Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  So much for the most primitive name of Herefordshire itself, regarded as a fixed unit of territory. The history of the folk who dwell in it is far more complicated. Very soon after the earliest West Saxon brigands had crossed the Cotswolds and settled down in the rich valley of the lower Severn around Gloucester and Worcester, 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 Herefordshire. The men of the Worcestershire kingdom were called Hwiccas: those of the region beyond the Malverns became known as Magesæte — a name of the same type as the Dorsæte, the Sumorsæte, the Wilsæte, and the Defnsæte of southern Wessex, or as the Wroken-sæte and Pec-sæte 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 Roman station of Magna — or the Cymric word which it represents — as that of the Dorsæte is cognate with Durnovaria, and that of the Wrokensæte with Uriconium. 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 Magesæte. When the Mercian kings began to consolidate 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 Magesæte 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 modern form as early as the days of Bede, was made into the see of the Bishop of the Magesæte 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 Scandinavian “host,” on a piratical expedition up the Severn mouth, “harried among the Welsh, and captured Cameleac, the Bishop of Ircinga-feld, and led him with them to their ships.” The Bishop in question was the Welshman Cimeliauc of Llandaff; 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 princes. At the same date with this notice we meet for the first time with what seems at least a foreshadowing of the later division of the Hwiccan and Magesætan 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 history, and in their place we get Gloucestershire and Worcestershire; but the Magesæte seem to have had a somewhat greater tribal vitality. A century later, during the wars of Cnut and Edmund, the Magesæte 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 Magesæte 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 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 Hereford 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 corn 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 principality 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 “Kyndylan the Fair,” burned the town, and took up fresh farms in the surrounding country. The new colonists called themselves the Wroken-sæte, 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 to its English masters as Wroken-ceaster. But, according 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 modern Coalbrookdale; and the greater part of what is now Shropshire, the undulating country about Church Stretton and Oswestry, the Longmynds 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 Pengwern, 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 mediæval travellers. Meanwhile, the English Mercians, or March-men, 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 Sev
ern, 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 Pengwern, conquered all modern 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 earthwork known by the name of Offa’s Dyke, which runs 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 unmixed 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 modern Australians would call it, the Bush. The inhabitants were known as Scrob-sæte, the Scrub-settlers: though the older name Wroken-sæte 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. Pengwern 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 earliest mention of the county, however, as an administrative unit, in our existing documents, seems to occur during the wars of Cnut and Edmund. “They fared into Stæfford-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 manuscript has the interesting variant, “Stæfford-scir, and Scrob-sætas, 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 arrangement coincide with the old division into the Wroken-sæte and the Scrobsete? 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 Wigra-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 gradually 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 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 pronounce 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.

  V. 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 importance ever since the earliest beginnings of our national life. A tribe of Cornavi held the region of the salt wyches at the date of the Roman conquest, and doubtless had their chief village by the flats of the Roodee, on the site of the modern 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 island, Cheshire formed part of the native Welsh kingdom 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 century 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 neighbouring Welsh monastery of Bangor Iscoed — a different place, of course, from the modern cathedral-town of the same name — to pray for the success of the Christian army against the pagan Englishmen. Athelfrith tur
ned first upon the defenceless monks and massacred all but fifty in cold blood, after which he captured the town and perhaps burned 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 in the west into two sections, by dividing the Welsh of Wales proper from co-operation with their northern brethren in Strathclyde and Cumbria.