by Grant Allen
York was, London is, and Lincoln will be The greatest city of the three.
NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE
The youngest among English cities may also claim to rank as one of the oldest among English towns. Whether a Celtic stockaded stronghold ever occupied the site of the Norman keep at Newcastle is still a moot point; but at least from Roman days downward the deep gorge at the tidal head of the Tyne has almost uninterruptedly afforded the site for a military station or a trading burgh of considerable importance. It was not coals that first made Newcastle. When the Romans spread their conquests in Britain as far north as the narrow neck of land between the Forth and the Clyde, they ran a great causeway northward between York and the Caledonian wall; and at the point where Hadrian’s road crossed the Tyne, the tête-du-pont of the Pons Ælii (so-called from the Emperor’s gentile name) must naturally have formed the nucleus for a town, which rapidly rose to be the earliest capital of all Tynedale. Its alternative title of Ad Murum was due to its position at the point where the north road intersected the lower wall between Carlisle and Wall’s End. Relics of the Roman town are now scanty; and the silence of later Northumbrian historians as to its occupation by the English would lead to the belief that it scarcely reached anything more than local and military importance. When the first English pirates bore down upon the exposed provincial coast before a favouring north-east wind from Sleswick, and founded their colony of Bryneich or Bernicia, the Land of the Braes, between Tyne and Forth, the new chieftains did not fix their principal capital at Newcastle, but on Ida’s craggy promontory of Bamborough, about the centre of the little principality. As the Tyne now formed their boundary against the Deirans of Yorkshire and Durham to the south, the lords of Bamborough could hardly be anxious for the maintenance of the Roman road; and though we cannot know with certainty whether they actually broke down the bridge, in pursuance of that policy of isolation which made every early English principality surround itself with a mark of waste borderland, or whether they merely allowed it to fall out of repair, it is at least undeniable that the communication was long interrupted, and that the road or “gate,” as our ancestors called it, came to a dead halt by the banks of Tyne, at the spot which still bears the significant name of Gateshead — that is to say, the road’s end. During this intermediate period of heathen anarchy, it is very probable that the station of Ad Murum became quite depopulated, or that it was reduced to a few huts of fishermen and crofters, who must often have been exposed to border raids from the men of the debateable district south of the river.
With the introduction of Christianity into the country of the braes, the deserted site by the Tyne began once more a fresh career as a habitation of civilised men. It was at first a royal vill of the Northumbrian princes; but the Church in the north laid special claim to all the remains of Roman buildings; and a body of monks was granted the old station of Ad Murum, which now took from them the newer title of Muneca-ceaster or Monkchester — a form that would, doubtless, have been modernised, on the usual local analogies, as Muncaster. The older name survived as an alternative in that of At Wall, once given to the existing suburb of Pandon. Still, the monastery seems to have been a small one, for it is seldom mentioned in the northern annals, and its border position must have made it very insecure, except during the times when Bernicia and Deira were temporarily united under a single ruler. When the heathen Danes once more descended upon Christian Northumbria, in the eighth century, Tynemouth was one of the first spots to bear the brunt of their attack; while Jarrow and Lindisfarne, the great ecclesiastical centres of early Bernicia, were both sacked and demolished after the merciless Scandinavian fashion. Monkchester could hardly fail in those evil days to meet with the same fate as its sister-monasteries. For the most part, however, the Danes spread but little in the harbourless country between Tyne and Forth, which continued to acknowledge the sway of Christian English masters in Bamborough, even while heathen Scandinavians bore rule in the archiepiscopal city of York itself. The Dane, in fact, cared little for a country with no fiords or tidal inlets. Yet even so, Monkchester must have stood so close to the Scandinavian border that it could hardly have been a safe dwelling-place for Englishmen, exposed as it was to constant eruptions by the open navigable waters of the Tyne.
By the days of the Norman conquest, Monkchester still remained apparently a mere village of monks and fishermen. When William returned from his terrible harrying of Northumbria — a harrying so complete that manor after manor is entered in Domesday with the laconic description, “waste,” “waste,” “waste” — he was stopped for a while by a flood on the Tyne, at the place where Hadrian’s bridge had once made the transit so easy, and where Stephenson’s vast structure now carries the railway trains hung high in air above the grimy and smoky abyss below. But after the harrying there was little material for the natural growth of a town left in Northumbria, and Monkchester might have shared the fate of Porchester or of Uriconium had not Robert Curthose, on his way back from an expedition against the Scotch, decided to guard the passage of the river by a castle, and, if one may judge from the cursory expression of a later chronicler, to secure communications by a bridge as well. The castle was hastily reared above the steep side of the gorge, and from it the trading town, which soon grew up clinging to the slope under its walls, received its modern-sounding name of Newcastle; for the older station rather occupied the site of Pandon. No part of this earliest building is now discoverable; the existing remains belong to the later Norman castle erected under Henry II. It was always the fate of Newcastle to be a border town, and this fact alone checked the development of its natural resources and the utilisation of its splendid position throughout the Middle Ages. The castle became the principal border fortress against the Scotch during those troublous times when every farmhouse in Northumberland was a fortified peel-tower and every farmer a raiding moss-trooper. After the revolt of Mowbray under William Rufus, the earldom of Northumberland merged in the Crown; but it was again granted out by Henry I. to David of Scotland, and for a whole century the county passed in a perpetual see-saw from the real or nominal sway of one king to that of the other. Throughout the Scotch wars of the Edwards, Newcastle was a constant rendezvous and base of operations for the English army; and, on the other hand, the neighbouring population were often compelled to take refuge within the walls of the castle from the forays of the Scotch freebooters. Even as late as the great Civil War, the Scotch army became masters of Newcastle, where they kept King Charles a prisoner until they sold him to the English Parliament. The curiously one-sided position of the county town, [barely] paralleled in any other shire, is doubtless due to the natural choice of the safest and most strongly fortified post in the whole county as the local metropolis.
Nevertheless, in spite of border warfare and constant insecurity for life and property, the value of the Tyne with its navigable water-way made the town struggle on as a commercial centre all through the long centuries of raids and moss-trooping. The company of merchant adventurers of Newcastle early began to trade on their own account with the great staple at Antwerp, chiefly in fells and country produce. Their houses were for the most part built in the old Cloth Market; but at a later date they began to straggle down the slope towards the water’s edge in the steep street still known as the Side; and the narrow chares, or alleys of steps which climb the dirty but picturesque flank of the hill, prove how anxious were the burgesses and goodmen to keep their wares well within the protection of the castle garrison. The grand tower of St. Nicholas’s church shows the increasing wealth of the town in the fourteenth century. Under the Lancastrian kings trade began to take a wider sweep, and Sir Robert Umfreville did so much for the commerce of Newcastle that he gained the name of Robin Mendmarket; while Roger Thornton, the local Whittington of the same period, is still gratefully remembered in many a pithy Tyneside proverb. How early coal began to be mined in the neighbourhood it is impossible to say exactly, but the industry was already well established in the fifteenth century. From
that time Newcastle has continuously grown in wealth and population with the general growth of English manufactures. The lead mines, the great coal-field, the iron-works, the ship-building trade, and the navigable river now form, of course, its true raisons d’être. The coal extends over eight hundred square miles, and a large part of the output finds an exit by the railways and collier ships of Newcastle. Before the days of steam this port was almost its sole means of egress, and the old name of sea-coal bears witness to the only way in which it long arrived at the London market. Until the present century, however, the town still continued to consist mainly of the narrow chares along the gorge of the Tyne, and little was done in the way of improving its comfort or sightliness. The introduction of railways gave it its most striking feature at the present day, the immense high-level bridge which hangs so lightly across the gorge; while about the same time Grainger’s cold but handsome buildings in the new town metamorphosed the appearance of Newcastle as it is now to be seen; though even to this day the visitor can still find himself suddenly transported to the Middle Ages if he chooses to explore the close wynds and narrow staircases about the Side and Sandhill. It brings the two extremes of English history into yet more incongruous juxtaposition when we remember that our modern best Wallsend derives its name from the terminal station on the great Roman wall at Segedunum, and that the large sister-town of Gateshead is still called after the gap in the north road at the broken bridge of Hadrian.
MANCHESTER AND SALFORD
Between the dense forest or wilderness of the Pen region and the sea, a wooded tract of undulating red land once subsided slowly into the alluvial flats of the low-lying district which long bore the strange descriptive title Between Mersey and Ribble. This wild western slope of Lancashire was until yesterday the most desolate and desert country in all Britain. From time immemorial woodland spread over its whole expanse, and a few clearings here and there in the thick scrub alone gave tokens of occupation by early man. One of the most ancient among these backwood settlements was the primitive British hamlet of Manchester, which stood in a corner where the limpid forest-brook of the Medlock — now black as ink with the refuse of suburban dye-works — fell unpolluted into the lonely water of Irwell, not far below the modern bridge at Knott Mill. The site still bears its very antique title of Castlefield, far away at the opposite end of Deansgate from the cathedral and Market Street, which formed the busy centre of the later mediæval town. A rude stockaded fort enclosed the village, triangularly guarded after the fashion of early Celtic strongholds by the confluent streams on two sides, and by a belt of primæval forest on the third. For some time after the Roman conquest of south-eastern Britain, these wild northern woods were left unmolested; but when at last Agricola broke the power of the Brigantians in the fertile vale of York, he annexed all the surrounding country from sea to sea as part of his new province of Maxima Cæsariensis. Then with characteristic Roman boldness he drove a great causeway through the very heart of the Pen mountains, from his main strategic centre at Diva, our Chester — the City of Legions, as the Britons called it — across the moors by Rochdale, to join the main north road from London and Lincoln at the important station of Isurium (Aldborough) [or Calcaria], not far from the new provincial capital at York. The route passed by the native village on Castlefield, and the Roman engineers, as usual, took advantage of the site to strengthen the shapeless and irregular Celtic fortress into a rectangular military station on their own model. Parts of the wall with which they enclosed their fort were visible as late as the first half of the present century; while Roman remains and coins have at various times been plentifully disinterred in the neighbourhood of Castle Quay. Mancunium is the form of the name handed down on doubtful authority, and usually followed in modern times. But no student of local etymology can doubt for a moment that the variant Mamucium given in the Antonine Itinerary is really the correct native word, as shown by the intermediate early English forms. The coins [found here] date from Nero to Constantine; and the Roman occupation must here have lasted for about four hundred years.
After the withdrawal of the legions, Mamucium suffers the usual eclipse for a couple of centuries, during which we know absolutely nothing of its local history. But as the surrounding country formed part of the native Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde and Cumbria, which was not conquered until a very late period, long after the conversion of the Northumbrian English to Christianity, it is not probable that it was ever sacked or burnt like so many other Roman towns. In all likelihood, modern Manchester descends with unbroken continuity from Roman and Celtic times. If we may trust to Mr. Green, however, who modifies his conjecture with a “perhaps,” the southern portion of Cumbria, as far north as the Ribble, fell into the hands of the Northumbrian invaders as early as the conquest of Chester by Athelfrith; although Professor Earle, on the contrary, believes that it was still in native Welsh hands as late as the beginning of the tenth century. Be this as it may — and we can but trust at best to guesswork or analogy — Mamucium, Englished as Mamuc-ceaster or Mame-ceaster, first definitely reappears by name in history during the Danish wars of Edward the Elder, who occupied the town with a Mercian garrison, and renewed its Roman fortifications as a stronghold against the Danes. The abiding Mercian influence is shown in the soft form assumed by the name as Manchester, when compared with the hard Northumbrian analogues, Lancaster, Doncaster, Tadcaster, and so forth [?]. The new town which grew up around the burgh of the West Saxon kings and the lord’s mill seems to have spread rather towards the cathedral and Victoria Station than over the area of Castlefield. At the same time, Salford rose apparently to be even more important than Manchester itself, and gave its name to the little local division of Salfordshire. Down to the days of Edward III. the town of Manchester consisted of two separate villages — Aldport, the old port on the Irwell, occupying the site of Mamucium, and New Manchester, the parish near the confluence of the Irk, whose centre is now marked by the Exchange building. It was said that nowhere else in Lancashire did two churches lie so close at hand as these. Gradually, as the country settled down under the early Plantagenets, the woods of Salfordshire began to be felled, and Manchester became the centre of a considerable rural district. Yet most of the land still remained as weald or warren. Early in the fifteenth century the collegiate church (now the cathedral) was founded by one of the De la Warre family; and its massive perpendicular tower, rising finely from the open paved square in the very heart of the city, forms almost the sole relic of old Manchester now preserved for our times. At the time of the Reformation Salfordshire was still considered one of the wildest and most uncivilised parts of England; and its capital could have been little more than a rough north-country market-town. “It stondith on south side of the Irwell River, in Salfordshire,” says Leland, in the reign of Henry VIII., “and is the fairest, best builded, quickliest, and most populous townne of al Lancestreshire, yet is in hit but one paroch chirch.” Lancashire seemed to the men of the Tudor period much as Mayo or Kerry might have seemed to Arthur Young.
The trade that was to raise the village on the Irwell to the second place among English cities came to it from Flanders and the Low Countries. Even as early as the days of Edward VI. an Act provides for the regulation of the cottons called Manchester, Lancashire, and Cheshire cottons. But these were really woollen fabrics, sold originally under that curious name. A little later, religious refugees from Ghent and Antwerp brought the true cotton manufacture to Bolton and Manchester. Already the trade of the town looked westward; for the merchants bought linen yarn from Ireland, “at Lyrpole,” wove it, and returned the finished goods for sale in the country of their origin. In Elizabeth’s time cotton came from Smyrna and Cyprus; and by the days of the Restoration the population of the town had risen to 6000 souls — a very large number, as towns then went. Early in the eighteenth century the Manchester trade in fustians, tuckings, and tapes exceeded that of any other town in the kingdom. As yet, however, there was no reason to suspect the immense development of
the cotton industry for which the district was predestined by its position and its underlying mineral wealth. Liverpool was only just beginning to be a port for the rising Atlantic traffic, the silting of the Dee at Chester having turned the shipping interest of the estuary into the mouth of the Mersey. Cotton was only just beginning to come over from his Majesty’s plantations in America, and it would then have been hard to predict in what part of the kingdom its manufacture would finally be naturalised. But Manchester lay on the verge of the largest and richest coal-field in England, within easy reach of our best and safest westerly harbour. It was a foregone conclusion that the unsuspected mineral wealth beneath the dales of the Pen country would shortly turn the moors of the West Riding and the slopes of Salfordshire into the wealthiest and most populous district of provincial England, as soon as steam began to revolutionise every department of our manufacturing industry. Meanwhile events were slowly leading up to the future growth of Manchester. It is significant of that westward twist on her pivot performed by England during the eighteenth century that the most important of the Duke of Bridgewater’s canals was constructed to put Manchester into easy communication with its port at Liverpool. Arkwright, a Preston barber, invented his drawing-rollers, and Hargreaves perfected the model of the spinning-jenny, which between them practically introduced the modern factory system as against the old method of handicraft. Next came Crompton’s mule, which further increased the power of output, and gave an immense impetus to the manufacture. None of these inventions in themselves, however, had any necessary tendency to keep the trade fixed at Manchester; and while the mills were still turned entirely by water-power it might have seemed doubtful whether it would not ultimately establish itself by preference among the hill-streams of Derbyshire and the West Riding. Indeed, Arkwright’s own factory stood on a little brook at Cromford, in the Peak district. But towards the end of the last century the first steam-mills were erected in Manchester; and from that moment the future development of the town was secured. No other place could claim equal advantages in both essentials of the trade: the combination of the coal-field at its doors and the short water-way to Liverpool for its exports and imports enabled Manchester easily to distance all its competitors. At the same time, other large and thriving secondary towns sprang up above the coal in every direction, from Preston to Stockport and from Warrington to Burnley. The desert hundred of West Derby— “a waste of forest, moor, and heather” — grew into the cotton country, and Manchester grew into the capital of a vast manufacturing region. Still, the means of communication were deficient; the canal was choked with trade; and some new outlet and inlet became imperatively necessary for the raw material and the finished product. When railways at length took shape in the mind of Stephenson, the first important line opened was that which connected Manchester with Liverpool. The spread of the system has only increased the importance of the town, although it has also distributed the mills more widely over the surrounding country wherever water is easily obtainable from rivers. Manchester is now rather the central mart of cotton than actually the main seat of its manufacture; it has grown into a community of brokers and a great warehouse for goods supplied to it from an ever-widening ring of sister towns. At the present day the capital of desert Salfordshire ranks as a cathedral city, a municipality, and an important parliamentary borough; while with its suburbs (not included in the official figures of the census) it really contains a larger population than any other town in England, London only excepted.
