by Grant Allen
At first it does not seem probable that the Celtic peasants of Churnside were actually deprived of their lands, which they held as the Celts of Ireland and Scotland held them long ages afterward, by tribal not by personal tenure. The head-man of the Churn valley villagers was entrusted with the task of collecting the revenue and handing it over to the Imperial officials at Carchester. He was responsible for so much corn to the authorities, and he distributed the incidence of the impost upon the villagers according to his own discretion. But in time the Roman legal system began to tell sadly against the native cultivators, as civilised legal systems always tell against barbaric or semi-barbaric tribes, upon which they are imposed from above. Little by little the Celts got into debt with Roman usurers, mortgaged their lands to cancel the debt, and finally lost them through inability to pay. So, as time went on, the position of the Churnside people became more and more degraded. At last, the whole valley fell into the hands of a single successful money-lender, a Roman adventurer, perhaps, from Bath or Colchester; and the Celtic cultivators sank into the position of serfs, as wretched as the Connemara peasants [before the Land Bills]. They tilled the soil for their Italian master, and shared their miserable cabins, which clustered round the villa on the hill-side, with the pigs and cattle, their fellow-slaves.
Nevertheless, wealth had necessarily grown with the spread of cultivation, the opening of roads, the digging of mines, and the rise of an industrial class in considerable towns like Lincoln, York, and London. Much of it was carried away to Rome, but some little portion at least was left in the tills of the merchants and usurers of the large towns. This remaining fraction was all concentrated, however, in the hands of a very small class. The landowner, whose villa occupied the brow of the hill at Churney Abbey, was obviously a wealthy man, even when judged by the standard of modern England. He planted his home on the sunniest slope of the valley, near the very spot afterwards chosen by those Cistercian monks who had always so keen an eye for a good building site, and he decorated it like the home of a Roman magnate at Tibur or Baiæ. His mosaic floors, his porphyry columns, his marble baths and fountains, his well-planned hypocaust, his frescoed walls, all indicate his wealth and taste, and have all left some relic of their former existence which can at once be recognised by the antiquarian eye. From his pillared portico he could look down over the whole cultivated valley, every acre of which was his own property and tilled by his own British serfs; and at the end of the vista he could catch a glimpse of the Channel, where the station at King’s Peddington put him in direct communication with the Portway Street and the rest of the Roman world at Carchester. One of the Peddington archæologists even fancies that he can detect across Champernhay farm some traces of the vicinal way, which led from the villa to the main road at the tenth milestone; but this is probably a piece of over-zealous historical and local enthusiasm. To the last, however, the Roman held himself apart from the native Celt, exactly as the Englishman holds himself apart from the native Hindoo. He added no new element to the population. There was no connubium even between them; and if a few half-castes grew up in the towns, their place was with the provincials, not with the Romans. The people remained as before, a mixed race of Celts and Euskarians, speaking the Celtic dialects, and preserving in many cases the Euskarian features. They never even learned, [at least out here in the south-west of Britain], as in Gaul, to use familiarly the Latin tongue. When the Romans left they were still speaking unmixed Welsh. To this day one may pick out Celtic words in the common speech of the Churnside people; but the name of Portway Street and the word castle applied to the hill-forts are almost the only Latin forms which have filtered through uninterruptedly from Roman times into the modern dialect of King’s Peddington.
V. PEDDINGTON AND CHURNEY
There are few more interesting remains of our forefathers to be found in the land than the local names of all our towns and villages. They often bear witness to historical facts, of which the memory is otherwise wholly lost. This is conspicuously the case in Churnside, where the English conquest has left no permanent record in the way of buildings, monuments, or written annals; but where the nomenclature of the valley alone recalls the history of the early English colonists who settled here about the close of the sixth century. We are thus enabled even to know with accuracy and certainty the very family to which these original colonists belonged. The Roman name of King’s Peddington was “ad Decimum”; the Welsh name has hopelessly perished; but the English name has nothing to do with either, and was in its first form Peadingatun; that is to say, the tun or enclosure of the Peadingas, or the Paddings, as we should now call them. These Peadingas were an English family of the West Saxon tribe; but they have left memorials of their presence in one other place at least, and that is at Paddington, in the territory of the Middle Saxons, where the Great Western terminus now stands. I suspect, too, that their name is but a dialectical variation on that of the Pidingas who settled at Piddington in Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire; while the Pydingas of Puddington in Bedfordshire, Cheshire, and Devonshire were perhaps other representatives of the same old English stock [?].
The particular body of Peadings who have imprinted their name on King’s Peddington to the present day were a family of Saxon pirates from the old Saxon land at the mouth of the Elbe. Though English in the general sense that they were members of the [race we call] English, they did not come from the specially English tribe which colonised East Anglia and the north. Their name, which they had in common with other Saxon, English, and Jutish families, is a patronymic of the ordinary Teutonic type, and means the sons of Peada, just as the Karlings are the sons of Karl, and the Wodenings the sons of Woden. They are mentioned in an early charter to Glastonbury Abbey, in common with the Leamingas who have left their name at Leamington, and the Earmingas of Earmington in Devon. Local settlements of this sort bristle over the map of England, and are specially common in the thoroughly Teutonic counties of the east and south-east. In Sussex alone one can pick them out by dozens — Aldings at Aldingbourn, Aldrings at Aldrington, Billings at Billingshurst, Donings at Donnington, Folcings at Folkington, and so on through a long and curious list. In that old kingdom of the South Saxons alone there are no less than sixty-eight town or village names of this type, each of them marking the settlement of a primitive English clan. For Sussex lay right in the path of the English pirates, and its Welsh inhabitants were almost “exterminated” during the contest with them, as one may see by noting the small proportion of long skulls and dark faces among the people of the modern shire, in its country districts at least. But here, in the farthest ends of Wessex, things went far otherwise. King’s Peddington is one out of two solitary names formed on the English patronymic principle in the whole county. Evidently the West Saxons settled around Churnside as lords of the soil only, not as colonisers of the entire district. Every indication goes strongly to prove that their arrival must have been somewhat after this fashion.
When the Romans withdrew from Britain, the artificial unity which they had introduced fell with them. For it was not the organic unity of a really national league; it was a mere military subjection like our own subjection of India. Everybody knows that if we were to withdraw from India to-morrow, Sikh, Mahratta, and Mahommedan would begin all their old fights afresh; and when Rome withdrew from Britain, Gael and Cymry, Brigantian and Silurian once more fell apart into petty principalities of half-Romanised type. The Katuriges of Churnside and Carchester formed part of such a principality, ruled over by a king of Burdonian origin, about whom we certainly know worse than nothing. It is even doubtful whether the Churnside people had ever been christianised like the inhabitants of the Roman towns, Lincoln, York, and London; or whether they did not remain Pagans — mere rustic idolators — to the very last. Certainly no Christian Roman relic has ever been discovered in Churnside. But when the West Saxons landed in Southampton Water, at the end of the fifth century, they rapidly conquered the Winchester Valley, and began a series of colonising raids into the c
ountry westward and northward. Tribe by tribe the Welsh serfs made a desperate resistance under their native princes; but they had been wholly crushed and demoralised by the Roman rule, and they were forced to succumb, valley after valley, to the fresh and vigorous onslaught of the foreign pirates. The farther the West Saxons went from their first colony, however, and from their base at Winchester, the more sparsely did they people the country, being satisfied on the outskirts with a mere military occupation, and with the enslavement rather than the extermination of the Romanised Celtic and Euskarian population. Three distinct marks of this mode of colonisation remain to our own day. In the first place, the local names of the English patronymic type are commonest around the original nucleus of each colony, but decrease in frequency as we move inland and outward. In the second place, the hundreds, each of which at first represented a mutual guarantee society of a hundred free English families, are small in the neighbourhood of the nucleus, but very large on the outskirts and the marches, showing that the English families were there thinly scattered over wide districts. And in the third place, the traces of the old dark, long-headed, servile population are common everywhere in the outlying regions, and comparatively wanting in the oldest settled parts, though many of the dark people are also to be found in the prædial lowlands which probably formed the domains of the early English kings, and were tilled by their Welsh serfs.
In Churnside we see every sign that the English conquest was only such an occupation by the Peadingas of the lower end of the dale. King’s Peddington is the one solitary local name of purely Teutonic origin in the whole valley. The Churn itself retains its Celtic name; the Portway Street still bears its Latin title; and though Churney has an English termination in its last syllable, meaning island, this Teutonic suffix is grafted on to the old Welsh word for the river. Moreover, as we have seen, though at King’s Peddington the majority of the people have heads of the broad English type, often with light hair and eyes, at Churney almost the whole population is of the long-skulled Celtic, or rather Euskarian, type, with dark hair and eyes, only slightly intermixed with Teutonic traits. Indeed, even in the lower part of the dale, there is a fair sprinkling of brunette complexions; and as these people cannot have descended wholly from the very blonde English conquerors, they must be the half-caste Anglicised descendants of their Celtic and Euskarian serfs. In fact, looking at the question from the standpoint of the history of Churnside, and not of the history of England, there can be very little doubt that the West Saxon invasion of this valley was merely a substitution of the Peadingas as lords of the little dale in the place of a Welsh chieftain. Perhaps, if we were mentally to split England up a little oftener, and to picture to ourselves the history of each part separately, we might find that our common notions as to violent displacements of whole races were generally too sweeping. The more we try to fathom the real story of a single district, the more do we see that everywhere relics of the very earliest times are surviving to this day in our midst. Even the county town of Carchester still proclaims itself in its name as the capital of the Katuriges; and the neighbouring shires of Dorset and Devon, which as late as Alfred’s time were counted as being inhabited by Welsh-kind, are still called by the names of the Durotriges and the Dumnonii. To the historian of Churnside the great questions are not how Celtic blood got mixed with English in Britain generally, but whence came the Celtic elements in the speech of the Churney villagers, and what mean the dark hair and eyes of so many Peddington lasses. And since all England is made up of many such places put together, these questions may ultimately help us to understand the general problem better than any lengthy disputations over the vague traditions of the English Chronicle as to the dubious Ida of Bernicia and the half-mythical Ælle of Sussex.
VI. SHERBORNE LANE
The winding highway which threads its course along the banks of the Churn from King’s Peddington to Churney, though now known popularly as the London Road, still bears in legal documents its more correct and ancient name of Sherborne Lane. Few people, however, are aware that Sherborne Lane is so called from the former connection of the little borough with Sherborne Abbey. In our own time we give new streets mere fancy names without any particular reference to the fitness of things: we call a row of suburban houses Bedford Road or Alexandra Terrace, not because the one leads to Bedford and the other belongs to the Princess of Wales, but because these titles are the only ones which happen to occur to the poverty-stricken imagination of the contractor who laid them out. In earlier times it was not so: the Harrow Road was the road to Harrow, and the Bishopgate or the Queengate was the gate or street belonging to the bishop or the queen. Civilisation had not reached the high pitch at which we dignify a level row of cottages as a terrace, or a short cul-de-sac as a road. Sherborne Lane is thus another one of those precious philological fossils which preserve for us so much of local history, hardly to be gathered as a rule from any written documents, but full of interest for the scientific antiquary.
A charter of Cynewulf, king of the West Saxons, still exists in a Yorkshire manor-house, having been bought as a curiosity by an ancestor of the north-country squire from the proprietor of the Sherborne Abbey lands, shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries. This charter recites in mediæval Latin that King Cynewulf, by and with the consent of his wise men, grants to the Church of St. Mary at Sherborne, for the boiling of salt, sundry lands at Peddington, of which the boundaries are added in old English of the earliest West Saxon type. These boundaries— “from the sea to the east brook; thence up on stream to the salt-ford; then by the stone-barrow to cliff: from cliff west to the haw-thorn tree; thence to Churn head; and so by the hazel water to the Woden stone” — are still identifiable as the modern boundaries of High Peddington parish. The charter is dated from the king’s ham at Carchester, A.D. 763. From that day to this, therefore, the limits of High Peddington must have remained the same, being annually assured by the old ceremony of beating the boundaries. Nay, the very names of the landmarks are still all but unchanged, for the salt-ford is now Salford Parva; the haw-thorn tree has long disappeared, but its memory is preserved in the hamlet of Thorn; and the Woden stone, a solitary monolith on the crest of Churnside Hill, is known as Wanston Pillar to the present day. Cliff, Stonebarrow, Churnhead, and Hazelwater brook are marked by those very names on the Ordnance Survey Map of modern England. Indeed, if you take the country up and down, you will find it is but a mushroom title which does not date back at least a few centuries before the Norman Conquest. Every field in England had a name long before Domesday-book was compiled; and most of those names are quite unchanged down to our own times. Sherborne Lane thus points back to the days when the monks of St. Mary’s Church boiled their salt in a wych at High Peddington — Peddington Abbas, as it used to be called, to distinguish it from the Royal manor of King’s Peddington — and carted it along the road which now leads up the valley to join the great London highway from the west, but which then ran straight across country to Sherborne direct.
This charter of the eighth century, however, shows us a Wessex and a Churnside very different from the Wessex and the Churnside of the early Peading colonists. The Peadingas were heathen worshippers of Woden and Thunor, who gave the names of their gods to termini like Wanston: the charter of Cynewulf makes over a large stretch of land to the church of St. Mary at Sherborne, in a simple matter-of-course way which clearly bespeaks a long-settled Christianity. The original colony of the Peadingas was apparently the domain of an isolated and independent clan: the charter of Cynewulf betokens a regular central government, with a king who has power to book land to persons or corporations with the advice of his duly constituted Meeting of Wise Men. Evidently we have passed from a period of wild Teutonic heathendom and local independence to a period of comparatively settled royal rule constituted on a partly Roman model, under the guidance of Romanised Christian priests, who use the Latin tongue as an official language. Yet of this momentous change we have few and very indirect memorials in Churnside
itself. We are left almost entirely to inference and analogy for the details which must enable us to bridge over the vast gap thus disclosed in our annals.
It is not probable that the Peadingas could have settled down at Peddington much before the end of the sixth century. The first West Saxon invaders only reached Britain at the very close of the fifth, and conquered Winchester some twenty years later. It was more than half a century before they had got as far as Old Sarum, and after eighty years they had only just advanced to Bath and Cirencester. Hence it is not likely that their farthest outposts could have occupied the Churnside district till the closing years of the sixth century. The Peadingas, who were the pioneers of English conquest in the Valley of the Churn, must long have remained almost independent marchers on the outlying West Welsh frontier of the West Saxon realm. Beyond them stretched the still unconquered Celtic kingdom, which shrank at last to the narrow limits of Cornwall, but which remained a powerful principality even in the later days of Ini and Cuthred. The evidence of names and features clearly shows us that the Peadingas did not exterminate the Welsh inhabitants of the valley; but the evidence of language, religion, and customs also shows us that they completely Anglicised them. For at least a hundred years the Peadingas and their Celtic serfs continued to worship the old Teutonic gods. Names of places referring to Woden, to Frea, and to Hel, or compounded with the sacred trees and animals of the Saxon race — the oak, the ash, the thorn, the horse, the raven, and the wolf — abound in Churnside and the neighbourhood generally, and attest the ancient reverence paid to the Teutonic mythology. Black-haired and dark-eyed children of true Euskarian type will still tell you folk-lore and fairy tales of the conquering race — myths which had their origin in the Thuringian forests or by the marshes of Old England on the Sleswick coast. But the Peadings owed to the distant king at Winchester their military service in time of war, though perhaps at first the canton was really independent even in this matter, and was only later subdued or amalgamated by some warrior prince of the house of Woden and Cerdic. At any rate, when the authentic history of Wessex opens, we find it a real though loosely organised kingdom, with a king who could collect a considerable army of Saxons to waste the yet unconquered Welsh, or make raids upon the English Mercians beyond the forest belt of Cotteswold. More than this it could hardly have been in the old heathen days at least.
