oscytel, and Anwend, came southward from Repton with " a mickle host," and "sat there one year." After the Danes had " horsed themselves " and settled down quietly on the soil, such a host, distinct from that which held East Anglia, though doubtless in dependent alliance with it, took up its permanent quarters in the town of Cambridge. The post was a convenient one for making raids into English Hertfordshire, on the direct line for the rich monastery of St. Albans and the merchant commonwealth of London itself: in fact, it was just the sort of place the Danes loved, and it became accordingly the temporary metropolis of one among the many rude httle Scandinavian States which then occupied the whole of the north and the midlands. To judge by analogies elsewhere, we may conclude that the Danes divided out the land among themselves as lords of the manors, and that the territory dependent upon Cambridge was roughly coincident in boundary with the modem shire. For half a century the heathen held sway in Cambridge, and over the patrimony of St. Etheldreda ; but when Edward the Elder engaged \ 134 SHIRES AND COUNTIES in his gallant campaign for the recovery of the conquered districts, Cambridgeshire only held out for a very short time. A single victory secured Essex and East AngUa, in both of which the Danish garrison accepted Edward's supremacy ; and then, says the English Chronicle, " the host that belonged to Grantanbrycge chose him separ- ately for lord and protector, and fastened it with oaths." Seeing that Edward erected the other petty Danish States into shires as soon as they were recovered, we may be pretty sure that he did the same with the territory of the Cambridge host ; and indeed as early as the time of Athelred we find " Grantabrycg-scir " distinctly mentioned by name in the Chronicle as a county. The river has always had a double alter- native title— either as Cam or Granta— and both forms must be very ancient, since the one is enshrined in Camboritum and the other in Grantchester ; but the precise date of the substitution of Cambridge for Grantabrycg, or Grantebridge, is not known with certainty. The Isle of Ely has a peculiar later county history of its own. The monastery was refounded by Bishop Ethelwold, of Winchester, under King Edgar, and was then endowed afresh with large landed property. Its abbots became chiefs of the King's Court up to the time of the Norman Conquest, alternately with those of Glastonbury and St. Augustine's. But after the resistance offered to William by the last English patriots in the Isle, traditionally associated with the exploits of Hereward, though really headed by Edwin and Morkere, the monastery fell into royal disfavour, as a hotbed of anti- Norman insurrectionary feeling. To weaken its influence a new bishopric was erected at Ely, early in the twelfth century, its territory being carved out of the immense diocese of Lincoln, which then stretched from the Humber to the Thames, and the revenues of the see were provided for from those of the monastery. The isle itself became a royal franchise, known as the Liberty of the Bishop of Ely, and was in fact, though not in name, a county palatine. EAST 135 The Bishops ruled as really in this little district as the successors of St. Cuthbert ruled in their larger princi- pality of Durham. The episcopal power was largely curtailed under Henry VIII., but the temporal juris- diction of the Bishop was not wholly abolished until the year 1837. 4 I) ! I I . "■■ww i /,:•- ih CITIES, TOWNS, AND BOROUGHS j^^W INTRODUCTION THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH TOWNS In a new country like America or Australia everybody recognises at once that each town owes its existence at the precise and particular point it occupies to some perfectly definite and obvious causes. New York stands at the land-locked mouth of the Hudson, on one of the finest harbours the world can show. Philadelphia com- mands the open traffic of Delaware Bay. Chicago collects the wheat of the great lake basin. Buffalo has grown up around the elevators which tranship western grain from the lake -going bottoms of Huron and Michigan into the flat barges of the Erie Canal. Mon- treal represents the spot where the navigation of the St. Lawrence begins to be difficult for ocean-going craft on account of the lowest range of rapids. New Orleans gathers on its quays and levees the cotton of all the lower Mississippi flats. In every case, we can point immediately to the exact advantage of situation which has caused great masses of men to aggregate so rapidly around these special centres. The conditions which gave rise to the towns still subsist in full working order, and for the most part continue to operate as attractors of yet larger population. Even when we meet with a purely artificial town, like Washington or Ottawa, we can nevertheless easily understand the motives which led to its being placed in its present odd situation. The American capital represents a compromise between the 140 CITIES AND TOWNS North and the South ; the Canadian capital represents a compromise between the French and the EngUsh province. Everywhere the social, political, or com- mercial causes which brought the towns into existence either remain unaltered or are matters of such recent date that ^eir memory is still fresh in the minds of the people. In England, on the other hand, it is not by any means always so. To be sure we have towns, like Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, and Bristol, whose origin and cause is as clear as that of any bran-new American " city." Nay, we have even a few towns, like Preston, Bolton, Wigan, Bury, and Oldham, which have sprung up almost as rapidly as any mushroom minmg centre among the Colorado Pikes. But many of our oldest and most famous places have now so Httle apparent vitahty, and stand apart so thoroughly from the course of modem EngUsh industrial life, that we almost forget to think they had once a real and obvious raison d'etre, a necessary origin in the fitness of things. The causes which gave them birth have long since passed away, and they now survive in many cases by dint of our pure national conservatism : the town continuing where it is merely because it is a town and has habitable houses which people can occupy. So much is this the case,, indeed, and so largely have the conditions altered, that we often look upon the town as existing for the sake of some ancient accessory; whereas at first, of course, the accessory was placed there because of the town. Chi- chester, and Canterbury, and Lichfield, for example, are now almost purely cathedral cities ; and we usually quite forget that the city was there before the cathedral — that • each of them was first the capital of a heathen English principality, and only afterwards the bishop-stool of a Christian diocese. Oxford and Cambridge are older than their universities ; Lincoln than its minster ; Warwick tLm its castle ; SaUsbury than its very site. Yet if we inquire into the origin of our oldest towns, we can always discover some real reason why they were first put in the places they occupy ; and these reasons generally INTRODUCTION 141 f cast a good deal of interesting side-light on the ancient social history of the country. Some of them took their origin from old agricultural conditions of British and Roman times : they occupied the centre of some wide natural clearing in the forest or they lay at the river- edge of some broad alluvial champaign. Others had their first use in the internal wars of early English times : they were strongholds of the Teuton against the Welsh- man, or border fortresses of the West Saxon against his Mercian foe. Yet others date from the rise of the earliest English commerce, the export wool trade, and represent the old staples of the Plantagenets, among the sheep-feeding chalk downs of the south coast and the eastern shore from Yorkshire to Norfolk. Our oldest ports all looked southward or eastward toward the Con- tinent ; our later ones look westward toward the open Atlantic. Another large class of ancient towns, again, grew up around such monasteries as Bury, Ely, and Peterborough, or around Norman castles like Mont- gomery, Beaumaris, and Alnwick. In every instance the town had once a real meaning and purpose, though it has often gone on existing by mere force of inertia long after the original purpose has utterly died away. It is this continuity with the past that gives so great and inexhaustible an interest to an old civilisation like that of England : it is this that Americans and other strangers from new countries often fail to appreciate in the soil and sentiments of Britain. Every inch of ground has here its story, and rouses an intelligent curiosity in the minds of all its inhabitants. England is an endless and delightful puzzle : she offers us a riddle to solve, a queer custom to account for, a name or a relic to explain, at every turn. Why is Maidstone the county-town of Kent, and Chelmsford that of Essex ? Why does Oxford- shire lie so one-sidedly to its capital, and Leicester stand so centrally to its shire } Why may we say Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, but not Sussexshire, Comwallshire, or Cumberlandshire ? Why is Old Sarum now desolate, while Shaftesbury still caps its waterless hill ? Why is there a Winchester on the site of Venta Belgarum, while V 142 CITIES AND TOWNS Venta Icenorum has died down to a mere P^vinciaj Caistor, and Venta Silurum to a fo'-g^ttf « ^f,' J^'^*^ Why is Anderida still utterly uninhabited, while York and London stand on the sites of Eburacum and Lon- dinium ? These are the questions which naturally pre- sent themselves on every hand m looking at a"y Enghsh shire or any English town. At the same time, the prob- lems aW a town are always somewhat different from tW about a county ; because a t^™*""*! ^i-sion once set up may outUve immense changes in its component partsfand may even become a mere traditiona^ atounis- totive entity, without real organic umty »; genuine separation from its neighbours; whereas a town must always go on attracting and retaining its population, or else it ceases altogether to exist, at least as a corporate and collective whole. Once begun it may go on by means of very different causes from those which deter- mined its first attractiveness ; but some kind of sufficient ground for its existence it must always be "We t"^""^ throughout all its history. Sometimes it begins by be ng a manufacturing place, and ends by being an agncultu^ centre ; sometimes it owes its earliest impulse to its position as the head of navigation on a nver, and traces to later importance to a railway or a coal-mine ; some- times even it sets out as a fortress or a royal re^'dence, and sinks at last into a mere group of pleasant villas, depending for support upon pretty scenery or sunny chmate. Manchester is now a great emporium of piece- Eoods ; but its very name shows its alien ongin, tor it fould never have owed its Roman termination cheHerXo the cotton of South Carolina and Bombay. C^^terbwO^ now exists mainly as the metropolitan city of the Enghsh Church ; but the Roman Durovemum certainly did not depend for its foundation upon the future """«*«« Ethelbert and Augustine, or upon the medieval shnne ot St. Thomas a Becket. Hastings and Brighton were large fishing stations long before they became fashionable water- ■ing-places; Cheltenham was a market town and capital of the Cotswold wool trade long before the discovery of the mineral waters led to the buUding of the Promenade INTRODUCTION 143 and the Spa Houses. Reading was once the clan-centre of the Readingas; now it is a junction on the Great Western, and does an active business in Huntley and Palmer's biscuits. Tamworth once stood a good chance of being the capital of all England; Dorchester-on- Thames and Winchester each in turn ran London close for the same honour; and Westminster has actually carried off the prize, though the outgrowth of the metropolis has now practically merged it into a single town with the City. On the other hand, a few places here and there have never swerved from their first love. London has always mainly depended upon the traffic of the Thames ; Bristol has always been the port of the Avon ; Bath has owed its existence throughout to its hot springs, Yarmouth to its fisheries. Wells to its abbey or cathedral. To unravel in each case the efficient causes at work in producing and maintaining any particular town is a task full of interest and instruction, and one for which English history affords exceptionally abundant materials. 4 1 '■ • I i 1 1 I' ■ t I EAST ST. ALBANS Among tlie uiuliil.itiiiix low tertiary liills which bound the alhivi.il l.oiuloii basin to iiortliward, the fjrcat medisuval Abbey Chiirt-h of St. Albans overlooks the windin«; little valley of the Ver from a faintly-marked ledge or stej) hanging midway between the river and the plateau above. As one gazes across the narrow dell from the site of Verulamium to the square and massive tower of the minster on the ojiposite slope, it is a curi- ous thought that this small fori^otten Hertfordshire town is the molhir-eity of London, and was already the recognised ca|»il;d of the lower 'riiamcs region before London itself yet existed. A large fosse and earthwork, starting from and returning to the stream of the Ver — these Celtic river names have a wonderful vitality — and encircling on its way the existing town, together with a space of some fom* scpiare miles, probably marks the site of the old straggling Jh'itish metroj)olis : a mere stockaded village, into whose wide area all the women and cattle of the tribe could be huddled hastily for defence in time of war. Here doubtless stood the vppidum of the Cassii, and of their chieftain C'assivel- launus, as CVsar Latinises the name ; and here the Romans gained their first fruitless victory over the British prince. Certainly Verulamium, the village on the Ver, was the capital of his successor Tasciovanus, '•"■'•'**"'^ 'i ' .' ! i a i l ■ "ii i iw iiii||iiiii i nn piii w i fpN m inumi n -.<-,T< -„„_ ^___ TTK; I II I III 1 1 1 1 ■ II mm\ I : 4>.. EAST 145 'i^>l II I , . f! ^i 'ij ■ !ii » m I- » ! ll - r 1 1 I, . . Ni: I ' » 1 ,11 > I ' * t J lii: :1: '^ J ■ ! J?' i I. r i \: :^ 14G CITIES AND TOWNS Mr. Green, however, observes, the importance of towns ill the llonian provinee was purely niiUtary. While the conquerors were mainly engaged in reducing the dis- tricts nearest to Gaul, Colchester, Verulam, and London were the greatest of Roman stations ; as the tide of war rolled away northward and westward, (Chester and Cicr- leon became the seats of the legions, and York the capital of the entire province. Even in the south itself, Verulam nmst slowly but surely have dwindled before the rising imj)ortance of London, the port on the greatest eastward river and the fortress that blocked the passage of the Thames to the Teutonic pirates. Nevertheless, it was during these later Roman days that the event occurred which has given the town its mcdiicval importance and its modern name. During the persecution of Diocletian, according to the well- known legend told us by Bede, one Albanus, a Roman resident, gave shelter to a hunted Christian clerk. Converted by his guest, he assumed the clerical cloak and gave himself up in his stead to his jiursuers. He was led out from the inimidpiinn across the Ver to a hillock on the opposite slope, and there, with the usual miraculous accompaniments, was beheaded for the faith. When Germanus of Auxerre came to Britain to put down the Pelagian heresy, he raised a wooden chapel over the martyr s remains ; and his own name is still conmiemorated in that of St. German's Farm. Such is the one legend of the older Ikitish Christianity which has coiner down to lis across the blank abyss of early Knirlisli healhiiuloni. Its mere survival is a point full of historical significance. The tale was already current at Verulamium in the early part of the fifth century, a hundred years after the event it describes ; and it was handed down in part to Rede by the Ihitish monk Gildas, who himself saw the full brunt of the heathen Saxon invasion in the Midlands. When the East Saxon pirates swarmed across the low hills north of still unconquered London to Verulam they fell upon the Roman station and the church of the protomartyr, a little time before the period when Gildas I . m m u mm mm'ipmf^gmm ■ ■ ^ f rl '•^'t EAST 147 wrote his despairing jeremiad over the destruction of Britain. The rough sea-wolves from the pathless cran- berry marshes of Sleswiek were astonished at the massive walls and paved roads of the Roman city. Such works must needs have been the handicraft of the Watlings, those Teutonic giants who laid the glittering track of the Milky AVay across the vault of heaven. So they called the city W\atlinga-ceaster, the caslnmi of the Watlings ; and that is one of the names which it bears in Bede's history, though the older name survived side by side with the barbaric iiniovation under the slightly altered guise of Verlama-ceaster. So, too, they knew the paved road which led them on to blockade the doomed city of London by the name of the Watling Street ; and that name the Roman causeway still pre- serves throughout its whole course across the Midlands of England. Whether Verulam then lay waste, and if so how long, we cannot tell with certainty. But there is no good reason to suppose that it was ever deserted during the early iMjglish period. It is clear that the memory of St. Alban never died out at Veru- lam. For two centuries we know nothing of the ])lace ; and then, long afler the conversion of the l^nglish, during the last days of the inde])endent petty kingdoms, we hear that Ofla of Mercia determined to build an abbey at the s])ot where Alban was beluadctd, on the knoll of Holmhurst, in honour of the old British martyr. Place and j)erson were both significant. Mercia was the most Welsh of all the F'nglish ])rinci])alities : OfTa liimself had jiisL eoiupK-n-d Powyslmid, iind iiu'orporati'd a large fresh body of Welsh tributaries; his ancestors had been in close alliance with native Welsh jmnces ; and it was probably to mark the sense of unity between his Welsh and lilnglish subjects that he determined to raise a great minster in place of the little church which covered the remains of the most famous martyr of the older race. On the other hand, he had lately annexed London and Kent to his dominions ; and it was a wise piece of policy to place a body of hospitable Mercian monks on the connecting line of Watling Street, near if I 1 148 CITIES AND TOWNS llie point wlurc llic old IvisL ^nxnn and Mercian tcrri- torits niarchcd lo'-tllH r. Olla's cluncli and Jk-ncdictine monastery, richly endowed with neijrhbourinjr land, soon grew into jjjreat importance. The people of Vcrii- km gradually deserted their Uonian walls, and came to live under the j)rotection of St. Alban and his great minster. Shortly before the Norman Concpicst, Abbot Eadmer collected materials for rebuilding the minster on a larger scale. But the troubles of Harold's time ]nit a stop to the ])roject ; and when William crossed the Thames at Wallingford, and marched upon London by the Watling Street, the nujuks bravely attempted to stoj) him, abnost single-handed, by erecting wooden barricades u[)on the road. The fust Norman abbots carried out the scheme of reluiilding the minsUr ; and a large part of the existing abbey, including the tower and transepts, belongs to this great architectural ))eriod. The materials were largely derived from the ruins of Verulam. Strangely enough, the shrine of the Hritish saint became one of the most popular in all JMigland, and rich pilgrims from London brought it an abundance of gifts. The town which grew lip around the abbey was a typical instance of the monaslie burgh. Indeed, throughout all its his- tory St. Albans (as distinguished from old Verulam) has been wholly dependent upon ecclesiastical arrange- ments. The soil was the abbot's ; the burgesses were his men ; the town was entirely at his mercy, as the barons' towns were at the mercy of their lords. End- less disputes arose about the abbot's monopoly of grinding corn; about his penny for hunting, fishing, wood-cutting, and jiasturage. In Wat Tyler's rebellion the peasants and craftsmen of St. Albans rose against the monastery; and one William Grindecobbe wrung a charter from Richard II., with which he burst at the head of his followers into the abbey cloisters, and summoned the abbot to deliver up the papers Avhich kept the townsmen in servitude. The mob broke the millstones, which visibly symbolised the hateful mono- poly, and divided them into little pieces as souvenirs of ii ■ i- EAST 149 the revolt. Ihit in the reaction which followed Wat Tyler's death, William (Irindecoblx* was hanged, with many of his followers, and the hastily granted charter was at once rescinded. Here, as elsewhere in J^^ngland, the freedom of the serf was won slowly and impercep- tibly — not by any single administrative measure. Jn later days, as wealth increased and the value of land rose, the minster became innnensely rich, and coinited Wolsey himself among its abbots. The great church bore its own varied architectural history on its face till its recent restoration, beginning with the Norman tower built by Paul of Caen from Roman bricks, and ending with the perpendicular portions erected just before the dissolution. At that barbarous jieriod, all the conven- tual buildings exce|)t the abbey church and gateway were destroyed ; and even tlw^ great minster itself would have been pidled down had not the burgesses purchased it from the grantee for their own parish church. Like all purely monastic towns, St. Albans declined after the dissolution ; and to this day it centres entirely round the now restored abbey. Lord 15acon, who took his two titles from St. Albans and Verulam, had his seat at Gorhambury, close by. To-day the town lives on mainly by j)urc vhi ificiiicr, and by the nearness to London which may yet make it into a considerable place. The two names of V^erulani and St. Albans are in themselves, perhaps, fuller of historical suggestiveness than any others in the whole expanse of modern England. COLCIIKSTKR On the northward sloj)e of a gentle valley between two lines of Eocene hills, not far from the fl;it eastern coast of Essex, lies a small, s(juare, slee[)y town, girt round even now by Roman walls — a town which may lay claim to be, with one exception ])robably, the oldest in all England. St. Albans can alone boast a greater antiquity than Colchester; and even at St. Albans there is not the same pervading sense of continuity with the remote 'a.> m if'-: 1 :. *l I V ■J- !-■■ Ml m ^:h • mr 150 CITIES AND TOWNS past as in the quiet Essex market-town which still bears the Roman title of the colony as an integral part of its modern name. No other inhabited place nearer to us than the mouldering white Proven9al cities that cap the dry hills of the Rhone valley has preserved throughout so much of its ancient Roman aspect as Colchester. You drive up from the Mile End Railway Station through a straggling modem suburb — that inevitable outgrowth of the railway system — and enter North Hill by a gap which represents the original gate in the walls of Suetonius Paulinus. Thence, as you go through the town, you pass stage by stage upward through all the centuries of English history. The High Street leads you to the Norman castle keep, ruined in the civil wars of the Commonwealth ; and without the walls on the other side lie the mediaeval remains of St. Botolph's Priory and the scanty rehcs of St. John's Abbey. The Botanic Gardens bear to this day the name of the Crutched Friars ; while a long straight street beyond the east boundary leads over a small hill to the old port of Hythe, once, as its name implies, the busy haven for the woollen manufactures of Colchester, and still the head of navigation for a few coal -boats on the lazy oyster-fishing estuary of the Colne. Even the town of Suetonius, however, was not the earhest Colchester of all. The site has been one of strategical importance in all times, from those of the flint-weaponed men who raised the Grimes Dyke beyond Lexden, to those of the modem camp and the cavalry barracks which now cover the high ground south of the borough. Colchester forms the natural centre of the Essex coast-land. It stands in the corner of a peninsula, enclosed on the north by the River Colne, flowing originally through a swampy bottom, and on the south by a smaller stream which still bears the strange and suggestive title of the Roman River. The neck of this peninsula, between the flanking swamps, was guarded from primitive times by a long line of rude earthworks, usually attributed to the Britons of Caesar's age, but really shown to be of neoUthic origin by the character EAST 151 \ V of the flint implements and other associated remains. Over the wide space between these limits — adopted no doubt by later races — stretched perhaps the British camp of refuge, known from its chief height as Camalo- dunum. But whether that original British fortress occupied the same site as the Roman colony of like name may be reasonably doubted. A good local archaeo- logist has placed it at Lexden; and the claims of Maldon to be the primitive Camalodunum must not be overlooked. The Celtic word so Latinised by our authorities must have sounded really something like Cmaldun [?], and Maeldun is the earUest English form of Maldon in the Chronicle. [The god Camalos is anyhow the patron deity of this fort.] When Caesar visited Britain the leading native tribe [in the south-east] was that of the Trinobantes [or Trinovantes], or men of modem Essex (including Middlesex and Hertfordshire); and their king, Tasciovanus, shortly afterwards fixed his chief camp at Verulam, or St. Albans. His son, Cuno- belinus — Shakspeare's CymbeHne — removed the clan capital to the first Camalodunum, wherever that may have been — certainly a dun or irregular stock- aded hill fortress of the common early Celtic type. Coins bearing his name and that of the town are not uncommon. After the great campaign of Aulus Plautius, the Trinovantes were subdued, and Camalo- dunum was immediately occupied by the Romans. If Maldon, however, was really the British capital, then the Roman colony, founded sixteen years later, though it bore the same name, must have been erected on a site thirteen miles distant as the crow flies — a case which may be paralleled with that of old and new Sarum, or old and new Carthage. No other supposition equally harmonises the conflicting claims of Maldon and Colchester; for though the latter is undoubtedly Colonia by material continuity, the former is almost as clearly [?] Camalodunum by etymological identity. The first Roman Colonia, Camalodunum, though an unwalled town, seems to have been a place of some dignity as " an image of Roman civilisation.'* It had a 152 CITIES AND TOWNS EAST 153 temple of Claudius, statues of Victory and of Nero, and even a theatre, probably on the site of the semicircular excavation near the Grimes Dyke, west of Lexden, now popularly known as King Coel's Kitchen. But when the Iceni of Norfolk and Suffolk began their great insurrection under Boadicea, they jwured down upon the defenceless Roman colony and completely blotted out the new Camalodunum with all its Italian [and Italianate] inhabitants, estimated at 70,000 [?] persons. The victory of Suetonius restored the Roman authority ; and the conqueror rebuilt Camalodunum as a fortified post on its present site, a little to the east of the first city. The rectangular walls which Suetonius then laid out still enclose the modem Colchester on almost every side. They consist of alternate courses of brick and 4iWlliw>* liiiii in iiiiiiig NORTH 165 official] : and indeed the continuity with Roman civil- isation and Roman Christianity was doubtless nowhere more complete than in the city of Constantine and of Eborius. Wilfrith introduced glass for the minster windows, and covered its roof with lead ; both acts implying a continued or renewed connection with the continent, doubtless by the mouth of the Ouse. For several generations the town formed the capital of the leading English kings : and even after Mercia had risen to the hegemony in Britain under OfFa, it must still have ranked as the largest and most civilised city in the island. But when the heathen pirates from Denmark swooped down upon defenceless Christian England, as the heathen English themselves had swooped down earlier upon defenceless Christian Britain, York again lay right in the way of their sea-snakes, swarming up the open Humber mouth to sack the wealthy shrines of [the district]. After a few preliminary harryings of Wearmouth and other monasteries, an or- ganised Danish host fell at last, during the disastrous reign of the first Athelred in Wessex, upon York itself. [Three] sea-kings, [Halfdene], Ingwar, and Ubba, led the host up the Humber stream ; and they found a pair of rival Northumbrian princes at that moment engaged in fight- ing for the throne of York. The burghers, making terms with the heathen, admitted them within the Roman walls. The rival kings fell upon the town, and were defeated by the Danes with great slaughter. Halfdene, Ingwar, and Ubba at once proceeded to [" rope out "] the lands of [the northern kingdom] among their followers, and York city [lay] for at least 60 years in the hands of the Danes. A second period of darkness supervenes, during which we are left to decipher the local history from the scanty allusions of Norse sagas and the rude coins of the Danish kings. A regular Scandinavian dynasty ruled in the city during all that time, though the archbishops continued their succession undisturbed side by side with the heathen kings, and apparently exercised some sort of independent jurisdiction over the Christian English burghers. When Edward the Elder reached York in / 186 CITIES AND TOWNS Hi great campaigns for the recoveiy of the north, Ragnald, the local Danish king, acknowledged his supremacy and did homage to him (if we may thus early employ the language of feudaUsm) ; but Danish underkings still reigned at York as vassals of the West Saxon overlord, till on the death of Sihtric, a little later, Athelstan annexed Northumbria to his own immediate dominions. Even so, the Danish element remained very powerful throughout the north : the wicking ships made the Humber their chief port of entiy ; and under Edmund the rebellious men of York once more chose Anlaf of Ireland, one of the Dublin Northmen, for their king. Indeed, the renewed barbarism of Yorkshire throughout all this period is very conspicuous; the Danish colonisation had been powerful in effect, if not in numbers, and York remained thoroughly Danish in spirit up to the date of the Norman conquest — a trusty Scandinavian outpost in the very heart of Britain. The Northmen had completely undone the work of the Romans. After the Enghsh reaction under Dunstan broke down, the Danes once more began their ceaseless incursions. In the reign of Athelred the Redeless they stormed Bamborough, and sailed again up Humber mouth. There, in the midst of the old Danish king- dom, they found Earl Uhtred and the men of York ready to fraternise with them. The north, indeed, pre- ferred the kindred Scandinavian to the West Saxon stranger. Swegen Forkbeard and Cnut his son, starting from this secure and friendly basis, soon completed the conquest of all England. Even after the Scandinavians were fairly expelled, a generation later, York kept up its old position as the natural headquarters of their race. The town was thronged with Danish merchants; and Earl Siward himself was a Dane at heart as by birth. When Harold Hardrada of Norway came to attack Harold son of Godwin, just before William's invasion, he landed in the old Scandinavian stronghold of Northumbria, and was defeated at Stamford Bridge, not far from York. After the Norman conquest itself, indeed, before the nation had yet learned that its relations must hence- \ NORTH 167 forth lie with Normandy and the Romance civilisation of the south, not with Denmark and the Scandinavian barbarism of the north, Swegen the Dane brought his fleet into the Humber mouth, and roused all England as one man in the last great unsuccessful struggle against the Norman rule. With the Norman conquest, however, the fate of York as an independent capital was sealed, and it sank of necessity into the second place, as local metropolis of the north; while Winchester, London, and Westminster became the acknowledged royal cities of the new dynasty. Its later history deserves and requires separate treatment ; but the victory of Hastings naturally closes the first great chapter in the annals of York. The flagged footway leading round the modem promenade of the city walls marks the inhabited area of York at the date of the Norman conquest, and shows that the town must even then have been almost as large as it is at the present day. But, judging from the number of houses returned in Domesday, its popu- lation may not have exceeded seven thousand persons. Of course, William's victory in Sussex by no means necessarily implied the immediate submission of the lands beyond the Humber; for England was yet far from being consolidated into a single firmly -united whole. The possession of London and Winchester secured, indeed, the obedience of the Saxon south ; but York might still hope to become the separate capital of an independent Danish north. The supre- macy of the old Roman city died hard. It was not until a year after his victory at Hastings that the Conqueror marched against the organised English and Danish resistance in York. Edgar Atheling was there to repre- sent the kingly Hne of Wessex, with the Mercian princes of the house of Leofric, earls severally of the Midlands and the North ; backed up by Gospatric, the native lord of Enghsh Bemicia. As usual, however, the resistance crumbled away before William's approach, and he occupied the city without serious difficulty. It was then that he raised the first Norman castle on the 168 CITIES AND TOWNS site of the British dun and the Roman fortress, though hardly any trace now remains of this eariiest mediaeval stronghold. Shortly afterwards, on a sHght insurrec- tion, he built a second castle on Baile Hill, beyond the Ouse, near the modem House of Correction. Still it must never be forgotten that Yorkshire even at that date remained essentially Danish in blood and feeUng; and when in the succeeding year Swegen of Denmark led his fleet into the Humber and up to the gates of York, the whole North rose to welcome him. Three thousand Normans who formed the garrison of the two castles were attacked and slaughtered ; and in their frantic attempts to fire the neighbouring buildings in self-defence they set the city in flames, which swept away most of its wooden houses, as well as the old minster, erected during the eariier days of Offa. It is to this fire, doubtless, that we must set down for the most part the destruction of the Roman walls and of that " Roman magnificence " which Alcuin saw still sur- viving in the York of his own time. William swore revenge, per splendorem Dei, and went northward forthwith on his mission of vengeance. He bought off Swegen by a bribe ; and then, after securing his rear, proceeded to that memorable harrying of Northumbria, which left the north, from Humber to Tweed, a waste for centuries to come. York was effectually subdued : the Danes never again appeared as a factor in English politics ; and the relative position of north and south was reversed till the great industrial revolution of the present century once more turned the tide of wealth and population towards the coalfields of the West Riding and the Lancashire cotton country. Mediaeval York consisted of a pentagon lying within the existing walls, which surround it on eveiy side save where the marshes of what is now Foss Island (still liable to floods) proved a sufficient natural defence for the long gap between St. Cuthberi:'s and the Red Tower Although most of the present masonry is i-dwardian, fragments of Norman and even of Roman work occur abundantly in places. The Castle and NORTH 169 Baile Hill guarded the entrance by the Ouse, and effectually prevented the further interference of the northern invaders. Thomas of Bayeux, the first Nor- man archbishop, rebuilt his burnt cathedral from the ground ; but little now remains of his great work. The existing minster was erected at different times, piece- meal, by partial demolitions and rebuildings of the Norman cathedral between that time and the fifteenth century. On the whole, in spite of the slow recovery of the north from William's desolation, York still main- tained its lessened dignity as the second capital of England; and the proud Leonine inscription on the chapter-house, — Ut rosa Jlos Jlorwn^ sic est domus ista domorum, — shows the exalted notions which its citizens continued to entertain of their own importance. The existence of a Jewry is always a clear proof of considerable commercial activity during the Middle Ages ; and the King's Jews had, as everybody knows, their own quarter in York, long designated by the name of Jubbergate ; that is to say, the gate or street of the Jew-bar — a title now superseded by that of Market Street. Here the Jewish merchants and bankers lived in a degree of prosperity which scandalised the monks of St. Mary's Abbey and the soldiers of the castle ; and when during the first frenzy of the Crusades an English mob began the suicidal work of exterminating the only capitalists and financiers whom the country then pos- sessed, the Jewry of York met with the most terrible fate of any in England. In that strange siege, too familiar to need description, the Conqueror's castle was almost entirely destroyed; and the present massive keep, known as Clifford's Tower, dates accordingly only from the days of Edward I. In the same reign the Jews were finally expelled from England, and with them went a large part of the trade of York. Mean- while, events had been gradually lessening the com- mercial importance of the city on the Ouse. It had from the beginning two main reasons for its existence : 170 CITIES AND TOWNS its situation in the very heart of the Plain of York, which ensured its position as an agricultural centre; and its command of a navigable river, the chief inland port of the Humber mouth. The first of these advan- tages it can never lose ; the second it was fast losing by the combined influence of social and natural causes. Originally it had stood to the Humber as London stood to the Thames ; but while the north was ruined by war and given over to anarchy, especially during the Wars of the Roses, the Ouse was slowly silting up, and at the same time ships were coming daily to demand a greater draught of water. Thus the port of the Humber shifted imperceptibly — first to Ravenspur in Holdemess, a famous mediaeval harbour; and after Ravenspur was swallowed up by the sea, to the place which mariners then knew by the old-fashioned name of Kingston-upon-Hull. Nevertheless, York continued to possess great administrative and military importance as the capital of the north; while it never ceased to rank as the chief agricultural centre of the largest fertile plain in the island. There can be very Uttle doubt that down to the days of Charles I., at least, it might fairly claim to be considered the second city of England. The Reformation somewhat diminished the relative importance of all ecclesiastical towns ; and York was not only the metropolis of the northern archiepiscopal province, but also the seat of St. Mary's Abbey and of several smaller conventual establishments. Nowhere was discontent at the changes imposed by royal authority greater than in Yorkshire, where the trading element was still very weak, and the territorial and monastic element exceedingly strong. The Parliament of the North, which met at Pontefract and decreed the Pilgrimage of Grace, was backed by all the nobles of Yorkshire, as well as by the great abbots of Kirkstead, of Fountains, and of Jervaulx. After its suppression, the semi-independence of the country beyond the Trent was admitted in the institution of President of the Great Council of the North, who had his residence in the picturesque building still known as the King's NORTH 171 Manor, and standing on the site formerly occupied by the Abbot's House of St. Mary's. Later still, when Charles L fled from London, he went at once to York as the second capital of his dominions. Meanwhile, the tide of affairs was abeady beginning slowly to turn, and the north was putting itself in readiness to recover its lost commercial and political supremacy. The m- dustrial stagnation and social anarchy, which had long paralysed its energies, were gradually passing away before the peaceable and anti-feudal regime of the business-like Tudors. Even in Elizabeth's time, Man- chester was manufacturing friezes; Halifax was the seat of a rising cloth trade ; and York had become the nascent centre of a considerable woollen industry. In the days of the Stuarts, Hull was a great port and the second arsenal of the kingdom. Throughout the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries the north contmued step by step to overtake the south ; and with the nine- teenth century steam and coal completed the industrial revolution. Yet York failed to keep up with the rest of the shire in its onward march. In the days of the Georges it sank into a quiet and respectable archi- episcopal town, a county centre, and a little local metropolis in its way, where the neighbouring squires often spent the winter ; but trade drifted to the coal country or the water - powers ; and Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Wakefield, Huddersfield, and Bamsley —once, as their very names declare, mere clearings in the wealds of Hallamshire or the West Riding— rose to supersede their old Roman and British mother-city. With the growth of the railway system things have changed again a little for the better. York has grown into a great modem junction-station ; while still more recent alterations have turned it once more into a mili- tary centre for the north. But its [proud] position is now perhaps irrevocably lost. Hull has carried away its shipping trade, and coal has shifted the heart of York- shire from the lowland agricultural plain to the dales and uplands of the West Riding. Yet no town of England, not even London itself, still contains so much i^***»^Mi^ Mi si CITIES AND TOWNS NORTH 173 of historical interest as ancient Eburacum and modem York. From the Celtic dun beneath Clifford's Keep, through the Roman interior of the multangular Tower, the Norman work of the walls, and the mediaeval turrets of Micklegate Bar (where once mouldered the head of the last native Prince of Wales), down to the perpendicular Lady Chapel, the Elizabethan Manor, the Georgian street architecture, and the modem rail- way station, every stage of British history finds abundant representatives within its limits. Even now, popular saws have not wholly forgotten its former greatness; for, says the rhyming proverb — York was, London is, and Lincoln will be The greatest city of the three. NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE The youngest among English cities may also claim to rank as one of the oldest among English towns. Whether a Celtic stockaded stronghold ever occupied the site of the Norman keep at Newcastle is still a moot point; but at least from Roman days downward the deep gorge at the tidal head of the Tyne has almost uninterruptedly afforded the site for a miUtary station or a trading burgh of considerable importance. It was not coals that first made Newcastle. When the Romans spread their conquests in Britain as far north as the narrow neck of land between the Forth and the Clyde, they ran a great causeway northward between York and the Caledom'an wall ; and at the point where Hadrian's road crossed the Tyne, the tete-du-pont of the Pons JE\ii (so-called from the Emperor's gentile name) must naturally have formed the nucleus for a town, which rapidly rose to be the earliest capital of all Tynedale. Its alternative title of Ad Murum was due to its position «l the point where the north road intersected the lower wall between Carlisle and Wall's End. Relics of the Roman town are now scanty ; and the silence 6f later Northumbrian historians as to its occupation by the English would lead to the belief that it scarcely reached anything more than local and military import- ance. When the first Enghsh pirates bore down upon the exposed provincial coast before a favouring north- east wind from Sleswick, and founded their colony of Bryneich or Bemicia, the Land of the Braes, between Tyne and Forth, the new chieftains did not fix their principal capital at Newcastle, but on Ida's craggy promontory of Bamborough, about the centre of the little principaHty. As the Tyne now formed their boundary against the Deirans of Yorkshire and Durham to the south, the lords of Bamborough could hardly be anxious for the maintenance of the Roman road ; and though we cannot know with certainty whether they actually broke down the bridge, in pursuance of that policy of isolation which made every early English principaHty surround itself with a mark of waste border- land, or whether they merely allowed it to fall out of repair, it is at least undeniable that the communication was long interrupted, and that the road or " gate," as our ancestors called it, came to a dead halt by the banks of Tyne, at the spot which still bears the significant name of Gateshead — that is to say, the road's end. During this intermediate period of heathen anarchy, it is very probable that the station of Ad Mumm became quite depopulated, or that it was reduced to a few huts of fishermen and crofters, who must often have been exposed to border raids from the men of the debateable district south of the river. With the introduction of Christianity into the country of the braes, the deserted site by the Tyne began once more a fresh career as a habitation of civilised men. It was at first a royal vill of the North- umbrian princes; but the Church in the north laid special claim to all the remains of Roman buildings ; and a body of monks was granted the old station of Ad Murum, which now took from them the newer title of Muneca-ceaster or Monkchester — a form that would, doubtless, have been modernised, on the usual local 174 CITIES AND TOWNS analogies, as Muncaster. The older name survived as an alternative in that of At Wall, once given to the existing suburb of Pandon. Still, the monastery seems to have been a small one, for it is seldom mentioned in the northern annals, and its border position must have made it very insecure, except during the times when Bemicia and Deira were temporarily united under a single ruler. When the heathen Danes once more descended upon Christian Northumbria, in the eighth century, Tynemouth was one of the first spots to bear the brunt of their attack ; while Jarrow and Lindis- fame, the great ecclesiastical centres of early Bemicia, were both sacked and demolished after the merciless Scandinavian fashion. Monkchester could hardly fail in those evil days to meet with the same fate as its sister-monasteries. For the most part, however, the Danes spread but little in the harbourless country between Tyne and Forth, which continued to acknow- ledge the sway of Christian English masters in Bamborough, even while heathen Scandinavians bore rule in the archiepiscopal city of York itself. The Dane, in fact, cared little for a country with no fiords or tidal inlets. Yet even so, Monkchester must have stood so close to the Scandinavian border that it could hardly have been a safe dwelling-place for Englishmen, exposed as it was to constant eruptions by the open navigable waters of the Tyne. By the days of the Norman conquest, Monkchester still remained apparently a mere village of monks and fishermen. When William returned from his terrible harrying of Northumbria— a hanying so complete that manor after manor is entered in Domesday with the laconic description, "waste," "waste," "waste" he was stopped for a while by a flood on the Tyne, at the place where Hadrian's bridge had once made the transit so easy, and where Stephenson's vast structure now carries the railway trains hung high in air above the grimy and smoky abyss below. But after the harrying there was Httle material for the natural growth of a lipwii left in Northumbria, and Monkchester might have NORTH 175 shared the fate of Porchester or of Uriconium had not Robert Curthose, on his way back from an expedition against the Scotch, decided to guard the passage of the river by a castle, and, if one may judge from the cursory expression of a later chronicler, to secure communi- cations by a bridge as well. The castle was hastily reared above the steep side of the gorge, and from it the trading town, which soon grew up clinging to the slope under its walls, received its modem -sounding name of Newcastle ; for the older station rather occupied the site of Pandon. No part of this earliest building is now discoverable ; the existing remains belong to the later Norman castle erected under Henry II. It was always the fate of Newcastle to be a border town, and this fact alone checked the development of its natural resources and the utilisation of its splendid position throughout the Middle Ages. The castle became the principal border fortress against the Scotch during those troublous times when every farmhouse in Northumber- land was a fortified peel-tower and every farmer a raiding moss-trooper. After the revolt of Mowbray under William Rufus, the earldom of Northumberland merged in the Crown ; but it was again granted out by Henry I. to David of Scotland, and for a whole century the county passed in a perpetual see-saw from the real or nominal sway of one king to that of the other. Through- out the Scotch wars of the Edwards, Newcastle was a constant rendezvous and base of operations for the EngUsh army ; and, on the other hand, the neighbour- ing population were often compelled to take refuge within the walls of the castle from the forays of the Scotch freebooters. Even as late as the great Civil War, the Scotch army became masters of Newcastle, where they kept King Charles a prisoner until they sold him to the English Parliament. The curiously one-sided posi- tion of the county town, [barely] paralleled in any other shire, is doubtless due to the natural choice of the safest and most strongly fortified post in the whole county as the local metropolis. Nevertheless, in spite of border warfare and constant .11 1 M 176 CITIES AND TOWNS insecurity for life and property, the value of the Tyne with its navigable water-way made the town struggle on as a commercial centre all through the long centuries of raids and moss-trooping. The company of merchant adventurers of Newcastle early began to trade on their own account with the great staple at Antwerp, chiefly in fells and country produce. Their houses were for the most part built in the old Cloth Market ; but at a later date they began to straggle down the slope towards the water s edge in the steep street still known as the Side ; and the narrow chares, or alleys of steps which climb the dirty but picturesque flank of the hill, prove how anxious were the burgesses and goodmen to keep their wares well within the protection of the castle garrison. The grand tower of St. Nicholas's church shows the increasing wealth of the town in the four- teenth century. Under the Lancastrian kings trade began to take a wider sweep, and Sir Robert Umfreville did so much for the commerce of Newcastle that he gained the name of Robin Mendmarket; while Roger Thornton, the local Whittington of the same period, is still gratefully remembered in many a pithy Tyneside proverb. How early coal began to be mined in the neighbourhood it is impossible to say exactly, but the industry was already well established in the fifteenth century. From that time Newcastle has continuously grown in wealth and population with the general growth of Enghsh manufactures. The lead mines, the great coal-field, the iron-works, the ship-buUding trade, and the navigable river now form, of course, its true raisons d^etre. The coal extends over eight hundred square miles, and a large part of the output finds an exit by the railways and collier ships of Newcastle. Before the days of steam this port was almost its sole means of egress, and the old name of sea-coal bears witness to the only way in which it long arrived at the London market. Until the present century, however, the town still continued to consist mainly of the narrow chares along the gorge of the Tyne, and little was done in the way of improving its comfort or sightliness. The intro- NORTH 177 duction of railways gave it its most striking feature at the present day, the immense high-level bridge which hangs so lightly across the gorge ; while about the same time Grainger's cold but handsome buildings in the new town metamorphosed the appearance of Newcastle as it is now to be seen ; though even to this day the visitor can still find himself suddenly transported to the Middle Ages if he chooses to explore the close wynds and narrow staircases about the Side and Sandhill. It brings the two extremes of English history into yet more incongruous juxtaposition when we remember that our modem best Wallsend derives its name from the terminal station on the great Roman wall at Segedunum, and that the large sister-town of Gateshead is still called after the gap in the north road at the broken bridge of Hadrian. MANCHESTER AND SALFORD Between the dense forest or wilderness of the Pen region and the sea, a wooded tract of undulating red land once subsided slowly into the alluvial flats of the low-lying district which long bore the strange descriptive title Between Mersey and Ribble. This wild western slope of Lancashire was until yesterday the most desolate and desert country in all Britain. From time imme- morial woodland spread over its whole expanse, and a few clearings here and there in the thick scrub alone gave tokens of occupation by early man. One of the most ancient among these backwood settlements was the primitive British hamlet of Manchester, which stood in a corner where the limpid forest-brook of the Medlock — now blar-k as ink with the refuse of suburban dye-works — fell unpolluted into the lonely water of Irwell, not far below the modem bridge at Knott Mill. The site still bears its very antique title of Castlefield, far away at the opposite end of Deansgate from the cathedral and Market Street, which formed the busy centre of the later mediaeval town. A rude stockaded N I I 178 CITIES AND TOWNS fort enclosed the village, triangularly guarded after the fashion of early Celtic strongholds by the confluent streams on two sides, and by a belt of primaeval forest on the third. For some time after the Roman conquest of south-eastern Britain, these wild northern woods were left unmolested ; but when at last Agricola broke the power of the Brigantians in the fertile vale of York, he annexed all the surrounding country from sea to sea as part of his new province of Maxima Caesariensis. Then with characteristic Roman boldness he drove a great causeway through the very heart of the Pen mountains, from his main strategic centre at Diva, our Chester — the City of Legions, as the Britons called it — across the moors by Rochdale, to join the main north road from London and Lincoln at the important station of Isurium (Aldborough) [or Calcaria], not far from the new provincial capital at York. The route passed by the native village on Castlefield, and the Roman engineers, as usual, took advantage of the site to strengthen the shapeless and irregular Celtic fortress into a rectangular miUtary station on their own model. Parts of the wall with which they enclosed their fort were visible as late as the first half of the present century ; while Roman remains and coins have at various times been plentifully disinterred in the neighbourhood of Castle Quay. Mancunium is the form of the name handed down on doubtful authority, and usually followed in modem times. But no student of local etymology can doubt for a moment that the variant Mamucium given in the Antonine Itinerary is really the correct native word, as shown by the intermediate early English forms. The coins [found here] date from Nero to Constantine ; and the Roman occupation must here have lasted for about four hundred years. After the withdrawal of the legions, Mamucium suffers the usual eclipse for a couple of centuries, during which we know absolutely nothing of its local history. But as the surrounding country formed part of the native Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde and Cumbria, which was not conquered until a very late period, long NORTH 179 after the conversion of the Northumbrian English to Christianity, it is not probable that it was ever sacked or burnt like so many other Roman towns. In all likelihood, modern Manchester descends with unbroken continuity from Roman and Celtic times. If we may trust to Mr. Green, however, who modifies his con- jecture with a "perhaps," the southern portion of Cumbria, as far north as the Ribble, fell into the hands of the Northumbrian invaders as early as the conquest of Chester by Athelfrith ; although Professor Earle, on the contrary, believes that it was still in native Welsh hands as late as the beginning of the tenth century. Be this as it may — and we can but trust at best to guesswork or analogy — Mamucium, EngUshed as Mamuc- ceaster or Mame-ceaster, first definitely reappears by name in history during the Danish wars of Edward the Elder, who occupied the town with a Mercian garrison, and renewed its Roman fortifications as a stronghold against the Danes. The abiding Mercian influence is shown in the soft form assumed by the name as Man- chester, when compared with the hard Northumbrian analogues, Lancaster, Doncaster, Tadcaster, and so forth [?]. The new town which grew up around the burgh of the West Saxon kings and the lord's mill seems to have spread rather towards the cathedral and Victoria Station than over the area of Castlefield. At the same time, Salford rose apparently to be even more important than Manchester itself, and gave its name to the little local division of Salfordshire. Down to the days of Edward III. the town of Manchester consisted of two separate villages — Aldport, the old port on the Irwell, occupying the site of Mamucium, and New Manchester, the parish near the confluence of the Irk, whose centre is now marked by the Exchange building. It was said that nowhere else in Lancashire did two churches lie so close at hand as these. Gradually, as the country settled down under the early Plantagenets, the woods of Salfordshire began to be felled, and Man- chester became the centre of a considerable rural district. Yet most of the land still remained as weald 180 CITIES AND TOWNS or warren. Early in the fifteenth century the collegiate church (now the cathedral) was founded by one of the De la Warre family; and its massive perpendicular tower, rising finely from the open paved square in the very heart of the city, forms almost the sole relic of old Manchester now presented for our times. At the time of the Reformation Salfordshire was still considered one of the wildest and most uncivilised parts of Eng- land ; and its capital could have been little more than a rough north-country market-town. " It stondith on south side of the Irwell River, in Salfordshire," says Leland, in the reign of Henry VIII., "and is the fairest, best builded, quickUest, and most populous townne of al Lancestreshire, yet is in hit but one paroch chirch." Lancashire seemed to the men of the Tudor period much as Mayo or Kerry might have seemed to Arthur Young. The trade that was to raise the village on the Irwell to the second place among English cities came to it from Flanders and the Low Countries. Even as early as the days of Edward VI. an Act provides for the regulation of the cottons called Manchester, Lancashire, and Cheshire cottons. But these were really woollen fabrics, sold originally under that curious name. A little later, religious refugees from Ghent and Antwerp brought the true cotton manufacture to Bolton and Manchester. Already the trade of the town looked westward; for the merchants bought linen yam from Ireland, "at Lyrpole," wove it, and returned the finished goods for sale in the country of their origin. In Elizabeth's time cotton came from Smyrna and Cyprus ; and by the days of the Restoration the popu- lation of the town had risen to 6000 souls — a very large number, as towns then went. Early in the eighteenth century the Manchester trade in fustians, tuckings, and tapes exceeded that of any other town in the kingdom. As yet, however, there was no reason to suspect the immense development of the cotton industry for which the district was predestined by its position and its underlying mineral wealth. Liverpool was only just NORTH 181 beginning to be a port for the rising Atlantic traffic, the silting of the Dee at Chester having turned the shipping interest of the estuary into the mouth of the Mersey. Cotton was only just beginning to come over from his Majesty's plantations in America, and it would then have been hard to predict in what part of the king- dom its manufacture would finally be naturalised. But Manchester lay on the verge of the largest and richest coalfield in England, within easy reach of our best and safest westerly harbour. It was a foregone conclusion that the unsuspected mineral wealth beneath the dales of the Pen country would shortly turn the moors of the West Riding and the slopes of Salfordshire into the wealthiest and most populous district of provincial England, as soon as steam began to revolutionise every department of our manufacturing industry. Meanwhile events were slowly leading up to the future growth of Manchester. It is significant of that westward twist on her pivot performed by England during the eighteenth century that the most important of the Duke of Bridge- water's canals was constructed to put Manchester into easy communication with its port at Liverpool. Ark- wright, a Preston barber, invented his drawing-rollers, and Hargreaves perfected the model of the spinning- jenny, which between them practically introduced the modem factory system as against the old method of handicraft. Next came Crompton's mule, which further increased the power of output, and gave an immense impetus to the manufacture. None of these inventions in themselves, however, had any necessary tendency to keep the trade fixed at Manchester ; and while the mills were still turned entirely by water-power it might have seemed doubtful whether it would not ultimately establish itself by preference among the hill-streams of Derbyshire and the West Riding. Indeed, Arkwright's own factoiy stood on a little brook at Cromford, in the Peak district. But towards the end of the last century the first steam-mills were erected in Manchester ; and from that moment the future development of the town was secured. No other place could claim equal advan- ii. HiiiiiiiiiJniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.iiiiu Miii Jilt. ...iiji'jikjii 182 CITIES AND TOWNS tages in both essentials of the trade : the combination of the coal-field at its doors and the short water-way to Liverpool for its exports and imports enabled Manchester easily to distance all its competitors. At the same time, other large and thriving secondary towns sprang up above the coal in every direction, from Preston to Stockport and from Warrington to Burnley. The desert hundred of West Derby — "a, waste of forest, moor, and heather ** — grew into the cotton country, and Manchester grew into the capital of a vast manufactur- ing region. Still, the means of communication were deficient ; the canal was choked with trade ; and some new outlet and inlet became imperatively necessary for the raw material and the finished product. When rail- ways at length took shape in the mind of Stephenson, the first important line opened was that which con- nected Manchester with Liverpool. The spread of the system has only increased the importance of the town, although it has also distributed the mills more widely over the surrounding country wherever water is easily obtainable from rivers. Manchester is now rather the central mart of cotton than actually the main seat of its manufacture ; it has grown into a community of brokers and a great warehouse for goods supplied to it from an ever-widening ring of sister towns. At the present day the capital of desert Salfordshire ranks as a cathedral city, a municipality, and an important parliamentary borough ; while with its suburbs (not included in the official figures of the census) it really contains a larger population than any other town in England, London only excepted. 1 III SOUTH SALISBURY As one stands on the brow of Hamham Hill, near the great white rent of the deep-hewn chalk-pit that forms a well-known landmark in the country for miles around, the eye ranges over a wide and varied prospect which includes all that is vital in the past or present history of the city of Sarum. In the foreground lies the valley of the Avon, winding tortuously through the gate in the chalk-downs towards the sea, with the modem town nesthng closely in its lap, all its lesser towers and steeples dominated by the tall and graceful centre spire of the most perfect cathedral in England. Beyond, again, the open undulating uplands of Salisbury Plain stretch away towards the primaeval trilithons of Stone- henge: while in the middle distance a curious conical knoll, bearing even now its artificial origin on its face, marks the deserted site of Old Samm. That great isolated dun formed, of course, the earhest Salisbury of all, the first town to which the existing name was applied. It is a natural position for a stronghold, and probably a hill-fort has crowned its summit from the days of the stone age onward : for neolithic implements of polished flint are common in the neighbourhood, and many fine specimens from local pit-dwellings are pre- served in the Blackmore Museum at Salisbury. It was the neolithic men of this ancient city, in all likelihood. '\ 184 CITIES AND TOWNS wlio raised the vast monument of Stonehenge, for its great rough-hewn sarsens are quite untouched by marks of metal tools ; and the long barrows, with stone imple- ments and long-headed skulls, which cap the downs around the primitive temple, no doubt cover the relics of the neolithic chieftains of Old Sarum. The round barrows, with bronze weapons and round skulls, belong apparently to the later Celtic princes of the same fortress, who thus placed their own tumuh beside the time-honoured standing stones of the earUer race. Old Sarum hill, however, owes its present shape mainly to the Romans, with some later additions of West Saxon date. When the Italian engineers had wrested this key of the Wily valley from its nameless British defenders, they seem to have quite disregarded the original earthworks, whose very existence is now vouched for only by a few^ scanty finds of bronze-age weapons, and to have defended the position by a simple escarpment, which still forms the main face of the knoll as we now see it. The surface consists of an elongated oval platform, containing some twenty-seven acres ; and in its centre rises a circular earthwork, the bramble- covered site of the inner citadel. Our Celtic prede- cessors called the dun by some such name as [was little changed when] Latinised by the conquerors into Sorbiodunum or Sorviodunum. It became in their hands one of the great fortresses of the pro- vince, with miUtary roads radiating in every direction to the other important forts at Silchester, Winchester, Dorchester, Bath, and Marlborough : for it must not be forgotten that the Roman occupation of Britain was always purely military, and that strategical reasons alone dictated the position of all the chief towns of the invaders. After the legions were withdrawn from Britain, Old Sarum fell into the hands of some native prince, whom Dr. Guest (with characteristic boldness), identifies with that doubtful Aurehus Ambrosius, men- tioned by the Welsh monk Gildas, and still perhaps commemorated in the name of Ambresbury or Ames- bury. But the same name crops up too universally in SOUTH 185 connection with so-called Druidical remains (from Ambresbury Banks in Epping Forest, to Dinas Emrys near Beddgelert) for the cautious antiquarian to accept its bearer as anything more than a possible eponymous myth. It is certain, however, that long after the heathen West Saxons had conquered Hampshire, and fixed their seat at Winchester, a Christian Welsh prince still bore rule at Sorviodunum, and the Britons still fought fiercely for the valley of the Avon around their ancestral sanctuary of Stonehenge. According to the Winchester chronicler, Cerdices-ford (now Chardford, near Downton, on the Avon, some six miles south of Salisbury) marked the limits of the principahty seized by the real or mythical ealdorman Cerdic ; while Brit- ford, about a mile from the city, is supposed by Dr. Guest to represent the first ford in the country of the Britons [?]. Grimsdyke, which runs along the top of the downs by Cleabury, is considered as a boundary earth- work thrown up by the Welsh of Sorviodunum to check the advance of their West Saxon foes. Certainly it has its fosse turned towards Winchester and the heathen territory, while its defensive vallum faces Old Sarum and Christian Wilts. More than half a century after the fall of Venta Belgarum— our Winchester— a West Saxon aetheling of the house of Cerdic, Cynric by name, marched at last by the Roman road across the downs to the dale of Avon and stormed or starved out Sorviodunum, which thenceforth became an integral part of the English dominions. A body of Saxon Wilsaete settled at once in the valley of the Wily. The Saxons, however, do not seem to have immediately occupied the fortress itself; their chief town was rather at Wilton in the flat alluvial stretch below, from which the county took its later name of Wiltunscir or Wiltshire. Already the Britons seem to have shortened the cumbrous name of Sorviodunum into something like Sarum ; and from this abbreviated form the first English name of Searo-burh (or, as we [might] say, [the fort of Sarum]) was compounded. That is the name under which its capture is recorded lagi-aahaiiaiaMaBiarjidMiil J l\ 186 CITIES AND TOWNS in the English Chronicle, under date a.d. 552. Later on, however, by the irresistible popular tendency to invent an eponymous founder, the word took a genitive form as Searesburh, as though the meaning were the hurgh of Sear. It is this form, in the obUque case Searesb3mg, that was afterwards corrupted on Norman lips to Sealisbury or SaHsbury, which was the real collo- quial name of Old Sarum while that town was still inhabited. Some time during the West Saxon occupa- tion, perhaps while Alfred was struggling with the Danes for the possession of Wessex, Old Sarum was once more employed as a fortress, and the great earthen rampart and ditch which now scar the face of the glacis were then probably first thrown up. Under Edgar the Pacific it was clearly an important town, for that King held a witena-gemot here ; and in the days of the Con- fessor it must have been one of the largest places in Wilts. Ages before, as we learn from Bede, the West Saxon diocese, owing to its unwieldy size, had been split up into two sees : one at Winchester for the pure English of Hants, and one at Sherborne for the Welsh- kin of the country beyond Selwood. Some time later a third bishop -stool was erected at Ramshury for the eastern Welsh-kin of Wilts. Shortly after the Norman conquest, however. Bishop Herman reunited these two west-coimtry sees, and transferred his residence to Old Sarum, in accordance with the usual Norman practice of removing bishoprics from villages to larger towns. A new cathedral was soon built, and its cruciform ground -plan can still be traced on the bare mound of the ancient city. It was for this first Salisbury Cathedral that the famous " Sarum use " was originally compiled. But Old Sarum was too narrow a site for the growing requirements of an English town under the new regime. A cathedral, an episcopal palace, two churches, a castle with a military garrison must have occupied nearly all the available space on the little platform, leaving small room for merchants and their houses. Moreover, when the castle was handed over to a lay castellan the monks and SOUTH 187 soldiers could not agree, while the want of water was severely felt. At length, in the reign of Henry III., Bishop Richard Poore obtained leave to remove the cathedral to a new position in the valley, between the villages of Hamham and Fisherton, now regarded as suburbs of Salisbury, but then little independent rural hamlets. Around the chosen site of his rising minster. Bishop Poore laid out the ground-plan of a fresh city with American regularity ; and the result may be seen on the modem map of Salisbury, which is partitioned out into chequers, or square blocks, intersected at right angles by broad and open streets — a strange contrast to the winding lanes which have grown up irregularly in all directions in most of our old English towns. Already the merchants of Old Sarum had begun to build on the plain, and as the great cathedral rose on the level close of Miryfield a new city sprang up around it with astonishing rapidity. Henry III. granted it a charter, without which trade would have been impossible ; and shortly after Bishop Bingham diverted the Icknield Street, or great western road, from Old Sarum to the new town by building a bridge across the Avon at Hamham. Roman roads were still the main highways of traffic in England, and the diversion completed the ruin of the hill city. Under Edward III. the old cathedral was taken down to build the spire and close of the new one ; while the walls of the castle were used, with the ordinary mediaeval vandalism, as a common quarry. Nevertheless, as everybody knows. Old Sarum, decaying away till not a single farmhouse was left, retained its parliamentary privileges down to the days of the first Reform Act. Meanwhile, the wool-stapling trade was making new Salisbury into an important com- mercial centre. Chalk downs form the great sheep- walks of England; and during the later Plantagenet period, when England, like Australia at the present day, lived pn the wool export, we naturally find a large mercantile town in the centre of every valley in the chalk districts. Never before or after, probably, was the relative importance of Salisbury so great. The SIL.I m 188 CITIES AND TOWNS SOUTH 189 I wealth of her merchants is shown in such buildings as the hall of John Halle, one of her chief wool-staplers during the reign of Henry VI. Its splendid banqueting- room has been well restored by Pugin, and now forms one of the sights in the modem city. The guild-halls of the joiners and of the tailors, the numerous carved gables to the old houses, and the existence of four handsome mediaeval churches besides the cathedral, sufficiently attest the size and riches of the town during the wool-stapling period. At a somewhat later date Salisbury acquired a reputation for clothing and cutlery, both of which manufactures are now extinct. Since the Restoration, in fact, the town has chiefly lived upon its cathedral, its position as an agricultural centre, and its trade with the surrounding country. Nevertheless, it still continues to grow with the general growth of England, and its suburbs are even now extending on every side. Its situation as an important railway centre has had much influence upon its modem development. MAIDEN CASTLE AND DORCHESTER A pleasant walk, at first along the Roman road with its overhanging avenue of sycamores or chestnuts, and then across an open sweep of English chalk down, leads from the square ramparts which still gird round modem Dorchester to the vast prehistoric earthworks of Maiden Castle. Nowhere else in Britain have the ancient inhabitants left so gigantic a relic of their forgotten enmities: Maiden Castle holds among British strong- holds the same place that Stonehenge holds among megalithic monuments. In both cases it is significant that the great work stands among the bare undulations of the chalk country, and overhangs the utmost border of a rich alluvial lowland. The Mai-Dun, to give it its proper title [?], is the most stupendous of all the Celtic duns that cluster thickly in all similiar sites over the length and breadth of Britain. Its open central plat- form occupies the summit of a jutting down, abutting I I y I on the Ridgeway, about two imles south of Dofchester. Before getting to this central area, however, the visitor must clhnb to the top of three several steep ramparts, Td descend again into the ditch-like bottom of three several deep fosses. Each time he fancies he has reached the goal of his day's expedition, and each tune he « obliged to descend once more into » great ravme which divides him from the next ridge or from the final ram- part Near the west end alone a zigzag gateway, defended by over-lapping ends, which enclose a sort of insulated mound and other outworks, admits h™ through a comparatively level road to the mtenor of the great earthwork. At the present moment, however, this ^^cticable entrance is sufficiently defended for all practical purposes against the solitary tounst by a long- homed white bull, who might almost represent to fancy the cattle of the old Durotriges themselves, and who eems by no means disposed to admit the hostile Saxon into the safe retreat of his Celtic ancestors. There is nothing for it, therefore, but to climb over the three almost perpendicular ridges and fosses as best one may, among the hare-bells, the devil's bits, and the clustered campanulas which make the steep slopes blue even now with their nodding blossoms. It '^ a ^''''-d P"!!' '"i* ^ quarter of an hour takes one over it; and then the view opens over a wide uneven area, where the herd ot the white bull raise their heads from then- grazmg to stare the soUtary intruder in the face. ^ „„ „f The inner area alone covers an irregular surface of fortv-five acres, roughly oval, or, rather, hour-glass-like in form ; the entire fortification, including the ramparts, Covering a gross extent of 115 acres Merely to walk once ro!nd the circuit of the inner defences makes in "S a fair constitutional, for the distance is scarcely ess than two miles and a quarter. The fosses have been excavated out of the solid chalk, and the material so removed has been heaped up to form the mtervenmg rammrts. No broad flat implements like our own spades were used in their construction : to a mihtaiy eye the work bears abundant evidence of having been performed ilKHiialalki 1 ; 190 CITIES AND TOWNS by the aid of narrow bronze celts alone, with which a small quantity of the subsoil was removed at a time. The view from the top of the inner ridge, shifting at each curve, sufficiently explains the nature and origin of this stupendous prehistoric fortification. The castle looks on every side save one over bare and bleak chalk down, crested here and there by the dark patches of heath which mark the undenuded tertiary strata. On the tallest of these, known as Black Down, rises the octagonal tower of Hardy*s Monument : scattered over the lower crests are innumerable barrows, which some- times similarly preserve in their corrupted names some faint memories of earlier heroes. They are all of the round or true Celtic type, and they belong therefore to the same race as the builders of Maiden Castle. But on the one remaining side, towards Dorchester, the castle looks down upon perhaps the widest and longest strip of alluvial lowland in all England ; and this strip gives us the true raison d'etre of earthworks and of barrows alike. Such a position formed the absolute ideal of a Celtic principality. Cultivation was then confined to the flat river valleys ; grazing was then confined to the open treeless downs. Man had not yet begun to hew his way through the natural forests that covered all the secondary plateau and primary hills of England, where now we find the richest corn-land of the whole country. Hence the primitive Celt required most of all an alluvial stretch for his rude tilth and an open chalk tract for his sheep and cattle. In the valley of the Wily and the Avon near Salisbury, and in the valley of the Var or Frome near Dorchester, he found these advantages combined, perhaps, to a greater degree than in any other district of Britain. It is not without reason, then, that in the one country we find the vast hill-fort of Old Sarum, the prehistoric circle of Stonehenge, and an endless surroimding array of ancient tumuli, while in the other we find the immense fortress of Maiden Castle, the long terraces of the Dorset downs, and the innumer- able barrows that stud the sky-line of all the boundary hills. There can be very little doubt that, though SOUTH 191 mountains and passes made some other tribes more difficult for the Romans to subdue, the Belgae of the Avon and the Durotriges of the Frome were intrinsic- ally the most powerful as well as the most numerous of southern British tribes, and inferior only to the great horde of the Brigantes who held the still broader and more fertile plain of York. As British Caer Badon looks down from its hill-perch on Roman Aquae and English Bath, so the British Mai- Dun looks down from its terraced steep on Roman Dumovaria and English Dorchester. But there is Httle reason to suppose in either case that the town properly so-called ever occupied the summit of the isolated neighbouring hill. Both were probably mere high-places of refuge for th? women and the other cattle in time of war. The people of the Frome valley were emphatic- ally the Durotriges, the dwellers by the water -side; and their native capital was Dumovaria, the water of Var, an alternative title of the river which still survives in the later West-Saxon town of Wareham. That the main body of the folk lived in time of peace on the site of Dorchester is clear enough, both from the existence of a smaller local camp at Poundbury, hard by the town, and from the survival of their rude agora at Maumbury, near the railway station, now commonly called the Roman Amphitheatre, but too suspiciously Hke a Cornish "round" in its constructive features to bear out its reputed Italian pedigree. The southern invaders, in all probability, only adopted the native British village by the water-side, and replaced its irregular stockade by the square vallum and fosse, which, now planted with trees like the boulevards of so many French cities, form such a conspicuous and un-English feature in the view from the castle. They also ran through its centre two intersecting roads at right angles, which still make up the main streets of modem Dorchester, though their point of junction has been sadly narrowed by the build- ing of the old English church on the site of St. Peter's. From that time forth, no doubt, the Mai-Dun of the Celt, the Dunium of Ptolemy, has lain waste as a pasture r w i\ 'III \ mmm •I 192 CITIES AND TOWNS for cattle; though, perhaps, it may again have been occupied for a while by the provincials when the heathen West Saxons swarmed up the Frome from Poole Harbour to the conquest of eastern and central Dorset. On the Ups of the new-comers the dun became Maiden, as again at Maiden Newton ; and later on it took the Norman termination Castle, like most other prehistoric earth- works in the semi-Celtic west country. At the same time the Durotriges became Domsaete, or Dorset folk ; while Dumovaria became Domwaraceaster, or, more shortly, Domceaster, a word which has slowly worn down on local lips into Dorchester. Such fossilised names as Dumgate Lane, within the city, still faintly preserve the memory of the older tongue. The fate of the great earthwork contrasts strangely with those of its various compeers elsewhere. Thus Sorviodunum, or Old Sarum, another similar dun, was actually occupied and altered by the Romans: it became the site of a mediaeval cathedral town, and it was only slowly abandoned in favour of modem Salisbury, which stands to its deserted platform much as Dorchester now stands to Maiden Castle. On the other hand, the dun by the Exe has continued its life to the present day, and has largely got rid of its entrenchments on either side, so as to coalesce with the surrounding heights in the modem city of Exeter. But Maiden Castle, like its numerous neighbours to the west, the boundary group [of hill-forts] which secured the Durotriges from the Dumnonians of Devon, has remained utterly unoccupied ever since the defeat of its Celtic founders. It is this accident of fate that has preserved it for us to our own time in such singular perfection. Had it been held in a military sense by the Romans, it might have been altered to a Roman shape, like Lincoln and Sarum : had it passed through both the Roman and the mediaeval stages it might have been as hopelessly distorted as the Castle mounds at York and Exeter, or as that ancient dun which gives its name to London, and which we now call Tower Hill. But its fortunate desertion in favour of the site by the river-side has kept unaltered for us to SOUTH ^^^ this day the features of what - Foba%^^^^^ very beginning ^^%t «de t ii^^^ Britain. Its very vastness made i^^^ ^engineering ; and from the P-f V^.^, IJ^^e as a^m^^^^^^ to modem times S wSr Te ItilS^aln could do in the simplest arts of warfare. I IV SOUTH-EAST t ^ I HASTINGS AND ST. LEONARDS Whoever wishes to reconstruct the original Hastings in his mind's eye must climb the gorse-covered slopes of the East Cliff on some clear sunny morning, and sit down upon the little broken scarp of crumbling sand- stone that overhangs the square old tower of All Saints' Church. He must mentally abolish the pier, the Parade, and the long line of houses that form the modem suburb of Halton, and must restrict his atten- tion entirely to the deep little glen, thickly crowded with red-roofed houses, that lies directly beneath his feet. That one narrow hollow combe, worn out of the soft sandy strata by the tiny stream known as the Bourne, represents the site of the primitive clan-village of the Haestingas. Behind his back, on the summit of the cliffs, stands an earthwork of yet earlier date — probably Roman, but perhaps the relic of some aboriginal Celtic or pre-Celtic race. In the days when that earthwork was thrown up, however, the valley of the Bourne was doubtless still in much the same wild condition as Ecclesboume Glen, just beyond the flagstaff on the hill, at the present day. It was not till the period of the South Saxon invasion, in all probability, that any rude fishing village first occupied the site of Hastings old town. When the invaders came, they came apparently in separate clan bands, \ I SOUTH-EAST 195 each clan having its own little fleet of keels, and conquering a small isolated district on its own account. The existing Rape of Hastings, consisting of the high sandstone belt that here runs northward to meet the Forest Ridge, seems to have formed for a while just such a separate principaUty for the petty tribe of the Haestingas. It was ringed round by a very distinct mark of swamp and woodland, which naturally fitted it to become the seat of a single chieftainship among the jealous little Teutonic communities. On the east, the estuary of the Rother, debouching into the great tidal expanse of Romney Marsh, as yet undrained and unreclaimed, altogether cut it off from the Jutish conquerors of Kent. On the west, the smaller fen-land of Pevensey Level, now carefully guarded by drains and sluices, but then a vast stretch of boggy quagmire, divided it equally from the main South Saxon kingdom in the chalk-down country. In the rear, the pathless forest of the Weald, long an absolute barrier to roads and settlements, completed the girdling line of natural defences. The practical peninsula thus formed, all of whose boundaries may still be marked from the wooden watch-tower in the new cemetery, lay open in fact to the sea alone. By sea, then, the Haestingas probably attacked it ; and having overrun it, they held out for ages in their all but island territory as a separate community, only slowly amalgamated with the general dominions of the West Saxon kings. Before the Norman Conquest, indeed, the tract now included in Hastings Rape is never described as a part of Sussex ; and as late as the days of Cnut the Dane, the English Chronicle speaks of the Kentings, and the South Saxon, and the Haestingas, and the Surreys, as though each division were equally important and equally recog- nised for an independent folk. During all these early times, the name of Haestingas belonged not to the place but to the people, and was hardly perhaps more distinctive of the one narrow combe where Hastings arose later on than of any other clustering hamlet in the peninsular district. Even 'I \ If ■ IB 1^ ^ i \\ 1 196 CITIES AND TOWNS then, however, a small fishing village had evidently gathered in the valley of the Bourne ; and as it pos- sessed the only harbour in the whole territory of the tribe for elsewhere the shore was either cliff or swamp —it came to be known as Haestinga-port, or the haven of the Hsestingas. Up to the period of the Conquest, we may picture this little group of rough wooden houses as filling the very lower end of the Bourne glen, for the land then ran farther out to sea than at present ; while on either hand the Castle Hill and the East Cliff rose sheer above their roofs as open downs, the White Rock (now demolished) closing the view to westward with its weather-beaten mass. The great impetus to the port of the tribesmen, as to all the other towns of Sussex, an-ived with the advent of William the Conqueror. "In this year," says the English Chronicle, under the date of the Conquest, « ame Wyllelm earl out of Normandy into Pevensey, on St. Michael's Mass even, and wrought a castle at Haestinga-port." This castle was a mere rough and hasty stockade [as we are told], for temporary defence ; but it probably occupied the crest of the present Castle Hill, to the west of the fishing village, on the spot where the stone fortress afterwards arose. From that point William marched, as everybody knows, to the heights of Telham, near Battle, and there fought with Harold the decisive engagement which settled the fate of England. In the history of Hastings town, however, the battle which takes its name from the tribal district is a mere alien episode : and, indeed, it is the common error of local historians to concentrate themselves too closely upon those events in the general annals of England which have happened to occur in their neigh- bourhood, and to neglect overmuch the organic develop- ment and individual continuity of their own town or country. Still, the results of the battle were full of immediate importance to the fishing village itself. Of all parts of England, Sussex, the first conquered, suffered most from the conquest. Its nearness to Normandy made its obedience of the first moment, for SOUTH-EAST 197 1 it formed the open gate for reinforcements from the Continent. William divided it out into six rapes or divisions, each of which was handed over to a Norman castellan, and each guarded by a great fortress. The country of the Haestingas fell to the share of the Counts of Eu, who built the first Norman Castle on the West Hill. Hastings, as the town now began to be familiarly called, rose rapidly into importance under the new regime. Its port was one of the chief outlets to Normandy; and while the Norman connection lasted, Sussex, previously one of the most isolated districts in South Britain, formed the king's main highway from England to his continental provinces. The old church of the fisher town was given to the monks of Fecamp ; and ships from St. Valery-sur-Somme, whose houses are visible from the East Cliff in clear weather, resorted with merchandise to the little harbour. The castle, the neighbourhood of so wealthy a monastery as Battle Abbey, and the ship-building trade induced by the nearness to the timber of the Weald, must all have contributed to make Hastings a comparatively large and notable place under the first Hne of our foreign kings. In the later Plantagenet period, our relations with France became reversed, though not apparently to the detriment of Hastings. As premier Cinque Port, it still maintained its own among the coastwise towns of England ; but a wall now protected it on the sea half from marauding Frenchmen, running across the gap in the downs from the Castle Hill to the East Cliff, and still partly visible in the little alley called Bourne Street. The ship-building trade continued to flourish ; the fishing-trade is always perennial ; and the rise of the iron-smelting industry in the Weald probably made Hastings into a considerable port. Hither, too, the monks of Battle must have imported all their wine and merchandise from the Continent. The proofs of the increasing wealth in the place at this time are seen in the two large and picturesque churches of the old town — All Saints' and St. Clement's — both of the '4 I r1 ,.' .y .,x' .X" ll 198 CITIES AND TOWNS perpendicular period, though the oldest and largest •f aU was long ago swept away by encroachment ot the sea. Until the days of Elizabeth, Hastings held its own manfully; but during that queen's reign a CTeat storm— the same that threw up the shingle-bank which turned aside the mouth of the Ouse from Seaford to Newhaven— destroyed the old wooden pier, washed away the lower part of the to\*Ti, obUterated the harbour, and ruined the trade of Hastings. For two centuries the decaying port became a poor strugglmg fishing village once more, with a broken castle crown- ing a picturesque chff on its western side. Even the fishing-vessels could only be beached with danger and difficulty. At last, about a hundred years ago, a fashionable London doctor began to send his con- sumptive patients for the winter months to Hastmgs. The pretty old-world quarter known as the Croft, under shelter ^ the Castle Hill, dates in part from this renaissance. From that time forward the town has steadily increased as a watering-place. Lying so near London, it flourished even in the coaching days ; but railways soon achieved its fortune. It began to grow westward from the Croft, and first rounded the edge of the cHff in the West Hill by a barbarous excavation in the native sandstone rock, beneath the castle, hollowed out to receive Pelham Crescent, and the Arcade. Thence it spread, in the early years of the century, past Wellington Square, mto the valley of a second bourne, which flows through St Andrew's Gardens, and now falls into the sea in- gloriously by iron pipes near the Queen's Hotel. A little later, the invalid district about Robertson Terrace was built, and by a horrid act of vandalism the White Rock was blown away, so as to let the rising Parade extend onward even beyond the limits of the western valley. Meanwhile, early in the second quarter of the century, the Burtons had begun their fashionable water- ing-place of St. Leonards, at first a totally distinct town, separated from Hastings by a wide open stretch of close-cropped down. It consisted of several terraces SOUTH-EAST 199 if fronting the sea, all built upon a regular and similar plan, with the club, the baths, the hotel, and the Assembly Rooms in the centre. Gradually, however, the Hastings Parade spread westward, and the St. Leonards Marina spread eastward, till they met at last in the middle, at Warrior Square. Seen from a height, indeed, the place still naturally divides itself into three distinct portions, each occupying a valley of its own — Old Hastings, New Hastings, and St. Leonards; for the buildings zigzag in and out through the hollows, leaving the intervening hills for the most part quite unoccupied. The dates of the various churches accur- ately mark the general growth of the population at each period. BRIGHTON It is a popular error to suppose that Brighton owes its existence entirely to a caprice of George IV., or even to believe with Macaulay that it remained only an unfre- quented fishing-village down to a very recent period. Though the history of the largest English watering- place is certainly not so eventful as that of many smaller and now less famous towns, it yet throws back its roots into a remote and respectable past, for the borough still bears in its very name the best evidence of its antiquity. The Brighthelmstone of the last century is lineally descended from the Brihthelmes Stan of the early South Saxon settlers; and that primitive form of the word again enshrines for us the half -obliterated memory of an ancient and universal custom. The open space between the Pavilion and the Aquarium is now known as the Steyne. Most people who have been familiar with its name from childhood upward have probably associated it only with local traditions of the Prince Regent or recollections of Thackeray's wicked marquis in " Vanity Fair." As a matter of historical fact, how- ever, the Steyne carries on its face far more remarkable implications than that. It is indeed the site of the original Stdn, the holy stone or monumental monolith y 200 CITIES AND TOWNS roun^ which the later town has slowly gathered. Such holy stones have often formed the nucleus for an English or British settlement, and in many cases the word still survives as part of the modem town name. Brixton in the Isle of Wight was once Ecgbrihtes Stan, the stone of Egbert ; and another Ecgbrihtes Stan, the judgment-seat of its shire or hundred, which formed the rendezvous of Alfred's army during the Danish invasion, is now identified as Brixton Deverill, near Warminster. Folkstone, too, is Folces Stan, the Folk Stone of the Kentish men, the Lapis Tituli of the conquered Romano-Britains. All over England such prehistoric stones still survive in numbers, in many places as sites of the local courts ; and the court of the Hundred of Stone is always opened, to the present day, by pouring a bottle of port as a libation over the sacred relic from which the district takes its name. The Brihthelm after whom this particular stone on the site of the Steyne was originally called, ranks as an early Bishop of Selsey [?] ; though in all probability he was not himself buried there, but merely gave a Christian character to some old local heathen monument, perhaps of pre- Roman or pre -Celtic date. So St. Patrick, finding three pillar stones connected with Irish paganism, instead of destroying them, inscribed them with holy names ; while one, which he used as a place of baptism, was ever afterwards known as Patrick's Stone. Indeed, many mediaeval crosses are firmly mortised into bases com- posed of such hallowed megalithic structures belonging originally to the older creed. The obviously pagan clan-name of the Staningas, or sons of the stone, at Steyning, close by, may possibly have reference to this primaeval monument. No English clan seems to have settled beside the Stone of Brihthelm itself; but the site lay right on the line of the old British coast -road from Anderida or Pevensey to Regnum or Chichester ; and the pre-historic fort of Whitehawk Hill overhung the little combe from behind ; so that it must always have stood in the very thick of the local civilisation for the time being. SOUTH-EAST 201 "I rl Indeed, English clan villages cluster closely all around it ; and we may be sure that a few fishermen settled in the seaward combe from the very earhest date when the South Saxons took to sea-fishing, which could hardly have been as late as the days of Wilfrith, in spite of the miraculous story retailed for us by Bede. The look of the hollow by the Steyne must then have been some- thing like that of Rottingdean, without the houses : a mere gap or gate in the chalk downs, opening to the sea in front by a small fringe of lowland, where the Madeira Walk now runs beneath the buttressed cliffs. Until the Norman conquest we hear nothmg definitely about the condition of Brihthelmes Stan. After that event the manor was granted to the Earls de Warrenne, castellans of Lewes, and a large number of Flemish fishermen from the opposite coast were induced to fix their homes on the ledge below the cliff. Another small village of landsmen crowned the white chalk heights above. The old church, dedicated to St. Nicholas, was placed quite apart from either hamlet, on high open ground between the Steyne and the modem railway station, where it served at the same time for a landmark to the fishermen out at sea. Of the primitive Norman or South Saxon building no relic now remains, except the font ; but all visitors to Brighton before the last twenty-five years can remember the old long low decorated parish church of the fourteenth century, built, like so many antiquated Brighton houses, of that curious flint patchwork, the use of which was forced upon the inhabitants by the want of good building-stone. The base of the broken churchyard cross stands even now on the little plot without, upon the desecrated hill-side. In spite of French descents and occasional internal feuds, Brighthelmstone must have presented much the same picture all through the mediaeval period : a green valley in the downs, along the hollow of the London road; a small fishing-village under the cliff; a little agricultural and trading hamlet above it; a solitary church among fields and pastures on the hill-side ; and a few white windmills crowning the conical bosses of ^QV CITIES AND TOWNS the chalk heights that bounded the view to northward behind the town. Shortly after the Reformation, however, the days of old Brighthelmstone began to be numbered. The sea encroached gradually upon the lowland beneath the cliff, and at last the fishing-village was entirely swept away. For more than a hundred years the name was only remembered as that of a country rectory, on the coast near Shoreham, which had once been a flourishing fisher town, but was now reduced to a small group of agricultural cottages. Three old lanes. East Street, West Street, and North Street, forming with the sea- front a little square district near the market-hall, still preserve for us the boundaries of all that then remained of Brighthelmstone. Charles II. hid here for a while on his way to France by Shoreham. About the middle of the eighteenth century the doctors had just begun to discover the seaside ; and when that discovery was once made, the Httle valley in the Sussex downs was one of the most natural places in the world to which the invalids of London could be sent for change and fresh air. It was a certain Dr. Russell in the bustling and busy county town of Lewes, hard by, who has the credit of first casting an appreciative eye upon the quiet and unvisited nook by the sea at Brighthelmstone. At that time the Steyne was an open common, and sojourners put up at the old King's Head in West Street. Lodgings soon began to be in demand. The houses of this transitional period can still be easily recognised in the district just ringing round the old square village, as well as in many of the streets lying within that ancient boundary. Towards the close of the eighteenth century the Prince of Wales took a fancy to Brighton, as the name had now for some time been abbreviated, and began to build the mongrel domes and minarets of the Pavilion. Under such patronage the new town grew rapidly. The chain-pier was thrown out into the sea at the point where the cUff subsides, and houses spread quickly up the hill towards St. Nicholas Church, as well as in the other direction towards the New Steyne f / SOUTH-EAST 203 and the Marine Parade on the cliff-top. The Old Steyne was also enclosed and cut up by roads ; though what became of the stone from which it takes its name, and on which tradition asserts that the old fishermen used to dry their nets, cannot now be discovered. Shortly after, the big pseudo-Gothic church of St. Peter, at the end of the Steyne, was built by Barry — a singular monument of the first attempts in the direction of mediaeval revival in England. Even during the coach- ing days Brighton grew with astonishing rapidity : it had as many as 7000 inhabitants in 1801, and by 1830 it was already a large town, with more than thirty coaches running daily to London. The square and crescent at Kemp Town had been built before that period; while the names of the streets and districts elsewhere generally give one a shrewd idea in passing of their probable date. The Reform Act made Brighton into a parHamentary borough with two members ; and the railway of course turned it practically into a seaside suburb of London. Since then almost all that was old in the town has disappeared ; the great line of marine terraces has covered the whole sea-front, from Kemp Town to Hove and Cliftonville ; the ugly West Pier has been put into unhappy competition with its graceful but neglected eastern neighbour; the Aquarium has been stuck down on a reclaimed comer near the Pavilion ; the old church has been rebuilt and modernised out of recognition ; and the houses have spread inland over all the hills, or along the original valley far beyond the once beautiful viaduct on the London road, now choked and obscured by endless rows of modem brick- built cottages. Nothing remains to-day of the primitive Brighton except a forgotten philological fossil in the name of the Stejnie and the queer old legal form of Brighthelmstone still employed in public documents for certain official purposes. ill a 1 1 ^ ^ M SOUTH-WEST BATH I As everybody knows, during the first half of the eighteenth century Beau Nash was King of Bath. But most people probably imagine that the title was a purely fanciful one, invented on purpose for that fantastic potentate, and confined in its application to him alone. This, however, is not the case. Beau Nash only added fresh importance to an old traditional phantom office. From time immemorial, and certainly from the tenth century onward, the citizens of Bath were annually accustomed to elect a king ; and it is even possible that the mock ceremony dates from a still more remote period, as a last nominal survival from the days of British independence in the west. Instead of Beau Nash being the first King of Bath, he was really the last king ; and his predecessors went back in an unbroken line at least to Edgar the West Saxon, and perhaps to some far earlier local prince, whose reign preceded the English occupation, or even the Roman Conquest. Like the Rex in republican Rome, or the Basilem in democratic Athens, the shadowy king may have been the repre- sentative of some more ancient real sovereign. Indeed, the royal reminiscences which have always lingered about Bath are so numerous and so curious that the history of its kings deserves something more than a passing mention from county annalists. I / SOUTH-WEST 205 Whether Bath and the surrounding country had any separate princes of their own at the time of the Roman invasion is not certain. But it is, at any rate, clear that two very large and important hill stations flanked the valley of the Avon— one of them on Little SoHsbury and the other on Hampton Down, both overlooking the modern city. Such great hill -forts usually mark the capital of a little British chieftainship ; and near them gather the big round barrows which cover the cromlech- tombs of the dead chieftains. The Bury or fort of Sul gave the later town, which gathered round the hot springs in the valley, its Roman name of Aquae Sulis ; but the old British title of Caer Badon has lingered on into modem Welsh as the ordinary form for the city of Bath ; and to read in a Welsh newspaper of the present day of a " Caer Badon " carries one back in imagination over twenty centuries. At Bath itself, however, the name of Caer Badon now belongs only to the earthwork on Hampton Down. Tradition, too, gives us some warrant for believing that there may have been Kings of Bath even before the Roman conquest ; for the story of Bladud, though it rests on no better authority than that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, an unblushing romancer, is probably based upon some real old British legend. Geoffrey was a Welshman with a considerable knowledge of Cymric folk-lore; and, like most other historical romancers, he often builds his romance upon facts or traditions of genuine illustrative value. His story of Bladud shows at least that Welshmen in his day con- nected Bath very closely with the old British princes ; and it probably shows also that tales to that effect were then current at Bath itself. If there were local princes in the Avon vale before the Romans came, it is likely enough that they continued to retain a titular sovereignty under the Roman rule, as we know was the case in Sussex, where one Cogidumnus called himself King of the Regni, apparently in the same sense as our own titular feudatories in India call themselves the Nawab Nazim of Bengal or the Guicowar of Baroda. It is clear from the account given by Tacitus that Agricola found 1 206 CITIES AND TOWNS Britain still occupiea hy its native chiefs as persons of importance, and that he endeavoured to Romanise them without depriving them of their tribal authority, much m we ourselves AngUcised the Irish chieftains or the heads nf Scotch clans by making them into earis and barons on the English pattern. At any rate, as soon as the Romans left, the tribes seem each to have reverted to their own recognised chieftains— exactly as during the Indian Mutiny the people of Banda rallied round their Ranee, or the Mahrattas round the adopted heir of the Peshwas. For nearly two centuries after the departure ot the legions, native Welsh kings ruled in Bath ; and these are the only real historical kings of Bath of whose existence we can be sure. Towards the close of the sixth century, however, the West Saxons fought agamst Farinmail King of Bath, at D>Tham Park, and slew him, together with his two alUes, Conmail of Gloucester and Condidan of Cirencester, petty Welsh princes like those of PoA*7S and Gwent, or like the Lords of Snowdon m later days. The Dumnonian kings of Somerset were then driven farther west beyond the marshes of the Parret, and Bath fell into the hands of the English heathen. It is just possible that even after the English occupation the native Welsh of Bath, in their servile condition, may have still chosen themselves a titular king from year to year, if only for form's sake ; and, indeed, a curious document, noted by Sir Francis Palgrave, shows that in Devonshire at least a Welsh [community] long contmued to be ruled by [its] own Council of Elders, who made regular agreements with the English witan, just as in India the headman of the village and the local council are recognised even now by the British authorities. In any case, it seems clear that memories of the old Welsh royal house in Bath remained strongly fixed in the minds of the people, and that the city was especially connected with legends of the supposed but fabulous imperial British line. When all Britain was finally for the first time united under Edgar, the coronation of that king, « chosen by the Anglo-Britons," as Horence of Worcester III SOUTH-WEST 207 significantly remarks, took place at Bath ; and the ballad in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commemorating this great event carefully mentions "the ancient burgh" both under its Enghsh and its British name. From Bath, Edgar went direct to Chester, and there eight subject Welsh or other Celtic princes rowed him in state on the sacred Dee, the holiest of all the rivers of ancient Britain. We see the full significance of these steps when we remember that the minister who built up Edgar's power was a Somerset man, Dunstan, bom beside the old Welsh monastery of Glastonbury or Ynys Witrin, of which he was afterwards abbot — a monastery founded by the Welsh Dumnonian kings of Somerset and still retaining the original Welsh charters as late as the days of William of Malmesbury. Dunstan must have well known all the local importance of Bath, and the tradi- tions of its connection with the old imperial British line; and it was not without reason that he selected this place for Edgar's coronation fourteen years after his accession. No doubt to be crowned at Bath made a man not merely king of the English but emperor of Britain. Long after, when Swegen the Dane could not get into London, he went to Bath and obtained the allegiance of the West Welsh shires, and then " all folk held him for full king." This traditional habit of regarding Bath as specially fitted for coronations is not more curious in its way than the connection of Rheims with the French kings, or the connection of Scone with the kings of Scots. It is from Edgar's time that the institution of the mock King of Bath [may be] dated. The coronation of the first king of all England and overlord of Britain — Edgar himself even used the style of Imperator— was an event not likely to be forgotten in the little town. From that time forth the citizens of Bath annually elected one of themselves to be King of Bath in a mock- solemn assembly, held on the same date as Edgar's coronation, " the Day of Pentecost." Whether Edgar's visit really gave origin to the custom, or whether it was one handed down from an earlier time, it would be I I 208 CITIES AND TOWNS SOUTH-WEST 209 difficult to decide ; at any rate, tlie memory of Edgar blotted out tlie older memories, if sucfi there were ; and the annual feast was thenceforth said to owe its institu- tion to the West Saxon king. All the old local histories give this as the reason — ^^ that the citizens might hold in remembrance the name of Edgar, wlio was crowned at Bath Abbey in the year of our Ix)rd 973." If the King of Bath ever had any real duties, they were soon for- gotten ; and the office became something like that held by the Queen of the May or the Pape [or Evesque] desFotus. Still, it was kept up all through the Middle Ages, and on to the beginning of the eighteenth century, the day of election always remaining the same ; which is hardly more surprising than the vitality of Guy Fawkes' or of All Fools' Day, and far less surprising than the still existent celebration of Marius's victory over the Teutones at Mont Ste. Victoire, near Aix, on the anniversary of that distant event after nearly two thousand years. Until Beau Nksh's time, the honour seems to have been tenable for one year only, like the mayoralty in English towns; but Beau Nash, being always re-elected, held the crown for fifty years, so that it came at last to be regarded as a personal attribute. At his death, the memory of the annual ceremony appears to have died out, and there was never, apparently, another King of Bath. It is interesting to note in this connection that the last king was himself a Welshman ; so that the royal line ended, as it began, with British blood. A mock mayor is still in the same way elected yearly at Colyford in Devon, and in several other small towns. WELLS AND TAUNTON The two chief towns of West Somerset have so much of their history in common that it is natural in dealing with the one to deal also at the same time with the other. Both appear to be comparatively recent in their origin — recent, that is to say, when considered side by side with such very ancient British fortresses as St. 1 1 I 11 Albans, Colchester, or Norwich. The spot now occu- pied by Wells was probably a mere grassy basin, nestling among the craggy outliers of the forest-clad Mendips, long after' the days of the Roman conquest or the first landing of the later English colonists. It lay for a hundred years upon the very mark or woodland border which separated the West Saxon realm from the dominions of the native Dumnonian princes. The West Saxons, after their capture of Bath, seem to have over- run the whole eastern portion of modem Somerset, including the Mendips, till they were checked by the dreary stretch of marshes, through whose reclaimed expanse the Axe now runs down between artificial em- bankments to the Bristol Channel. For a century the little river formed the recognised boundary of the two races ; so that, as Mr. Freeman puts it, the unoccupied site of Wells was still in Welshland, while Wookey, a few miles off, was already in England. But shortly after the conversion of the West Saxons to Christianity, their king Cenwealh turned against the yet unconquered Welsh of Dyvnaint or Dumnonia. By two battles fought, one at Bradford and another at Pen, Cenwealh made himself master of central Somerset as far as the Parret. The new territory thus acquired of course included the site of Wells, but not that of Taunton. Mr. Freeman himself admits that west of the Axe the Welsh were not exterminated, or even enslaved, but merely reduced to the condition of tributaries ; and it seems clear that most of the existing peasantry in the great peninsula which stretches from the Avon to the Land's End are still, in his own phrase, " only natural- ised Englishmen." As yet, however, there was no Wells. Sixty years after Cenwealh's conquests, a later West Saxon prince, Ini, turned once more upon the West Welsh of Dumnonia, and drove their king Geraint from the wide valley between the Quantocks and the Black Down, through whose midst the Tone flows placidly to join the marshy levels of the Parret near Bridgewater. In the very centre of the valley Ini built a great border -fortress against his Dumnonian 210 CITIES AND TOWNS enemies, and called it after the river, Taunton, or the tomn on the Tone. The West Saxon kings seem to have pursued from the first a policy of conciliation towards the Welshmen of this newly -acquired territory; and West Somerset certainly became their favourite residence and their safest retreat. Ini took over the great Welsh sanctuary at Glastonbury — that Celtic Westminster where Arthur lay buried — and built a new church and monastery of his own beside the ancient wattled chapel of the Dum- nonian kings, founded, as tradition asserted, by St. Joseph of Arimathea. But he wished, perhaps, to set an English abbey by the side of this old Welsh founda- tion ; and, casting about for a spot on which to build it, his choice fell at last upon the site of Wells, a few miles north-east of Glastonbury. Nowhere could one find a better situation for an ecclesiastical town. Wood and water, the two great monastic needs, were there in abundance. The little grassy basin lay in the centre of a ring of limestone hillocks ; and from the summit of the wooded Mendips came down the numerous springs, which gushed forth abundantly at the outcrop,, and gave the spot its name of Wells. Around, beyond the hills, stretched a great morass, which the canons might reclaim with profit to themselves and the community at large. Here, then, Ini founded his wooden abbey, and settled his English brothers. From beginning to end, the town was thus a purely artificial one ; it has had no trade and no manufactures ; it has not even been to any great extent an agricultural centre ; but it has depended entirely in all stages of its existence upon its ecclesiastical position. Ealdhelm, a kinsman of Ini, was appointed bishop of the new Welsh-kind diocese ; and the West Saxon kings themselves had a manor and hall hard by at Wedmore, where, long afterwards, Alfred [made] his treaty with Guthrum and the Danes. The seat of the bishopric, however, was not yet at Wells: Ealdhelm' s bishop-stool was placed rather at Sherborne, in older- conquered Dorset. Meanwhile, Devonshire was being slowly overrun by the West \ \\ f SOUTH-WEST 211 Saxons ; and after the Danish invasion was over, Edward the Elder thought it well to establish a separate diocese for the Somerset folk, now fully Anglicised; whereas his father Alfred had appointed a Welshman, Asser, bishop of the still Celtic-speaking Devonians in the west. The new see was fixed at Wells, and an abbot of Glastonbury was its first occupant. Of this earliest cathedral nothing, of course, now remains. The Nor- man conquest left Wells where it was ; but in the reign of Henry I. John de Villula, following the usual con- centrating tendency of the time, attempted to remove the see to Bath. Wells must still have been a mere straggling village, grown up irregularly around the [minster] ; while Bath had never ceased to be a walled town of importance since the Roman times. But the canons clamoured to have their bishop-stool restored to them ; and a little later it was arranged that the bishop should in future be elected by the regulars of Bath and the seculars of Wells conjointly, and should take his style from both [minsters]. The old church was at the same time rebuilt ; but early in the thirteenth century it was pulled down, and the present cathedral begun. Its architecture covers all the periods from Early English to Perpendicular. Throughout the mediaeval era a small ecclesiastical town gathered around the cathedral ; but its existing relics are almost entirely ecclesiastical — consisting of the walled and moated episcopal palace, the deanery, the vicar's close [and St. Cuthbert's Church]. The nature of the foundation saved it during the wreck of the monasteries ; and the town is now no doubt larger than at any earlier period, though of course far less relatively important than formerly. It had once some petty textile manufactures; but it now subsists entirely on the cathedral and the small surrounding agricultural district. Taunton, though so closely connected with Wells in origin, owes its continued existence to very different causes. The splendid vale in which it stands, thickly dotted with rich apple orchards, known as Taunton Dean, must always have been one of the most fruitful i 212 CITIES AND TOWNS triassic reaches in all Britain. Indeed, the coins found on the spot seem to indicate that long before Ini's time a station stood here on the Roman road from Bath to Exeter ; while the great British camp at Norton, close by, justifies the l^cal rhyme, Norton was a walled town When Taunton was a fuzzy down. It was to Ini, however, that the modem town owed its foundation ; and his border fortress, a stockaded burg, placed at the point where Taunton Dean narrows to a neck of land along the river, occupied the site of the later castle. It was thus a military post in its beginnings ; but it was meant to guard the rich farms of the newly- conquered region whose centre it occupied. A little farther on, the name of Wellington, the town of the Wealings or Welshmen, sufficiently marks the old limits of the Dumnonian kingdom. At a later period, when the capture of Exeter rendered the fortress unnecessary. Queen Fritheswyth granted Taunton to the see of Winchester, in whose possession it long after remained. The bishops built the castle on the site of Ini's earth- work, the building being erected under Henry I. But its site made the town into the natural agricultural centre of Taunton Dean — the mart for all its cider, grain, and cheese; for, like all triassic districts, the Tone valley is largely given over to orchards and grazing. Of history in the ordinary acceptation Taun- tun has little; its growth has been slow and imper- ceptible. During the Middle Ages it rose to be the real capital of West Somerset ; and its importance is attested by its magnificent churches, one of which, St. Mary Magdalene, has probably the finest and richest perpendicular tower in all England. When the woollen trade was naturalised in this country, the manufacture of serges found a home for a while in Taunton ; and silk is still made there in a humble way. The sieges during the civil wars of the G)mmonwealth, and the events connected with Monmouth's rebellion, belong to the political history of England, not to the local history rv ! SOUTH-WEST 213 of Taunton. The draining and cultivation of the moors — in Somerset the word is appHed rather to a fen than to a down — of course increased the importance of the town; and when at last the railway from Exeter to Bristol swept through the centre of the picturesque valley, Taunton became an important junction, with branch lines diverging from it through the neighbouring dales in all directions. It has now some few manu- factures, notably that of gloves; but as a whole it represents the purely natural agricultural town, as Wells represents the purely artificial cathedral city. From beginning to end it has been the centre of a fertile valley and nothing more. Communications have I widened its district and increased its importance ; but it contrasts at once with those towns which, like Salis- bury and Colchester, have obtained an administrative impulse from ecclesiastical or military reasons, and those which, hke Manchester or Sheffield, have been revolu- tionised by their position near the great coal-beds. Taking them as a whole, indeed, the central towns of the rich triassic vales remain the most thriving purely agricultural centres of England; and Taunton may perhaps be regarded as the best example of the class. TAVISTOCK AND PLYMOUTH On the farther side of Dartmoor, among the richly wooded dales that converge to form the valley and estuary of the Tamar at Plymouth, the long silver thread of the Tavy meanders in ceaseless windings through a deep glen, till at length it opens on the main stream of the united rivers near Tamerton. As in most other parts of Devonshire, the stream has given its own name to all the villages and parishes along its banks. Its upper portion is known as Tavy Cleave ; next come two villages with churches dedicated severally to St. Mary and St. Peter, and known accordingly as Marytavy and Petertavy ; then, a little lower down the bank stands Mount Tavy; while in the very midst of the fertile ^J ssm 214 CITIES AND TOWNS little valley, at the point naturally best adapted for an agricultural centre, rises the picturesque market-town of Tavistock. Its very name marks it out as the oldest and most important place in the whole glen of Tavy ; for the termination ^^stock" or "stoke" is old English for a [stockaded place or a staked ford], and it [some- times] denotes the primitive local centre of the dis- tricts in which it occurs. In the Saxon Chronicle, however, this obvious derivation of the name from the river at its foot is curiously distorted by the writer, who gives it the form of Taefingstoc, as though the town were really an early clan - settlement of Teutonic Tavings. So Torridgeton on the Torridge close by has been corrupted into Torrington, and Oak- hampton on the Okement, which should be called Okement-ton, has assumed on provincial lips the current form of Ockington. In like manner, on the Erme and the Dart we get delusive Ermingtons and Dartingtons, which oddly simulate the true clan-settlements, the Paddingtons, Kensingtons, and Basingstokes of the more thoroughly Teutonic east. In the west country, in fact, where (as in Ireland to-day) the Celtic inhabitants were rather Anglicised than exterminated or even absorbed, such false analogies are very common. As the people of the Llans and the Abers began to use the English language, they twisted their own local names into very curious translated or corrupted forms; just as the modem Cornish have twisted their old Cymric Bryn Huel into Brown Willy, have altered Maen-eglos into tie Manacles, and have distorted Braddoc into a seem- ingly English Broadoak. It is thus that the twelfth century [east country scribe] changed the unfamiliar Taefistoc into Taefingstoc ; and it is only the survival of the river name Tavy, like its Welsh sisters the Teify and the TafF, that has preserved for us the true old Anglicised form of Tavistock. What may have been the original West Welsh or Cornish name of the town on the Tavy it would now probably be impossible to discover. Ever3rwhere in Britain the English conquest makes a complete blank SOUTH-WEST 215 \ If 1 ! ■k- i I of the previous history after the Roman occupation; and the later that conquest was anywhere delayed, the longer is the intervening blank in the local annals. Now, western Devon was only really subdued in the reign of Athelstan, and it was not thoroughly Anglicised until a far later period. As there is no reason to suspect the former existence of any Roman station on the site, we may take it for granted that the vale of Tavy remained in the possession of a mere scattered Celtic population down to the period of the English conquest, and ,that its chief hamlet always occupied the place where Tavistock now stands. But as the English language slowly spread over the newly annexed districts, the native Welsh names were rudely translated — Lanpetroc, or the church of St. Petroc, becoming Petrocstow, afterwards corrupted into Padstow; while a line of similar saintly names marks the debatable borderland of the two tongues at Morwenstow, David- stow, Jacobstow, Virginstow, and Bridestow. All these parishes, though mostly on the Devonian side of the boundary, retain their Celtic dedications, and clearly represent primitive Cornish-Welsh Llans. By much the same process some old Cymric Caer or Dinas became roughly Anglicised as Tavistock. Up to the days of Edgar the West Saxon, the Celtic Defnas of Devonshire still apparently retained a great deal of local feeling under their own ealdorman Ordgar, whose daughter was con- sidered a fitting bride for the great overlord at Win- chester himself It was Ordgar who began the founda- tion of the famous minster at Tavistock, on the extreme western limit of his earldom ; and the joint dedication of his abbey to Our Lady and the Cornish St. Rumon sufficiently attests the surviving strength of Celtic sentiment in the west country down to that compara- tively late period. The relics of St. Rumon formed the great treasure of the place. The monastery was finally completed and endowed by Ordgar's son Ordwulf. Around the new shrine all the later history of Tavistock naturally clusters. Athelred granted it numerous privileges; but during his disastrous reign, a body of ^■l 216 CITIES AND TOWNS Danes sailed up the Tavy— there was as yet no Plymouth to sack at the mouth of the estuary— and *' burned up Ordwulf s minster at Taefingstoc, and bore unnumbered booty with them to their ships." Nevertheless the abbey was soon rebuilt and ranked as of such import- ance that it gave an archbishop to the province of York before the conquest. As the shrine of a local Comu- British saint it enjoyed the greatest popularity in the two counties. The Cornish language, indeed, did not become wholly extinct in this part of Devonshire until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Throughout the Middle Ages, Tavistock remained ecclesiastically and commercially the centre of the whole Tamar basin. The site of Plymouth was then occupied only by three little fishing hamlets known as the three Suttons; and in his own secluded valley, cut off from all the rest of England by the intervening block of Dartmoor, the Benedictine abbot of Tavistock reigned practically supreme over his little territories for five hundred years. Within the borough and hundred he possessed sole jurisdiction ; and his house was con- sidered the wealthiest in the West Welsh counties, save only the Augustinian monastery at Plymton. The neighbouring borough of Lidford was also the stannary capital of the Dartmoor mines, and doubtless contributed by its proximity to the local importance of Tavistock. The great minster church almost equalled in size and importance the two western cathedrals of Wells and Exeter. Under Henry VIII., just before the suppres- sion of the monasteries, the head of this house was raised to the dignity of a mitred abbot, and at the same time made independent of episcopal control by a special bull of Leo X. Shortly after, the storm broke ; and the [dis- mantled] abbey, with most of its manors, was bestowed by Henry on the founder of the house of Russell, still so intimately connected with the borough of Tavistock. Thomas Cromwell had already pulled down a large part of the buildings, and the few fragments that now remain are but of slight interest. Even the abbey ekmch was destroyed ; the existing parish church [St SOUTH-WEST 217 Eustace] is a minor building of the perpendicular period. Meanwhile the trade of Tavistock had been gradually developing, especially its woollen manufacture, and the local kerseys were favourably known in the sixteenth century throughout the whole of England. At the same time its copper and tin mines were more fully explored; and during the seventeenth century it still remained the undoubted capital of the extreme west. Pym sat for the borough in the Long Parliament ; and, like most other industrial centres, it declared against the king in the Civil War. But with the eighteenth century the supremacy of Tavistock in the Tamar basin began to be rudely shaken by the rise of Plymouth. The village of King's Sutton, or Sutton-juxta-Plym- mouth, had been slowly growing up to the reign of Henry VI., when it was first incorporated by Act of ParUament : and from that time onward it rose rapidly to the rank of a great commercial port. The westward twist given to trade and adventure in the reign of Elizabeth immensely increased its importance; and from the days of the Stuarts it manifestly superseded Tavistock entirely as the local metropohs of the west. At present, the little borough has dropped quietly into the position of a small country mining town and agri- cultural centre ; now being gradually revivified by its position on a through line of railway between Plymouth and Exeter. It only deserves attention from the historical inquirer in our own time as the real original native centre of the debatable Tamar district, a place now occupied by Pljrmouth, which may fairly be regarded at the present day as the true capital of the Cornu-British race in both counties. EXETER A defensible hill overlooking the head of navigation on an estuarine river — such is the common situation of all old British or early English commercial towns; and Exeter forms no exception to the rule. Its primitive \ 216 CITIES 4ND TOWNS Danes sailed up the Tavy — there was as yet no Plymouth to sack at the mouth of the estuary— and '' burned up Ordwulf's minster at Taefingstoe, and bore unnumbered booty with them to their ships." Nevertheless the abbey was soon rebuilt and ranked as of such import- ance that it gave an archbishop to the province of York before the conquest. As the shrine of a local G)mu- British saint it enjoyed the greatest popularity in the two counties. The Cornish language, indeed, did not become wholly extinct in this part of Devonshire imtil the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Throughout the Middle Ages, Tavistock remained ecclesiastically and commercially the centre of the whole Tamar basin. The site of Plymouth was then occupied only by three little fishing hamlets known as the three Suttons; and in his own secluded valley, cut off from all the rest of England by the intervening block of Dartmoor, the Benedictine abbot of Tavistock reigned practically supreme over his little territories for five hundred years. Within the borough and hundred Im possessed sole jurisdiction ; and his house was con- sidered the wealthiest in the West Welsh counties, save only the Augustinian monastery at Plymton. The neighbouring borough of Lidford was also the stannary capital of the Dartmoor mines, and doubtless contributed by its proximity to the local importance of Tavistock. The great minster church almost equalled in size and importance the two western cathedrals of Wells and Exeter. Under Henry VIII., just before the suppres- sion of the monasteries, the head of this house was raised to the dignity of a mitred abbot, and at the same time made independent of episcopal control by a special bull of Leo X. Shortly after, the storm broke ; and the [dis- mantled] abbey, with most of its manors, was bestowed by Henry on the founder of the house of Russell, still so intimately connected with the borough of Tavistock. Thomas Cromwell had already pulled down a large part of the buildings, and the few fragments that now remain are but of slight interest. Even the abbey church was destroyed ; the existing parish church [St SOUTH-WEST 217 Eustace] is a minor building of the perpendicular period. Meanwhile the trade of Tavistock had been gradually developing, especially its woollen manufacture, and the local kerseys were favourably known in the sixteenth century throughout the whole of England. At the same time its copper and tin mines were more fully explored; and during the seventeenth century it still remained the undoubted capital of the extreme west. Pym sat for the borough in the Long Parliament ; and, like most other industrial centres, it declared against the king in the Civil War. But with the eighteenth century the supremacy of Tavistock in the Tamar basin began to be rudely shaken by the rise of Plymouth. The village of King's Sutton, or Sutton-juxta-Plym- mouth, had been slowly growing up to the reign of Henry VI., when it was first incorporated by Act of Parliament : and from that time onward it rose rapidly to the rank of a great commercial port. The westward twist given to trade and adventure in the reign of Elizabeth immensely increased its importance ; and from the days of the Stuarts it manifestly superseded Tavistock entirely as the local metropolis of the west. At present, the little borough has dropped quietly into the position of a small country mining town and agri- cultural centre ; now being gradually revivified by its position on a through line of railway between Plymouth and Exeter. It only deserves attention from the historical inquirer in our own time as the real original native centre of the debatable Tamar district, a place now occupied by Plymouth, which may fairly be regarded at the present day as the true capital of the Cornu-British race in both counties. EXETER A defensible hill overlooking the head of navigation on an estuarine river — such is the common situation of all old British or early English commercial towns ; and Exeter forms no exception to the rule. Its primitive 218 CITIES AND TOWNS i nucleus consists of the isolated red igneous rock which forms the mound now capped by the scanty relics of Rougemont Castle ; and the original Celtic earthworks may still be traced in the vallum on two sides of the castle yard ; for here, as elsewhere, the site of the stronghold has no doubt been successively occupied by Euskarian, Dumnonian, Roman, Saxon, and Norman masters. The river which it commands bore originally the common Celtic name of Isca, [a form] which re- appears in the Axe, the Esk, and the Usk, besides affording the first syllable to Uxbridge and Axminster. That British Exeter early formed the chief emporium for the Cornish tin trade is sufficiently vouched by the numerous discoveries of Greek coins belonging to the Syrian and Egyptian dynasties; while, indeed, its connection with the stannaries has throughout its history been very close. When the Romans penetrated into the western peninsula they made the stockaded fort on the River Isca into their principal Dumnonian station ; and with them its name took the form of Isca Dumnoniorum, to distinguish it from that other Isca in the Silurian territory which has been so differently modernised as Caerlon upon Usk. Villas, tessellated pavements, and other remains still attest the commercial and administrative greatness of Exeter under its Roman lords. After the withdrawal of the legions cast the semi-Romanised provincials upon their own resources, Isca appears to have remained for some centuries the capital of the revived Dumnonian principality, which long held out against the aggi-essive clansmen of Wessex. Here a Christian Dumnonian prince undoubtedly held his court, while heathen Saxons ruled in Winchester, during those shadowy days which Lord Tennyson has chosen for the scene of his Arthurian Idylls ; and hither a little later, when Wessex had made its peace with the Roman Church, Abbot Aldhelm of Malmesbury dispatched his epistle on the Celtic heresies "to the most glorious lord of the western kingdom, Geraint." In truth, nowhere in all Britain is the continuity between Roman and modem times so marked as at SOUTH-WEST i: 1 If I 219 Exeter ; and that fact forms the master-key to all the subsequent history of the city— from the political point of view at least. Even before Egbert's time, however, the West Saxon kings had reduced the district of Dyfnaint or Devon to tributary submission; and already we hear of fights between the Defnas and the men of Cornwall, where the Defnas clearly appear to be acting in the interest of the West Saxon overlords. Mr. Davidson has shown that the Saxons had certainly settled in the eastern part of the shire as early as the middle of the eighth century ; and on tlie lips of these Teutonic colonists the Isca be- came Exe, and the totvfi of Isca became Exan-ceaster — a name gradually softened, after the usual border fashion, into Execestre and Exeter. Till the reign of Athelstan, English and Welsh dwelt together independently in the city ; but when that vigorous W^est Saxon king began his wars against Howell of Cornwall, he reduced the Welsh burghers of Exeter to subjection before passing on to subdue their independent brethren in the west. To this day, as Mr. Green points out, the dedications of churches in the northern and southern halves of the city bear witness to the original division of races within the burgh ; for those in the northern part commemorate such local Celtic devotees as St. Petroc, while those in the southern quarter are hallowed in the familiar names of orthodox Roman saints. Athelstan restored the old city walls, and fortified the angles with stone-built towers. Down to the date of the Norman conquest, Exeter lay of course wholly within the ancient walls, whose boundaries can still be easily traced along the edge of the escarpment. It occupied the summit of a low hill, defended on one side by the Exe, and on two others by the long ravines of Northernhay and Southern- hay; while it lay exposed to the east alone, where a sort of high isthmus, now traversed by St. Sidwell Street (the old Icknild Way), connected this outlying spur with the main uplands in the rear. The extreme limits extended from the castle to the old Snail Tower near All Hallows Church, and from Bedford Circus to the '^' II 1 1 220 CITIES AND TOWNS comer of Coombe Street. The four main roads (in reality two) intersecting one another nearly at right angles — North Street, South Street, Fore Street, and High Street — still represent the original ground-plan of the square Roman Isca. East Gate, West Gate, North Gate, and South Gate, where they passed through the wall, have long ago ceased to be practically recog- nisable. Quay Gate, at the comer of Coombe Street, led down obliquely to the wharves at the river-side which gave the city its commercial importance. Here alone the wall stretched down to the banks of the Exe ; elsewhere it faithfully followed the commanding crest of the triangular hill-slope. Like other trading towns, Exeter suffered during the Danish invasions, though the burghers more than once compelled the discomfited pirates to fly to their ships. The royal rights in the city were made over to Emma, wife successively of Athelred and Cnut, as part of her morning gift ; and in Cnut's reign the strength of the Danish seafaring element in Exeter is sufficiently shown by the foundation of St. Olave's Church, dedicated to the canonised Scandinavian king Olave. It was under Emma's son the Confessor, however, that the ecclesias- tical history of Exeter began in eamest. The joint West Welsh bishop-stool of Devon and Cornwall was then removed from Crediton to its present seat, in order that it might enjoy the needful protection of a walled burgh. Thus, before the conquest, Exeter had already become the acknowledged capital of the semi -Celtic west, standing to the Dumnonian Welsh-kin as London stood to the dominant West Saxons, and as York stood to the colonising Danes of the North. After the Conqueror's victory at Hastings, the little local metropolis ventured to stand out on its own account against the Normans, and offered to admit the new king only on the terms of a free civic republic receiving its emperor. But William would brook no Florence or Venice in his conquered realm, and he besieged and took Exeter by means of a mine. He then erected a new castle, which he called Rougemont, on the site of the Dumnonian dun and the SOUTH-WEST 221 Roman fortress. The old cathedral of Leofnc, the first bishop stood on the site of the existing Lady Chapel probably; but Warelwast, the Conqueror's nephew, began the Norman minster, which was much injured by fire during the troubles of Stephen's reign. To this building belong the unique, and it must be confessed uncouth transeptal towers, which form the most striking feature of the cathedral in a distant view. The larger part of the existing minster, however, consists of decor- ated work, and was erected by successive bishops between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With the growth of the mediaeval export trade in wool, the city advanced rapidly in size and importance, liut at the close of the thirteenth century it received a senous check to its commercial prosperity, which for a while threatened to prove as disastrous as the rise of Liverpool has proved to Chester, or as the rise of Hull has proved to York. Isabella de Redvers, to revenge herself upon the citizens, built the obstmction at lopsham, still known as Countess Weir, so as completely to cut off the city from its navigable water-way. Under Hugh Courtenay, Topsham became commercially all that Exeter had once been. The burghers, however, did not lose heart ; and after two centuries of lawsuits and fruitless endeavour, they at last cut the ship canal trom Topsham to Exeter, in the reign of Henry VIH. —-a work of remarkable spirit and enterprise for such an age. The cathedral city speedily regained its former greatness, and was erected into a royal port by Charles II. It resumed its position as the chief mart for woollen goods and serges in the West of England, being described by Defoe as second only to the Brigg Market at Leeds. The handsome Elizabethan Guildhall bears witness to this revived prosperity. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the country gentry were acquiring the habit of keeping up a town -house but had not yet centralised themselves on London, Exeter became the fashionable centre of the west, where many county families passed the winter. But at the same time, its trade began to decline, partly from the slight \i \ 222 CITIES AND TOWNS draught of water at the quay and partly from the north- ward determination of all commercial enterprise towards the coal and cotton country. Woollen fabrics no longer went away from the basin "in whole fleets." Still, Exeter has survived the change far better than most other practically disused ports ; its position makes it the natural receiving and distributing centre for the two main fertile districts of Devon, and it is the only large town between Bristol and PljTnouth, so that it neces- sarily attracts to itself the mercantile interests of a wide intervening tract. The extension of the railway system, on which it is an important junction, and the growth of considerable watering-places or health resorts at Torquay, Exmouth, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Newton, and Ilfra- combe, as well as the large tourist traffic to Dartmoor and the North Devon coast, have each tended to advance its fortunes ; and at the present day Exeter has still all the appearance of a prosperous and rapidly growing city. I < ' ' ^th (^lul Julius fesar himself. The merchants frfi^l^aTr lSL had reported, too, how the great Roman imperataTn landed on the coast of Kentland, how the kS men had routed him with their war-cars, how he had Thame's affi "T ™°" !f^°"^ "^^ ''^^' h«^ch at High Peddington-Peddington Abbas, as it used to be called, to distinguish it from the Royal manor of Kmgs Peddington-and carted it along the road which now leads up the vaUey to jom the great lx)ndon highway from the west, but which then ran straight across country to Sherborne direct. This charter of the eighth century, however, shows us a Wessex and a Chumside very different from the Wessex and the Chumside of the early Peadmg colonists. The Peadingas were heathen worshippers of Woden and Thunor, who gave the names of their crods to termini like Wanston: the charter of Cynewulf makes over a large stretch of land to the church of St Mary at Sherbome, in a simple matter-of-course way which clearly bespeaks a long-settled Christianity. The original colony of the Peadingas was apparently the domain of an isolated and independent clan: the charter of Cynewulf betokens a regular central govern- ment, with a king who has power to book land to persons or co^rations with the advice of his duly constituted Meeting of Wise Men. Evidently we have passed from a period of wild Teutonic heathendom and local inde- pendence to a period of comparatively settled royal rule constituted on a partly Roman model, under the guidance of Romanised Christian priests, who use the Latin tongue as an official language. Yet of this momentous change we have few and very indirect memorials in Chumside itself. We are left almost entirely to inference and analogy for the detads which IP i I SHERBORNE LANE 251 must enable us to bridge over the vast gap thus dis- closed in our annals. It is not probable that the Peadingas could have settled down at Peddington much before the end of the sixth century. The first West Saxon invaders only reached Britain at the very close of the fifth, and conquered Winchester some twenty years later. It was more than half a century before they had got as far as Old Sarum, and after eighty years they had only just advanced to Bath and Cirencester. Hence it is not likely that their farthest outposts could have occupied the Chumside district till the closing years of the sixth century. The Peadingas, who were the pioneers of English conquest in the Valley of the Chum, must long have remained almost independent marchers on the outlying West Welsh frontier of the West Saxon realm. Beyond them stretched the still unconquered Celtic kingdom, which shrank at last to the narrow limits of Cornwall, but which remained a powerful principality even in the later days of Ini and Cuthred. The evidence of names and features clearly shows us that the Peadingas did not exterminate the Welsh inhabi- tants of the valley; but the evidence of language, religion, and customs also shows us that they completely Anglicised them. For at least a hundred years the Peadingas and their Celtic serfs continued to worship the old Teutonic gods. Names of places referring to Woden, to Frea, and to Hel, or compounded with the sacred trees and animals of the Saxon race— the oak, the ash, the thorn, the horse, the raven, and the wolf —abound in Chumside and the neighbourhood gener- ally, and attest the ancient reverence paid to the Teutonic mythology. Black -haired and dark -eyed children of true Euskarian type will still tell you folk- lore and fairy tales of the conquering race — myths which had their origin in the Thuringian forests or by the marshes of Old England on the Sleswick coast. But the Peadings owed to the distant king at Win- chester their military service in time of war, though perhaps at first the canton was really independent even h / 252 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE in this matter, and was only later subdued or amalga- mated by some warrior prince of the house of Woden and Cerdic. At any rate, when the authentic history of Wessex opens, we find it a real though loosely organised kingdom, with a king who could collect a considerable army of Saxons to waste the yet un- conquered Welsh, or make raids upon the English Mercians beyond the forest belt of Cotteswold. More than this it could hardly have been in the old heathen days at least. inr . But in the beginning of the seventh century a West Saxon king, Cynegils, listened to the missionaries who had been sent over to Kent a generation earher, and was baptized at Dorchester -on -Thames by a Gaulish bishop. Christianity must have spread downward, how- ever, very slowly, for the kings and chiefs were always the first converts in England; and it probably did not reach remote comers like King's Peddington for many years. Long after Cynegils and his two Christian successors, we find a pagan West Saxon king ; and out- lying places, such as Wight, remained wholly heathen tai considerably later. But the old minster at Win- Chester was founded as early as 648 ; Glastonbury was set up under EngHsh rule (for there had been a Welsh monastery there before) some forty years later; and Wimbome dates from the first years of the eighth century. A bishop of Wessex, "west of Selwood," was appomted about the same time. So, long before Cynewulf gave the manor of High Peddington to the monks of Sherborne, the Chumside people must cer- tamly have been at least imperfectly Christianised. How imperfectly we can see from the still surviving folk-lore and the long lingering belief in witchcraft, which was but the secret worshipping of the proscribed gods. The change of faith on the part of their chief at Winchester made little difference to the descendants of the Peadingas at Peddington, still less to the dark and long-headed serfs of Chumey and Upchum. As late as the days of Cnut they still practised open heathendom, which brought down upon them the anger III DANE'S HILL 253 of the Danish king. The reports of witch trials under James I., and even under Charles XL, sufficiently show that they still practised it in secret down to the seven- teenth century, if not even to the reign of George III. VII. DANES' HILL Westward of King's Peddington a pretty path leads through the warren — that beautiful broken underclifF of chert and greensand, brought down by almost yearly landslips, and thickly overgrown with bracken and clematis ; while beyond it the tall chalk cliffs hem in a very small seaward combe, through which a mere thread of water worms its way between the hills to a tiny shingle beach, fronted by the half-dozen tar-plastered houses that form the fishing hamlet of Gamelby. Antiquarian visitors prick up their ears in a moment at the very mention of the name. A Gamelby in Wessex, a Gamelby within three statute miles of King's Peddington — it seems altogether too strange, too delightfully romantic, to be really true. Yet there the fact remains, and the reasons for it are clear enough to any one who has once seen that retired Httle combe, hemmed in by high defensible hills on every side, and opening only to the sea in front. But why not a Gamelby here as well as elsewhere? asks the unanti- quarian mind. What is there about the name to make it such a curiosity in Wessex or in any other part of the United Kingdom ? Simply this. The word is purely and wholly Danish. In the Scandinavian North we expect to find Whitbys, and Derbys, and Kirbys, and Harrowbys; and we do find them all through the Danish and Norse parts of England from Cumberland to Suffolk : but in purely English Wessex they are naturally almost unknown. The termination common to them all was introduced into Britain by the Northern wickings ; and no place-names of this type are to be found in documents earlier than the Danish conquest of half England. The old name of Derby, as we get it in Beda, is Northweorthig, ssmm l| 254 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE or, as we should now spell it, Norworthy ; the old name of Whitby was Streoneshalh, or, as we should now spell it, Strenshal. Wherever we meet with towns or villages of this type, we may be quite sure that there has once been a Scandinavian colony upon the spot Yet so rare is a Scandinavian colony in Wessex that here at Gamelby one might be inclined to doubt the unsupported testimony of the "by" were it not the incontestable evidence offered us by the "GameL" There is no gettingj^rid of " Camel " in any way. It is a most indubitable Danish name, of excellent pedigree ; and Orm, the son of Camel, is a famous person in late Northumbrian history. Moreover, the chalk down just above the hamlet is known to this day as Danes' Hill, and the manor is entered under that title, in very choice Norman Latin, by King William's commissioners in the Exeter Domesday. On the summit of the down, half obliterated by time and hedges, one may still trace the lines of some ancient earthworks ; and these earth- works were almost indubitably raised by the Danes, from whom the hUl derives its title, for they exactly accord with similar Danish works in the Cheshire Wirral and on the low peninsular nesses of East Anglia. Most curious of all, on the reach of the Chum which bends rounds the ridge of downs to the north of this isolated combe, stands a village called Beckford-in- England ; and the strangeness of the name has given rise to a foolish piece of folk-lore among the gossips of the place. A tramp, it is said, once fell asleep in the sprmg time on top of a haystack. During the night the floods rose, and the haystack, with the sleeper upon it, was carried away by the river to this spot. When the tramp awoke, he fancied he must be sailing over to France ; and after the stack grounded on the shallows of the ford, he called out to some bystanders to know the name of the place. Being told that it was Beckford, he exclaimed in surprise, "What! Beckford in England?" — and Beckford- m- England has therefore been the name of the village ever since. As a witness to the truth of this story, the Uttle inn bears for its sign a DANE'S HILL 255 .1 man floating in a river on a haystack. This is the sort of nonsense which is offered to the inquiring stranger as the result of local antiquarian research. But the inquiring stranger easily reflects for himself that " beck " is a Scandinavian word; and that when the Danes owned a petty domain of their own at Camelby, the far side of the ford over the beck was naturally spoken of by them as being in England, whereas the near side was in Daneland. Long after the very existence of the Danes had been utterly forgotten, the silly myth was no doubt invented to explain the curious fact that a village in the heart of an English shire should bear so queer a name as Beckford-in-England. When and how the Danes got to the Chumside district it is not difficult to guess. From the days of Ecgberht in Wessex onward, Scandinavian pirates in their lightly -built long ships were always hovering around the coast of England, doing a little plundering and robbing as occasion offered; and there were few better places for them to land in than the fiords of the west country, from Cornwall to Dorsetshire. The penin- sula of Cornwall itself was still mhabited by free West Welsh, always ready to make a raid against their English neighbours — as, indeed, their Enghsh neigh- bours always richly deserved. In Devonshire the Welsh had not yet forgotten their fellowship with their Cornish brothers nor given up their native Celtic speech; and even in the days of ^thelstan they remained as a distinct nationality in Exeter itself. Here, then, and in the largely Celtic lands to the east, the Danes could always count upon finding allies ; and so from the beginning of the struggle this south-western comer of Wessex was the favourite point from which to attack the West Saxon kings. Even before Ecgberht's time the wickings had made descents upon Dorsetshire, where they came like thunderbolts upon the poor peace- able Christian people. The West Saxon peasants of the coast, good simple souls, had long since settled down into quiet and honest tillers of the soil, having no particular quarrel with anybody, and protected from i 256 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE war by their insular position. Now and then the Chumside folk were called, it is true, by their overlord at Winchester, to resist an attack of the Mercians, or to aid him in subjugating recalcitrant Sussex; but as a rule they lived peacefully on their own farms at Peddington, defending their corn-plots from the crows, and seeing that the wolves did no harm to their pigs in Chumhead forest. When first a few shiploads of heathen pirates landed in Wessex, the simple people did not know what an invasion meant. They were as astonished as the West-countrymen of our own day would be by a raid of the Kurds or the Dyaks on Torquay or Weymouth. "The Kmgs reeve rode to them," says the English Chronicle in its ndtf way, ''and would drive them to the king's ham, for he knew not what they were." The Danes had small regard for reeves, however, and slew the good, honest steward on the spot. But before long the West-countrymen learned, only too well, what the wickings really were. Towards the close of Ecgberht's reign the king himself had to come down and fight thirty-five ship-loads at Charmouth, on the borders of Dorset and Devon, "and there was great slaughter made, and the Danes kept the battle-field." There, too, you may see their fortified camp still crowning the top of Coney Castle hill. Two years after, another fleet of pu-ates landed in Cornwall, stirred up the West Welsh, and marched with them to Hengston, where the West Saxon king put both hosts to flight. Years later, when the Danes held half England, a third host landed at Kmg's Peddington, and burned the church, besides plundering the lands of Sherborne Abbey. The ealdor- man of the shire came against them, and the bishops of Sherborne and Carchester came too; for when the heathen were burning God's churches even good church- men felt they might take mace in hand to defend their homes. There was no such thing possible, however, as a united resistance: that imphes organisation, com- munications, commissariat, and many other civihsed devices whereof the West Saxons knew nothing ; but each shire fought as best it might for itself, and was DOMESDAY BOOK 257 satisfied if it could only drive away the wickings to the next shire on either side. The wickings had to fight hard ; they said themselves, with their own fierce and candid humour, that they had never met with harder hand-play in England than the two bishops gave them ; but in the end the ealdorman and one of the bishops were among the killed, and the Danes once more kept possession of the field. It was then, doubtless, that the unknown Gamel settled down in this isolated and protected little cove, and, with the sea before him and the hills behind him, fortified himself in his petty principality till the peace under Alfred enabled him to become a quiet English landholder. There are traces of many such little Danish settlements on rocky islets or peninsular promontories of the west country ; but not many of them occur in such land-bound positions as that overshadowed by the mouldering earthworks of Danes' HUl. ' 'I h VIII. DOMESDAY BOOK. From the days when Gamel the Dane settled in the little seaward combe of Gamelby to the days when William the Norman " held deep speech with his witan about this land, how it was peopled," our Chumside history is almost an absolute blank. True, some time between those two dates — ^most probably in the reign of Edward the Confessor — the round-arched doorway in the Peddington Church was set up ; for even our most iconoclastic architectural expert and archaeologist allows that the door in question, now built round by the present late decorative tower, is a genuine pre-Norman relic, " and one of the finest specimens of early Roman- esque architecture in all England." But, with this trifling exception, there is no direct evidence, docu- mentary or otherwise, as to the state of Chumside between the Danish inroad and the Norman conquest. Domesday, however, comes in upon us as usual with a whole flood of light. It tells us all about King's Peddington (not yet a Royal manor), from the abbot s W; 11 HI 258 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE and the staller down to the very number of cows and pigs in the parish. "King Wilhelm caused to be written/' says the grave Peterborough Chronicler, with his deUghtful barbaric simpUcity, " what or how much each man had who was a holder of estate in England, in land, or in cattle, and how much money it might be worth. So very narrowly he bade it be sought out that there was not one single acre, nor one yard of land, nor even— shame it is to tell, but him it shamed not to do it an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine that was not set down in his writ" We can almost fancy we are listening to a modem Hindu complaining against the monstrous indehcacy of the Indian census. "Walter the son of Ivo," says the great Survey, « holds Pedingatune. Edric the Staller held it in King Edward's time. Before King Wilhelm came into Eng- land"— that is Domesday's exquisitely official manner of alluding to the wholly unrecognisable reign of Harold ^" Edric died." Then it goes on to describe the part of the manor belonging to Walter, now King's Pedding- ton ; and the part belonging to Sherborne Abbey, now Peddington Abbas or High Peddington. Disentangling the living facts from all this dry mediaeval Latin— this hash of bad English, misspelt by Norman pens, this jargon of soc and demesne, of carucates and bordars, of harsh contractions and crabbed syntax— we can still perhaps picture to ourselves the Chumside which King William's commissioners came doym to see. There was as yet no considerable village on the sea front ; perhaps there was even less of a village than in the old Euskarian and Celtic times, or in the days of the first Peadingas. The Parish itself was now in the main a pure agricultural manor, owned by a lord who was the feudal superior of all the churis within its boundaries. This change had been taking place even " before King William came into England " ; for ever since the EngUsh had been exposed to the raids of the wickings it had become almost a matter of necessity for the poorer freeman of the old constitution to seek himself a lord, under whose protection he might place himself. \ DOMESDAY BOOK 259 and to whom he must owe in return certain customary dues of labour. It was the fear of the Gamelby Danes which drove the men of Chumey and Peddington to commend themselves to the chief landholders of their districts, and which thus set up the feudal system in Churnside. For, like all other phases of the English Constitution, the feudal system was not made but grew. To suppose, as most old-fashioned school-books used to suppose, that it was all settled in a day by a Royal pro- clamation, an Act of Parliament, or a decree of the Witena-gemot, is much on a par with that other sup- position, not wholly unknown to American tourists, that you may buy a printed copy of the British Constitution, neatly and explicitly set forth in appropriate if somewhat high-flown phraseology, just like the Constitution of the United States. The people whom William's delegates found in Chumside were still essentially the same people as ever. There was the substratum of dark Celts and Euskarians ; there was the small body of free English churls ; and there was one new element in the person of Walter son of Ivo, a Breton from the neighbourhood of Dinan. For here, as elsewhere, the close study of local history shows us— what it is sometimes hard to see on a larger scale— that at bottom population changes but very little. New factors are superadded from time to time ; but the old factors still remain ; and so all our history is one and continuous — the ancient is always reappearing in the modem. But the arrangement of the population was undergoing great changes. The old cus- tomary village life had broken down ; the land that once belonged to the community was now the property of a single owner ; and the English churls, lately bound down by feudal ties to their English lord, were now still more tightly bound down to their French master. Edric the Staller himself had joined Harold's army, but fell at Stamford Bridge. William forgave his son, and permitted him to hold Peddington till the great English rebellion, when the young man joined the Exeter in- surgents. Then William put out his eyes, cut off his b- I 260 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE feet, and gave the lands to Walter the Breton. Froni that day to this the descendants or representatives of Walter, or those who purchased from him, have owned the soil of King's Peddington. So we rightly speak of their occupation as feudal in origin, because it has sup- planted the old communal land tenure of the mhabit- Lts : and though the relation of the tenants to the . lord has passed from one of labour-rents to one of money-rents, it is still essentially a feudal relation all the same. No such system has ever existed at Kmg s Peddington or elsewhere in the world, except as the result of a military regime supplanting the common holding of the land by all the commumty. The details of the great Survey suffice to give us a very graphic picture of the general aspect of Chumside during the early Norman time. All the valley was now cultivated by the churls and serfs of the various owners ^Walter hhnself, Sherborne Abbey, the Danish pro- prietor who still held Gamelby, and so forth-but the hillsides were even yet covered with dense forest, which ran inland till it joined the vast belt of Selwood, the great woodland barrier that cut off all the half-Celtic western peninsula of England from the more purely Teutonic shh-es on the east. The villages seem to have been a good deal broken up ; for population is always thicker and more concentrated round little nuclei >yhen the people till their own plots than when they cultwate the soil as serfs for their lords. The old Romanesque church, the wooden hall of the manor house, the huts of the churls who shoed the lord's horses and ploughed the carucates in the dale, still marked the site of the old Celtic, Roman, and EngUsh settlement at Kmg s Peddington ; but the mass of the people were scattered among little hovels in the outlying leys, hursts, and dens, where they cut then: lord's wood, burnt his char- coal, looked after his game, fed his pigs on acorns and beechmast, or tended his sheep, his horses, and his cattle in the clearings still exposed to the attacks ot straggling wolves. The range of the forest, and the position of the clearings, can even now be traced by the II THE STONE PIER 261 names of the upland farms which embody the leys, hursts and dens of the early feudal period. A belt of Brockleys, Wadhursts, Everdens, and the like girds round the old arable tract for miles and miles continu- ously, preserving the memory of the badgers, the wild boars, the beavers, and the deer, whose very names have long since ceased to have any significance in our modem speech. The entire constitution of society was wholly altered. In the place of the old free, self- supporting community, we get a community labouring entirely for the advantage of a single lord. His artisans and cultivators lived in immediate dependence in his own hall ; his serfs worked for him in the outskirts. 1-rom the pomt of view of King's Peddington, that is what we mean by feudalism. The glitter was seen at Wmchester.and London; the squalid reality in Churn- side. And though the seeds of this feudalism had been sown long before, it was WiUiam's Survey that fixed it firmly on the soil for ever. IX. THE STONE PIER Our ordmary evening promenade at King's Peddington is on the old and curiously curved stone pier. This pier IS half a breakwater and half a quay : it forms and protects the little artificial harbour, round three of whose sides it bends quaintly in an irregular semicircle. Ihe top of the outer barrier (on which we walk) is not flat but slopes gradually downward and outward, so as to throw off the breakers in heavy weather ; and when the stones are wet with clammy spray it is by no means easy always to keep one's footing without sliding qmetly off into the sea on the outer side. To say the truth, the pier was never meant for a promenade : this high external barrier was intended merely to break the torce of the waves ; while the quay itself runs round the mside of the protecting semicircle at a lower level, so as entirely to cut off all view of the sea, restricting one's prospect to the tiny harbour and the three or four I I 262 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE coasting colliers which happen to be unloading there. But when King's Peddington pier was first designed, the notion of promenading had never entered into any- body's head : for it was originally built in the reign of Edward I. ; and though it has since been remodelled many times over, it still preserves the main features of its primitive construction. So the old pier is really a memorial of the greatest revolution which ever affected the fate of Chumside and of England generally. One is often tempted to wonder why historians who are so minute and exphcit about the changes in the mere external form of our social structure — who tell us so much and at such length about the glorious Refor- mation and the glorious Revolution and the signing of Magna Charta — should have usually passed over almost in silence the vast and all-affecting changes which at various times have come across the whole inner nature of the social structure itself. To a simple-minded Chumside antiquary, living remote from Courts and Parliaments, and wholly without curiosity as to Queen Elizabeth's ruffs or King George's periwigs, it would seem that the history of King's Peddington and of Britain since the English settlement fell naturally into three great epochs of paramount importance. The first is the epoch when the whole country was entirely agricultural, and when every manor or every village was self-contained and self-supporting ; and during this period there was no trade worth speaking of. The second is the epoch when the country began to export raw material to the more civilised Continent, and to receive in exchange Southern products and manufactured goods ; and during this period England was in a position analogous to that of Australia or of the Western States, and local collecting and distributing centres or com- mercial towns sprang up at wide intervals among the agricultural tracts. The third is the epoch when England began to manufacture and export finished goods instead of raw material, and to import raw material mstead of finished goods; and during this period the towns rise into prominence, the industrial THE STONE PIER 263 class become the most important element of the population, and the whole social life of the community is utterly reversed. Compared with these momentous revolutions, a mere change of abstract religious opinions or of central administrative system sinks for the mind of the Chumside antiquary into complete insignificance. For that reason, the old stone pier, which marks and dates the beginning of the great industrial movement, must always be to every enlightened historian of King's Peddington a critical turning-point in the long annals of the parish. The pier, in fact, shows us at once that by Edward's time Chumside had cast off its old local isolation, and had begun to enter into the general current of European life. There was growing up a need for foreign products. The Norman gentlemen who owned the manors re- quired tapestry, and Oriental steel, and better wine than that of the Gloucestershire vineyards; their wives needed velvets, and silk robes, and Rouen fashions, and Southem headgear. The churches and abbeys wanted glass, and incense, and vestments, and paintings, and Italian carvings. Ever since the Norman Conquest had dissevered England from the barbaric Scandinavian North, and bound it up with the civilised Romance South, trade in such articles had been going on to some extent ; and though it was still carried on solely for the benefit of the governing few, poHtical or ecclesiastical —for the Court, the knightly class, and the clergy— yet it had already begun to produce some little increase in the mercantile element of towns like London, Winchester, Exeter, and Norwich — where, indeed, large numbers of Norman artisans and traders had settled down after the conquest as a sort of commercial aristo- cracy. When Peddington pier was built, however, things had got a little beyond this first stage ; and one can see easily enough why Edward's reign should have been a natural time for the further development of the nascent industrial and commercial spirit. Of course the history books, with their ordinary love of person- alities, have an easy ready-made personal explanation !« > * ■!■ ■"■■ ■ . ^ . ^T " If 264 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE to offer: — "King Edward greatly encouraged trade, and induced Flemish weavers to settle in England." But behind King Edward and his Flemings lay the nation, and the reason why the nation was now prepared to enter upon a commercial life is pretty clear. The Norman peace, the strong hands of William and Henry had put a stop to the old Danish plundering and the old English local anarchy. At the same time, the final separation from Normandv had turned the Norman and Angevin aristocracy into' settled English landed pro- prietors, Uving on their own estates, and no longer engaged as of old in constant Continental warfare. Thus on the one hand population and wealth had increased during the long period of comparative peace ; while, on the other hand, the class in whose hands wealth was entirely concentrated were left at home, and so com- pelled to spend their wealth where they gathered it. Here, then, we come upon the true mediaeval England, the England of great castles and splendid abbeys, of merchant repubUcs and special privileges, of a tinsel feudal chivalry and of abject peasant degradation. This was the England which first largely needed a foreign trade to supply those Southern luxuries and artistic products never dreamt of by the ruder old English thanes or Danish earls under Cnut or Edward the Confessor. And in this way it became practicable to ship bales of wool and tallow and hides from King's Peddington for Flanders, France, and Italy; and to import in return wine from Bordeaux, silk mercery from Rouen, and textile fabrics from the rising cities of the Flemish industrial belt. The way in which King's Peddington came to be selected as a port for the new traffic is in itself suffi- ciently significant. For it was in the fourth of Edward I. that Peddington became a Royal manor. It had been sold by the descendants of Walter the Breton to the Bishop of Sarum, who exchanged it with the King for Walbury Eccles, Wilts. Ever since that period the town has borne its present title of Kmg's Peddington. But the change of master did much more than merely CHURNEY ABBEY 265 alter the name of the pkce: it changed the little village at the mouth of the Chum from a^group of hut^ vZ A A r"^"°' ^"'* *^ '='^"'-<='' ^^ * Royal Lrough. Edward determined to make his new possession a p^rt. He planned the original stone pier, and enclosed \vith LZt'^l^A ^^^ *■■'* '^'^''' ^ '^'•'^'"^ then went, capable of holdmg a couple of dozen coasting vessels fo^ the Rouen and Bordeaux trade. The town must clearly mttPm r^ ^^\ ^A °T °" * fi^^-i administrative pattern and peopled with merchants, chapmen, sailors, «id craftsmen by a regularly planned migration ; for its Zr .r/"r*r'^ f ^^^ ^^^^ charterfas are also its tour chief streets, and its merchant guild and its crafts- Zfh. V^" burgesses were summoned to Parliament to the Kmg at Westminster, and were fined for non- attendance under Edward's son. The borough was also held answerable for four ships for the king's wars; and hii V. r/ " P'^"^ ^^"^ ^"^ '■'»' "« privilege. This high-handed, regal way of manufacturing a commercial fn^. c? •",- *''°'?"f % indicative of the first stage of tse?f froi""' -^^"'^ '* ^' 7^* ^^«"» to emancipate Itself from ngid governmental control. X. CHURNEY ABBEY Among all the visible historical memorials of Chum- side, none occupies a larger place in the public estimation wK- I. .^ ^ ^'''^ ""'"' °^ *•»« g^^^'t Cistercian Abbey which stood in the centre of the little vaUey at its widest pomt, just below the old Roman villa homestead at Chumey. Indeed, to most casual thinkers, the abbey seems to form the one salient historical feature of the whole Peddmgton district. Talk to them about the numerous as^ciations of the past which cluster so thickly around our beautiful dale, and they answer at once with a complacent smile: "Ah, yes, to be sure: unmensely interesting place, isn't it.? Why, there's Churney Abbey there, of course." A monastic build- mg always has an immense hold upon the romantic side \i if 266 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE of the pnWic felicy. WM^&icaied minds, especially, are fond of peopling it with the few vague and essen- tially incorrect figures which make up their theatrical picture of mediaeval life. The "olden time/* as they Uall it with a delicious indefiniteness, seems to their eyes a compound of mailed knights, cowled monks, and beautiful ladies (they prefer to spell it "ladyes") in peaked head-dresses of the most impossible sort. To such minds, the notion that men, women, and children have gone on living, and working, and eating, and drinking, and suffering (especially the last) continuously here in Chumside for ten thousand years past, is some- thing wholly aUen and inconceivable. The olden time and the present, a brilliant phantasmagoria and an actual reality, make up their sole historical conception of the life of their own district. How much the history books have to answer for! and how long will it be before the children at the board school in the Vicarage Road are taught a little about the real past of England, instead of being crammed with facts and dates as to the murderous doings of Henry and Richard } The existing ruins of Chumey Abbey belong to the last building raised by Thomas Peddington just before the dissolution— a tall, grand, but wholly chilly specimen of pure late Perpendicular architecture. Long before Abbot Thomas Peddmgton, however, the Cistercian monks had been settled at Chumey ; and long before the Cistercians a Benedictine community had raised a rude monastery on the same spot. Cynewulf the West Saxon in the early Christian days granted the land of Chumey, with the manentes, being two hundred persons —Welsh serfs, no doubt, bound to the soil— as a gift to one Eadfrith, the mass-priest, to erect a minster at that spot, for love of God and St. Peter. Eadfrith made the men-serfs work at building his wooden church and the rough barracks where he and his monks lived ; while he shipped many of the women and children as slaves over sea to Italy, by the hands of a Frisian skipper and monger at the port of Bristol, getting a retum cargo for the value m pictures, incense, and the finger bones of St. 1" /. CHURNEY ABBEY 267 Euphemia. In spite of these undoubted rehcs, how- . ever, the httle minster seems never to have prospered. Even the elevation of ^Ifric, a shepherd's son in the monastery, to be Bishop of Sherborne, did it Httle good; for ^Ifric was killed by the Danish invaders before he had time to carry out his pet design of enlarging the monastery as a rival to Glastonbury, in the neighbouring and therefore hostile diocese of Wells. Still, Chumey Old Minster, as aftertimes called it, did no small amount of good work in the dale, in spite of its evil beginning ; and among other things it gave the poorest Chumside lad a chance which he never had before, and has never had since, of rising by talent and merit to the highest position in the State. In all that rough predatory and aristocratic community it formed one among a great network of real democratic centres; and it worked honestly and hard, so far as its lights went, to promote culture, freedom, 'right, and industrialism, in a jarring and discordant worid. That, perhaps, is a more im- portant fact about Chumey Old Minster than the fact that the foundations of its later stone church exhibit some traces of early Romanesque workmanship, and possibly even of very incipient dog-tooth omamentation. Chumey New Minster, the Cistercian Abbey, was founded by a great-granddaughter of Walter the Breton, who had an idea that the prayers of English monks could not be of much efficacy for the salvation of a Norman lady. So she bought out the rights of the old monastery, and packed off the brethren to Wallow Monachorum, where St. Euphemia's fingers afterwards became the nucleus of a flourishing pilgrim trade under the more commercial abbots of the fourteenth century. In their place, a body of Cistercian monks was brought over from Fecamp, and settled in the Chumey valley. The brethren of the old minster had long since drained the morass which spread around the eyot, and the Fecamp abbot came at once into possession of a con- siderable and fertile estate. For thirty or forty years the French element predominated in the monastery, as it predominated in the towns and the country at large ; r *\ \ 268 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE but as the effects of the two French immigrations— the Norman and the Angevin— gradually passed away after the loss of Normandy, EngHsh monks once more filled the chapel and the refectory, and the Chumside lads had again a chance of rising to high distinction by means of the education they received in the minster school. Culture, in fact, was then a special prerogative of the Church, and a certain ostentatious lack of it marked the military class. In time, however, Chumey Abbey grew so rich, through the numerous donations made by various pious benefactors, that it became worth while to put boys of gentle birth as monks, in order to give them the chance of finally rising to be abbot. At the same time, under the later Plantagenets and the early Tudors, society had so far progressed and educa- tion had been so far popularised, that the special func- tion of the monasteries seemed to be gone. The brothers became a mere close corporation of well-to-do old gentlemen, living easily off their lands, obstructive in poUtics and religion, and wholly opposed to the great movement of enhghtenment which was beginning to spread from Italy and France to the Teutonic north. They had outlived their work and had grovm in course of time to be an abuse— a greater abuse than even our own Merton or Christ Church, perhaps nearly as great as All Souls' or the City companies at the present day. When the crash came, they suffered not undeservedly ; though the revolution which put an end to their corporate existence was one of the most disgraceful in Its motives and disastrous in its results that has ever been known in England. Abbot Thomas Peddington had just completed the magnificent Perpendicular structure on whose battle- ments you may still read his name [in a rebus cut in stone], when King Henry's Commissioners came down to inquire into the revenues and management of the Abbey. Their report was decidedly unfavour- able, and was couched in terms which in our own days would unquestionably be held as unnecessarily strong language for an official document Its details. CHURNEY ABBEY 269 s / I indeed, contain some of the foulest and most palpable slanders ever committed to paper by party spite. But King Henry was prepared to fabricate or accept any evidence, however disgraceful, that helped him to carry out his intended measure of spoliation. Abbot Thomas Peddington and his monks were pen- sioned off on a pittance — lucky to have escaped with their heads ; and the abbey lands and buildings were sold for a nominal price to Lord Clairvaux, whose aid Henry needed in securing the loyalty of the west- country gentlemen. The havoc that followed was too hideous a piece of vandalism to detail at full. Lord Clairvaux's agent writes to his master, " The workmen have fully carried out your Lordship's commands in the pulling off the roof of the church and selling the lead thereof; also in taking out the glass windows [and the brazenwork], and in stripping the high altar and the Lady Chapel; and they now humbly await your lord- ship's good pleasure that they may know whether they shall further break down the walls, whose fair stone is much commended for the repairing of the pier at Peddington." His lordship's pleasure was fortunately to leave us the bare shell of the church and refectory, as he had thoughts of utilising them hereafter for his projected country seat. Thus the people of Chumside lost their last hold upon some small fragment of their native soil. Even the Conqueror had spared the lands of the monasteries ; and though he put Norman monks in many of them, that was an evil which soon cured itself. Ever since the time of the Conquest, more and more land, in spite of hostile statutes, had continuously been given back to the Church, and so indirectly to the people ; but with Henry's spoliation the one remaining democratic element in our landowning system was swept away at once. The present earl Hves in the abbey, is feudal lord of the whole valley, and generously permits the public to look at the outside of his house, under guidance of his gardener, on every second Tues- day. The historian of Chumside, with the rest of the Peddington Archaeological Association^ has more than 1 I' 270 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE once asked in vain for permission to examine the ground -plan on the spot. His lordship's convenience did not permit of it. Sir John Lubbock long sought ineffectually for an Act which may barely prevent the earl from pulling down or defacing the historical monument of which he has thus become the legal possessor ; in how many centuries may we hope for an Act which will allow the people free access once a week to this building, which the earl's ancestors did not raise, and for which the earl has done nothing, except to spoil the west wing with an absurd restoration ? Of course, Mr. WilUams, the Bradford cloth-weaver, who has built a fine modem house on the opposite hill, throws open his picture gallery and ethnological collection, after the industrial fashion, every Wednesday. " It's the way of these noiweaiix riches,'* says the earl, with a superior smile of condescending exclusiveness. XI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF KING'S PEDDINGTON Just above the point where the Chum falls into the sea, its pretty grassy valley narrows to a small gorge, through whose midst the river, here known as the Buddie, winds its way among the back slums of the village to the little bar, where its polluted stream finally slinks, as if ashamed of itself, into the purer waters of tlie bay. For on the banks of the gorge the oldest houses of King's Peddington are built ; and their back- yards open out upon the Buddie, into which all their drainage still flows, in the good old fashion, poisoning the fish outright and giving rise to an epidemic of scarlet fever once every five years or so among the human inhabitants. Conspicuous among these lower quarters of the little town are four large gaunt build- ings, overhanging the very edge of the stream, each with three tiers of paneless windows, and each with a disused water-wheel rotting by its side. They are the outward and visible signs of the decline and fall of ; KING'S PEDDINGTON 271 King's Peddington ; and their present condition largely accounts for the startling decrease in the population which local curiosity has already deduced from the un- official gossip of the census enumerators. For the empty mills are all that now remains to us of the west country cloth trade, gone northward to the coal regions, leaving King's Peddington in these its latter days wholly dependent upon its fishermen and its summer visitors. All through the later Plantagenet period King's Peddington kept up its position as a Continental port. Under the Tudors it seems to have been really one of the most important harbours upon the whole south coast of England. When the discovery of America and of the new route to India revolutionised English trade, by turning it westward towards the young plantations and the Cape, instead of eastward or southward towards Flanders and France, King's Peddington still found itself in the full tide of rising commerce. More than one vessel left the old stone pier for Virginia and Barbadoes ; and Churnside lads sailed with Raleigh to Guiana, and with Drake or Frobisher on their glori- ous foolhardy expeditions to round the world by the south and north passages. Indeed, the period included between the reigns of Edward IV. and Charles II. was the golden age of King's Peddington. Absolutely speaking, the town must have been even smaller then than it is at the present day ; for the plan preserved in the British Museum, among papers relating to the great Civil War, and representing the circuit of the walls during the siege, when the citizens held out stoutly against Prince Rupert for God and the Parliament, clearly indicates that only the quarter immediately surrounding the Buddie was then inhabited, while the modem main street and the Rectory road were still open fields, without even a cottage. Indeed, all the houses at that date lay within the walls ; and the walls, which can even now be traced with the aid of the parish survey, enclosed a space not more than sufficient for a closely crowded population of 1500 or 1800 souls. M 272 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE But that was a large number as towns then went ; and the relative importance of King's Peddington was really far greater than it has ever since been. When railways, and even canals, were unthought of, small local seaports were of immense value as places of distribution for Imported goods, and imported goods were gradually becoming more and more important throughout all this period to the average Chumside folks. Already sugar, rum, and tobacco were beginning to flow in from the New World; and the old records of the Peddington Custom-house, happily still to be seen in the loft of that dehcious anachronism — the nation now spends £300 yearly here to collect £90 — show that the trade with the Mediterranean and the French coast was very con- siderable. The principal street lay along the Buddie under James II., where tradition still points out the house of a wealthy Peddington merchant occupied by Jeffreys during the Bloody Assize ; and the trade of all Chumside and of many neighbouring districts must have centred for a couple of hundred years in that narrow, dingy, and malodorous alley. With the eighteenth century, however, the star of King's Peddington began to set. Our little harbour was well enough adapted for mediaeval and Elizabethan craft, but it has not depth enough for bottoms drawing as many feet of water as did the larger vessels of the Georgian epoch. From the very beginning of the cen- tury all the smaller ports began to decay, while the larger ones, such as London, Bristol, Liverpool, South- ampton, Plymouth, and Glasgow began to attract to themselves the whole external carrying trade of the country. It paid better to bring over cargo in bulk and distribute it overland or coast-wise, by road or by small craft. So long as goods continued to be for- warded from Southampton — our nearest great port — mainly by means of jjack-horses or waggons, a good many Uttle coasting vessels used still to frequent King's Peddington harbour, and the town still remained to some extent a distributing centre for the dale and the back country. But when, towards the end of the cen- n I k ii ifl KING'S PEDDINGTON 273 tury, the canal was run through the heart of the county, and the new village of Harbome Port (as its founders ambitiously called it) was thus put in direct water communication with Bristol and London, the commer- cial importance of King's Peddington rapidly decayed away to nothing. Harbome Port commanded a whole circle of trade in every direction, while Peddington commanded only a semicircle, the sea occupying the other half of its circuit. Thus the younger town quickly supplanted its elder rival. Of course, when the railway again cut through the same district, halfway between the old port and the new, leaving each of them seven miles off on either side, the sleepy market town of Churminster, formerly a mere agricultural centre, now becoming an important station, superseded them both as the export-collecting and import-distributing capital of the entire district. Nowadays, a stray collier puts in at the Peddington harbour about once in every six weeks with coal for the consumption of the town itself, and a few stone-boats carry away to London and elsewhere blue lias for making cement ; but with these petty exceptions, the busy little harbour of Plantagenet times is to-day ahnost wholly given over to some half- dozen clumsy fishing smacks, with picturesque russet- brown sails of a sort to delight a painter's heart. Even after the commercial importance of the town had greatly passed away, it yet retained a certain amount of industrial importance through its thriving cloth works. The water-power on the Buddie gave it an advantage over many other places ; and the presence of fullers' earth in the oolitic deposits of the upper valley was, in those days of difficult carriage, a decided point in its favour. The introduction of steam, how- ever, and, still more, the growth of the railway system, left poor Peddington out in the cold. The West- country cloth trade was quickly ruined by the competi- tion of Bradford and the other Yorkshire towns. Stroud and Bradford-on-Avon, indeed, managed to keep up their position somehow— perhaps through their situation on considerable rivers with a splendid head of water ; T • ^M0 ' ■illinium ■■■■I iliiiil||n3llilll!ll : ll! : ;;iilli.J»il ii.iLll. 274 ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE but little outlying towns like Peddington, away from the main lines of traffic, fell back hopelessly into agri- cultural obscurity. Coal and cotton, America and India, had revolutionised England. The north had outstripped the south, and everything tended northward accordingly. One by one the mills on the Buddie were closed : the owners were ruined, and the hands followed the stream to Saltaire, where hundreds of them found emplojrment in a body. The last mill struggled on till 1870; the owner, a man with a conscience, went on working at a slight loss for many years, rather than turn adrift his people ; but at last the responsibility of fifty mouths to feed daily wore him out, and at his death the only remaining factory was closed for ever. Since that date, the town has stagnated quietly as a fishing village and petty watering-place. Several pretty villas have been built upon the hillside looking across the valley to the beautiftil bay ; and several half-pay colonels or retired Anglo-Indians have taken up their abode within them ; but unless some new and unforeseen revolution should again fundamentally alter the relations of the country as coal and railways altered them fifty years since, the days of King's Peddington as an independent centre of human Ufe and activity have passed away. Henceforth it must only survive as a retreat for those workers whose own work (such as it is) has been done elsewhere. ( THE END Printed by R. & R. Clark, LiMtTEo, Edinburgh. If I 'J A iM f^ /J' ,Ai* .fOLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 0032255799 ly^ i 1, mmm