Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 23

The people of “proud Salopia” are a proverbially clannish folk; and their famous toast of “All round the Wrekin” has long been the favourite symbol of local exclusiveness and county feeling throughout the whole shire. But few Shropshiremen probably know how intimately the name of the Wrekin has always been bound up with the tribal name of their ancestors for untold centuries. Long before they were Salopians they were men of the Wrekin; and to this day the sugar-loaf cone of the great hill remains the visible bond of union for the whole Salopian race. The word which we use in that Teutonic garb would be naturally used by the Roman and the Celt in a form something like Urecon; and Uriconium was the chief Roman station which collected the corn and country produce of the villa homesteads in the upper valley of the Severn. When the legions withdrew from Britain, the Wrekin district formed part of the Welsh principality of Powys, and Uriconium doubtless became the capital of the petty State thus composed. But the Severn valley offered a convenient highway for the aggressive English settlers; and shortly after the conquest of Bath and Gloucester the West Saxons poured up the old Roman road to Uriconium, slew “Kyndylan the Fair,” burned the town, and took up fresh farms in the surrounding country. The new colonists called themselves the Wroken-sæte, or settlers by the Wrekin; and a late charter in Mr. Kemble’s collection describes Plesc (now Plash, in Shropshire) as standing “in provincia Wrocensetna.” Uriconium itself was doubtless known to its English masters as Wroken-ceaster. But, according to the common usage of the border counties, that inconvenient name has been worn down with time to Wroxeter: just as Exan-ceaster on the West Welsh border has become Exeter, and as Gleawan-ceaster and Wigra-ceaster, after declining into Gloucester and Worcester, have come to be pronounced as they now are. Perhaps the same root reappears in Wrexham, written Wricksam in Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

The West Saxons, however, only occupied a small strip of land along the Severn shore—the modern Coalbrookdale; and the greater part of what is now Shropshire, the undulating country about Church Stretton and Oswestry, the Longmynds and Caer Caradoc, still remained in the hands of the Welsh. The princes of Powys, after the fall of Uriconium, retreated to the forest region in the rear; and there, in a horse-shoe bend of the Severn, on the site of the existing Shrewsbury, they built their new capital of Pengwern, whose name is preserved for us both by the bard Llywarch Hen, and by the more trustworthy historian Giraldus Cambrensis, the liveliest and wittiest of mediæval travellers. Meanwhile, the English Mercians, or March-men, were slowly advancing from the other side along the valley of the Trent, and had fixed their chief seat around Lichfield and Tamworth in the neighbouring shire of Stafford. Under their great King Penda, the last champion of Teutonic heathendom in Britain, they succeeded in uniting all the scattered English chieftainships of the Midlands into a single kingdom; and after annexing the West Saxon territory along the Severn, they represented thenceforth the aggressive van of the English advance against the Welsh. Offa, the most famous of the Mercian kings, turned upon Powysland, drove the Welsh princes from Pengwern, conquered all modern Shropshire, and probably settled the newly-acquired territory with English military colonists. To protect or rather to demarcate his new dominions, he erected the vast earthwork known by the name of Offa’s Dyke, which runs from Holywell in Flintshire to the Wye: its course in this district still roughly coincides with the western border of Shropshire, and it is well seen between Wynn-stay and Montgomery. At a later date, Harold, Godwin’s son, enacted that any independent Welshman found east of this line should have his right hand cut off. We must not suppose, however, that the native Welsh of the county were either exterminated or expatriated; indeed, they were not even enslaved. Offa’s code regulated the relations of the two races in the conquered territory. The Welsh remained on the soil as tributary proprietors under the English overlords, and they learned in time to speak the English language and to consider themselves as Englishmen, exactly as the Cornish did in the south at a much later period. In physique, and to a great extent in their surnames, the Shropshire peasantry still betray their almost unmixed Welsh descent. The Anglicisation of Wales now taking place is, in the same way, accompanied by hardly any infusion of Teutonic blood.

The greater part of Shropshire was still covered with woodland; and so the new conquest came to be known by the English as the Scrob—that is to say, the Scrub, or as modern Australians would call it, the Bush. The inhabitants were known as Scrob-sæte, the Scrub-settlers: though the older name Wroken-sæte is sometimes found, perhaps as descriptive of a special sub-district; for here, as elsewhere, nothing is known with certainty as to the organisation of the shire under the Mercian kingdom. Pengwern at the same time acquired its English name of Scrobbes-byrig (or more correctly Scrobbes-burh), the town or bury in the Scrub. The shire as a shire first comes distinctly into notice after the recovery of south-western Mercia by the West Saxons from the Danes, who had built a fort on the Severn, below Bridgnorth. It formed part of the territory assigned to Alfred by the treaty of Wedmore, and it was doubtless definitely erected into a shire at the same time as Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. The earliest mention of the county, however, as an administrative unit, in our existing documents, seems to occur during the wars of Cnut and Edmund. “They fared into Stæfford-scir,” says the Laudian Chronicle, “and into Scrobbes-byrig, and to Legeceaster,” the last-named being the old name of Chester; and the collocation seems to show that Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire were then, as now, three separate counties, especially as the list goes on to mention several other acknowledged shires. Moreover, the Abingdon manuscript has the interesting variant, “Stæfford-scir, and Scrob-sætas, and Legceaster,” which still more clearly indicates the tribal meaning of the words. Perhaps the distinct form Scrob-scir, or Shropshire, is not to be found before the Norman Conquest. It is observable that the county lay partly in the diocese of Hereford and partly in that of Chester: may not this arrangement coincide with the old division into the Wroken-sæte and the Scrobsete? Ecclesiastical boundaries often preserve old lines which the lay organisation has otherwise obliterated.

Long after the Norman Conquest, the men of Shropshire seem to have remembered that they were Welsh by origin, and to have made common cause with their Welsh brethren, as the equally Celtic men of Hereford on the south also did. In 1087, “the chief people of Hereford and all the shire with them, and the men of Scrob-scyr, and a muckle folk of Bryt-land (Wales), came and harried and burned on Wigra-ceaster-scir (Worcestershire) forth until they came to the port itself (Worcester).” But under the Norman earls of Shrewsbury of the Montgomery family this feeling gradually died out; and the people of Salop took to harrying the Welsh instead. Perhaps we may trace to this period the origin of the marked county feeling which still distinguishes Shropshire. The folk must have stood quite alone: on the one hand were the Welsh, whom they had learnt to look upon as enemies; on the other hand were the men of English Staffordshire, who must still have looked upon them as little other than Welshmen. So Salop, like the equally clannish shire of Devon in the south, would necessarily have been thrown a great deal upon her own resources. The abbreviated form of the name itself deserves a passing notice. It is a Norman corruption of the native English Scrob-. The Normans could not always pronounce the uncouth Teutonic names: they turned Lincoln into Le Nicole, and Sarum or Sares-byrig they dissimilated, as the philologists say, into Salis-bury. On the same analogy, Domesday Book gives Scrob-scir as Salopes-sire, though it gives Scrobbes-byrig as Sciropes-berie. Shropshire and Shrewsbury are now the accepted popular forms. But the contraction Salop, as a name for town and shire alike, has lingered on through the influence of certain legal usages for a few colloquial purposes. Our ordinary speech still bears traces of the distinction of tongues; for when we use the English form “shire” we say “Shropshire,” but when we use the Norman-French word “county” we say “the county of Salop.” Like most other Mercian shires, Shropshire lies in a rude circle around its county town. It differs, however, from all the others (except Rutland) in the fact that its name is not derived directly from that of the town, but merely from a cognate form. The only exact analogue elsewhere is that of Kent and Canterbury; though Somerset and Somerton, Wilts and Wilton, Dorset and Dorchester, all present remotely analogous cases in Wessex.