Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  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; but 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 element (perhaps not even the chief element) in the present population. He welcomed the arrival of the “præ-celtic theory,” which he had foreseen. He first showed his generation clearly that the results of archæology and anthropology must take their due place even in our English school histories and “popular” history books. He had nothing of the acute Teutonismus or Morbus Germanicus that came of the too absolute acceptance as oracles of certain anti-Gallic 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 Christchurch, — 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,” idiosyncrasies 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 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 Churnside, with which this volume ends, is a piece of reconstruction such as Viollet-le-duc once worked out for a typical 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; it 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 command. 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 stuff that is so plentifully 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 Anglo-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 disquisitions, 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 trying to push on his subject, and things often seemed clearer and more hopeful after an hour or two with him even when he 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 judgment, could not have been left in the text without stereotyping 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. Editing, 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 reconstruction of the past become more clear, or fruitful relations between isolated facts are discovered. But “corrections” are few. I have not been able to identify every spot in the Chronicles, but the rough map will 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 morn 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,

  March 29, 1901.

  SHIRES AND COUNTIES

  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 burn 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 be to say that Queen Anne separated Great Britain into England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. The real fact is that the counties were united, not that they were divided: they represent old independent communities, now merged into a larger whole, not parts artificially cut off from such a whole. They are like the Swiss cantons rather than like 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 Cornwall still remained independent under their own British chiefs. The 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 this 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 corner of a hostile tribe from the remainder of its lands. Some of them preserve for us the frontiers of early English kingdoms; some of them keep up the memory of Danish hosts, who settled down in some little principality as independent commonwealths; some of them even retain 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 boundaries 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 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 Winchester, 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 Dorsæte, the settlers among the Durotriges, whose semi-Celtic descendants still occupy the whole county. Somerset and Devonshire are the territories of the Sumorsæte and Defnsæte, 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 corner, instead of an irregular Devonshire with Exeter on its outer verge, instead of an angular Berkshire with Reading in a bend of its boundary, we get counties like Warwickshire, Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire, lying 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 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 submitted 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 modern 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 respectively. The North and South Folk of the East English 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 modern county of Lincoln, probably because all were united under a single Danish host. Nobody knows when or how little Rutland became a county; while Yorkshire, for all its size and its Ridings, and for all its older principalities, too, of Elmet, Craven, Cleveland, Holderness, and Hallamshire, remains a single shire to the present day. Westmorland still formed part of the same great county 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 understand 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 genealogical formula for ourselves. It is a valuable fragment of our prehistoric and irrecoverable pedigree.

  I. 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 valley has been worn away by denudation, and the 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, Hastings, 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 Andredesweald. Its cold clay can support little 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 Hayling, 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.