of the Danelaw. 858878. CHAP. III. conquest of the Norman, northern England is for two The Making hundred years all but hidden from our view. The division of Deira into three Trithings, or Ridings, which probably dates from this time, may answer in some degree to older divisions; the East Riding or district of the wolds to an earlier Deira of the English conquerors which seems in later times to have retained some sort of existence as an under-kingdom, while the bounds of the West Riding roughly correspond with those of Elmet, as Eadwine added it to his Northumbrian realm. But the arrangement by which the Trithings were linked together, the adjustment of their boundaries so that all three met in York itself, had clearly a distinct political end, and marks a time -such as that of the Danish kings-in which York was the seat and capital of the central power. The division of the Trithings into Wapentakes, which answer here to the Hundreds of the south, is probably of the same date. In England, as in Iceland, the word may have been originally used for the closing of the district-court, when the suitors again took up the weapons they had laid aside at its opening, and have finally extended to the district itself. The change of the English name "moot" for the gathering of the freeman in township or wapentake into the Scandinavian "thing" or "ting," a change recorded, as we have seen, by local designations, is no less significant of the social revolution which passed over the north with the coming of the Dane. The Danes in The year after Halfdene's parting of Deira among Mid-Britain. his followers saw another portion of the Danish host 1 Stubbs, "Const. Hist." i. 109. CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858 878. settle in Mid-Britain. While Alfred was still in the midst of his struggle with the Danes about Exeter, The Making "in the harvest-tide of 877, the Here went into Mercia, and some of it they parted, and some they handed over to Ceolwulf" who till now had served as their under-king for the whole.1 The portion they took for themselves is for the most part marked by the presence in it of their Danish names. "Byes" extend to the very borders of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, and Northamptonshire, while from the rest of Mercia they are almost wholly absent. It was this western half of the older kingdom, our Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Oxfordshire, which remained under Ceolwulf's rule, and to which from this time the name of Mercia is confined, while the eastern or Danish 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 877. For Ceolwulf see ib. a. 874. "That same year they gave the Mercian kingdom to the keeping of Ceolwulf, an unwise thegn of the king" (Burhred, who had fled to die at Rome), “and he swore oaths to them, and delivered hostages to them that it should be ready for them on whatever day they would have it, and that he would be ready both in his own person and with all who would follow him for the behoof of the army." 2 The country about Buckingham however, which formed the southern bound of the "Five Boroughs," has no "byes." Those about Wirral in Cheshire are an exception which I shall have to notice later on. We find too "byes" extending some few miles into our Warwickshire. I shall afterwards explain why I set aside the notion of Watling Street being the boundary of Danish Mercia. 3 In 896 we find three ealdormen among the Witan of this part of Mercia. Cod. Dip. No. 1073. The number in the undivided Mercian realm seems to have been five. CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858. 878. half was known, at any rate in later days, as the The Making district of the Five Boroughs,' Derby, whose name superseded the older English "Northweorthig," Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, and Nottingham. Politically this state differed widely from Danish Northumbria. While Northumbria was an organized kingdom under the stock of Inguar or Ivar, with a definite centre at York and a general administrative division into Trithings and Wapentakes, the independence of the Five Boroughs was unfettered by any semblance of kingly rule. Their name suggests some sort of confederacy; and it is possible that a common "Thing" may have existed for the whole district; but each of the Boroughs seems to have had its own Jarl, and Here or army, while (if we may judge from the instance of Lincoln and Stamford) the internal rule of each was in the hands of twelve hereditary "law-men." There was a like difference in local organization. In the country about Lincoln we find both Trithings and Wapentakes, as on the other side the Humber, but there is no trace of the Trithing in the territory of the four other Boroughs. The distribution of settlers over this midland Danelaw was as varied as their forms of rule. They lay thickest in the Lindsey uplands, where the lands seem to have been treated throughout as conquered country, and to have been parted among the conquerors by the rude rope-measurement of the time. Lincolnshire indeed contains as many names of 1 The name first occurs in the Song of Eadmund, Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 941. northern settlements as the whole of Yorkshire;1 and its little port of Grimsby, whose muddy shores were thronged with traders from Norway and the Orkneys, came at last to rival York in commercial activity. In the districts of the other four towns the names of such settlements are far less numerous; it is only in Leicestershire indeed that we find anything like the settlements of the north.3 In In East Anglia the northern colonization was of a yet weaker sort than in Mid-Britain. Although this district had been in Danish hands since the fall of Eadmund in 870, its real settlement dated ten years later, when Guthrum led back his army from Wessex after the Frith or Peace of Wedmore. 880"the army went from Cirencester to East Anglia, and settled the land, and parted it among them." + Guthrum's realm, however, included far more than East Anglia itself. The after war of 886 and the 1 Isaac Taylor, "Words and Places," p. 122, numbers some three hundred. 2 "When Kali was fifteen winters old, he went with some merchants to England, taking with him a good cargo of merchandise. They went to a trading place called Grimsby. There was a great number of people from Norway, as well as from the Orkneys, Scotland, and the Sudreyar. . . . Then he, Kali, made a stanza This however was in the twelfth century. 3 In Leicestershire Taylor finds one hundred such names, in Northampton and Notts fifty each, in Derby about a dozen. "Words and Places," p. 122. 4 Eng. Chron. (Winch.) a. 880. CHAP. III. The Making of the Danelaw. 858878. The Danes in CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858878. frith that followed it show that Essex was detached The Making from the Eastern or Kentish kingdom, to which it had belonged since Ecgberht's day, and brought back to its old dependence on East Anglia. With Essex passed its chief city, London, now wasted by pillage and fires, but soon to regain its trading activity in Danish hands, and whose subject territory carried Guthrum's rule along the valley of the Thames as far as the Chilterns and the district attached to Oxford, which now became a border-town of English Mercia. To the north too Guthrum seems to have wielded the old EastAnglian supremacy over the southern districts of the Fen. In extent therefore his kingdom was fully equal to either of the two rival states of the Danelaw. But its character was far less northern. The bulk of the warrior-settlers may have already found homes on the Ouse or the Trent; it is certain at any rate that in East Anglia their settlements were few. The "byes" of Norfolk and Suffolk lie clustered for the most part round the mouth of the Yare; and this was probably the one part of this district where distinct pirate communities existed; throughout the rest of it the Danes must simply have quartered themselves on their English subjects. In the dependent districts to north and south they seem rather to have clustered in town-centres, such as Colchester and Bedford, or Huntingdon and Cambridge, where Jarl and Here remained encamped, receiving food and rent from the subject Englishmen who tilled their allotted lands.1 1 Robertson, "Scotland under Early Kings," vol. ii., Appendix, "The Danelagh." |