by Grant Allen
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 Northamptonshire. 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 continuity 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 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 principality has now wholly lost every sign of its original independence, and has merged completely into the general mass of modern 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 Winchester, where Cerdic, their leader, if there ever was a Cerdic, fixed his home. The boundaries of these three little 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 chieftainships. The Jutes of the mainland seem soon to have 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 Berkshire, 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. Accordingly, 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 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, Wiltshire, 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 abbreviated forms are not permissible. So far down in the history of England do the commonest usages of everyday 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 gradually absorbed Surrey, Sussex, Kent, and Essex is a matter of ordinary English history with which everybody 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 Westminster through the influence of Edward the Confessor’s great abbey, and of William 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 distinction between Westminster and the merchant republic beside it to die out for almost all practical purposes. To this day the people of Winchester themselves 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 — Wymerings, 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 was laid out. On the other hand, Dorset has but twenty-one, Devon but twenty-four, an
d 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 Thames and the Channel; Hampshire is the basin of the Test and the Itchin. But Wilts is a mere watershed — 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’être 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 watershed 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 Aurelianus, the Romanised Briton who long kept off the 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 of 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 conquered territory were known as the Wilsæte — 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 Dorsæte of Dorset, the Sumorsæte of Somerset, and the Defnsæte 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 anatomical marks of Celtic or semi-Celtic descent. It is noticeable, however, that the modern 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 Wilsæte; 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 Wilsæte, 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. That of Westbury — the very name is significant — appears to point out the farthest outpost of the Wilsæte 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 ealdorman 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 of 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 Pillesdon Pen to the watershed of the Thames. Cranborne 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 primæval 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 Durotriges, or men of the water-vale, who had their capital at Durnovaria, 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 Belgæ, 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.
