by Grant Allen
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 modern 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 afterwards 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 modern 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 modern 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 lying 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 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 showing itself to be an artificial territorial division, mapped out around a military post, the residence of its ealdorman 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] distinctly mentioned as such till after the Norman Conquest. Edgar, the first real king of all England, held at “Lægeceaster” 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 headquarters 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 Cumberland 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 Stæfford-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-sæton,” 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. 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 modern Lancashire between Ribble and Mersey, with Manchester, Liverpool, and the cotton country: on the west it extends over the greater part of modern Flintshire. The Conqueror, 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 Henry III., 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 III. the family of the Earls Palatine of Chester became extinct, and the earldom was immediately 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 annulled 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 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 Furness, completely 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 Amunderness; and, thirdly, the undulating country which slopes slowly down in cloughs 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 territories. As a matter of fact, such is really the case. Furness originally formed part of the Strathclyde Welsh kingdom in Cumberland; Amunderness was long counted as an outlying district of Yorkshire; and the region between Ribble and Mersey was reckoned, under the old names of Blackburnshire 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 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 principalities; 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 Bernicia and Deira — our 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 modern Leeds, and divided the Cymri of the north from their brethren of Wales by his victory at Chester, he retained in 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 Lancashire 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 during 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. in 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 district between Morecambe and Ribble — and had 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 Northumbrian realm.
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 peninsula 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 reappears much the same as ever in organisation. At the 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 — Inter Ripam et Mersha, as King William’s Norman commissioners phrase it — is included in Cheshire, and consisted mainly of the great wooded Hundred of West Derby, with Manchester and Salford for its only towns. The middle portion, Amunderness, 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 of Lancashire, owing to the participation of Robert de Ferrars in Simon de Montfort’s rebellion; and then for the first 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 comparatively slight importance of the southern district, now the most densely peopled part of England except Middlesex. Manchester was still a small country 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 corruption 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 peninsula between the Solway Frith and Morecambe Bay. 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, everywhere 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 Northumbrian king) in his own royal wooden fort of Bamborough; 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 colonisation 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 a Northumbri
an town down to the days of Edward the Elder. From the time of Athelfrith onward, the Britons of Reged were known to their English neighbours as the Stræcled 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, Amunderness and Westmoringaland fell into the hands of the English, while the Welsh were confined to the larger Cumberland — that is to say, the modern county so called, together with Strathclyde proper and Ayrshire. The outlying peninsula of Galloway still remained in the hands of its old Gaelic [or præ-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 Whithern, 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 Galloway 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 principalities 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 everywhere to conciliate the Welsh race; and when once the pirates carried off a Bishop of Llandaff, the politic West Saxon ransomed the Celtic prelate out of his own royal bounty. This imperial 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 little later, after his advance on Bakewell, the king of the Strathclyde Welsh followed their example. For some time from this period onward, Strathclyde and Cumbria became tributary principalities of the growing West Saxon empire.
