Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  The fifty years of Danish rule in York form almost a complete blank in the annals of the county. We can only piece out the list of kings from a few meagre hints. With the English reconquest, Yorkshire once more emerges into the full light of history. After Edward the Elder had successfully recovered the whole of Mercia, he went northward to Bakewell in Peakland, the English Chronicle tells us, “and there bade a burgh be wrought, and manned it with the folk thereabout.” All the north at once acknowledged his overlordship. Ragnald, the Danish King of York, “bowed to him,” as did also “the sons of Eadwulf,” English lords of Bamborough and Bernicia, as well as the King of the Strathclyde Welshmen, who still maintained their separate independence in Cumberland. As yet, however, the Danish princes kept up their state in Yorkshire as subject rulers under the West Saxon overlord; and when Athelstan succeeded his father Edward, he even acknowledged the high royal rank of Sihtric, the young King of York, by meeting him in state at Tamworth (the old royal town of Mercia) and giving him his own sister in marriage. But a year later Sihtric died, and Athelstan thereupon expelled his successor Guthfrith, uniting all Northumbria, Danish or English, to his own immediate dominions. Yet it was long before the Scandinavian north was thoroughly incorporated with the Saxon south. Again and again the Yorkshire men rebelled, now calling over Anlaf, King of the Dublin Danes, now choosing Ragnald, son of Guthfrith, and now once more setting up a prince of their own, Eric Harold’s son. Even later, the north elected the West Saxon Edgar, while the south was still under his brother Edwy. In fact, it was only the strong hand of the Norman and Angevin kings which finally consolidated the two great divisions of England; and the abortive attempt of Cnut against William the Conqueror was really the last final effort of Northumbrian independence.

  It was under Edgar, first genuine King of all England, that Yorkshire makes its earliest appearance as a single county. Edgar, or to speak more correctly, his great Minister Dunstan, broke up the old Northumbrian realm into three divisions, of which the southern, comprising Danish Yorkshire, was made over to Earl Oslac; the central, consisting of English Durham and Northumberland, was left in the hands of its native ruler, Oswulf; while the northern, the Lothians, was entrusted to the care of the King of Scots. The earliest mention of “Eoforwicscir” occurs in the reign of Edward the Confessor, where it is coupled with “North-hymbra-land” in nearly the modern sense, as including the whole of old Northumbria then left in English hands. In the Domesday Survey, Yorkshire (even now the largest county in England) was still larger than it is at the present day, the West Riding then including all Amunderness Hundred in North Lancashire. The first recorded division of the counties into circuits for Justices in Eyre under Henry II., on the other hand, distributes the north into Yorkshire, Richmondshire, Copeland, Westmoreland, Northumberland, and Cumberland. The slow change by which the neighbouring counties were definitely demarcated from Yorkshire belongs rather to the separate history of those shires themselves. To the present day, however, besides the recognised division into Ridings, there are several popular sub-shires of Yorkshire, such as Cleveland, Richmondshire, Hallamshire, and Holderness, which survive in colloquial use long after they have ceased to have any official existence. These probably represent old tribal shires of Deira, as Wilts and Dorset represent old tribal shires of Wessex. But while in the south the subdivisions have lived on unchanged, in the north they have almost died out, because of the relatively slight importance of Northumbria under the Norman kings, after the terrible harrying of the Conqueror. As a whole, therefore, Yorkshire still represents an old English kingdom, erected afterwards into a Scandinavian principality, and finally shaped into a Norman county.

  NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM

  Probably many people remember the surprise they felt when they first learned that the county called Northumberland lay north of the Tyne, not of the Humber; and though the glib explanation usually given — that the name had once a wider signification, but was afterwards restricted to its present meaning — might quash all the critical doubts of childhood, it cannot certainly be considered a wholly adequate or satisfactory answer for grown-up intelligence. As a matter of fact, the history of Northumberland, either as a name or as a county, cannot be got rid of in quite so summary a manner. The tale that hangs thereby is both long and interesting. The earliest English settlement on the Northumbrian coast seems to have been made in the neighbourhood of Bamborough, at some unknown date and by some unknown leader. It is usual to assume, indeed, from a single meagre entry in the English Chronicle, that one Ida was the first king, about a century after the English colonisation of Kent; but in reality the Chronicle merely tells us that at that time “Ida came to the Kingdom,” or, as we should now say, ascended the throne; while the assumption that he was the first English conqueror of Northumbria is only a bit of that uncritical guesswork which often passes for superior historical knowledge. It is highly improbable, indeed, that the English pirates would take the trouble to round the Forelands and settle in distant Hampshire before they had attempted a landing on the nearest and least protected shore of Britain in the Lothians and Northumberland. What is certain amounts to no more than this: that in the middle of the sixth century an English prince named Ida ruled over a petty principality among the rocky braes of the Northumbrian coast; that he “timbered Bamborough that was first betyned with a hedge, and thereafter with a wall”; and gave it its name, Bebbanburh, in honour of Bebba, his Christian Welsh wife. That is the first fixed starting-point in the history of the modern county of Northumberland.

  As yet, however, the name of Northumberland was quite unknown. The English people of this northern principality, which spread in time from the Tyne through what are now the Scotch Lowlands to the Forth, called themselves the Beornice; and the native title for their country is most familiar to us in Bede’s Latinised form of Bernicia. South of it, from Tyne to Humber, stretched a second considerable principality — that of the Dere, also Latinised as Deira, and comprising the modern counties of Durham and Yorks, though the first-named seems to have fluctuated between the two tribes. Both principalities were themselves doubtless built up by the coalescence of several earlier and minor chieftainships, whose names have in some cases been preserved to us: and under Edwin, the first Christian King at York, if not also under his heathen predecessor, Athelfrith, the two larger principalities were in turn united into a single powerful kingdom, which stretched uninterruptedly from the Humber to the Forth. To this new and important State the name of Northan-hymbra-land came to be applied — meaning quite strictly, not the land north of the Humber, but the land of the Northan-hymbras or Northumbrians. It is an ethnical, not a territorial title. Similarly, the people beyond the Humber, afterwards known as Myrce or Mercians, were commonly described in early times as Suthan-hymbre, or South-humbrians. But though the two northern principalities were thus politically united, they did not socially coalesce; and from time to time we hear for a while of separate kings reigning once more in Deira and Bernicia respectively. The old Roman provincial capital of York continued to be the metropolis of Deira, while Bernicia had as its chief city Ida’s royal stronghold itself. So, too, after the universal introduction of Christianity the northern Archbishop had his see fixed at York, the capital of Edwin; while the suffragan Bishop of the Beornicas took up his abode at Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, not far from the Bernician capital of Bamborough.

  Up to the period of the Danish invasions Northumbria, as a whole, remained the most flourishing and civilised part of Britain. It had been the seat of the Roman prefecture; it had kept up the traditions of Roman culture; and the struggle of the English with the natives had not apparently been so severe or so crushing as in Wessex and the south. In the pages of Bede we see Northumbria, including what are now the Lothians, described as the centre of light and learning for the whole island, and the special seat of monasteries and convents. Bede himself was a monk of Jarrow; Cædmon, the great epic poet, was a lay brother at Whitby; and Cynewulf, the sweetest early E
nglish lyrical writer, was a member of some other, though doubtful, Northumbrian religious house. But even before the Danish troubles the position of Northumbria had begun to decline; and the native kings were at last obliged by force of arms to recognise the supremacy of Egbert of Wessex. Nevertheless, they continued to rule as under-kings in York for a couple of generations longer. When the northern pirates, however, began to fall upon Britain in full force they naturally directed their first attacks against Northumbria, as the English themselves had probably done four centuries before them. Deira fell almost without a blow at the very earliest invasion, and York became the capital of the first Danish kingdom in Britain. Thus Yorkshire was merged for a time in the Denalagu or Danish territory. But the northern part of Northumbria, stretching from the Tees to the Forth, and including the modern counties of Durham and Northumberland, as well as the Lothians, did not fall into the hands of the Danes. A branch of the native royal house continued to rule at Bamborough; and the northern pirates, in their eagerness to attack the rich plains of Mercia, East Anglia, and Wessex, did not trouble themselves about the rocky upland kingdom of the braes. Hence this northern fragment of the old Northumbrian realm, alone remaining in the hands of its English natives, kept the style and title of Northumberland, while the Danish kingdom to the south began a little later to be known as Yorkshire.

  As yet, however, the name Northumberland, even in this restricted sense, applied to a far wider district than the modern county. When King Edward of Wessex recovered the overlordship of the north, Ragnald, Danish King of York, did homage (to use the familiar term of later feudalism) for Yorkshire; while Ealdred, English lord of Bamborough, appeared as the under-king of all the rest of old Northumbria. In the reign of Edgar, when the whole of England was first thoroughly united, Northumberland once more underwent a serious clipping. Deira was finally handed over to Earl Oslac: Oswulf, the representative of the native dynasty, was also compelled to accept the title of earl, and was recognised as ruler of the central portion between Tees and Tweed; while the whole of the northern portion, from Tweed to Forth, was granted as a fief to Kenneth, King of Scots, and has ever since remained an integral portion of the Scottish realm. Such at least is the statement given by the English historians, and accepted by the great authority of Dr. Freeman; and though the Scotch have a more patriotic version of the affair on their own account, the question is rather one connected with the annals of the Lothians than with the annals of Northumberland. Edinburgh, originally an English border fortress, built by Edwin of Deira, whose name it bears, thus became the capital of the Celtic Scotch kings; and English Lothian became the richest and most important portion of the later historical Scotland.

  For another century Northumberland was held to include the whole district between the Tees and the Tweed; till after the Norman Conquest it received yet a further mutilation in the loss of its southern half. The See of St. Cuthbert and of the Beornice, driven for a while by the Danes from Lindisfarne to Melrose, had been restored to Durham. The country between the Tees and the Tyne, the old debateable border of Deira and Bernicia, was now separated as the county palatine of Durham, and the prince-bishop himself was regarded as the guardian of the frontier against the Scottish kings: for the Lothians, once an integral part of the Bernician realm, had now become the hostile march of an unfriendly power. Durham still retains one noteworthy mark of its post-Norman origin in the fact that it is always spoken of as the county of Durham, and never as Durhamshire. At the date of its creation as a county the French word had officially superseded the native English term.

  As for Northumberland itself, it was first finally reduced to its modern limits; and as it was cruelly harried by William, partly in retribution for revolt, and partly as a convenient means of creating a waste between himself and his troublesome vassal, the King of Scots, it almost disappears for a while from English history. It was many ages, indeed, before it fully recovered from the blow; and its comparatively modern rise in its present form is attested by the curiously latter-day tone of the name borne by its county town, Newcastle. The existing shire thus lineally represents the old Northumbrian kingdom of which it forms the last central fragment; while, strangely enough, it also contains the original nucleus of Ida’s ancient principality, and the primitive Northumbrian capital of Bamborough.

  IX. EAST

  NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK

  East Anglia stands alone among the territorial divisions of England in the completeness and the naturalness of its local boundaries. Even popular language clearly testifies to its real isolation; for in no other case has the old historical name of an early province survived in common use to the present day, in spite of adverse administrative changes, with the vitality only ensured by natural causes. We still speak of Kent and Sussex, it is true, because Kent and Sussex, though originally separate kingdoms, are still English counties in our own time; but nobody thinks of talking in everyday life about Wessex or Mercia or Northumbria. The North, the West Country, and the Midlands have superseded the old names for every practical purpose. It is not so, however, with East Anglia. Though the kingdom of the Eastern English has long since been divided into the two shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, the original name continues to be employed in ordinary speech as a convenient common designation for the united district. It answers to a real geographical entity, while the two shires answer only to comparatively artificial administrative subdivisions; and so it has survived to modern times, long after accidental kingdoms like Strathclyde or Wessex have wholly dropped out of popular recollection.

  The Isle of the Icenians originally formed in fact as isolated a district as Anglesey or Man at the present day. Before the fens were drained, it lay completely ringed round by a continuous border of sea, marsh, or river on every side, and it was regarded to some extent as a separate little England by itself. From the central morass of the fen-land, south of Ely, the Ouse ran northward between swampy levels to the great flats of the Wash; while the Stour flowed eastward through flooded meadow-land to the vast muddy tidal wastes about Harwich and the Naze. Between the fens and the sea, threaded only by the narrow backbone of cretaceous hills which terminates in the interrupted range of low bluffs from Hunstanton to Cromer, a broad level corn-growing plain covers the whole intermediate slope of East Anglia. From the earliest times this fertile plain must have composed the principality of a separate tribe or confederation, practically inaccessible from any side save the seaward, and thus safe from hostile attacks before the age of extended navigation. When the Romans came the island belonged to the tribe of Icenians; and in the centre of the Gwent or agricultural champaign [?], close to where Norwich now stands, lay their chief town, Latinised into the familiar form of Venta Icenorum. As usual in the non-manufacturing shires, modern changes have left the main features of this primitive arrangement untouched. The boundaries of the counties are still roughly the boundaries of the Icenian Isle, while Norwich still forms the natural capital of the whole region and the cathedral town of the existing diocese. The names, indeed, change; but the things and even the people still remain.

  Naturally, an isolated district like the Icenian country was one of those least ready to submit to Roman rule; and the insurrection of the islanders under Boadicea is the most familiar incident of early British history. But when the native resistance was crushed the Romans set to work at their ordinary task of breaking down the local isolation and binding the fen-girt peninsula to their central organisation by roads and military works. A great causeway bridged over the gap between Colchester and the Icenian stations; while two of the coast fortresses for the protection of the provincials from the Saxon and English pirates were established at Brancaster and Burgh Castle. Norfolk and Suffolk formed part of the country under the care of that equivocal officer, the Count of the Saxon Shore; and as they lay right in the track of long-boats sailing before a fair north-easter from Sleswick and Friesland, we may be reasonably sure that they were more often exposed than any other section of the coast to the incursion
s of the little pirate fleets. But as to how or when the English actually settled in this the first insular England we have not even a hint. The country disappears from view in Roman writings as the land of the Iceni; it reappears three centuries later (in Bede) as the land of the East English; and of the process which turned it from a British into an English land we hear not a word. Henry of Huntingdon, indeed, five or six hundred years afterwards, tells us that many separate chieftains came from “Germany,” by which he means Sleswick, and occupied bits of East Anglia on their own account. But Henry of Huntingdon had no better means of information than we have ourselves. At any rate, when the Eastern Counties emerge again upon the historical stage, they emerge as a thoroughly Teutonised kingdom. Mr. Freeman calls them “perhaps the most thoroughly Teutonic realm in Britain”; and certainly the number of villages bearing English clan-names is far greater there than in any other part of England; whence we may fairly conclude that the English settled in the Eastern Counties more thickly than anywhere else. The very name of East Anglia points to a thoroughly Teutonic region. On the other hand, Dr. Rolleston, who united in a singular degree the culture and knowledge of a classically educated archæologist and historian with the physical training of an anatomist and anthropologist, always lays great stress upon the fact that skulls of the long Celtic type are now very common in Norfolk and Suffolk, where, as he remarks, we do not hear that Teuton and Briton ever met as enemies when East Anglia became a kingdom. Moreover, Sir Francis Palgrave has collected a number of facts which tend to show that separate bodies of Britons long held out as independent tribes or outlaws among the islands of the fen-land. On the whole, it seems not improbable that East Anglia, from its exposed and isolated position, was one of the parts of Britain earliest peopled by the English; that it was thickly settled by the invaders, whose barrows still cover the ground, while their clan-villages still occur abundantly in the local nomenclature; but that large numbers of the Romanised Britons, or at least of their women and children, were spared as serfs, and so became the ancestors of the existing East Anglian peasantry. Here, as in so many other places, the Celtic blood still seems to mingle unmistakably with the dominant Teutonic element.