Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 12

From some points of view there is hardly in all England a more curiously artificial county than Wiltshire. Taking them as a whole, most of our true old English shires are real geographical entities, cut off from one another, now or formerly, by mountains, rivers, forests, or morasses. Sussex is the coast strip between the Weald and the sea; Kent is the promontory between the Thames and the Channel; Hampshire is the basin of the Test and the Itchin. But Wilts is a mere watershed—a central boss of chalk, forming the great upland mass of Salisbury Plain, and dipping down on every side into the richer basins of the two Avons, the Kennet, and the Thames, on the west, the south, the east, and the north severally. Geographically speaking, it has no raison d’être whatever: it is only when we come to look at its origin historically that we can see why this high central table-land of the western peninsula should ever have come to rank as a separate shire at all. Everywhere the early English pirates of the fifth century found their way up into the country by the river-mouths. Their very first settlements were on islands like Wight or Thanet; their next colonies were on practically isolated districts, like East Anglia, between the Fens and the Sea, or like Sussex, between the Weald, the Romney Marshes, and the Channel; their latest great conquests were up the rich river-valleys of the Thames and the Humber, the tributaries of the Wash, and the streams which unite to form Southampton Water. The watershed always barred for many years their progress towards the interior. It was easy for them to sail in their long-boats up the open streams into the rich corn-lands of the Hampshire valley or the vale of York; it was quite another thing for them to force their way over the downs and fells in the face of a steady and organised British resistance. Accordingly, the West Saxons who settled in Hampshire rested on their laurels long enough before they ventured to attack the independent Welsh who held out for themselves among the Roman hill-forts of Wiltshire.

Fifty years after the English had conquered the valleys of Hants, Old Sarum and Amesbury still remained in the hands of the British. The square fortress of Sorviodunum, with the great national monument of Stonehenge to its rear, must have been defended by its Welsh inhabitants with unusual vigour. Ambresbury, the longer form of Amesbury, even now in occasional use, recalls the name of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the Romanised Briton who long kept off the attacks of the West Saxon intruders. All along the old frontier, as Dr. Guest has pointed out, village names like Sherfield English and Britford still point back to a time when English and Welsh met upon the marches of Wilts and Hants as enemies; and the great earthwork of Grimsdyke has been shown to be the barrier thrown up by the Britons to check the advance of the aggressive Teutons. The dyke has its vallum turned towards Wilts and its foss towards Hampshire; thus indicating that the defenders were the men of the inland shire and their presumed enemies the West Saxons of the coast. Half a century after the landing of the English, however, the invaders set out from their capital of Winchester, crossed the downs which divide the basins of the Test and the Avon, and descended upon the vale near where Salisbury now stands. They stormed Old Sarum, and no doubt put to death most of its garrison; but the town continued to be occupied till after the Norman Conquest, when Bishop Roger moved down the cathedral to New Sarum or Salisbury. About the same time with the capture of Sorviodunum, it seems probable that almost all Wilts passed into the hands of the English, as soon as the great border fortress had fallen; though the part of the country around Malmesbury remained under Welsh rule for a much longer period.

The English who came to occupy this newly conquered territory were known as the Wilsæte—that is to say, the settlers by the Wyly—much as Canadians now talk of the Red River Settlement. The name alone sufficiently shows that the colonists were at first confined to the southern slope of Salisbury Plain. The same termination reappears in the Dorsæte of Dorset, the Sumorsæte of Somerset, and the Defnsæte of Devon. We may infer from it, what seems also likely on other grounds, that the English came into these shires rather as lords of the soil among a body of British serfs than as exterminators and colonisers. To this day the peasantry of the western counties show all the anatomical marks of Celtic or semi-Celtic descent. It is noticeable, however, that the modern name of the shire is not Wilset, as one might expect from the analogy of Dorset and Somerset, but Wilts. The change of form is due to the fact that the county had a name of its own, distinct from that of the people: it was called Wiltonshire, from Wilton, the capital of the Wilsæte; and this accounts for the apparently intrusive consonant in the existing word. The men of Wilts, though doubtless subject from the first to the overlordship of the West Saxon kings at Winchester, had originally a certain political autonomy of their own. They were governed by their local ealdorman, and they made war and peace on their own account. As late as the beginning of the ninth century the men of Worcestershire attacked the Wilsæte, and the Wilts men met them under their native ealdorman and put them to flight. At this time the form Wiltonshire was unknown: it was only at a later date, when the county had become thoroughly incorporated with the rest of the West Saxon dominions, that it began to be regarded not as an integral whole but as a shire or subdivision of the West Saxon realm. The existence of a separate bishopric of Salisbury similarly points back to the original independence of the Wilts men; for in early England the Bishop was always the ecclesiastical counterpart of the king or ealdorman; and the diocese was only the kingdom or principality viewed from the spiritual side.

The origin of Berkshire is not so clear or so certain. The county probably represents the first great northern extension of the West Saxon power, when the English colonists began to cross the ridge of the North Downs and descend into the valleys of the Kennet and the Thames. The white horse formed the standard of the invading Teutons, as it still does both of Hanover, whence they came, and of Kent, where, perhaps, they first landed in Britain; and a white horse cut into the green side of the chalk downs seems always to have marked the English advance to the north and west. That of Westbury—the very name is significant—appears to point out the farthest outpost of the Wilsæte towards the still unconquered Damnonian Welsh of Somerset; that of the Berkshire hills appears similarly to bear witness to the frontier of the West Saxons towards the scattered Welsh principalities of the Midlands. Wallingford [whatever Walling means] may mark the spot, as Dr. Guest suggests, where the two races were once conterminous. However this may be, it is certain that Berks formed one of the earliest West Saxon conquests, and that it was very soon incorporated with the main principality in Hampshire. An ealdorman of Berks is mentioned in the ninth century, but he is mentioned as immediately dependent upon Winchester. There has never been a Bishop of Berkshire. The name of the county, originally Bearrucshire, is [said to be] derived from the forest of Bearruc, which once stretched from Chertsey to Reading; and the very title shows that the shire as a whole was then relatively unimportant. It was regarded, in fact, merely as the “back country” of Hampshire: people talked of the Bearruc-wood shire much as they talk now of the hills beyond the Limpopo, or the Australian bush. From the very first Berkshire must have been a mere subdivision of the West Saxon kingdom; and therefore it has no name of its own except as a shire. The towns and villages bearing English clan-names number only twenty-two, of which Reading and Sonning are the best known.