Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 21

Along the level lower reaches of the Severn, the great oolitic range of the Cotswolds subsides by a steep escarpment (well shown at Leckhampton Hill) into the broad cheese-growing vale of Gloucester and Cheltenham. On the western edge of this lias region, again, the river has cut its channel almost along the very line of junction with the red marl formations which compose the outlying portion of Gloucestershire on the opposite bank. Still farther to the west, however, in the Forest of Dean, we come upon a little island of the coal measures, surrounded by a considerable belt of other primary rocks. A good agricultural country, situated in a great river valley, is sure to be thickly peopled in a primitive civilisation; and so it is no wonder that the Roman station of Glevum should have been one of the most important in western Britain, and that Roman villas should have clustered thickly all along the edge of the Severn and Avon valleys. The main road ran from Corinium or Cirencester, the strategical centre of the west, to Glevum, and from Glevum on to the mines in the Forest of Dean; whose huge refuse-piles still mark at once the extensive scale and the insufficient smelting of the Roman works. The capital of the lower Severn was also the junction for the road leading to the Silurian country in South Wales, and for that which ran northward by Uriconium or Wroxeter to Chester and York.

After the departure of the Romans, Glevum became apparently the capital of a little Welsh principality, which seems to have been leagued with Aquæ [Sulis] and Corinium (Bath and Cirencester) against the aggressive heathen West Saxons on the south. For nearly a century after the first West Saxon hordes landed in Britain they were engaged in slowly building up the nucleus of their power in Hampshire, and in worming their way up the river valleys into Wilts, Berks, and Dorset. But when at last, towards the close of the sixth century, the two filibustering Saxon princes Cuthwine and Ceawlin boldly marched over the downs at Chippenham, and met the British confederation at Dyrham Park, near Bristol, a king of Glevum was one among the three Welsh princes left dead upon the field of battle. Conmagil is the corrupt form of name given to him in the brief chronicle of the conquerors; and his town of Gleawanceaster, as the early English note calls it, fell at once, with Bath and Cirencester, into the hands of the West Saxons. The fall of Bath separated the Damnonian Welsh of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall from their brethren in Wales proper: the fall of Gloucester, the great fortress of the lower Severn, left the whole basin of the main western river open to the English advance. The heathen invaders marched up the valley to Uriconium, which they utterly destroyed, so that it lies waste to this day; and having thus burned to the ground the other great key of Powysland, they settled quietly down as colonists and slaveholders in the conquered district. The West Saxons of this remote dependency, however, seem hardly to have done more than acknowledge the bare supremacy of the great overlord at Winchester. They were known by the name of Hwiccas (a name [thought by some to be] curiously preserved under a very clipped form in that of Wigra-ceastor or Worcester), and they were ruled by under-kings of their own who must have been practically almost independent of the mother State. Only fourteen years after the settlement of the valley, indeed, we find its inhabitants conspiring with the Welsh to drive out the West Saxon king; and a few years later, when Augustine of Canterbury met the Welsh bishops in synod at Aust, that place is described by Bede as being “on the borders of the Hwiccas and the West Saxons,” so that the two powers must then have been regarded as distinct from one another. The country occupied by the Hwiccas did not yet extend to the west of the Severn; for half Worcestershire, half Gloucestershire, and all Herefordshire were still in the hands of the Welsh; while Monmouth, of course, is even now only an English county “by Act of Parliament.” Thus the primitive territory of the Hwiccas really consisted only of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire east of Severn, together with a small piece of Warwickshire.

The connection of Gloucestershire with the West Saxons, such as it was, did not last long. Early in the seventh century, and still during the heathen period, Penda of Mercia, the real founder of the Mercian kingdom, attacked “Ciren-ceaster,” and there decisively defeated the two West Saxon kings. The Chronicle tells us that they “came to terms” with him; and though we do not know exactly what the terms were, we know that from that moment the Hwiccas ceased to be counted as West Saxons and began to be considered as Mercians. When Mercia, last of all the English kingdoms save only Sussex, received the Christian religion, Oshere, the under-king of the Hwiccas, obtained leave from his suzerain, King Wulfhere of Mercia, to erect his own principality into a bishopric; and this bishopric had its see at Worcester, the ceaster of the Hwiccas, as its name is believed literally to mean; whence we may infer that that town, rather than Gloucester, was considered the capital of the entire tribe. For many ages afterwards the diocese of Worcester consisted of the original Hwiccan principality only—that is to say, of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and a bit of Warwickshire. Osric, king of the Hwiccas, was also founder of Bath Abbey, which looks as though his power may even have extended into north Somerset. Under Offa, the greatest of all the Mercian kings, the English border was pushed forward from the Severn to the Wye, so as to include all the modern shires of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford; but the last-named territory was not incorporated with that of the Hwiccas, its own Anglicised Welsh inhabitants, the Hecanas, continuing to rank as a separate tribe and having their separate bishopric at Hereford. Down to the days of Egbert in Wessex the Hwiccas were still regarded as one undivided people, and no mention of Gloucestershire or Worcestershire as distinct Mercian counties yet occurs. Nevertheless, their king had sunk to the position of a mere ealdorman: for in the year of Egbert’s accession we read for the first time that “Athelmund, ealdorman of the Hwiccas, rode over at Kemsford; and there Weoxtan the ealdorman met him with the Wilsetan (or Wilts men), and there was a muckle fight.”

There is every reason to believe, therefore, that so long as Mercia remained independent the country of the Hwiccas was still one and indivisible, and Worcestershire or Gloucestershire had no separate existence. Under Egbert, however, the West Saxon overlordship was extended over all Mercia; and the Danish invasion soon came, utterly to disintegrate the whole native organisation of the north and the midlands. In the beginning of Alfred’s reign, Burgred, the under-king of Mercia, after a vain resistance, fled over sea to Rome; and the Danes, after making over the kingdom for a while to “an unwise thegn” as their ally, soon took the greater part of it back into their own hands. There are some grounds for supposing, however, that they never settled largely in the Severn valley, as they did in all the northern and eastern districts: certainly Gloucester and Worcester never were held, like Nottingham or Derby, by Danish “hosts”; and though we often hear of the Danes “sitting” at Cirencester, they seem seldom to have “sat” in the other towns of the Hwiccas. Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum, by which the Danes gave up all Wessex, also stipulated that the West Saxon king was to hold half Mercia south-west of Watling Street, as the old English called the Roman road from London to Chester. By this arrangement, all the land of the Hwiccas, together with Oxfordshire, Bucks, and London itself, fell once more into Alfred’s hands. In fact, he now recovered as immediate king all that district which had originally been colonised by West Saxons, but had fallen later on into Mercian hands. It was now, probably, that “King Alfred divided England into counties”; at any rate, he seems to have led the way to the universal establishment of the shire system by cutting up this recovered strip of Mercia into shires on the familiar West Saxon model. What he really did was to divide half Mercia. Almost immediately after the recovery we read of “Oxford and all that depended on it”—that is to say, Oxfordshire: while, instead of meeting any longer with the Hwiccas as a tribal name, we hear in the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward, that a Danish host endeavoured to plunder Ircinga-feld (the forest of Dean), whereupon “the men of Hereford and of Gleaweceaster met them, and fought with them, and put them to flight.” This mode of speech is exactly analogous to what we find said elsewhere of the recognised counties: doubtless Alfred had put an ealdorman in each town to lead its local levy, as his son afterward did in the Danish burgs. The earliest definite mention of “Gleawe-ceaster-scir,” however, occurs a century later, during the wars of Cnut; while a few years after it is coupled with “Wigra-ceaster-scir” (Worcestershire) in a very unmistakable manner. There can be but little doubt that the county was really demarcated in pretty much its present form by Alfred; and, as might be naturally expected, it holds a middle place between the purely natural shires of Wessex and the purely artificial shires of north-eastern Mercia. Roughly speaking, it contains just one-half of the old Hwiccas territory—the southern half between the two Avons; and it extends westward so as to include the Forest of Dean, up to the borders of Monmouth, then a part of the Welsh principality of Gwent, and up to the boundary of Herefordshire, then the region held by the Anglicised Welsh tribe of the Hecanas. Why it should cross the Cotswolds so as to include Cirencester and a part of the Thames Valley is more difficult to see; but perhaps this country may really have belonged from the first to the Hwiccas—the historical connection of Cirencester with the Severn vale is certainly strong—while even if it did not, Alfred may reasonably enough have chosen the existing boundary-line, running along the bleak region of the Wold, and about equidistant from his two selected centres at Oxford and Gloucester. It is important to notice, too, that these new shires, like those of Danish Mercia, show traces of their comparatively artificial origin in the fact that they are called after their capital towns, and not after the name of a tribe or kingdom.