by Grant Allen
When the great flood of Scandinavian wickings poured over England in the ninth century they first overran Northumbria and East Anglia, and then turned to the conquest of Mercia. In each large town of the conquered districts a Danish earl took up his residence, with a “host” or organised body of military followers; and these hosts seem to have divided between them the cultivable territory which surrounded their town. One such host was settled at Bedford, where the Danes built a fort; and the neighbouring country in a rough circle around this centre was appropriated by the Danish freemen. To the north similar hosts had possession of “Hamptun” or Northampton, of Huntingdon, and of Cambridge: to the south, a debateable border against the English of London and Wessex occupied the modern counties of Buckingham and Hertford. This state of things existed throughout the time of Alfred in Wessex, and continued into the first half of his son Edward’s reign. Heathen Scandinavians held all the towns, with their great confederacy of the Five Burghs in Lincoln, Leicester, Nottingham, Stamford, and Derby, supplemented by these smaller southern chieftainships at Bedford and elsewhere; the Christian Bishopric of the Middle English was driven from Leicester to Dorchester on Thames, within the boundaries of Alfred’s diminished realm; and the Danes made a vigorous attempt to subjugate even Wessex itself, the last stronghold of the English race, and so to turn all England into a Daneland or Denalagu, as they had already turned the North and the Midlands.
Alfred’s reign, however, formed the turning-point in the history of the wicking movement. Under that capable though half-barbarian leader, the English began to make a successful resistance to the heathen invader, and to save Wessex at least from the fate of the northern principalities. Under his son Edward the work of reconquest began. Early in the tenth century Edward took in hand a series of systematic efforts for the recovery of the Midlands. He began by occupying the debateable border and “timbering forts” at Hertford and Maldon. The Danish “hosts” in Northampton and Leicester distrusted this serious beginning, and made a raid against the country about Buckingham — it would be an anachronism as yet to speak of Buckinghamshire — but they were severely defeated, and repulsed with great loss. Shortly after, Edward himself went to Buckingham with his army, or rather his military levy, and there “wrought a fort.” Thereupon, the Danes of Bedford, alarmed at being thus half-surrounded, gave in without a blow. “Thurkytel earl sought him for lord, and all the holds likewise, and almost all the worthiest men who owed fealty to Bedford, and eke many of those who owed it to Hamtun.” This, however, was a mere semi-feudal recognition of the overlordship of the West Saxon king; and the English did not at once proceed to reoccupy the town. But in the succeeding year, “King Edward fared with his levy to Bedford, before Martinmass, and gained the burgh; and almost all the burghers who ere dwelt there turned to him: and he sat there four weeks, and bade timber the fort on the south half of the river.” One year later, the Danish earl Thurkytel apparently grew tired of an idle and civilised life under a Christian overlord, with nobody to plunder and nowhere to burn; so “he went over sea to Frankland, with such men as would last by him, with King Edward’s peace and aid.” No doubt the West Saxon king was glad enough to be rid of such a doubtful and dangerous subject, without being too particular as to what his intentions might be beyond the Channel. But in the history of the shire system, this reconquest of Bedford and all the territory dependent upon it is of great importance as a critical turning-point. The newly conquered districts were naturally remodelled on the analogy of the West Saxon under-kingdoms. An ealdorman was placed as military commander of the levy in Buckingham, in Hertford, and in Bedford; the people were increased by the new military colonies in the forts, who were assigned lands in the surrounding country, and in return were bound to protect the cities from the Danes; and a shire-reeve, or sheriff, was set up by the side of the ealdorman as civil and fiscal representative of the West Saxon king. As the Five Burghs and the other Danish towns were one by one recovered, the country around each of them was similarly erected into a new shire; so that these shires really represent the territory which each conquering Danish host took for itself, and which fell again into the hands of the English with the recovery of each Danish stronghold. Thus Bedford may be regarded as the most typical of the Mercian or Midland shires, which are recaptured Scandinavian chieftainships; just as Sussex is the most typical of the southern shires, which are old English kingdoms; or as Devon is the most typical of the western shires, which are the result of successive conquests from the Damnonian Welsh.
VII. NORTH MIDLANDS
HUNTINGDONSHIRE AND NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
In prehistoric and early historical times the great central table-land of England possessed far less importance than the valleys of the three chief rivers — the Thames, the Severn, and the Humber. Few barrows or forts of the old Celtic and Euskarian inhabitants stud the plateau of the Midlands as they stud the hill-sides which border the great agricultural vales. No important Roman station rose anywhere in this main central upland — no town at all comparable to York or London, to Lincoln or Colchester, to Bath, Gloucester, or Cirencester, to Winchester or Verulam. When the early English pirates began to occupy the deserted land, their settlements coincided for the most part with the most thickly peopled districts of the Roman province. So much was this the case, indeed, that the West Saxons had pushed their way in an intrusive wedge up the valley of the Severn almost to the Dee, while the central plateau as far south as Oxfordshire and Bedfordshire still remained in the hands of the British or Welsh. And when the English at last slowly worked their way over the Midlands, the petty kingdoms which they formed in the upper valleys of the rivers were divided from one another by the waste moorland of the watersheds, and were too unimportant for any but the scantiest records to have been preserved of their existence. How or by whom they were founded we do not know: we can only say that more than 200 years after the first English colonisation of the east coast we find the heart of England occupied by at least four scantily-peopled principalities — those, namely, of the Mercians, with their capital at Tamworth or at Lichfield; of the Southumbrians, with their capital at Nottingham; of the Gyrwas or Fenmen, with their capital at Stamford; and of the Middle English, with their capital at Leicester. An outlying dependency of the latter chieftainship seems to have occupied the modern shires of Huntingdon, Northampton, and Bedford; and the scattered folk who lived in this flat and then unproductive region bore the name of the South English.
Gradually, under the strong old heathen, Penda, and his later Christian inheritors, Ethelbald and Offa, the power of the Mercians overshadowed that of the other midland principalities: till at last, just before the Danish incursions, all England from Manchester to London and from Lincoln to Bristol — including the whole irregular parallelogram enclosed by the Mersey, the Humber, the Thames, and the Severn — became part of the Mercian realm. Of the internal administration and territorial divisions of the kingdom thus united under Offa we know nothing [but a bare list of districts, and the names of the dioceses]. But when, in the ninth century, the Danes overran the whole of Mercia, they seem to have parcelled out the country among themselves exactly on the lines of the original English colonies. Such a course appears quite natural when we remember that each little kingdom probably represented a valley of soil fitted for tillage, cut off from its neighbours by forest, fen, or wild upland moor: just as any hypothetical conqueror of Australia at the present day would necessarily regard our colonies of Victoria, New South Wales, and West Australia as natural divisions, because they are similarly cut off from one another by large tracts of unsettled or half-settled country. In the north, the Danish confederacy of the Five Burgs exactly answered to the above-mentioned colonies, with the addition of Lincolnshire, the land of the Lindiswaras; the Burgs in question being Lincoln itself together with Derby, as representative of the older Mercia, and Nottingham, Leicester, and Stamford, in the territory of the Southumbrians, the Middle English, and the Gyrwas severally. Closer to the hostile W
est Saxon border, the land of the South English was rudely divided out with a rope, after the Danish fashion, between three heathen “hosts,” having their fortified seats at the three towns of Bedford, Northampton, and Huntingdon. Each host was led by its own earl; and within each Burg twelve Danish lawmen duly administered the Scandinavian law. Even in these southern and earliest recovered districts, the heathen Northmen thus held undisputed sway for forty years.
We have already seen how, in the first attempt of the West Saxon overlords to recover the supremacy of the north, Edward the Elder drove out the Danish earl from Bedford, and annexed the surrounding country to his own immediate dominions as Bedfordshire. Immediately after this first great success, the West Saxon king began to advance still farther to the north. The western half of Mercia he left for his sister Athelfled, the Lady of the Mercians, to reconquer; while he himself undertook the work of reducing the east. In the very next year after that in which Thurkytel, the conquered Danish earl of Bedford, “fared over sea to Frankland,” Edward himself took the field before Easter, and “bade timber the fort at Towcester.” Thereupon, the Danes of the five Burghs and the two yet unconquered South English towns began to fear mischief. “The host of Hamton and eke of Leicester brake the peace, and thence northward, and fared to Towcester, and fought against the fort all day, and thought that they could break it.” However, the English repulsed them; and the pagans in revenge broke into Buckinghamshire (now for the first time mentioned) and killed many men “betwixt Birnwood and Aylesbury.” At the same time, the Huntingdon host, alarmed at the renewed English attacks, altogether abandoned Huntingdon, and took up a new position at “Thamesford,” or Tempsford, where they built a fort. They also made an attack upon Bedford, now the chief English outpost; but the men within the Burgh there fought with them and put them to flight. Shortly after, Edward gathered together a raw levy, according to the fashion of those times, and proceeded to attack the new Danish fort at Tempsford. In a hard fight the English were successful, “and offslew the king, and Toglos earl, and Mannan earl, his son and his brother”; the king in question being [a successor of Guthrum and Toglos earl] of the Huntingdon men and [leader] of the Danish confederacy in the south. Thence, after a few operations in Essex, Edward went once more to Towcester, which he had already “timbered,” and now surrounded it with a stone wall — the first fortification of the sort mentioned in English history. The Danes of Northampton at once submitted to him. “Then Thurferth earl turned to him,” says the Chronicle, “and the holds, and all the host that belonged to Hamton, northward to Welland, and sought him for lord and for guardian.” From Northampton the English army proceeded to Huntingdon, and “bettered and renewed the fort,” which the Danes had abandoned; “and all the folk that there was left of the land-people” — probably native English— “bowed to Edward king, and sought his peace and his protection.” By this decisive campaign, the West Saxons recovered all the original South English territory.
The districts thus conquered by the West Saxons were doubtless at once reorganised upon the usual West Saxon model, as the earlier conquests in Bedfordshire had been reorganised the year before. At Huntingdon, where the Danish earl had been slain, together with his nearest kin, an English ealdorman was probably set as military commander; while a scirgerefa, or sheriff, would naturally be appointed to represent the interest of the king himself. At Northampton, where Earl Thurferth had made voluntary submission, or “commended himself,” he would most likely be permitted to remain as Edward’s vicegerent; for so large a latitude was allowed to the Scandinavian towns as regards internal affairs that even as late as the days of the Doomsday survey many of them still retained their twelve Danish lawmen. The fact that the Welland was already regarded as the northern limit of Northamptonshire seems to show that the two new counties were fairly conterminous from the first with our modern shires: certainly, they have not varied in any noteworthy particular since the time of William the Conqueror. Of course, like the other artificial Mercian shires thus rudely demarcated round a Danish fortified post, the two counties have no real natural boundaries, and answer to no real geographical division: they are merely the country about Huntingdon and the country about Northampton. The first of the pair, indeed, is peculiarly typical of these rough-hewn Danish territories; for it is grouped almost symmetrically in a rude circle around the town of Huntingdon as a centre. The comparatively elongated form of Northamptonshire, with its outlying northern spur between the Welland and the Nen, is no doubt due to the fact that this flat fen-land belt was then almost entirely covered by the great wood of which Rockingham and Whittlebury forests were later on the small remains. Professor Pearson, indeed, marks the entire county, with a few exceptions, as woodland, even after the Norman Conquest. The towns round which the two shires were cut off appear to have been of little or no importance before the Danish occupation. “Huntandun,” the hunter’s hill — afterwards corrupted into Huntingdon, as Abbandun has been corrupted into Abingdon, by confusion with the familiar clan forms like Birmingham and Kensington — shows by its very name that it was originally a mere outlying forest-clearing; and the only early mention of the place is in a forged charter of Peterborough Minster. The full county title, “Huntandun-scir,” first occurs in the reign of Athelred the Unready, nearly a century after the reorganisation. “Hamtun” was probably a larger place; but it also makes no appearance until it became the headquarters of a Danish host. The distinctive name of North-Hampton does not seem to have been employed before the Norman period.
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
Between the hills and dales of Derbyshire and the low-lying belt of land whose undrained morasses once made Lindsey practically an island, stretches a broad tract of triassic country which corresponds almost completely in outline with the modern county of Nottingham. One could almost believe at first sight that the rough English or Danish pirates of the fifth and tenth centuries were good geologists, who marked out the limits of their principalities on advanced scientific principles. It is only when we come to reconstruct the primitive characteristics of the landscape as they once were that we can see the real and natural reason for this coincidence. The lower valleys of the Trent, the Idle, the Don, and the other southern tributaries of the Humber, consist of a level alluvial stretch, from which the Isle of Axholm, now administratively united to Lincolnshire, stands up as a solitary outlier of the triassic system. At the time when the English colonised Britain, and for ages after, this wide alluvial plain formed a vast fen-land, through whose stagnant flats the rivers wandered in zigzag courses to the sea. Navigable streams formed always the highways along which the Teutonic pirates made their way into the heart of the Roman provinces in Western Europe; and the Trent must thus have served as the main channel by which the English settlers penetrated into the midland plateau of Britain. Though modern historians are not aided in the north, as they are in the south and west, by the dubious assistance of mythical legends from which to reconstruct the lost annals of the conquest, it is not difficult to guess what must have been the general drift of affairs in this particular district at least. The first English who settled in the north of Britain about the Humber were clearly the two hordes who turned severally northwards to York and southwards to Nottingham; and for this reason they were always known by the significant names of Northumbrians and Southumbrians, constantly employed by Bede, our earliest English historical authority. The pirates of the fleet which entered the Trent must have rowed on in their long-ships through the fen district of Axholm, and past the wooded region known later on as Sherwood Forest and the Dukeries, to the point where the valley widens out to a cultivable alluvial vale, according to the ideas of those times, at Nottingham. There these Southumbrian adventurers settled down, no doubt after massacring the adult male Welsh population, in the narrow strip of rich soil which borders the Trent from Burton to Newark. At a later time, other offshoot colonies spread farther along the course of the chief surrounding rivers; those who went up the Soar to Leicester bein
g known as Middle English, and those youngest settlers of all who followed the Tame and the Trent itself to their head-waters at Tamworth, Lichfield, and Stafford, being known as the Mercians or March-men, since they formed the advanced English outpost against the Welsh. But the colonists of Nottinghamshire itself, as being the original horde, retained the distinctive name of Southumbrians, and spread on every side up to the fens on the north, the Isle of Lindsey on the east, and the unpeopled primary hills of Derbyshire on the western border.
There was an old British town on the spot where Nottingham now stands even before the English arrived; and its native name of Caer Tigguocobauc was remembered by Welshmen as late as the days of Asser, King Alfred’s Welsh secretary and Bishop of Sherborne in the West Welsh country beyond Selwood, who explains it as meaning “the House of Caves.” But, as in some few other cases, the English here entirely changed the original name. The chief clan of the Southumbrians was that of the Snotingas, and from them the town took its new title of Snotinga-ham: just as Ynys Witrin became Glæstinga-byrig or Glastonbury, and as Pengwern 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 Southumbrians, 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. The 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 at Leicester, the four others being at Lichfield, Worcester, Sidnacester, and Dorchester-on-Thames.
