Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 22

The valley of the Wye and the beautiful broken hill-country west of the Malvern range have one of the most confused and uncertain histories among all the English shires. Naturally a district of Gwent, in South Wales, and still inhabited for the most part by a peasantry of Welsh descent, many of whom even now employ their ancestral Cymric tongue, it was yet early attached to the English interest, and has been counted, in its eastern half at least, as a part of England from the very first days of the Teutonic conquest. Long before that period Herefordshire, with several of the surrounding shires, formed the old principality of the Silures, the British race that held out with fiercest energy against the invading Roman legionaries. Modern anthropological investigations have tended to show that the Silurians were not a pure Celtic race, but a dark, long-skulled, non-Aryan people, allied to the primitive neolithic inhabitants of Britain, and perhaps also to the modern Basques of the Pyrenean region. To this day the type of physique usually identified with the remnants of the prehistoric Euskarian stock is exceptionally common among the men of Hereford; and even the casual visitor can hardly fail to be struck by the dark complexions, oval heads, and prominent cheek-bones so frequently noticed in the country districts about Ross and Monmouth. Be this as it may, however, it is at least certain that the Silurians, even if originally Euskarian by race, must have adopted the Celtic tongue at a very early date, as their brethren the so-called Black Celts have long done in Ireland and Scotland. During the Roman invasion these Celticised aborigines offered a peculiarly sturdy resistance to the southern conquerors. Herefordshire, indeed, is the classic country of Caractacus, the land celebrated in the vigorous rhetoric of Tacitus as the last home of British freedom. The great range of late pre-Roman earthworks which caps the Malvern hills probably marks the first line of defence thrown up by the Silurian chief against the advance of Ostorius, who had crossed the Severn to attack him with all the troops collected from the numerous stations that dot the surface of the Cotswolds. The camps at Whitborne, Croft-Ambrey, Thornbury, and Wapley seem to belong to a later campaign, when the line of the Malverns was abandoned, and Caractacus was forced to fall back upon his secondary range of fortresses in the rear. Finally, Coxwall Knoll is held, with great probability, to be the scene of the last desperate defence, immortalised in the vague and rather theatrical description of Tacitus.

After Frontinus had at length pacified the whole district from the Forest of Dean to the banks of Usk, we hear for the first time the name around which the whole subsequent history of the county centres—that of Ariconium. The important station so styled lay either at Ross itself or at Weston-under-Penyard, two miles distant. Just as the root-syllable of Uriconium, variously disguised, crops up over and over again in the history of the Wrekin district, so the root-syllable of the very similar Ariconium perpetually occurs in the history of ancient and mediæval Herefordshire. Long after the Romans had left the country, the dubious Welsh writer quoted as Nennius speaks of this region under the name of Ercing, a word whose connection with Ariconium is not particularly clear until we recollect that the first was pronounced hard like Erking, while the second was a Latinised variation of some crude form, Aricon or Arcon. Geoffrey of Monmouth, a writer of local knowledge, calls it Hergin; and indeed the lively and romantic Archdeacon is never very remarkable for correctness in the use of aspirates. In the English Chronicle and other Anglo-Saxon documents the name is converted into a typical Teutonic clan-title, as Ircinga-feld; and from that corrupt form it has been finally modernised into Archenfield, a clear product of sound local etymological instinct still preserving for us in a fairly recognisable shape the old root of Ariconium.

So much for the most primitive name of Herefordshire itself, regarded as a fixed unit of territory. The history of the folk who dwell in it is far more complicated. Very soon after the earliest West Saxon brigands had crossed the Cotswolds and settled down in the rich valley of the lower Severn around Gloucester and Worcester, a small outlying colony from this young parent state appears to have penetrated still farther westward and conquered for itself from the Welsh of Gwent a petty principality in the hither half of Herefordshire. The men of the Worcestershire kingdom were called Hwiccas: those of the region beyond the Malverns became known as Magesæte—a name of the same type as the Dorsæte, the Sumorsæte, the Wilsæte, and the Defnsæte of southern Wessex, or as the Wroken-sæte and Pec-sæte of Shropshire and Derbyshire. The termination seems usually to imply a settlement of a few English overlords among a large conquered and servile Celtic population; and such was certainly the case in Herefordshire, where the number of slaves recorded in Domesday is unusually high. Perhaps the first syllable of the name may be derived from the Roman station of Magna—or the Cymric word which it represents—as that of the Dorsæte is cognate with Durnovaria, and that of the Wrokensæte with Uriconium. Another small English tribe of West Hecanas seems also to have inhabited old Herefordshire; yet Florence of Worcester, who is usually remarkable for his accuracy in dealing with his own district and its neighbourhood, apparently identifies them with the Magesæte. When the Mercian kings began to consolidate the petty principalities of the Midlands, and to drive the West Saxons across the Thames and the Avon, they united the lands of the Hwiccas and Magesæte to their own overlordship, but left the native princes in possession as subject kings or ealdormen. The town of Hereford, which had acquired its present name in the exact modern form as early as the days of Bede, was made into the see of the Bishop of the Magesæte shortly after the conversion of Mercia. But it must then have been a border fortress of the Teutonic colonists; for the Wye remained the boundary between Welsh and English long after the days of Offa, and the portion of Herefordshire beyond that river contains local names almost exclusively of the Welsh type to the present day.

At what precise date the whole of the existing shire became English it is perhaps now impossible to decide. Mr. Freeman, indeed, marks it all as Mercian territory in his map of England during the ninth century. But early in the tenth the Chronicle tells us that a Scandinavian “host,” on a piratical expedition up the Severn mouth, “harried among the Welsh, and captured Cameleac, the Bishop of Ircinga-feld, and led him with them to their ships.” The Bishop in question was the Welshman Cimeliauc of Llandaff; and it would seem as though some part at least of Archenfield was then still Welsh territory, and as such included within the limits of his diocese. On the other hand, Edward the West Saxon ransomed the captive churchman, as though he regarded him as a subject; but then all the Welsh at that time already acknowledged the suzerainty of the Winchester princes. At the same date with this notice we meet for the first time with what seems at least a foreshadowing of the later division of the Hwiccan and Magesætan territory into the existing shires, already, perhaps, introduced by Alfred after his recovery of south-western Mercia. As in so many other cases, the Scandinavian invasion probably produced the new arrangement. The Northmen, we are told, wished still to harry in Ircinga-feld; but “the men of Hereford and Gloucester met them, and fought with them, and put them to flight.” From that time forth the Hwiccas disappear from history, and in their place we get Gloucestershire and Worcestershire; but the Magesæte seem to have had a somewhat greater tribal vitality. A century later, during the wars of Cnut and Edmund, the Magesæte still fight as a separate nation, with an identity of their own. It is during the reign of Edward the Confessor that Hereford-scir is first distinctly mentioned under that name. But perhaps the two forms lingered on for a while side by side, the people being described as Magesæte and their territory as Herefordshire. At any rate, the distinct mention of the men of Hereford and Gloucester shows, by analogy with other cases, that those two burgs were regarded as true shire-centres in the beginning of the tenth century. Perhaps, too, the peninsula beyond the Wye may have been retained by the Hereford folk after they had overrun it in this raid against the Danes: for the border war with the Welsh is one long record of successive annexations, a bit at a time, each conquered part becoming as a rule thoroughly Anglicised before the next was attacked. Thus at the date of Domesday Book Herefordshire included, not only all the existing county, but also the entire stretch of land between Wye and Usk, which by later arrangements was erected into Monmouthshire, with the addition of the still more recent acquisitions as far as the vale of Taff. At the period of the Norman Conquest, Archenfield was still inhabited by a semi-Celtic race, governed by their own laws and customs. From the very first, however, the proportion of English blood throughout the whole county must have been extremely slight; and beyond the Lugg the population still remains fundamentally identical with the old Silurian liegemen of Caractacus. The name of Hereford itself, in spite of its temptingly English form, is really an Anglicised corruption of a Welsh original.