Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 11

The county of Southampton, as legal phraseology still words it, represents to some extent a middle term between the natural shires which were old English kingdoms, like Kent or Sussex, and the artificial shires mapped out arbitrarily by the Danish conquerors round their military posts, like Nottinghamshire and Northamptonshire. In a certain sense, indeed, it may be said that Hampshire is the real original nucleus of the British Empire—the primitive State which has gradually expanded till it spread out from Hants into Wessex, from Wessex into England, from England into the United Kingdom, and from the United Kingdom into that great world-wide organisation, which includes India and South Africa on the one hand, with half North America on the other. For it was the princes of Winchester who grew into the Kings of the West Saxons, and these again who rose to be overlords of the whole Isle of Britain. As late as the days of William the Conqueror, Winchester still remained the royal city, the capital of all England. It is this continuity with the whole story of the past in England that gives Hampshire such a special interest as the real germ of the entire existing British monarchy.

Yet even Hampshire itself is a compound of three earlier and somewhat shadowy principalities, whose very memory has now almost died out beyond the reach of antiquarian research. At the date of the English conquest, three separate bodies of Teutonic pirates settled down on this exposed stretch of southern coast. As the first English who colonised Kent seized upon insular Thanet for their earliest conquest, so the first English who colonised Wessex seem, naturally enough, to have begun by occupying the Isle of Wight. They were Jutes from Jutland, like the Kentish men, and they had their capital at Carisbrooke, whose old English name signifies the Bury of the Men of Wight. The great opposite inlet of Southampton Water forms just one of those long and tempting fiords, giving access into the heart of the country, which the northern corsairs loved to use for their landing-places; and here a second body of Jutes settled down in the forest region then known as Netley, and stretching from Christchurch to the tidal flats of Hayling Island. The county of the Isle of Wight still retains for some purposes the rank of a separate shire; but this second Jutish principality has now wholly lost every sign of its original independence, and has merged completely into the general mass of modern Hampshire. The name of its people, the Meon-waras, survives at present only in the parishes of East and West Meon and of Meon Stoke. But the third petty kingdom, that of the Gewissas, has had a very different fortune; for its chieftains have gradually risen, by successive stages, to be kings of all England and of the entire British Empire. The Gewissas were English of the Saxon tribe, and arriving in Britain probably at a later date than their Jutish brothers, they pushed inward to the corn-growing plain of the Test and Itchin, guarded by the great Roman city of Winchester, where Cerdic, their leader, if there ever was a Cerdic, fixed his home. The boundaries of these three little pirate tribes must have coincided in the main with those of the existing shire. By slow degrees, however, the princes of Winchester made themselves masters of the two lesser and neighbouring chieftainships. The Jutes of the mainland seem soon to have coalesced with them; while Wight, which maintained its independence longer, was at last annexed after a bloody war. The kings of the West Saxons, as the Winchester princes now began to call themselves, were thus supreme masters of all Hampshire. The county, accordingly, owes its present shape to the conquest of the two minor chieftainships by the leader of the Gewissas. That is why there is now a Hampshire and no Meonshire or Meonfolk.

But how does it happen that the county as a whole is called Hampshire, and not Wessex? This is a real difficulty, and one not easily solved. It is curious that while the names of Sussex, of Essex, of Kent, and of Surrey have survived, the name of Wessex, the dominant State of all, should have passed completely out of sight. The reason may perhaps be found in the very supremacy which made Wessex the leading kingdom of all Britain. Originally, no doubt, as Mr. Freeman suggests, what we now call Hampshire must have been known merely as the West Saxon Land. Gradually, however, the West Saxons sent out colonies of their younger men to the north and west, who spread the English domination over Berkshire, Wilts, and Dorset, and who later still established a political supremacy over the Celts of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. All these conquered districts, though they each possessed an ealdorman of their own, were dependent from the first upon the princes of Winchester; and therefore they were all regarded as equally forming part of the West Saxon Land. Accordingly, it was necessary to invent some artificial name for the restricted territory under the immediate rule of the West Saxon Kings; and the name which people half-unconsciously fixed upon was Hampshire. It occurs for the first time in an entry in the West Saxon royal Chronicle concerning [an event of] the eighth century, when the Moot of the West Saxons deposed an unpopular King, and deprived him of all his dominions, “except Hamptonshire”—that is to say, they restricted him to his old ancestral principality, handing over Wilts, Dorset, Berks, and Somerset to another member of the royal family. Even so, it is difficult to understand why the county should have been named after the smaller town of Southampton, rather than after the royal city of Winchester. Mr. Freeman can only suggest that some special prerogative of the capital may have excluded it from forming part of the general territory, much as Washington now forms no part of any American State. It may have been regarded as a liberty or county by itself. At any rate, the distinctive title of shire, which we usually give to Hants, shows at once that when the name arose it was looked upon as a division of a larger whole, not as a separate and integral entity. We never add the termination “shire” to the names of real old kingdoms or tribes, such as Kent or Surrey, Sussex or Essex, Norfolk or Cornwall; but we usually add it to the subdivisions of Wessex, such as Hampshire, Wiltshire, or Berkshire, with their alternatives of Hants, Wilts, and Berks; while we always add it to the purely artificial Danish divisions, such as Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Warwickshire, where such abbreviated forms are not permissible. So far down in the history of England do the commonest usages of everyday speech go for their origin.

How Wessex spread from this little nucleus of Hampshire till it included all the country from Hayling Island to the Land’s End is a matter to be treated of under the several counties thus included: how it gradually absorbed Surrey, Sussex, Kent, and Essex is a matter of ordinary English history with which everybody is familiar. During the great struggle with the Danes, the Kings of Wessex grew to be Kings of England; and, indeed, what we read in our ordinary histories as early English annals is really little more than the private chronicles of the West Saxon royal House. Every King or Queen who has ever sat upon the English throne, with the exception of the Danes and of [Harold Godwine’s son and of] William the Conqueror, has had the blood of Alfred the West Saxon in his veins. Winchester was the capital of England until some time after the Norman Conquest; and it was only slowly superseded by Westminster through the influence of Edward the Confessor’s great abbey, and of William Rufus’s palace, which has grown at last into the Houses of Parliament. As for London, of course that city never has been the real capital, nor was it even so considered until the growth of streets in the intermediate portion caused the distinction between Westminster and the merchant republic beside it to die out for almost all practical purposes. To this day the people of Winchester themselves have by no means forgotten that their city was once the metropolis of all England. Moreover, the county itself still shows some signs of having been the original nucleus of English colonisation in Wessex. Local names of the Teutonic clan type cluster thicker here than in any other part of the west country. Even now, thirty-three towns or villages in Hampshire bear titles of the old clans which first settled there—Wymerings, Lymings, Pennings, Haylings, Elings, Stubbings, or Bradings—and these clan-colonies would doubtless be somewhat more numerous were it not for the clearance of old villages effected at the time when the New Forest was laid out. On the other hand, Dorset has but twenty-one, Devon but twenty-four, and Cornwall only two. Nevertheless, if we compare these cases with those of Kent, Sussex, and the East Anglian counties, where Teutonic clan-names occur at every turn, we shall be forced to conclude that even in Hampshire itself the English colonisation was far less complete than on the exposed eastern coasts of England.