\^A 
 
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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
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 ENGLISH TOWNS AND DISTPJCTS
 
 »
 
 ENGLISH TOWNS AND DISTEICTS 
 
 A SEEIES OF ADDKESSES AND 
 SKETCHES 
 
 \iy BY 
 
 EDWAED Af FEEEMAN, M.A., Hon.D.C.L. & LL.D. 
 
 HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGK, OXFORD 
 
 ' Ilia quidem loiige celebri splendore beata 
 Glebis, lacte, favis, siipereminet insula cuuctis. 
 Testes Loudoniae ratibus, Wintouia Baccho, 
 Hereforda grege, Wirecestria friige redundaiis, 
 Batlia lacvi, Salesbira feris, Cantuaria pisce, 
 Eboracum silvis, Excestria clara metallis, 
 Norvicium Dacis, Hibernis Cestria, Gallis 
 Cicestrum, Norvvageuiis Duiielma propiuquans. 
 Testis Lincoliae geus infinita decore, 
 Testis Ely formosa situ, Rovecestria visu.' 
 
 Hen. Hitnt. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP 
 
 ITonbon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1883 
 
 All i-iyhls reserved
 
 LOXDOS : PRINTED BY 
 
 m-OTTISWOODB AXD CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE 
 
 AKO rjL&hlXUZST STBEET
 
 PEEFACB. 
 
 I HAVE liere brouglit together papers of two kinds. The 
 shorter ones, reprinted from the Saturday Review, are 
 of exactly the same character as those which I have 
 collected in my two small volumes, ' Historical and Archi- 
 tectural Sketches, chiefly Italian,' and ' Sketches from 
 the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice.' Their sub- 
 jects are English, instead of Italian, Greek, or lUyrian ; 
 that is all. The longer ones come nearer to the nature of 
 the papers on cities and countries in the third series of 
 ' Historical Essays,' such as ' The Normans at Palermo,' 
 and ' The Illyrian Emperors and their Land.' There is only 
 the difference which is implied in the fact that those papers 
 were written merely to be read, while those now reprinted 
 were written to be heard by considerable bodies of hearers. 
 They were addresses to various societies, several of them 
 being presidential addresses delivered at the opening of 
 the Historical Section at various meetings of the Archse- 
 ological Institute. They have mostly appeared in the 
 Archaeological Journal or Macmillan's Magazine, or both ; 
 that on Carlisle appeared in the Contemporary Review. 
 In both kinds of papers I have, in revising them for the 
 reprint, made any changes that seemed to be called for, 
 whether by adding, leaving out, or any other form of
 
 xi PREFACE. 
 
 improvoment. Of some places I found that I had both a 
 loiiLTor luul a shui'ter account, both a shorter sketch in 
 the Saturday lievicNv and a longer address read before 
 one of the societies. In such cases I have reprinted the 
 longer discourse, working into it any matter in the shorter 
 sketch which was not in the longer and which seemed 
 worth preserving. 
 
 One piece is of a different character from any of the 
 others. I had not at first thought of giving a place in 
 the volume to the paper headed, ' The Case of the Colle- 
 eriate Church of Arundel.' For it is more of the nature 
 of a legal argument than either of an address or of a 
 sketch. But, in going through the other papers, I found 
 so many references to the class of churches divided be- 
 tween a parish and a body of monks or clergy that I 
 thought that a paper dealing more generally and directly 
 with that subject would not be out of place. And, con- 
 sidering that this paper, written for use at the time of the 
 trial between the Duke of Norfolk and the Vicar of 
 Arundel, had a kind of history of its own, I have reprinted 
 it just as it was originally written, and I have kept most 
 of the notes and references. The whole subject of these 
 divided churches is a very curious one, and it would be 
 quite worth the while of any one to make it the subject 
 of a thorough-going monograph, with ground-plans of 
 each. To one such church I wish to call special atten- 
 tion, one to which, had I thought of it earlier, I should 
 have liked to give a paper in this volume. This is the very 
 singular priory church of Waybourne in Norfolk, which is 
 referred to in a few words in the paper on Arundel. Here 
 the division was made in a way quite unlike any other. 
 The monastic tower, of Primitive Romanesque style, has
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 the monastic choir to the east of it. The parish choir is 
 built against the tower to the south, with the parish nave 
 to the west, so that the monastic and parochial churches 
 are not in a line with one another. I had a paper on 
 this church many years ago in the Gentleman's Magazine, 
 but I could not have reprinted it without unduly enlarg- 
 ing the volume. I have therefore done all that I could 
 by giving a view of the building. 
 
 The illustrations, some from my own drawings, some 
 from photographs, have been made by the same process 
 and by the same artists as those in the ' Subject and 
 Neighbour Lands of Venice.' I have specially had in 
 view the study of the towers of the Primitive style, the 
 ancient style common to England with the rest of Wes- 
 tern Europe. This is a subject on the general bearings 
 of which I have said what I have to say in the fifth volume 
 of the Norman Conquest. In choosing other subjects for 
 illustration I have taken buildings which are comparatively 
 little known, rather than the great cathedral and abbatial 
 churches which everybody has seen either in the original 
 or in a picture. In the case of Glastonbury, where every- 
 thing turns on the relations between the eastern and 
 western churches, a ground- plan seemed what was wanted, 
 and I have given one, modified for my own purposes from 
 that given by Professor Willis. The paper headed ' The 
 Shire and the Ga,' I have illustrated by a map chiefly 
 founded on one of Dr. Guest's, showing the successive 
 waves of West-Saxon conquest which led to the formation 
 of the land of the Sumorscetan. About the conquests of 
 Ceawlin and Cenwealh there seems no reasonable doubt ; 
 but in the extreme west of Somerset it is not easy to say 
 how much was won by Centwine and how much by Ine,
 
 vUi I'liKFACE. 
 
 ajid the question is further complicated by the difliculty 
 of fixing by what road and at what date the West-Saxons 
 entered Daninonia. 
 
 The main object of such a collection as this is, not to 
 go into the topographical and antiquarian details of each 
 place with the minuteness of a local antiquary, but to 
 point out the chief historical and architectural features of 
 each place, as a contribution to the general history of 
 England. Many of us, in these days of foreign travel, 
 have very little notion of the treasures of art and history 
 which still live in the towns and villages of our own 
 country. And many of us have not fully grasped the 
 truth how largely in every laud national history is made 
 up of local history. It is a wise saying of Polybios 
 (iii. 1) that the historian must study the parts through 
 the whole and the whole thi-ough the parts. No man 
 understands the history of a city like Lincoln or Exeter, 
 unless he puts the city in its fitting place, as part of the 
 history of the kingdom. And no man can really under- 
 stand the history of England unless he knows something 
 of the characteristic history of the several English cities, 
 unless he grasps the different ways in which the several 
 EngKsh kingdoms were formed, and the different relations 
 in which modem divisions stand to ancient ones within 
 the boundaries of the several kingdoms. 
 
 One of these points at least w^as grasped, as it was 
 grasped by no other man, by the brilliant painter of 
 history whom we have just lost. Mr. Green was good 
 enough, in the dedication of one of his volumes, to speak 
 of me as one of his ' masters in the study of English 
 history.' In this matter at least he was my master. I
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 may be allowed here to copy what I said twelve years ago 
 in the preface to the first edition of the fourth volume of 
 the Norman Conquest. ' I may truly say that it was 
 from him that I first learned to look on a town as a whole 
 with a kind of personal history, instead of simply the 
 place where such and such a church or castle was to be 
 found.' From Mr. Green I learned that, be it at Chester 
 or be it at Rome, the city itself and its history are some- 
 thing greater than any particular object in the city. To 
 liim is due the happy phrase of the ' Making of England ' 
 to describe the process in which many of the towns and 
 districts here spoken of played no small part. And I 
 trust that I am not to blame in having brought in, as I 
 believe I have once or twice done, that happy phrase in 
 the revision of papers which were written long before he 
 had thought of it. 
 
 SoMEEiiEAZE, Wells : March 12, 1883.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SOUTH WALES : 
 
 Cardiff and Glamorgan ... . . 3 
 
 Llanthony 20 
 
 Anglia Transwalliana 33 
 
 South Pembrokeshire Castles 40 
 
 WESSEX : 
 
 The Place of Exeter in English History ... 49 
 
 Glastonbury British and English 76 
 
 The Shire and the G.\ 103 
 
 Bradford-on-Avon ]34 
 
 Devizes 142 
 
 Wareham and Corfe Castle 149 
 
 Silohester 157 
 
 Christchurch, Twtnham 165 
 
 Carisbrooke 172 
 
 Merton Priory 181 
 
 MERCIA : 
 
 Lindum Colonia 191 
 
 York and Lincoln Minsters 222 
 
 Chester 230
 
 I'AUK 
 
 MKRl'IA (ioiitimu-il): 
 
 I'k.k-acadkmic Camiiriuoe 238 
 
 pr.k-acadkmic 0xk0r1» 249 
 
 Saint Alkans Auiiv.y 257 
 
 N(nvrnr.MnKRLANI): 
 
 Points in Eaklt Northttmbrian History . . . 2G5 
 
 KiRKSTALL 294 
 
 Selby 302 
 
 Notes in the North UiDiNb 309 
 
 The Percy Castles 316 
 
 BAMBrRGH ANT) DuNSTANBTJEGH 324 
 
 SUSSEX : 
 
 The Case of the Collegiate Church of Aktjndel . . 333 
 
 Appendix. Woi-ksoi) and lilyth 363 
 
 COWDRAY 367 
 
 Chichestek 374 
 
 COLONIA CA^rULODUNUM : 
 
 CoLONIA CAJnTLODUNUM 383 
 
 CARLISLE: 
 
 The Place of Carlisle in English History . . . 421
 
 To 
 
 face 
 
 P- 
 
 24 
 
 
 jj 
 
 
 25 
 
 
 >> 
 
 
 30 
 
 98 
 
 LIST 
 
 OF 
 
 ILLUSTEATIONS. 
 
 Llanthont Priory, looking North-East 
 
 LiANTHONT Church, North- West View 
 
 Kidwelly Church and Castle 
 
 Ground Plan of Glastonbury Church 
 
 Church of Saint Laurence, and Bridge, Bradford- 
 
 ON-AvoN „ 136 
 
 Towers of Saint Mary-le-Wigford, and St, Peter- 
 
 at-Gowts, Lincoln „ 211 
 
 House of Saint Mary's Guild, Lincoln. With Archi- 
 tectural Details „ 212 
 
 Tower of Saint Michael's, Oxford. — Tower and 
 
 Belfry AfeCH, Saint Benet's, Cambridge . , „ 244 
 
 Saint Gregory's Minster, Lastingham, and Crypt . „ 314 
 
 Towers of Bywell Church and op Trinity Church, 
 
 Colchester „ 323 
 
 Waybourne Priory, Norfolk „ 343 
 
 MAP. 
 
 Somerset and the Neighbouring Lands . . . ,, 118
 
 SOUTH WALES 
 
 T>^
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 
 
 1871. 
 
 [This paper was read as the Presidential Address to the Historical Section 
 of the Arch^ological Institute at its Cardiff ]\Ieeting. As the first 
 address of the kind that I was called on to make to that body, it may 
 serve as a kind of introduction to those that follow. It will be re- 
 membered that Dr. Guest was then still living.] 
 
 I AM well pleased tliat my first appearance in any official 
 cliaracter before a body with which I have had so long 
 had to do as the Archseological Institute takes place in a 
 district of which I have already some degree of know- 
 ledge, and one than which no part of the kingdom offers 
 a wider field to the historical student. In the seven and 
 twenty years which have passed since our Society first 
 came into being, we have visited famous cities and trod 
 on ground hallowed by the deeds of famous men. We 
 had our birth in the land which witnessed the birth of 
 the English realm and the English Church ; we started 
 on our path from that illustrious corner of our island 
 which was the first prize alike of Csesar, of Hengest, and 
 of Augustine ; we drew our first corporate breath in the 
 old metropolis of Canterbury, beneath the walls of the 
 mother church of England. Since then, year after year, 
 we have gone from city to city, spying out the minsters 
 and castles and fields of battle where the history of 
 England has been wrought. From the Old Minster and 
 the royal hall of Winchester, the home alike of ^Elfred 
 and of William, we have looked up to the hills hallowed 
 to English hearts as the scene of the martyrdom of
 
 SOUTH WALES, 
 
 "Waltheof. From the invful ruins of Glastonbury, the 
 connuon sanctuary of contending races, the one tie which 
 binds the Church of the conqueror to the Church of the 
 conquered, we have looked up from beside the rifled graves 
 of Arthur and the Eadmunds to the prouder Tor of the 
 Ai-changel, hallowed wherever truth and right are held in 
 honour as the scene of the martyrdom of Whiting. As 
 at Winchester and at Glastonbury, so also at Waltham and 
 Crowland and Evesham, Ave have mused over the spots 
 where the dust of the noblest heroes of England has been 
 scattered to the winds at bidding of the destroyer. We 
 have stood on the hill of the elder Salisbury, within 
 the niio-hty ditches which have formed the bulwarks of so 
 many successive races, and we have looked on the plain 
 where Cynric overthrew the Briton, where William 
 mustered his host -after the overthrow of England, and 
 where now the most graceful of West-Saxon minsters 
 covers the ground which was once the chosen meeting- 
 place alike of armies and of councils. At Silchester, at 
 Wroxeter, at either Dorchester, we have traced the works 
 alike of the Briton and the Roman, and we have seen the 
 relics which bear witness to the wasting havoc wrought 
 by Englishmen in the days of their first conquests. At 
 Warwick we have looked on the mound of ^thelflsed ; at 
 London and Rochester and Newcastle and Norwich we 
 have looked on the mighty towers reared by the Con- 
 queror, his companions, and his successors. At Oxford 
 and Cambridge we have seen how our ancient Universi- 
 ties seem but creations of yesterday within the walls of 
 boroughs which had played their part in English history 
 before a single scholar had come to learn Christian 
 theology at the feet of Robert Puleyn, or to hear Vacarius 
 expound the mighty volume of the Imperial Law. Time 
 wonld fail to tell of all that we have seen ; but we cannot 
 for^^et how, within the ramparts of old Eboracum, the 
 minster of Paullinus and Thomas of Bayeux seemed young 
 in the home of Severus and of Constantine ; nor can we
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 
 
 forget liow, where tlie Ouse flows between the two castles 
 of the Conqueror, we thought how often Scandinavian 
 fleets had sailed up those waters to ravage or to deliver 
 England. And we may deem perhaps that York itself 
 taught us less tlian the sight of the ancient City of the 
 Legions, where the monks of Bangor fell beneath the 
 sword of j3i]thelfritli, where the forsaken walls stood for 
 three hundred years to record the havoc of his victory, and 
 where the Lady of the Mercians bade the city rise once 
 more to life, to stand forth in English history as the last 
 of English cities to own the ISTorman as her lord. And 
 York and Chester themselves may yield to the charm of 
 the long history of the height crowned by the Colony of 
 Lindum, the home of Briton, Roman, Englishman, Dane, 
 and Norman ; its walls, its houses, its castle, and its 
 minster, bearing the living impress of its successive 
 conquerors ; where on the height we call up the memory 
 of those ancient Lawmen, those proud patricians who 
 once bade fair to place Lincoln alongside of Bern and 
 Venice, and where, in the plain below, a higher interest 
 is kindled by the stern yet graceful towers which tell us 
 how Englishmen, in the days of England's bondage, could 
 still go on, with the Norman minster and castle rising- 
 above their heads, building according to the ruder models 
 of the days of England's freedom. Such are the spots 
 which we have seen and mused on in the twenty-seven 
 years of our corporate life, spots whose history makes up 
 the history of England and the older history of the land 
 before it bore the English name. And in spots where 
 there has been so much to learn we have seldom lacked 
 worthy interpreters. We have had minsters expounded 
 by the unerring acuteness of a Willis, and castles called 
 up to their first life by the massive vigour of a Clark. 
 And below the ditches of Salisbury, beside the boundary 
 streams of Avon and of Severn, we have heard the great 
 master — I would rather say the great discoverer — of early 
 English history, bring together the combined witness of
 
 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 records and monuments and nomenclature to call forth 
 the true tale of Saxon and Anglian conquest out of what, 
 in other hands, had seemed but a chaos of myth and 
 legend. One spot still remains : we have not yet gone 
 over all the cities of England. Some strange freak of 
 destiny, some mysterious cause too deep for common 
 intellects to fathom, has during all these years kept us 
 out of the great city of the West. Damnonia is still 
 untrodden ground to us ; we have caught a kind of Pisgah 
 view out of neighbouring shires, but Exeter, the city which 
 beat back Swegen and all but beat back William, is still 
 a place which we know by the hearing of the ear, but on 
 which our eyes have not yet rested. Some day surely the 
 ban will be removed ; some day surely we may hear from 
 the lips of Dr. Guest how the process of conquest, which 
 he has traced to the Axe and the Parret, went on further 
 to the Tamar and the Land's End ; some day surely we 
 may be allowed to listen while our other guides set forth 
 all that is to be said of the city where walls which at least 
 represent the walls of ^thelstan still fence in the Eed 
 Mount of Baldwin of Moeles and the twin minster towers 
 of William of Warelwast. 
 
 But while we are thus shut out from that part of our 
 island which was anciently known as West- Wales, 1 must 
 congratulate our body on the choice of a place for its 
 meeting, now that the Archscological Institute of Great 
 Britain and Ireland has for the first time assembled beyond 
 the bounds of England. I hear a murmur, but I speak 
 advisedly. That the Institute has visited the extreme north 
 of England I fully admit; that it has met beyond its 
 northern border I deny. I can listen to no geography 
 which tells me that the earldom of Lothian and the 
 Borough of Eadwine are other than English ground. 
 Edinburgh then I claim as English ; Dublin, like Exeter, 
 is a place which we have heard of but never seen ; but 
 now we have at last crossed the border. Whether we 
 place that border at the Wye, the Usk, or the Eumney,
 
 CARDIFF AND QLAMOROAN. 
 
 there is no doubt that here, on the banks of the Taff, we 
 
 are standing on genuine British ground. I say genuine 
 
 British, I do not venture to say purely British ; for one 
 
 of the advantages of this district for historical study 
 
 is that it is not purely British nor purely anything ; 
 
 there is no part of the island where all the successive 
 
 races which have occupied it or overrun it have left 
 
 more speaking signs of their presence. We are here 
 
 emphatically in a border district, and a border district is 
 
 always specially rich in materials for history. A glance 
 
 at the map, a glance at any list of local names, shows how 
 
 many races and tongues have had their share or their 
 
 turn in the occupation or the superiority of the district. 
 
 In the greater part of England well nigh every name is 
 
 English or Danish, according to the district ; if here or 
 
 there a river or a great city keeps its British name, that 
 
 is all. Even in districts like Somerset and Devonshire, 
 
 which keep somewhat of a border character, districts 
 
 where the Briton was subdued and assimilated, but not 
 
 utterly wiped out, though British names are found in 
 
 comparative abundance, they are still, after all, but a 
 
 small minority. There are large districts of Wales, on 
 
 the other hand, where every local name is British ; where 
 
 if a stray English name is found by any chance, it is at 
 
 once felt to be a modern intruder. In districts like these 
 
 we see that the Briton is still in full possession ; it is a 
 
 mere political change, not any real disturbance of the 
 
 population, which cuts him off from the days of Howel 
 
 the Good and Roderick the Great. The land in which we 
 
 are now met, the land of Gwent and Morganwg, presents 
 
 phsenomena different from any of these. Cast your eye 
 
 at random over the map of this county of Glamorgan, and 
 
 it may haply light on the name of a place called Welsh 
 
 Saint Donats. Such a name is enough to set one a-think- 
 
 ing. In what state of things is it needful to mark out a 
 
 place as Welsh, to distinguish Welsh Saint Donats from 
 
 another Saint Donats which is not Welsh? If you are
 
 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 in Cfirdiixnnslnre, you have no need to distinguisli a 
 place as Welsh Llanfihangel ; if you are in Kent, you 
 have no need to distinguish a place as English Dartford 
 or English Sevenoaks. Such a name as Welsh Saint 
 Donats implies that you are in a district partly, chiefly, 
 but not ^vholly, Welsh. Look on more carefully through 
 the list of names ; it is easy to see that the mass of them 
 are purely Welsh, LlandafF, Llantrissaint, and a crowd of 
 others. But some, like Cowbridge and Newton, are 
 purely English ; others are English translations of Welsh 
 names, as where English Michaelston has supplanted 
 Welsh Llanfihangel. But here and there we stumble on 
 a name like Beaupre, which is neither Welsh nor English, 
 but good French. And here and there we find a name 
 like Flemingston, which not onlj^ points by inference to 
 the presence of other races, but tells us on the face of it 
 what those races were. A district which has such a local 
 nomenclature as this, where so many nations and lan- 
 guages have left their abiding traces, is shown, without 
 further proof, to be a district specially rich in materials 
 for historical study. We see a district in which the old 
 British race is still the prevailing element, but into which 
 intruders of more than one nation have made their way. 
 And they have made their way, not simply as visitors or 
 plunderers or momentary conquerors, but as men who 
 have settled down in the land, who have given their own 
 names to its fields and houses, and who have made them- 
 selves essential elements in the population of the district 
 alongside of its earlier possessors. 
 
 We have here then, on the face of it, a district of 
 paramount interest to the historical inquirer. We see in 
 the nomenclature of the district signs of the presence of 
 several successive races ; but those signs alone could not 
 tell us at what time or by what means those successive 
 races made their way into the land. The general course 
 of history will tell us that the Welsh names are older 
 than the English; but, without taking m other special
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 
 
 means of information, we could hardly get beyond that. 
 Let us try and find out, in a vague and general way, what 
 more special research is likely to tell us, what points for 
 further inquiry it is likely to suggest to us, as to the his- 
 tory of a district whose phsenomena show themselves, at 
 the first blush, as so remarkable. 
 
 We may begin with the old question of all, Who were 
 the first inhabitants of the country ? As far as recorded 
 history goes, as far as spoken language goes, there is 
 nothing to suggest the presence of any inhabitants earlier 
 than those who still form the bulk of the population, the 
 Britons, Cymry, or Welsh. But on points of this kind it 
 is often needful to go beyond the teaching either of re- 
 corded history or of spoken language. Two views, each 
 of which has been maintained with no small ingenuity, 
 suggest the presence of races older than the oldest now 
 existing in the country. Were the Britons the earliest 
 wa.ve of Aryan migration in these lands, or were they 
 preceded by an earlier Aryan and Celtic race, that namely 
 which consists of the Scots both of Britain and Ireland, 
 and which, on the lips of the Cymry as on their own, still 
 bears, in various forms, the name of Gael or Gwyddyl ? 
 That is to say, is the wide distinction between the two 
 branches of the Celtic race in these islands, between the 
 Scots or Gael and the Welsh or Britons, a distinction 
 which arose after they settled in these islands, or do they 
 represent two successive waves of Aryan njigration ? In 
 this last case, there can be no doubt as to putting the 
 Gael as the earlier settlers of the two. The evidence, as 
 far as there can be any direct evidence on a praehistoric 
 matter, consists mainly of certain spots in various parts of 
 Wales which still bear the name of the GwyddyL Many 
 of them are wild headlands ; a few are inland spots 
 equally wild, such as Nant-y- Gwyddyl in the heart of the 
 Black Mountains, in the upper part of the deep dale 
 where stands the elder priory of Llanthony. Are these 
 simply spots occupied by rovers from, Ireland who un-
 
 10 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 doiibtedly harried these coasts in later times, or are they 
 spots -Nvhoro the older Gaelic population made their last 
 desperate stand against the British invader 'P Is Nant-y- 
 Gwydihjl in Gwent a name analogous to Wallcomhe in 
 Somerset, a name which records the former presence of 
 the Gael in the land of the Briton, as its possible fellow 
 certainly records the former presence of the Briton in the 
 land of the West- Saxon? And again, can either branch of 
 the Celtic race, Gael or Briton, claim to be the first inhabi- 
 tants of the land ? The Celt, in some shape, was undoubt- 
 edly the first Aryan inhabitant, but was he the first human 
 inhabitant of any kind ? No one doubts that a large part 
 of Western Europe was overspread by non- Aryan races, 
 relics of which, in the extreme North and again in one 
 stubborn corner of Gaul and Spain, still retain their pri- 
 maeval languages. Was the same the case in Britain, and 
 was our island also once inhabited by non- Aryan races, 
 kinsfolk, it may be, of the Fins and Laps of the North, 
 or of the Basques of the Pyrenees ? Have we existing 
 monuments of their workmanship among us ? We are here 
 in a land not poor in primaeval antiquities ; this county 
 contains one of the largest cromlechs in Britain, and it is 
 as well to remember that one theory at least attributes these 
 gigantic graves — I suppose there is no one here so behind 
 the world as to dream about Druid altars — not to Celts, 
 British or Gaelic, not to Aryans of any race, but to the 
 strangers who held the land in the old times before them. 
 And this question has been still more strongly pressed 
 upon our minds by a very modern controversy. It has 
 been held, not only that Britain was occupied by a non- 
 Aryan race before either Gael or Briton made their way 
 into it, but that this same non- Aryan race still survives, 
 that it still forms a main element in the population of some 
 parts of the island, especially of that part in which we are 
 now come together. It has been held by two writers, both 
 of great name, but with a long interval of ages between 
 them — by Tacitus and by Professor Huxley — that the Silu-
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 11 
 
 rians of South Wales and the neighbouring districts were 
 really a people closely akin to the Iberians of Spain, and 
 therefore not Celtic, not Aryan at all. I do not know how 
 this doctrine sounds in the ears of men of British blood. 
 Speaking myself as a Saxon, I can only say that it fairly 
 took my breath away. I know not whether Britons will 
 be ready to give up Caradoc as a British brother; I 
 should certainly be unwilling to give him up as an Aryan 
 cousin. Still here is a doctrine which is supported by 
 great names, and which at least deserves to be thoroughly 
 gone into from all points of Tiew. One thing is plain, that 
 if the people of South Wales are really of a non- Aryan 
 stock, the process of Aryan assimilation has been very 
 thoroughly carried out. The British tongue, I need not 
 say, is still a living thing in these parts ; but if Basque, 
 or any other non-Aryan speech, is now spoken in any part 
 of Morganwg, we must, I think, look for it, not among 
 the native inhabitants of either the vale or the mountains, 
 but among the strangers whom commerce has brought 
 from all corners of the earth to the busy haven of 
 Cardifie. 
 
 Here then are questions as to the prsehistoric state 
 of the district well worthy of being tested in every way. 
 We will pass on to the more certain facts of history. 
 Whether the people of this district are genuine Britons 
 or Iberians who have somehow changed into Britons, it is 
 certain that, as far as either recorded history or local 
 nomenclature can carry us back, the land has been a 
 British land, and its prevailing tongue has been the British 
 tongue. But the people and the language are to a great 
 extent their own monument. It is a point of marked con- 
 trast between the archseology of Wales and that of Ireland, 
 that, while in Ireland the land is full of buildings of very 
 early date, I never saw in Wales any building — I mean 
 buildings strictly so called, works of masonry — which 
 I felt any inclination to assign to a date earlier than 
 the Norman invasion. The land was full of churches,
 
 12 SOT'TIl IVALEK 
 
 niul specially lull of saints, for the clmrclies of Wales 
 c omiiu lily lunr the name, not of the canonized heroes 
 of the Church at large, but of the local worthies who 
 were their own founders. They have left behind them 
 their names, their memory, and their foundations ; but 
 thoir actual works have, as far as I know, everywhere given 
 way to later buildings. Still less is it needful to show 
 that all the great military structures of the country, the 
 castles, great and small, which form such a characteristic 
 feature in its landscape and in its history, are all of later 
 date than the coming of the Norman. If then the j^rimsBval 
 sepulchres belong to an earlier race, and the ecclesias- 
 tical and military structures to a later, for British anti- 
 quities, in the strictest sense, we must look to the lesser 
 remains of the country. For British remains of heathen 
 times we must look among ruder, defensive works, camps 
 and earthworks like those of Caerau, and in Christian 
 times we must seek them among a most interesting class 
 of minor ecclesiastical antic[uities, the sculptural crosses 
 and inscribed stones, which have attracted deserved atten- 
 tion at the hands of several inquirers, and several of which 
 will be found within our present district. I commend this 
 question to the consideration of Celtic antiquaries : Why 
 it is that Ireland has a marked national style of ecclesias- 
 tical buildings, beginning long before and continued long 
 after the English Conc[uest, while in the Celtic parts of 
 Scotland we have only a few analogous structures, like the 
 round towers of Brechin and Abernethy, and while in 
 Wales nothing of this class finds any counterpart? The 
 ecclesiastical buildings of South Wales have much of deep 
 interest ; they have much of local character : but there is 
 absolutely nothing which reminds us of Glendalough, of 
 Clonmacnois, and of Monasterboice ; their connexion with 
 the days of early British Christianity is, even at places 
 like Saint David's and LlandafF, like Llantwit and Llan- 
 carfan, a connexion wholly of history and association ; it in 
 no case extends to the actual stones.
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 13 
 
 I have been carried on too far at the expense of chro- 
 nological order, for the first conqueror of the Briton has not 
 failed to leave important traces behind him. Two famous 
 seats of Eoman occupation stand forth among the chief 
 antiquarian attractions, if not of Morganwg, at least of 
 Gwent. On the banks of the Usk the Eoman fixed an 
 Tsca, a City of the Legions, which once was a rival both 
 to the other City of the Legions by the Dee and to the 
 other Isca by the Damnonian Exe. Not far off too are 
 the remains of the Silurian Venta, which once needed to 
 be so distinguished from that other Venta which became 
 the royal city of the West-Saxons, and from the third 
 Venta in the east, which has fallen the most utterly of the 
 three, but which is in some sort represented by a greater 
 city than any of those of which I have spoken. The Silu- 
 rian and the Belgian Venta still remain as habitations of 
 man ; but the Icenian Venta lives only in the rime which 
 
 tells how 
 
 Oaistor was a city when Norwich was none, 
 But Norwich was built of Oaistor stone. 
 
 The Briton then remains in his speech and in his own 
 presence; the Eoman and his speech have vanished 
 utterly, but his works remain. The relations of the 
 Briton to his next invader supply a more instructive sub- 
 ject of study. The results of the English conquest were 
 widely diflferent in various parts of Britain. In the greater 
 part of the land the fate of the Celtic inhabitants was utter 
 extirpation; in a considerable, but far smaller, district it 
 was assimilation. Men of British blood submitted to the 
 English conquerors, and they gra dually adopted the lan- 
 guage and feelings of Englishmen. How slow the process 
 sometimes was we see in the long endurance of the 
 British tongue in Cornwall. Now I need not show that 
 neither of these processes has taken place to any great 
 extent in this district. English does advance; but, except 
 in great centres of population, like that where we are now 
 met, it advances very slowly. English has taken far
 
 14 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 longer to advance from the Wye to the Usk than it took 
 to advance from the German Ocean to the Wye. Except 
 in tlie great towns, the land is essentially British, so far 
 British that anything else is exceptional. But it is not 
 purely British, like large parts of central and northern 
 Wales, which were conquered under Edward the First, 
 but which never received any large amount of English 
 settlers. In this district we see something more than the 
 mere political conquest of Cardigan or Merioneth, some- 
 thing less than the extermination of Kent or the assimi- 
 lation of Devonshire. Strangers have conquered and 
 settled in the land, but, except in small districts here and 
 there, they have neither driven out nor assimilated the 
 earlier inhabitants. The cause of this difference was 
 doubtless the time when the conquest of this country took 
 place. The old wars of extermination, when the heathen 
 English swept away everything Roman, British, or Chris- 
 tian before them, had ceased before Gwent and Morganwg 
 had any dealings with the English in peace or in war. 
 The West-Saxon Kings, from Ecgberht onwards, were 
 satisfied with an external supremacy, which was nominal 
 or real, according to the degree of power which the over- 
 lord had to enforce it. It was not till the time of Eadward 
 the Confessor that anything like real conquest was even 
 attempted. Then we find a Bishop of Llandaflf receiving 
 his see from the King and Witan of England. In the last 
 years of Eadward's reign, after the overthrow of Gruffydd 
 ap Llywelyn, I have no doubt that, along with certain dis- 
 tricts in northern and central Wales, the laud of Gwent, 
 between the Wye and the Usk, was formally annexed to 
 England. The hunting-seat which Harold raised for the 
 king at Portskewet, and which was presently swept away 
 by Caradoc ap Gruffydd ap Ehydderch, was no doubt meant 
 to be a solemn taking of seizin, a speaking sign that, 
 within these limits at least, the King of the English was 
 to be no mere overlord, but an immediate ruler. The 
 events which immediately followed hindered any plans of
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 15 
 
 English settlement from being carried out ; they even 
 hindered the deed of Caradoc from meeting with any 
 punishment. Nor did William himself ever do more than 
 pass through the district on his way to the shrine of Saint 
 David, receiving the submission of the land in a general 
 way, and providing for the liberation of English or Norman 
 captives. I ask those who know the local history better 
 than myself, how far we can trust the entry in the Welsh 
 Chronicles which places the beginnings of the castle of 
 Cardiff in the days of the Conqueror. He may have taken 
 some such precaution to secure the fidelity of his new vas- 
 sals, but further than this I see no signs of anything 
 strictly to be called a conquest in his time. The real con- 
 quest came in the next reign, and it is to its peculiar 
 nature that the characteristic phssnomena of the district 
 are owing. Gwent and Morganwg were not conquered by 
 heathen invaders, spreading mere slaughter and havoc 
 before them ; neither were they conquered, as a political 
 conquest, by a Duke of Normandy or a King of England, 
 at the head of a national Norman or English army. The 
 conquest was more like the conquest of Ireland a genera- 
 tion or two later than it was like either the English con- 
 quest of Britain or the Norman conquest of England. The 
 scramble for lands and dwellings, which some people seem 
 to fancy took place under the strict civil police, the stern 
 military discipline, of William the Great, really did take 
 place when a crowd of Norman knights and their followers 
 swept down on the devoted districts, each man seeking to 
 carve out a lordship for himself. The land was won by the 
 sword, but it was by the sword of private adventurers, not 
 by the armies of a regular government. The land was 
 conquered, the land was divided, to a large extent it was 
 settled, but its former inhabitants were neither destroyed, 
 expelled, nor assimilated. Each chief came with a motley 
 following. Normans and Frenchmen pressed on from the 
 conquest of England to complete the conquest of the rest 
 of Britain. Englishmen, conquered in their own land.
 
 16 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 could, alike in Maine and in Morganwj:^, appear as con- 
 querors out of it; and Normans and English forgot tlieir 
 mutual hatred when carrying on a common aggression 
 under a common banner. And along with Normans and 
 English came the near kinsman of the Englishman, the 
 keen-witted and hardy Fleming, equally ready and skilful 
 in the pursuit of gain, whether war, commerce, or manu- 
 facture, offered itself as the means of its pursuit. To this 
 peculiar character of the invasion we owe the peculiar 
 character of the antiquities of the district. Castles arose 
 far thicker on the ground than in England itself, for every 
 leader among the invaders needed a stronghold for the 
 safety of himself and his followers. A Norman knight, 
 who in England would have been satisfied with a manor, 
 made perhaps in some slight degree defensible, here 
 needed a fortress, smaller and less splendid, but as strictly 
 a militaiy work as the Towers of London or Rochester. 
 The Norman too was essentially devout; wherever he 
 dwelled, wherever he conquered, he founded monasteries 
 and parish churches ; but in such a land as this a monastery 
 could not fail to be a fortress ; a church was driven to be 
 on occasion a house of warfare. Of the fortified monas- 
 tery no better example can be seen than the priory of 
 EAvenny ; as to the smaller churches, the real necessities 
 of one age became the mere tradition of a later, and some- 
 thing of a military character was impressed on the church 
 towers of South Wales down to the very end of mediteval 
 architecture. And, besides castles and churches, the new 
 settlers soon began to seek at once strength and enrich- 
 ment by the foundations of chartered towns, whose privi- 
 leged burgesses would consist of a motley assemblage of 
 French, English, Flemings, anything in short but Britons. 
 Every castle, every town, was thus a foreign settlement, a 
 settlement of men with arms in their hands, who had to 
 keep what they had won against the enmity of those who 
 had lost it. Wherever it was convenient and possible, the 
 natives would be utterly driven out, and the result would
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 17 
 
 be such a purely English-speaking district as that of 
 Llantwit and Saint Donats. The land remained a scene 
 of predatory warfare, of a truly national strife, long after 
 men of all races and all tongues within England itself had 
 sat down side by side in common obedience to a common 
 law. 
 
 A district with such a history as this is rich above most 
 districts alike in antiquarian interest and in picturesque 
 incident. The student of language, of ecclesiastical or 
 military architecture, of ecclesiastical or municipal foun- 
 dations, will each find a rich store of the objects of their 
 several studies, a store all the richer because it contains 
 many objects of all classes which ai-e at once small in scale 
 and eccentric in character. And I believe that a field 
 equally wide is opened to the lover of genealogy and family 
 history, pursuits which, in a district of this kind, certainly 
 connect themselves more closely with real history than else- 
 where. I will myself touch on onlj'^ one point of detail. 
 I mentioned the Flemings among the settlers in South 
 Wales. Now about the Flemish settlement in Pembroke- 
 shire there is no kind of doubt. It is a matter of his- 
 tory, recorded by contemporary writers. But the alleged 
 Flemish settlements in Glamorgan, in Gower and about 
 Llantwit, do not rest on any such certain evidence as this. 
 They seem to rest only on inference and tradition, tradition 
 balanced by other statements which make the Teutonic 
 inhabitants of Gower, not Flemings, like those of Pem- 
 brokeshire, but West-Saxons from the opposite coast of 
 Somerset. Here then is a special point to be thoroughly 
 worked out by some one who has the opportunity. The 
 language of the alleged Flemish districts of Glamorgan 
 should be carefully compared with the language of the 
 known Flemish districts of Pembrokeshire, with the spoken 
 language of Flanders, and with the dialect of Somerset. 
 But such an inquiry must be made in a thoroughly scien- 
 tific way. Local inquirers into local dialects constantly 
 mark as local every word which has gone out of use in 
 
 G
 
 18 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 liij^li-polite Eiiylish. A word is thus set down as charac- 
 teristic of Kent which is equally characteristic of Northum- 
 berland or Cornwall. Points of likeness between Gower 
 and Somerset, between Gower and any other district, 
 prove nothing, unless it can be shown that they are also 
 points of unlikeness to other districts. 
 
 I give this as an example of the kind of questions; sug 
 gested by local phsenomena, but having an interest far 
 more than local, which are brought before us by the 
 varied antiquities of the land in which vre are met. It is 
 a land in which men of all the races which have occupied 
 this island may alike feel at home, for each and all may 
 trace out the memorials of their own forefathers. Briton, 
 Englishman, Norman, Fleming, have all contributed to 
 the population, to the speech, to the existing antiquities, 
 of the district. Our Danish friends in the North and 
 East have perhaps less part and lot in the matter, but 
 it may comfort them to remember that wiking fleets 
 were often seen in the Bristol Channel, and that down to 
 the eleventh century the Black Heathen were ready to 
 destroy all that men of the other races were ready to 
 rear up. On spots where our fathers met in arms, we, 
 livinc' men of those various races, can meet in friendship 
 to trace out their deeds. The castles which were once 
 badges of bondage of which men loathed the sight and 
 the name, are now the witnesses of a time which has 
 happily passed away, witnesses whose silent teaching we 
 can listen to with curiosity and even with reverence. And, 
 if the castles remind us of the old separation, the old 
 hostility, of contending races, another class of buildings 
 reminds us of their union. The ecclesiastical history of 
 Wales is certainly no pleasant page in the history of 
 England. One reads with a feeling of shame of the 
 revenues of ancient Welsh churches swept away, in the 
 twelfth century and in the sixteenth, to enrich English 
 foundations at Gloucester, Tewkesbury, and Bristol. Yet, 
 in the days of war and tumults, it was something that
 
 CARDIFF AND GLAMORGAN. 19 
 
 men of contending races could at least worship together, 
 that they could agree to look with reverence on spots like 
 the holy places of Saint Teilo and Saint Iltyd. And it is 
 something on the other side that, in one point at least, 
 the nineteenth century may hold up its head alongside of 
 any of its forerunners. No church of its rank in South 
 Britain had ever fallen so low, few have now risen so high, 
 as the cathedral church of the diocese in which we are 
 met. If there were nothing else to draw us hither, it 
 would be goal enough for our pilgrimage to see the 
 ancient minster of Llandaff, not so many years back a 
 ruin and worse than a ruin, stand forth, as it now does, 
 among the model churches of our land. 
 
 c 2
 
 20 
 
 LLANTHONY. 
 
 1853-187G. 
 
 EvEET ONE knows tliat tlie Cistercian monks, whetlier 
 of set purpose or througli a happy accident, always placed 
 themselves in the most picturesque parts of our island. 
 Monks needed wood and water ; Cistercian monks needed 
 special retirement from the common abodes of men. We 
 should hardly have looked for any other order in a solitary 
 vale fenced in by lofty hills which in southern Britain 
 rank as mountains. Yet at two times far away from each 
 other, in the twelfth century and the nineteenth, this very 
 obvious rule of monastic propriety seems to have passed out 
 of sight. The vale of Llanthony has been chosen in the 
 later period as the dwelling-place of self-styled Bene- 
 dictine monks, as in the earlier period it was chosen as 
 the dwelling-place of real Austin canons. But the ori- 
 ginal founder of Llanthony might at least plead that he 
 could not well have planted Cistercians there, as his founda- 
 tion was made before the beginning of that great Cistercian 
 movement in Britain which created Tintern and Neath as 
 well as the abbeys of Yorkshire. But the Benedictines 
 themselves would hardly have been more out of place than 
 the Austin canons, whom, about 11 08, Hugh of Lacy planted 
 in the heart of the Black Mountains. ' The Austin canons, 
 an order which may be called intermediate between the 
 seculars and the stricter regulars, were often placed in 
 towns, witness Bristol and Carlisle, and seldom in such 
 utter solitudes as that of Llanthony. The Austin canons 
 themselves seem to have been of the same mind. Less
 
 LLANTHONY. 21 
 
 than thirty years after their beginning, in 1136, they 
 found that the life in the mountain valley did not suit them. 
 They procured a transfer of the house to a site outside 
 the walls of Gloucester, which better suited their notions 
 of civilized life. There arose the monastery of Llanthony 
 the Second, while Llanthony the First still remained 
 among the hills. 
 
 There is something very singular in this transfer of 
 the monastery to so great a distance. The special reason 
 assigned is one of historical importance. Llanthony the 
 First was founded in the days of the Lion of Justice, and, 
 while he ruled, even the wild Britons were kept in some 
 kind of order. He was hardly in his grave before their 
 incursions began again, and the canons of Llanthony 
 were among the first to suffer. But, besides this, it is 
 plain that they did not like the place itself. How should 
 they? The first set of canons were brought to Llanthony 
 from the priory of Saint Botolf outside the walls of 
 Colchester. The change must have been frightful. We 
 must remember that they would have no feeling of the 
 picturesque, no admiration for the scenery of the mountain 
 valley. Perhaps even now a man who was obliged always 
 to live at Llanthony might admire the scenery less than 
 one who visits it only now and then. Landor himself, 
 ivith all his poetry and all his zeal to improve his neigh- 
 bours, did not stay there all his days. But in the earlier 
 days a transfer from Colchester to Llanthony must have 
 been a banishment which would make any Austin canon 
 of them shudder. When the brotherhood had moved to 
 Gloucester, the historian of the house draws an elaborate 
 contrast between the position of Llanthony the First and 
 that of Llanthony the Second. The comfortable Glou- 
 cester site was much more to his mind. Yet the valley is 
 not barren; it has rich pastures enough; but we may 
 believe that the very presence of the hills, which to us is 
 the chief charm of the spot, was to them a matter of 
 horror. Anyhow, Llanthony the Second became more
 
 S0T7TH WALES. 
 
 popular than Llanthony the First. It also became much 
 richer. But of Llnnthony the Second but little is left, 
 and of the church nothing at all. At Llanthony the 
 First enough remains both of the church and the other 
 buildings to form a most instructive study of architectural 
 style and monastic arrangement. 
 
 There is also another singular point in the transfer, 
 namely the removal of the name to a place where it was 
 utterly without meaning. There are indeed many other 
 instances of the transfer of monasteries, and indeed of the 
 transfer of names. But it would perhaps be hard to find 
 another case of the transfer of a name to a spot where it 
 was so grotesquely out of place. Llanthony is not, as 
 many people seem to think, the church of Saint Anthon3% 
 It is a contraction of Llanddewi-nant-Honddii — that is to 
 say, the church of David in the vale of the Honddu. The 
 vale of the Honddii is a deep mountain valley, in which 
 the older Llanthony stands, with the stream of the 
 Honddu rushing along it to find its way into the Usk, the 
 * Welsh Axe ' of our forefathers. So far the name was 
 indeed descriptive. Yet, after all, it was, even in its 
 beginning, a delusion. Llanddewi-nant- Honddii was not 
 in truth a Llanddewi at all. It is said to have taken its 
 name from an earlier chapel of Saint David which the 
 canons found standing there ; it is certain that their 
 own church was dedicated to Saint John Baptist. The 
 transfer to Gloucester made the rest of the name 
 meaningless. At Gloucester, by the banks of the Severn, 
 there was no Honddu and no vale — none, at least, in the 
 same sense as the narrow glen through which the moun- 
 tain torrent makes its way. Either the name must have 
 conveyed but little meaning to those ,who inhabited the 
 place called by it, or else they must have had a deeper 
 affection for the name than would have seemed from their 
 eagerness to quit the place. Anyhow, a new Llanthony, 
 a new church of David in the vale of Honddu, arose far 
 away from the vale of Honddu, and this time bearing the
 
 LLANTHONY. 23 
 
 dedication neither of Saint David nor of Saint John, 
 but of Our Lady. 
 
 The history of the two monasteries after the removal 
 to Gloucester in 1136 is very obscure. The Gloucester 
 Llanthony was designed to be merely a cell ; but, as we 
 have seen, it grew into a distinct house. But Llanthony 
 the First, though much poorer than Llanthony the 
 Second, still went on. It does not seem, as some have 
 thought, to have become in turn a cell to its own child. 
 There is a document of Edward the Fourth's reign uniting 
 the two Llanthonies, but it would seem not to have taken 
 effect, as they were distinct houses with distinct pro- 
 perties at the Dissolution. Anyhow, it is the elder 
 Llanthony which now survives in its old place among the 
 mountains. The church takes its place in the series of 
 the great churches of South Wales, being clearly inter- 
 m.ediate between the nave of Saint David's and the nave 
 of Llandaff. It supplies one of the best examples of the 
 Transition. The pointed form shows itself in all the main 
 constructive arches, but it is only in the west front that it 
 becomes predominant in the smaller decorative arches as 
 well. The work is just what suits a great church in such a 
 position. Every detail is good and well finished; but 
 there is a stern simplicity, a casting aside of all needless 
 ornament, which seems thoroughly in place in the church 
 and the dwelling of men who had of their own free will 
 chosen the wilderness as their home. Saint David's is 
 plain without, because, where it stands, external adorn- 
 ment would have been carved only to crumble away. But 
 then, as becomes the head church of a great diocese. Saint 
 David's makes up for its plainness without by lavish 
 gorgeousness within. Llanthony, on the other hand, 
 though its design is clearly to some extent modelled on 
 that of St. David's, does not reproduce any of the rich 
 ornament of the mother church, and affects altogether 
 different proportions. The nave arches of Saint David's 
 are round, and of remarkable width; those of Llanthony
 
 24 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 are pointed, aiul inucli narrower, having an arcade of 
 eiixlit in a lonfjth a little shorter than that which at Saint 
 David's is filled by six. The plainness of the pillars, most 
 of them without capitals, is striking, but the effect is 
 srood throuirhout. The short eastern limb, much shorter 
 than that of Saint David's even in its first estate, has 
 never, like Sahit David's, grown out into eastern chapels, 
 so that the whole length of Llanthony is very much 
 smaller than that of the mother-church. And again, 
 while Saint David's has gone through changes at every 
 date and in every style, few minsters could have been so 
 little changed as Llanthony between the foundation and 
 the Dissolution. No innovation seems to have happened 
 beyond the insertion of a large east window, and a re- 
 casting of the side chapels, exactly answering to that of 
 Saint David's. 
 
 We said that Llanthony filled a place intermediate 
 between Saint David's and Llandaff ; but it is much less 
 easy to compare it with Llandaff than with Saint David's. 
 A comparison can be one only of architectural detail, for 
 the peculiar outline of Llandaff, its lack of transepts and 
 central tower, puts it out of all comparison as regards 
 general effect. As far as this last goes, the outline of 
 Llanthony, with its three towers, was far more ambitious 
 than that of either of the two episcopal churches. But as 
 regards architectural style, as Llanthony, with all its 
 severity, is an advance on Saint David's, so Llandaff is a 
 further advance on Llanthony. Each marks a stage in 
 the great change by which the pointed arch and its ap- 
 propriate ornaments supplanted the round arch and its 
 appropriate ornaments. At Saint David's — we speak of 
 the nave — the round arch is dominant, though the pomted 
 arch is coming in. At Llandaff the pointed arch is 
 dominant, though the round arch is not quite forgotten. 
 At Llanthony we see the two in a moment of equal 
 struggle. Yet, with all this, there is a likeness of work 
 and feeling which binds the three churches together, as
 
 
 V 
 
 .:: 1 
 
 \ 
 
 
 ■S 
 
 
 
 ^"^ 
 
 
 
 
 f- V ' '■■A, i'
 
 LLANTHONT. 25 
 
 if they were the work of a single architect, or of a single 
 school of architects gradually feeling their way towards 
 successive stages of developement. A more instructive 
 study in the history of art can hardly be found than that 
 which is supplied by the gradual changes of style to be 
 traced in the three best preserved among the great 
 churches of South Wales. 
 
 Of the church of Llanthony the remains are very 
 extensive. In fact, though it is less perfect than some 
 other monastic ruins, there is enough to make out every 
 essential feature. But much more was standing, even 
 within living memory. Old prints show much more both 
 of the west front and of the central tower than is now 
 standing, and the southern arches of the nave fell only 
 about forty years ago. The remains of the monastic 
 buildings are considerable. The chapter-house is still 
 there, though broken down, and there are signs left of 
 the substructure of the refectory. The building which 
 immediately joins the south-western tower, and indeed 
 the south-western tower itself, are made partly into a farm- 
 house, partly into a small inn, where the traveller who 
 does not need very splendid quarters may pass a day 
 or two while examining the priory and its neighbour- 
 hood. And among the monastic buildings stands the 
 small parish church, seemingly of the same date as 
 the priory. Its existence appears to have puzzled some 
 of the earlier visitors to Llanthony, and indeed some of 
 its earlier historians. They seem not to have understood 
 how a parish church could be needed in such a place. But 
 the very existence of the monastery implied the presence 
 of a certain lay population, and the only choice was either 
 the creation of a distinct parish church or the division of 
 the minster itself between the parishioners and the canons. 
 The latter was the rule among Austin canons ; but the 
 position of Llanthony was an exception to all rule. Most 
 houses of Austin canons stood in towns, where the people 
 had something to say to the matter. In such a place as
 
 t>n aovrii ]\'AT.E>^. 
 
 Llantliony, the canons must always have had everything 
 their i»wn way, and they may have been best pleased to 
 keep their church all to themselves. 
 
 In short, wliat with the old Austin canons, what with 
 Landor, what with the modern Benedictines, Llantliony 
 seems to have had a \vay of coming before the world by fits 
 and starts. One fit or start in the last days of the twelfth 
 century gave us one of the most instructive pieces of 
 ecclesiastical architecture in our island, and placed per- 
 haps in a more remarkable site than any other. 
 
 A
 
 KIDWELLY. 
 
 1849-187G. 
 
 In speaking of Kidwelly, castle, church, and town, let ns, 
 first of all, give a warning as to the name. The traveller 
 who draws near to Kidwelly by the most likely road, that 
 is, by the road which will take him either from London or 
 from Bristol, will, before he reaches Kidwelly, pass by 
 Llanelly. This name may suggest to him that he has 
 reached a fit place for practising that sound so mysteri- 
 ous to modern Englishmen, but which their forefathers 
 uttered with perfect ease whenever they had to speak 
 of either a loaf, a lord, or a lady. In the name Llanelly 
 the sound which has vanished from the modern forms 
 of hlcif, hlciford, and hlcBfdige has certainly to be uttered 
 twice. The Llanelly of the south is as great a problem 
 as the Llangollen of the north. But let no one who 
 has succeeded in giving the due sound to Llanelly be sc 
 puffed up with his success as to go on further and pro- 
 nounce Kidwelly after the same pattern. The II in Kid- 
 welly is a mere English barbarism ; the first syllable is 
 spelled a dozen ways in the Welsh Chronicles, but the 
 latter part of the word is always weli, or something to that 
 effect. In short, the English visitor to Kidwelly need 
 give himself no trouble about the name of the place. He 
 will come nearest to the true British sound if he sounds 
 the name as he would sound it if he came upon it in Kent 
 or Norfolk. 
 
 The visitor who thus reaches Kidwelly by the Great 
 Western Railway will find a small town — if he is very
 
 28 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 metropolitan in liis -svays of tliinking, lie may be inclined 
 to call it a village — of -wliieli the most prominent feature 
 in the immediate neighbourhood is a tall spire, a most 
 unusual feature in that neighbourhood. Further off, 
 beyond the little river Gwendracth, he will see, rising 
 above church and town, a castle which is very far from 
 being the largest of the South-Welsh castles, but which, 
 as a real artistic design, may hold its own against any 
 military building in South-Wales or anywhere else. The 
 castle, the church, and the collection of houses dignified 
 Avith the name of a borough, are commonly the elements 
 which go to make up one of these small Welsh towns. In 
 some cases however the church is absent. That is to say, 
 the town was an absolutely new creation of the Norman or 
 English conquerors, whichever we are to call them. In 
 such cases the town does not form an ecclesiastical parish; 
 it simply stands within some elder parish, the church of 
 which may be near or far off, as may happen. Thus at 
 Newport on the Usk the castle and town were founded by 
 the river-side at the foot of the hill. The old parish 
 church of Saint Woollos stands at the top of the hill, 
 and it is only the modern growth of Newport which 
 has carried the town up to the church. But in other 
 cases, and at Kidwelly among them, the town was not 
 a new creation of the conquerors ; it was simply a place 
 taken possession of by them and applied to their own 
 uses. The town in such cases existed already ; what the 
 conquerors did was to give it new inhabitants, to build 
 a castle to protect or threaten it, and sooner or later to 
 give it an English municipal constitution. And very com- 
 monly the church grew into a religious foundation of some 
 kind or other. In all these ways Kidwelly is typical ; the 
 castle, the priory, and the borough, are all there. The 
 municipal history of these Welsh towns is a subject 
 which it would be specially worth the pains of some one 
 versed in municipal matters to work out thoroughl3^ 
 Each of them was a foreign colony in a conquered land,
 
 KIDWELLY. 29 
 
 and in each of them men of all nations except the con- 
 quered were welcome. Ages after the Christian sera Alex- 
 andria was still, in its own belief, peopled by men of 
 Macedonia — that is to say, men of anywhere except native 
 Egyptians. So the burghers of Kidwelly, in the twelfth 
 century and doubtless long after, were distinguished 
 among themselves as French, English, and Flemish. The 
 Briton had no place at all. If he was allowed to dwell 
 within the municipal circuit, he was at least not admitted 
 to municipal rights. At Kidwelly, as in so many other 
 places, there is an old town and a new. The old town 
 stood on the same side of the river as the castle, while the 
 new town, with the priory, was on the other side. That 
 is, most likely, the castle supplanted an older native settle- 
 ment on the high ground, while the new town of the 
 French, English, and Flemish burgesses arose, where 
 there was more room for it, on the other side of the stream. 
 Thus far the history of Kidwelly is a miniature copy of 
 the history of Lincoln and Cambridge. The town, with 
 its ancient bridge, and the ancient houses which here, as 
 elsewhere, are fast giving way to modern love of destruc- 
 tion, has that peculiar air which belongs to towns of the 
 smallest and least busy class, towns which have an air of 
 far less life than the mere open village. The municipal 
 archives of Kidwelly are said to be rich, and the borough, 
 like London, New Eomney, and some others, still remains 
 unreformed. 
 
 But while the municipal element in Kidwelly, though 
 still there, has in some sort to be looked for, the ecclesias- 
 tical and still more the military element force themselves 
 at once on the eye. The South-Welsh coast is, as a 
 whole, rather rich in churches — that is, if the traveller 
 will accept a kind of wealth which does not consist in size 
 or splendour, but in a class of buildings which almost 
 always have a good picturesque outline, which suit the 
 scenery, and which bear on them the impress of the history 
 of the country. The military towers of the churches along
 
 30 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 lliis \vholt> const, tVoin l\r(>iniu)utlisliiro to Pembrokeshire, 
 are well worth study ; but C'aormarthonshire, as a whole, 
 has K^ss to show in the ecclesiastical way than its neighbours 
 on either side. But Kidwelly, as becomes a monastic 
 church, is one of the exceptional class of larger and finer 
 buildings which ever and anon diversify the small and 
 plain, but picturesque, churches which are characteristic 
 of the country. Not that Kidwelly priory would pass as a 
 fine church in Somerset or Norfolk, not that it has in 
 the least the character of a minster ; still it is large and 
 striking and stately after its own fashion. A long, broad, 
 aisleless nave, cruelly cut short at the west end, would, if 
 it were only vaulted, not be out of place in Anjou or 
 Aquitaine. The tower and spire on the north side look as 
 if a local architect, used to the military towers of the 
 district, had made a journey into Northamptonshire, and 
 had brought back some rude notions of a broach spire. 
 The church is cruciform, though without a central tower, 
 and the choir, with some eccentricities, such as a strangely 
 flat chancel arch, is not a bad specimen of work of the 
 fourteenth century. The priory ^vas a cell to the abbey of 
 Sherborne ; the date of its foundation is doubtful, but it 
 existed in 1291. But the connexion of the place with 
 Sherborne is much older. The famous Bishop Eoger, 
 the founder of Sherborne as a distinct monastery, gave to 
 that house lands at Kidwelly, at which time the burghers 
 of the three nations also granted certain tithes. And it is 
 to be noticed that, among the witnesses to Eoger's grant, 
 we find two men with purely English names holding the 
 two most important local posts : ' Edmundus qui tunc 
 castellum de Cadweli custodiebat, et Alwinus presbyter 
 
 villffi.' 
 
 The castle then was in being, and in English hands, 
 in the time of Henry the First. It had already been ravaged 
 by English invaders as early as 993, and, exactly a hundred 
 years later, came the invasion, Norman or English, as we 
 may call it, with which the history of the place really
 
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 KIDWELLY. 31 
 
 begins. Somewhat after Bishop Roger's time, it belonged 
 to a certain Maurice of London, of the house of London or 
 Londres, a house which plays a leading part in the history 
 and legend of the conquest of Glamorgan. He, with his 
 son William, made grants to the church of Kidwelly and 
 to the monks of Sherborne. According to the received 
 pedigree, this Maurice, whose date was about 1150, is made 
 fourth in descent from William, the alleged conqueror of 
 1093. It may be so ; but the generations of the house of 
 London would seem to have been wonderfully short, and 
 in singular contrast to the length of those of the family 
 which is said to have succeeded them. We are told of a 
 certain Patrick of Cha worth or Cahors, who was living in 
 1194, but whose father came in with the Conqueror. Here 
 we are landed in the chronology of Ivanhoe, and we 
 turn from the pedigree-makers to the fact recorded in the 
 Welsh Chronicles, that in 1190 the Welsh prince Ehys built 
 the castle of Kidwelly. At that time then the house of 
 London could not have been in actual possession. And 
 in truth there is no doubt that Kidwelly had been, on the 
 conquest of Shrewsbury, granted again by Henry the First 
 to the Welsh prince Howel. All this is important, rather as 
 showing the kind of materials out of which the history of 
 Wales will have to be i3ut together when any real scholar 
 shall take it in hand, than as throwing any light on the 
 buildings which are now actually standing at Kidwelly. 
 Whatever either Maurice or Ehys may have built, it is not 
 there now. The present castle clearly belongs to the 
 latter part of the thirteenth century, when it was certainly 
 in possession of the house of Cahors or Chaworth. From 
 them it passed by marriage to the earls and dukes of Lan- 
 caster, and so became part of the Lancaster duchy, from 
 which in later times it has again passed into private hands. 
 Save the later gate-house, the whole building is of a piece 
 — a court surrounded by four round towers. Two other 
 large round towers flank the gateway, and another stands 
 at its outer side. Few castles have an outline at once so
 
 82 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 compact and so picturesque ; but the distinguishing- fea- 
 ture of the dwelling is to be looked for at the eastern side, 
 where the art of the military and tliat of the ecclesiastical 
 architect have worked together with a skill which is 
 beyond praise. At Kidwelly the chapel was to be a main 
 feature of the building. It was not to be a mere room 
 stowed away in one corner, where the inquirer finds it 
 with difficulty. But in a castle by no means on the 
 greatest scale, it w^as not to be a separate building, as at 
 Bamburgh and once at Alnwick ; still less was it to be 
 a miniature minster as at Warkworth, or a miniature 
 Saint Sepulchre as at Ludlow. A polygonal projection — 
 the chapel tower — was thrown out from the east face of 
 the castle, and an apsidal end was thus provided for the 
 chapel in its upper story. A projection again from this 
 tower provides in its upper stage the quarters of the 
 chaplain ; the castle, in short, has an ecclesiastical quarter, 
 and that one which stands forth from the main line of 
 defence, as if trusting to its sacred character. Nothing 
 was ever more skilfully devised as a matter of arrange- 
 ment ; nothing was ever more skilfully carried out in the 
 matter of execution. The castle chajDel at Kidwelly is 
 the very model of its own class; no form, no details, 
 could have been better devised for a building which 
 forms part of a military structure, but which is not itself 
 military. The work, well finished but not richly orna- 
 mented, exactly suits its position. Its range of trefoil 
 lancets proclaims the chapel as a part of the building 
 which has a character of its own, while they do not stand 
 out in any violent contrast to the plainer and more strictly 
 military parts of the buildings. The actual founder of the 
 castle can only be guessed at; the- name of his architect 
 has utterly perished; but, like so many other builders of 
 churches and castles whose names we cannot hope to 
 recover, he must have been a man of no mean order of 
 genius in his own art, and his employer, one would think, 
 must have been one who was able to appreciate his skill.
 
 ANGLIA TRANSWALLIANA. 
 
 1851-1876. 
 
 The last Teutonic settlement in Britain often passes 
 without notice. The Englishry of Pembrokeshire, ' Little 
 England beyond Wales,' can hardly be said to be an un- 
 known land while it contains the well-known watering- 
 place of Tenby. But we may guess that a good many 
 visitors to Tenby come away with very faint notions of 
 the remarkable ethnological pliEenomena of the land which 
 they have been visiting. To many it is doubtless enough 
 that they are in Wales ; one part of Wales is the same as 
 another. And certainly the authorities of Tenby have 
 done their best to lead their visitors astray. On the 
 castle-hill of Tenby is a statue of Prince Albert, with a 
 legend in English and Welsh, in which the Prince has 
 borrowed the epithet of the great British law-giver, 
 and appears as 'Albert Dda.' Moreover there is a dis- 
 play of heraldry, and a legend — in the British tongue 
 only — about the Red Dragon of the Cymry. Now there 
 is exactly as much reason for setting up a Welsh inscrip- 
 tion at Tenby as there is for setting one up at York or 
 Canterbury. The Welsh tongue was doubtless once spoken 
 in all three places, and all three places are called by mo- 
 difications of Welsh names. For Tenby must not be 
 mistaken for a Danish hy ; the name is British, the same 
 as the Denbigh of North Wales. It is possible that the 
 hych may have been changed into the likeness of Danish 
 hy by the same kind of process by which Jerusalem becomes 
 Hierosolyma ; but that is the full amount of the connexion, 
 
 D
 
 31 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 if there be any. In this purely En<Tlish town in a purely 
 English district, one looks up at the stran<|fe beast and 
 the straujje tongue with a feeliuj; that the Lion of Justice 
 has in some measure laboured in vain. King- Henry 
 took some pains to plant good seed in his field; whence 
 then these tares of Red Dragons, and of legends in a 
 tongue not understanded of the people of Tenby and of 
 all South Pembrokeshire ? Laying parables aside, we are, 
 at Tenby and the coasts thereof, in a district of the high- 
 est historic interest. We are within the bounds of the 
 last Teutonic settlement in Britain, as in Kent, on the 
 opposite side of the island, Ave are within the bounds 
 of the first. Henry wrought the last act of the drama 
 which was begun by Hengest. We are here in the 
 Englishry, in Little England beyond Wales. We are in 
 a district where language universally, where local nomen- 
 clature generally, is as Teutonic as it is in Norfolk. To 
 its inhabitants ' Albert the Good ' may give an idea ; but 
 ' Albert Dda ' is quite thrown away upon them. The Red 
 Dragon of the Cymry was to their forefathers only as the 
 Snark or the Jabberwock, a noisome beast to be hunted 
 down without mercy. The strange fancy of Englishmen 
 for turning their backs on themselves, for wiping out 
 their own history to make room for the legends of some- 
 body else, surely never took a stranger shape than in an 
 outbreak of Welsh nationality at Tenby. 
 
 There is no doubt, as was hinted in an earlier paper, 
 from the direct witness' of William of Malmesbury and 
 other contemporary writers, that Henry the First, among 
 his measures to keep the Welsh in order, planted a colony 
 of Flemings in Dyfed, the modern Pembrokeshire. In 
 the distiict allotted to them, the southern part of the 
 county, they must have done their work thoroughly. 
 The Briton has left but few traces. The one speech of 
 the district is English, and most of the places have 
 received English names. Most of them are called after 
 individual settlers — Johnston, Williamston, Haroldston,
 
 ANGLLA TRANSWALLIANA. 35 
 
 Herbrandston, names which exactly answer to the Danish 
 names in Lincohishire, save that they end in English ton 
 instead of Danish hy. Here and there a place keeps a 
 Welsh name, specially the towns of Pembroke and Tenby, 
 just like London, Gloucester, and Winchester, in other 
 parts of the island. Whatever we say of the alleged 
 Flemish settlements elsewhere, the settlement in Pem- 
 brokeshire is an undoubted fact. King Henry's colony 
 is always expressly described as a colony of Flemings. 
 It is recorded both by the English and by the Welsh 
 writers; but the fact that the colony, which was originally 
 Flemish, now speaks English has given rise to a good deal 
 of puzzledom, and to the talking of no small amount of 
 nonsense. Any one who knows the district will have 
 heard the question raised over and over again. In local 
 books too we constantly see mention of * Flemish houses,' 
 ' Flemish architecture,' ' Flemish chimneys,' and even a 
 ' Flemish court of justice,' as if the Flemings had brought 
 over some special style of art with them from their own 
 country. We have even seen an elaborate comparison, 
 which was meant to prove something, between the 
 ' Flemish houses ' in Pembrokeshire and a house in some 
 other part of England — in Cumberland, if we rightly 
 remember — belonging to a family named Fleming. It 
 would have been easy to improve upon this last notion ; 
 for, in some versions of the story, the Flemings whom 
 Henry settled in Pembrokeshire are said to have been 
 before that settled in the North of England. But the so- 
 called Flemish houses are in no way distinctively Flemish, 
 and they were built ages after the settlement of the 
 Flemings. They are simply good, solid, stone-built houses, 
 with pointed doorways and round chimneys. They show 
 that the district must have been fairly prosperous at a time 
 when so many stone houses could be built ; but they also 
 show in slight military touches that the days of war- 
 fare, or at all events the traditions of the days of warfare, 
 had not wholly passed away. On the other hand, it is only 
 
 P 2
 
 nc. SOUTH WALES, 
 
 in an old-fashioned district where there has been compara- 
 tively little change, that so many of them could have lived 
 on to onr own day. But there is nothing special or myste- 
 rious about them, nothing on which to found any ethno- 
 logical theory. To call them Flemish houses, attaching any 
 distinct meaning to the word Flemish, is as much to the 
 purpose as it would be to talk of a West-Saxon style in the 
 stone houses of Somerset, or of a Middle- Anglian style in 
 the stone houses of Northamptonshire. 
 
 We have brought in this last analogy of set purpose ; 
 for of course the great puzzle always is, how a Flemish 
 settlement came to speak English. People constantly ask 
 how the Flemings came to change their language. The 
 difficulty is by no means a new one; it is as old as 
 Raudolf Higden, who looked on Flemings as barbarians, 
 and says that in his day they had left off their barbarous 
 tongue, and spoke good Saxon ('dimissa jam barbarie 
 Saxonice satis proloquuntur ') . And of the two Welsh 
 chronicles known as the Brut, the later, fuller, and less 
 trustworthy, tells us how Henry planted Englishmen— in 
 Welsh, of course, ' Saxons,'— among the Flemings to teach 
 them English, and how into the writer's day they were 
 Eno-lish. It is a standing local puzzle how Flemings 
 could have come to speak English. What they were ex- 
 pected to speak, what the natural language of Flemings 
 left to themselves was supposed to be, does not appear. 
 Perhaps they were expected, as coming from the modern 
 kinf'dom of Belgium, which uses French on its coins, 
 to speak French rather than English. That native 
 Britons should have come to speak English was clearly 
 thought a much slighter difficulty than that Flemings 
 should have done so. It seemed like a paradox to many 
 to be told that the settlers in Pembrokeshire had never 
 chanced their language at all, to be told that there was 
 no need to ask how the Flemings came to speak English 
 althouo-h they are Flemings, while the simple fact was 
 that they spoke English because they were Flemings. To
 
 ANOLIA TRANSWALLIANA. 37 
 
 one w ho really takes in the history and the relations of 
 the Teutonic dialects of Britain there is no difficulty at all 
 in the matter. The Flemish tongue is one dialect of Low- 
 Dutch ; the English is another. Even now the nearness 
 between modern Flemish and modern English must strike 
 every one who thinks at all upon such matters, and the 
 nearness in the twelfth century, before English had gone 
 through those changes which have parted it off from its 
 fellows, must have been far closer than it is now. The true 
 way of looking at the matter is, as we have already said, 
 to look on the Flemish occupation of Pembrokeshire as 
 simply the last stage of Teutonic settlement in Britain. 
 The Flemings may fairly pass as another English tribe, 
 like Angles, Saxons, or Jutes, only coming so many ages 
 later. Between them comes a Teutonic settlement of 
 another kind, that of the Danes. The Flemish settle- 
 ment has far more in common with the earliest settlements 
 of all than the intermediate Danish settlement has. For 
 the Danes settled at the expense of earlier Teutonic inhabi- 
 tants, while the Flemings settled almost wholly at the 
 expense of the Celts, just as the Angles and Saxons did 
 ages before. There have been later settlements in Britain, 
 settlements from the same part of the world which sent 
 forth the Flemish settlement in Pembrokeshire. Inter- 
 course with the Netherlands, and the reception of refu- 
 gees from the Netherlands, has given a certain tinge to 
 East-Anglia in more ways than one. But here was a 
 settlement altogether of the old kind, a settlement where 
 the colonists drove out the old inhabitants, where they 
 divided the land among themselves, and gave places new 
 names from their new owners. The causes and circum- 
 stances of the Flemish settlement in Pembrokeshire were 
 altogether different from those of the earliest English settle- 
 ments in Britain. But the process of settlement must have 
 been very much the same; the only difference was that 
 the Flemings were not, like the first Angles and Saxons, 
 heathen destroyers. But to the second stage of Anglian
 
 38 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 and Saxon conquest, the stage represented by Cen-wealli 
 and Ine and other Christian conquerors, the settlement of 
 the Flemings must have presented an exact parallel. 
 
 In short, the processes which created the standard 
 English tongue, or rather the in'ocesses which brought it to 
 the front amid a crowd of local dialects, have affected the 
 Teutonic speech of Pembrokeshire, as well as the Teutonic 
 speech of other parts of the island. The Fleming of Pem- 
 brokeshire speaks English for the same cause that the Dane 
 of Lincolnshire speaks English. That is to say, one form of 
 standard English is common to all. How far all parts actu- 
 ally speak it is another matter. It is for some local philo- 
 loger to find out whether there are any local peculiarities 
 in the Nether-Dutch of Pembrokeshire, and whether they 
 at all approach to any peculiarities in the Nether-Dutch 
 of Flanders. After such complete separation for so many 
 ages, Ave should not expect to find much special likeness 
 between the two dialects. Still the point is quite worth 
 looking into ; and, though the colony was certainly mainly 
 Flemish, we need not suppose that every single man in 
 it came from Flanders. There may be truth in the 
 Welsh chronicler's statement that King Henry planted 
 Englishmen among the Flemings, though it is not likely 
 that he did it for the purpose of teaching the Flemings 
 English. We may be sore that there were both French- 
 speaking and more strictly English-speaking settlers 
 among them. Normans, English, Flemings, when they 
 got into Wales, largely forgot their differences, and 
 formed one whole as against the Britons. Pembroke 
 Castle was a strictly Norman foundation, the work of 
 Arnnlf of Montgomei-y before the Flemish settlement 
 began. And the foundation of the castle would naturally 
 lead, at Pembroke as everywhere else, to the settlement 
 of both French-speaking and English-speaking burgesses 
 around it. And there is everj^ probability that the Flemish 
 settlement was a revival, or a continuation, or a strengthen- 
 ing, of an earlier Teutonic settlement from quite another
 
 ANGLIA TRANSWALLIANA. 39 
 
 quarter. Thougli the name of Tenby is not Scandinavian, 
 yet other names in the district are. Such names as Hasgard 
 and Freystrop seem to point, not only to Scandinavian 
 occupation, but to Scandinavian occupation in heathen 
 times. Whatever we make of Hasgard, it seems hardly 
 possible that any place could have got the name of Freys- 
 trop — that is doubtless Freysthorp— if it had not been 
 founded by people who still believed in Frey. If any 
 Scandinavian settlements staj'ed on till the time of Henry 
 the First, they would merge with the Flemings and the 
 English into one Teutonic community, just as the Saxons 
 of Bayeux were lost among the Normans, but helped to 
 keep Bayeux Teutonic later than other parts of Nor- 
 mandy. In all these points of view, ethnological and 
 linguistic, this little out-of-the-way corner of the Teutonic 
 world is of very high interest, and its local history and 
 peculiarities have never been thoroughly worked out from 
 a scientific point of view. It has points in common with 
 another isolated Teutonic land at the other end of Britain. 
 The Scandinavian islands, Orkney and Shetland, speak 
 English. Indeed we have seen documents in those islands 
 drawn up in the Scottish form of English before they 
 were mortgaged by Denmark. Both cases teach the same 
 lesson, how easily a standard form of any language assi- 
 milates all the kindred dialects of a country, but how 
 little effect it has on dialects which are not kindred. 
 English has not assimilated, though it has largely dis- 
 placed, the Welsh and Gaelic tongues, with which it has 
 no connexion beyond the remotest Aryan kindred. But 
 the tongues of the Dane and the Fleming, as well as 
 those of the Angle and the Saxon, have all been drawn 
 together by the attraction of a single type of standard 
 English. The actual local speech of different parts still 
 remains very different. But all understand the same 
 standard tongue, and all read the same English Bible in 
 which that standard tongue appears in its best form.
 
 SOUTH PEMBROKESHIRE CASTLES. 
 
 1851-1876. 
 
 The Flemish district of Pembrokeshire — in what sense 
 Flemish we have already explained — is as rich in castles 
 as Northumberland itself, and for exactly the same reason. 
 The inhabitants were settlers in a conquered land, with 
 dangerous neighbours on their borders ; they held a small 
 isolated territory which lay open to attack from the whole 
 of a large district. Each town therefore needed its for- 
 ti'ess to guard it; each dwelling of a considerable lord 
 became itself a fortress. Yet perhaps castles are not so 
 thick on the ground here as they are in some other dis- 
 tricts. They are hardly so thick on the ground as they 
 are in Glamorgan. Perhaps the difference is in some 
 measure owing to the different nature of the settlement. 
 The settlement of Glamorgan was essentially a settlement 
 of lords with their followers. The Flemish colony can 
 hardly fail to have been of a more popular character. 
 Every parish church seems to have had its tower designed 
 as a stronghold in time of need, and, as we have said, a 
 military touch may be seen in the ordinary houses. And 
 the churches as well as the houses are well worth study- 
 ing. That they have less of ornamental detail than the 
 ancient churches of almost any other part of the island is 
 in no way surprising, nor is it in any way blameworthy. 
 And what they lack in ornamental detail they make up in 
 picturesqueness and complexity of outHne. They add too 
 the almost universal presence, though certainly in the 
 simplest of forms, of the stone vault, so rare in all other
 
 SOUTH PEMBROKESHIRE CASTLES. 41 
 
 parts of Britain, except in cliiirches of a far greater size. 
 In South Pembrokeshire, contrary to the rule of the rest 
 of the world, a wooden roof in a church is a sign of finer 
 work. It is a sign that the building is not a specimen of 
 the local style of the district, but that it has been built 
 after the pattern of churches of a richer type elsewhere. 
 Where we see, as we now and then do, elaborate windows 
 and other work of the fourteenth century, the plain local 
 barrel vault would be felt to be out of place. So it is at 
 Carew, so it is at Hodgeston, where a modern architect 
 has ruthlessly mutilated the most graceful feature of the 
 building ; so it is lastly in the most characteristic of the 
 greater churches of the district, the priory of Monkton 
 close to Pembroke. 
 
 From the churchyard of Monkton the view is one 
 which is eminently characteristic of the district. No- 
 where do we more thoroughly feel where we are than in 
 Little England beyond Wales. The great physical feature 
 of the district is brought strongly home to the mind of 
 the traveller who passes from the town of Pembroke to its 
 suburb Monkton. South Pembrokeshire is, before all 
 things, a land of inland seas, of peninsulas, and of islands. 
 It is not a land of mountains, but it is pre-eminently a 
 land of hills. The English district is largely made up of 
 two peninsulas, the northern of which is separated from 
 Dewisland, the immediate patrimony of Saint David, by 
 the noble bay of Saint Bride, curving round like the bay 
 of Penzance, or even of Naples, and with the islands off 
 either horn suggesting memories of Ischia and Capri. 
 This northern peninsula, itself made up to a considerable 
 extent of smaller peninsulas, is cut off from its southern 
 fellow by the haven of Milford. Here again we seem 
 to see a Scandinavian trace. The ford here is surely 
 neither an English ford nor a Welsh ffordd, but a Scandi- 
 navian ^orc^, like Waterford and Wexford. And a fiord of 
 very truth it is ; a fiord with endless creeks running far 
 up the country, so that points far inland stand on the salt
 
 SOUTH IVALES. 
 
 ■water. Wc arc here on a fiord of the Ocean, subject to 
 the linv of tides, so that the look of one of these inland 
 creeks varies greatly from one hour to another. But, at a 
 favourable moment, the great fiord of Pembrokeshire 
 may suggest the noblest gulf of the Hadriatic; on the 
 bosom of the haven of Milford, we are tempted to say that 
 vre only lack the moimtains to feel ourselves on the mouths 
 of Cattaro. The creeks which run thus far inland wash 
 the bases of three of the chief castles of the districts. At 
 Haverfordwest, the most northern point of the haven — 
 the spot where the traveller leaves the iron road of modern 
 times to betake himself how he can to the ancient city of 
 Saint David's — at this border stronghold of the Englishry, 
 castle and town rise proudly over the low ground at their 
 feet, low ground where, at the favourable moment, the in- 
 land sea shows itself. But the castle, noble in its position 
 and outline, is degraded and disfigured by its modern use 
 as a gaol. At Haverfordwest the objects of greatest 
 attraction are ecclesiastical. There is the church of Saint 
 Mary, of an uncouth outline enough outside, but which 
 shelters pillars and arches of the thirteenth century 
 which might stand part of the richest minster. And 
 there is the ruined priory by the water, with the shell of 
 its aisleless cruciform church, once seemingly, with its 
 long lancets, the fellow of the little cathedral at Killaloe. 
 From Haverfordwest the railway will lead us to its 
 most distant point at Neyland or New Milford, with 
 Pater or Pembroke Dock opposite to it. Here we are in 
 the thick of the works of modern times. But we have 
 only to cross the hill between the main haven and one of 
 its creeks, and we come in sight of the opposite heights 
 crowned by the castle of Pembroke and the priory of 
 Monkton. The narrow inlet of the ocean, dwindled to 
 the size of a small stream, ebbs and flows between the 
 two hills, and the proud fortress which grew out of the 
 wooden structure of Arnulf of Montgomery rises straight 
 from the rocks which form one of its coasts. A cave, the
 
 SOUTH PEMBROKESHIRE CASTLES. 43 
 
 Wogan — the British name survives for a natural object 
 — not quite of the size of Wookey Hole in Mendip — 
 perhaps its namesake — or of the Devil's Hole in the Peak- 
 land, but big enough to be striking and solemn, burrows, 
 as it were, under the hall of the castle, and is itself taken 
 into the line of the defences. The walls with their towers, 
 the huge round tower — not quite the rival of Coucy, but 
 the nearest surviving approach to it in Britain — the stately 
 hall itself with its late thirteenth-century windows, the 
 gateway, the whole circuit of the castle, all join to form a 
 group worthy to be the head of the Flemish land, worthy 
 to be the home of the great earls of whom the one gained 
 his fame by sheltering the youth of Henry of Winchester, 
 and the other by withstanding liis misrule. 
 
 The castle stands nobly, whether as seen immediately 
 from below or from the opposite side. But the Monkton 
 view, though it brings out the architecture of the castle 
 itself less perfectly, is perhaps the most characteristic of 
 all. The priory stands on its height, one of that class of 
 double churches whose arrangements seem at best to be 
 beginning to be understood — a church without transepts, 
 with a graceful choir and Lady chapel of the fourteenth 
 century, now in ruins, attached to a ruder nave of the 
 native type. In its churchyard — so it is said on the spot — 
 not so long ago stone seats still remained for the hearers of 
 the out-door sermon which was preached from the church- 
 yard cross. Below it stands, not exactly a castle, but a for- 
 tified house, a ' domus defensabilis,' thoroughly character- 
 istic of the district. On the opposite side are the castle, 
 the town wall, the massive tower of Saint Mary's church, 
 contrasting with the slender one of the priory itself, but 
 both such as could be found nowhere else. In mere extent 
 the town of Pembroke does not rank above an English 
 market-town ; but, just as with the small towns of Ger- 
 many, its position gave it importance. As the capital of 
 the conquered land, the seat of the local chief and of the 
 burgesses gathered under the shade of his fortress, a town
 
 44 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 of this class really ranked ratlier -with Exeter and Lincoln 
 than with the iietty places on whose level its mere physical 
 size would place it. 
 
 While one horn of the haven reaches to Haverfordwest 
 and another to Pembroke, each washing a fortress which 
 protects a considerable town, a third horn washes a third 
 fortress, which stands all alone, the stronghold of a lord, 
 not the shelter of a civic settlement. This is Carew, 
 a place whose name calls for a short lecture on its pro- 
 nunciation. The name is British, caerau, camps, a name 
 handed on from some encampment of the race who were 
 di'iven out. But the received English spelling is Carew, 
 keeping in its last syllable a survival of the British plural ; 
 and its received English sound is exactly the same as 
 Carey, not deviating very much from the sound of the 
 Welsh original. From the place a family took its name, 
 and, till within a generation or two, the name of both 
 place and family was alwaj-s sounded Carey. But, as 
 Smith becames Smythe and Smijth, so Caroo v^a,s thought 
 to have a finer sound, and the barbarous pronunciation is 
 actually making its way from the family to the castle. 
 The castle itself is in some j)oiiits a contrast to that of 
 Pembroke. While at Pembroke we have a purely mili- 
 tary castle, mainly of the thirteenth centmy, at Carew 
 we can trace the steps by which the mere fortress gradually 
 changed into the great house. The gates and towers are 
 there after the old pattern, but the great hall was tho- 
 roughly recast in the days of Henry the Seventh by Sir 
 Rhys ap Thomas, a person who plays some part in general 
 history, and who holds a very great place indeed in local 
 imagination. Joining on to his work, built on by a most 
 violent contrast against one of the .original towers with 
 its vast spur buttresses, is a range of large rooms of the 
 confirmed domestic architecture of the Elizabethan age. 
 The whole is forsaken and roofless ; but, as often happens, 
 the latest part of the building is the most ruinous. Huge 
 square windows, with their mullions and transoms, are
 
 SOUTH PEMBROKESHIRE CASTLES. 46 
 
 not so well fitted to weather storms as the massive walls 
 of a Norman keep. 
 
 The castle of Carew then is not only striking in its 
 general outline and worth studying in many of its details, 
 but it is specially instructing from its combinatioTi of 
 military and domestic architecture. But on the road from 
 Pembroke to Carew the traveller will do well to turn aside 
 to take such a view as is allowed him of another forsaken 
 and roofless building of the ecclesiastical-domestic class, 
 the once episcopal manor of Lamphey. The building, 
 once a favourite residence of the bishops of Saint David's, 
 is well worth the attention of the special student of 
 domestic architecture ; but in a more general aspect it is 
 chiefly remarkable for the question which has been raised, 
 whether its peculiar arcaded parapet, which bears a faint 
 likeness to the beautiful parapets of the palace of Saint 
 David's and the castle of Swansea, is the work of the 
 same architect, the famous Bishop Henry Gower of the 
 fourteenth century. But, compared with the work in the 
 other building, the Lamphey parapet looks so very poor 
 that it must surely be a weak imitation of later times. We 
 may with more confidence look for the hand of Gower in 
 the neighbouring church of Carew, one of the best of 
 those in the district which do not conform to the local 
 type. 
 
 From Carew, castle and church, the wayfarer will 
 naturally make his way to Tenby, but he will do well to 
 turn aside to give a glance to the church of Gumfreston 
 on its slope, with a singular mineral well at the bottom of 
 the dell in which either the natural philosopher or the 
 physician may find some interest. The church itself has 
 no detail of any kind, but no better specimen can be 
 found of the strange, wild, picturesque character of the 
 local type. At Tenby itself, the huge church has nothing 
 local but the tower ; but the process by which it has 
 swelled to its present form is worth comparing with 
 Grantham and Great Yarmouth. The most really interest-
 
 46 SOUTH WALES. 
 
 inpf thin^ at Tenby is the town wall, wliicli remains very 
 nearly perfect tlirou<^liout the whole of one side. Of the 
 oastle only fragments are left; but the peninsular hill 
 stands nobly, lookiny: over the sea two ways, to the island 
 known as Caldy on the one side, and on the other side to 
 the Worm's Head, the western promontory of Gower, the 
 Saxon or Flemish fellow of the Scandinavian Orms Head 
 of Gwynedd. From Tenby the favourite excursion is, not 
 without reason, to the castle of Manorbeer, the birthplace 
 of Giraldus. Five- and-twenty years back there was not 
 much to be made out here beyond a picturesque outline 
 of walls and round towers. But the chief features have 
 lately been brought clearly to light, a hall and a chapel 
 whose changes are well worth study, and among which 
 are parts of Giraldus' own day or earlier. The castle 
 stands well on the south coast, looking down on a small 
 bay, and with the wildest and strangest even of Pembroke- 
 shire churches on the side of an opposite hill. As to the 
 origin of the name of this place many strange guesses 
 have been made. It may be well to preserve the strangest. 
 At some unrecorded time the land was laid waste by a 
 huo-e and savage bear. For a while no means were found 
 of killing, trapping, or otherwise getting rid of the enemy. 
 At last a stout knight of those parts met the terrible 
 beast in single combat. At last he slew him, but not till 
 after so long and hard a struggle that it was for a while 
 doubtful to which victory would fall, ' man or bear.' 
 Wherefore the name of the place was called Manorbeer. 
 
 «
 
 WESSEX
 
 49 
 
 THE PLACE OF EXETER IN ENGLISH 
 HISTORY. 
 
 [Read at the Exeter Meeting of the Archfeological Institute, July 30, 1873. 
 Some few passagespiave been worked in from an earlier article on Exeter 
 in the ' Saturday Review,' June 11, 1870.] 
 
 The tliouglit sometimes comes into the mind of the 
 English traveller in other lands that the cities of his own 
 land must seem bat of small account in the eyes of a 
 traveller from the lands which he visits. I speak of course 
 as an antiquary ; I speak not of modern prosperity and 
 modern splendour ; I speak of the historical associations 
 of past times and of the visible monuments which past 
 times have left behind them. Our best ecclesiastical and 
 our best military building's, the minsters of Durham and 
 Ely, the castles of Rochester and Caernarvon, are indeed 
 unsurpassed by buildings of the same class in any other 
 land. But buildings of this kind are few and far be- 
 tween ; the English town, great or small, does not, as a 
 rule, make the same impression, as an artistic and anti- 
 quarian object, as a town of the same class in Italy, 
 Germany, Burgundy, France, or Aquitaine. The ordinary 
 English market- town has commonly little to show beyond 
 its parish church. Its history, if it has any history, is 
 simply that it has been, so to speak, the accidental site of 
 some of the events of general English history, that it has 
 been the scene of some battle or the birth-place of some 
 great man. In many parts of the Continent such a town 
 would have its walls, its gates, its long lines of ancient 
 houses ; it would have too a history of its own, a history 
 
 E
 
 50 WESSEX. 
 
 perliaps hai'dly known beyond its own borders, but still a 
 history ; some tale of its lords or of its burghers, of lords 
 ruling over a miniature dominion, of burghers defending 
 a miniature commonwealth, but still lords and burghers 
 who have a history, no less than kingdoms and common- 
 wealths on a greater scale. In towns of a higher class, 
 the peers of our shire-towns and cathedral cities, the 
 palace of the prince, the council-house of the common- 
 wealth, perhaps a long range of the dwellings of old 
 patrician houses, speak of the greatness of a city which 
 once held its rank among European capitals, as the 
 dwelling-place of a prince or as a free city of the Empire. 
 I speak not of world-famous cities Avhich have been 
 the seats of mighty kingdoms, of commonwealths which 
 could bear themselves as the peers of kingdoms, or of 
 the Lords of the World themselves. I speak not of 
 Venice or Florence, of Trier or of Ravenna. I speak 
 of cities of a class one degree lower. I speak of the 
 last home of Carolingian kingship on the rock of Laon ; 
 I speak of the walls of successive ages, spreading each 
 round another, like the circles of Ecbatana — the works 
 of Gaul and Eomau and Frank, of counts and bishops 
 and citizens — gathering around the minster and the cas- 
 tles of Le Mans. I speak of the Bern of Theodoric by 
 the Adige and of the Bern of Berchthold by the Aar. 
 I speak of the council-houses of Liibeck and Ghent, of 
 Padua and Piacenza, of the episcopal palace at Liege 
 and the ducal palace at Dijon, of the castled steep which 
 looks down on the church of Saint Elizabeth at Marburg, 
 of the hill, with its many-towered church, its walls, its gate- 
 ways, its rugged streets, which rises above the island home 
 of Frederick at Gelnhausen. We have few such spots as 
 these, spots so rich at once in history and in art. And 
 yet we need not grieve that we are in this matter poorer 
 than other nations. Whatever is taken away from the 
 greatness of particular cities and districts is added to the 
 general greatness of the whole kingdom. Why is the
 
 EXETER, 51 
 
 history of Niirnberg greater than the history of Exeter ? 
 Simply because the history of England is greater than 
 the history of Germany. Why have not our cities such 
 mighty senate-houses, such gorgeous palaces, as the seats 
 of republican freedom or of princely rule among the 
 Italian and the Teutonic cities ? It is because England 
 was one, while Italy and Germany and Gaul were still 
 divided. Our cities lack the stately buildings, they lack 
 the historic memories. But they lack them because 
 England became an united nation too soon to allow of her 
 nobles and prelates growing into sovereign princes, too 
 soon to allow of the local freedom of her cities and 
 boroughs growing into the absolute independence of 
 sovereign commonwealths. 
 
 And if the cities of England are less rich in historic 
 memories, less thickly set with historic buildings, than 
 the cities of the Continent, they must no less yield to 
 them in mere antiquity. We have no cities like Massalia 
 and Gades, which can trace u^j an unbroken being and 
 an unbroken prosperity to the days of Greek and even of 
 Phoenician colonization. It is only here and there that 
 we can find a site which can even pretend to have lived 
 on, like the ancient towns of Italy and Gaul and Spain, 
 as a dwelling-place of man from the earliest recorded 
 times, the home in turn of the Briton, the Eoman, and 
 the Englishman. Perusia, Tolosa, Herai, a crowd of 
 others in the south-western lands, are cities which have 
 lived on, keeping their own names or the names of their 
 tribes. They are cities reared by the Etruscan, the 
 Iberian, and the Celt, or become possessions of Roman, 
 Gothic, and Frankish masters. In our land Dr. Guest has 
 shown that London itself has but doubtful claims to an 
 unbroken being from the days of the Briton. Even of the 
 cities raised in Britain by the Roman, though many are 
 still inhabited, though some have been constantly in- 
 habited, yet many others, like Bath and Chester, rose up 
 again after a season of desolation, while other sites, 
 
 B 2
 
 52 WJESSEX. 
 
 Anderida, Calleva, Uriconium, remain desolate to this 
 day. All this is the natural result of the history of the 
 country. The tie which binds the history of the Roman 
 to the history of the conquered provincial on the one 
 hand and of the Teutonic conqueror on the other is weaker 
 in Britain than in other lands. Nowhere else did the 
 Roman find so little of native groundwork on which to 
 build ; nowhere else was his own work so utterly swept 
 away. The grass which once grew over the temples and 
 houses of Deva and AquEe Solis, the grass which still grows 
 over the temples and houses of Calleva and Anderida, is 
 the best witness to the difference between the English 
 Conquest of Britain and the Gothic, Burgundian, and 
 Frankish conquests of other lands. 
 
 Yet the very fact that the cities of England must yield 
 in antiquity, in artistic wealth, in historical associations, 
 to the cities of other European lands, does not fail to give 
 them a special interest of their own. The domestic 
 history of an English town, which was always content to 
 be a municipality, which never aspired to become an in- 
 dependent commonwealth, seems tame beside the long 
 and stirring annals of the free cities of Italy and Germany. 
 Yet, for that very reason, it has a special value of its own. 
 Because the city has not striven after an independent 
 being, it has done its work as a part of a greater whole. 
 Because it has not aspired to be a sovereign common- 
 wealth, it has played its part in building up a nation. 
 And the comparison between the lowly English muni- 
 cipality and the proud Italian or German commonwealth 
 has also an interest of another kind. The difference be- 
 tween the two is simply the difference implied in the 
 absence of political independence in the one case and its 
 presence in the other. This difference is purely external. 
 The internal constitution, the internal history, sometimes 
 the internal revolutions, often present the most striking 
 analoo"ies. In both we may often see the change from 
 democracy to oligarchy and from oligarchy to democracy.
 
 EXETER. 63 
 
 In both we may see men who in old Greece would have 
 taken their place as demagogues, perhaps as tyrants. 
 Here, as in other lands, the city has often had to strive for 
 its rights against the neighbouring nobles. Exeter has 
 something to tell of earls and countesses of Devon : Bristol 
 has something to tell of its own half citizens, half tyrants, 
 the lords of Berkeley. We may see germs of a federal 
 system among the Five Danish Boroughs of Mercia, 
 among the Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex, and in the 
 Hansa of the Burghs of Scotland. We may see germs 
 too of the dominion of the city, ruling, like Sparta or 
 Bern, over surrounding subject districts, so long as the 
 county of Middlesex neither chooses her Sheriffs herself 
 nor receives them from the central Government, but has 
 to accept such Sheriffs as may be given her by the great 
 neighbouring City. To that city her inhabitants stand 
 thus far in the relation which a Spartan knew as that 
 of ireploLKOL, and a Berner as that of Unterthanen. 
 
 In the free cities of the Continent in short we see what 
 English cities might have grown into, if the royal j)Ower in 
 England had been no stronger than that of the Emperors, 
 and if England had therefore split up into separate states, 
 like Germany, Italy, and Gaul. A city or borough, with 
 its organized municipal constitution, could, if the central 
 power were either gradually or suddenly removed, at once 
 act as an independent commonwealth. It is plain that a 
 county could not do so with anything like the same ease. 
 It has been the constant tendency to unity in England, the 
 tendency to subordinate every local power to the common 
 King and the common Parliament, which has made the 
 difference between a municipality like Exeter and a com- 
 monwealth like Florence. And here, in this city of Exeter, 
 thoughts of this kind have a special fitness. No city of 
 England has a history which comes so near to the history 
 of the great continental cities. No city in England can 
 boast of a longer unbroken existence ; none is so direct a 
 link between the earliest and the latest days of the history
 
 54 WESSEX. 
 
 of our island. None has in all ages more steadily kept 
 the character of a local capital, the undisputed head and 
 centre of a great district. And none has come so near to 
 being something more than a local capital. None has 
 had so fair a chance as Exeter once had of becoming an 
 independent commonwealth, the head of a confederation 
 of smaller boroughs, perhaps the mistress of dependent 
 towns and subject districts, ruling over her TrsplotKoi or 
 Unterthanen as Florence ruled over Pisa, as Bern ruled 
 over Lausanne. 
 
 I think then that it is not with mere words of course 
 that I may congratulate the members of this Institute on 
 finding themselves at last within the walls — here it is no 
 figure of speech to say within the walls — of the great city 
 of Western England. For years we have been, like Swegen 
 or William himself, knocking at the gates. At least we 
 have stood outside, and we would have knocked at the 
 gates, if any gates had been left for us to knock at. We 
 have, wherefore no man knoweth, dealt with the Dam- 
 nonian Isca as the last among the great cities of England, 
 but it has assuredly not been because it is the least. 
 We have seen York and Lincoln and Chester; and, if 
 Exeter must yield to York and Lincoln and Chester in 
 wealth of actually surviving monuments, it assuredly does 
 not yield to any of them in the historic interest of its long 
 annals. It has in truth a peculiar interest of its own, in 
 which it stands alone among the cities of England. It 
 is one of the few ties which directly bind the Englishman 
 to the Eoman and the Briton. It is the greatest trophy 
 of that stage of English conquest, when our forefathers, 
 weaned from the fierce creed of Woden and Thunder, 
 deemed it enough to conquer, and no longer sought to 
 destroy. 
 
 The first glimpse of the city shows the traveller that 
 it is one of a class which is common on the Continent but 
 rare in England, and which among West- Saxon cities is 
 absolutely unique. From Winchester onwards — we may
 
 EXETER. 55 
 
 say from Dorchester, for tlie forsaken sites must not be 
 forgotten in the reckoning — the seats of the West- Saxon 
 bishoprics, as a rule, lie low. Take the most familiar 
 test ; besides Exeter, Sherborne is the only one to which 
 the traveller on the railway looks up, and to Sherborne 
 he looks up far less than he looks up to Exeter. From 
 Sherborne indeed the Lotharingian Hermann took a high 
 flight to the waterless hill of the elder Salisbury; but 
 Richard Poore redressed the balance by bringing church 
 and city down into the plain of Merefield. Dorchester 
 looks up at the camp on Sinodun ; Winchester looks up 
 at the place of martyrdom on Saint Giles's hill. Wells 
 crouches at the foot of Mendip; Glastonbury, on her 
 sacred island, crouches at the foot of the Archangel's Tor. 
 Bath has in modern times climbed to a height like that 
 of Lincoln or Durham, but the site of her abbey shows 
 how the true Bath, the Aquse Solis that Ceawlin con- 
 quered, the Old Borough where Eadgar wore his crown, was 
 built, as the Jew says in Richard of the Devizes, ' ad por- 
 tas inferi.' But Exeter tells us another tale at the "first 
 glance. The city indeed looks up at heights loftier than 
 itself, but the city itself sits on a height rising far above 
 railway or river. Exeter, Isca, Caer Wise, is in short a 
 city of the same class as Bourges and Chartres, as com- 
 munal Le Mans and kingly Laon, as Lausanne and 
 Geneva by their lakes, as Chur and Sitten in their Alpine 
 valleys. We see here, what we see so commonly in Gaul, 
 so rarely in Britain, the Celtic hill-fort, which has grown 
 into the Roman city, which has lived on through the 
 Teutonic conquest, and which still, after all changes, 
 keeps its place as the undoubted head of its own district. 
 In Wessex such a history is unique ; in all southern 
 England London is the only parallel, and that but an im- 
 perfect one. The name carries on the same lesson which 
 is taught us by the site. Caer Wise has never lost its 
 name. It has been Latinized into Isca ; it has been Teu- 
 tonized into Exanceaster and cut shoi^t into modern Exeter ;
 
 66 WESSEX. 
 
 but the city by the Exe has, through all conquests, 
 through all changes of language, proclaimed itself by its 
 name as the city by the Exe. For the Exe is of no small 
 moment in the history of Exeter. The city is not only a 
 fortress on a height ; it is a fortress on a height over- 
 hanging a river. Every one must feel the difference 
 between a position of this kind and one, like that of 
 Bristol or Chalons, where the town was built close on, or 
 rather in, the river. At Chalons this kind of site was 
 chosen, because in the Catalaunian Fields no hill-tops 
 were to be had, and next to a hill-top an island in a river 
 was the safest site. At Bristol, a comparatively modern 
 town, of purely English name and origin, the same kind 
 of site was chosen for another reason. Bristol was a com- 
 mercial town from the very beginning; the merchant 
 borough of course needed defences, but the post was not 
 in itself a military one. At Exeter, a British hill-fort, 
 strength of position was the first object ; commerce was 
 something which came after. The walls ran round the 
 Croat of the hill ; it was only at one point that they came 
 down to the river, where the Quay Gate opened to receive 
 a commerce which, in the early middle age, was one of the 
 richest in England. 
 
 The name and the site go together. The name has 
 had a more perfectly continuous being than the names 
 of most of the cities of northern Gaul. At Rheims, 
 Paris, Bourges, a crowd of others, the name of the tribe 
 has supplanted the true name of the city ; but Isca, like the 
 cities of the south, like Burdigala and Massalia, has never 
 exchanged its own name for the name of the Damnonian 
 people. Name and site together at once distinguish 
 Exeter fi'om any of the ordinary classes of English towns. 
 They distinguish it from Teutonic ~ marks which have 
 grown into modern towns, and which, like Beading and 
 Basingstoke, still keep the clan names of the Rsedingas and 
 Basingas. They distinguish it no less from Roman towns 
 like Bath and Chester, which rose again after a season of
 
 EXETER. 67 
 
 desolation — from towns like Wells and Peterbcrougli, 
 wliicli grew up under the shadow of some great minster — 
 from fortresses or havens like Taunton or Kingston-on- 
 Huil, which sprang into life at the personal bidding of 
 some far-sighted king — from towns like Durham and New 
 Salisbury, where church and city arose together when some 
 wise bishop sought, on the peninsular hill or on the open 
 meadow, a home more safe either from foreign invaders or 
 from unkindly neighbours. Exeter is none of these ; like 
 Lincoln it stands on a site which Briton, Eoman, and 
 Englishman have alike made their own ; like Lincoln it 
 is a city set on an hill, it has a temple built on high ; on 
 the whole, Lincoln is its nearest parallel among the cities 
 of England; in some points the histories of the two pre- 
 sent a striking likeness ; in others they present differences 
 not less instructive than their likenesses. 
 
 Exeter then, as a hill-fort city, has, more than almost 
 any other city of England, a close analogy with the ancient 
 cities of Gaul. But there is another point in which the 
 history of Exeter altogether differs from theirs. The 
 Gaulish city has almost always been the seat of a bishop- 
 ric from the days of the first establishment of Christianity. 
 The cathedral church and the episcopal palace stand, and 
 always have stood, side by side, on the highest point of 
 the hill on which the city stands. The city is indeed 
 older than the bishopric, because it is older than Chris- 
 tianity itself. But the bishopric is something which was 
 firmly established during the days of Roman dominion, 
 something which, as far as the Teutonic conquerors were 
 concerned, might be looked on as an inherent and imme- 
 morial part of the city. There had been a time when 
 Bourges and Chartres and Paris had not been seats of 
 bishoprics ; but it was only as seats of bishoprics that their 
 Frankish conquerors knew them. The Roman bishopric, 
 like so many other things that were Roman, lived on 
 through the Teutonic conquest, and, except in the case of 
 very modern unions and suppressions, it has lived on till
 
 5S WESSEX. 
 
 oin- own day. In England, on tlie otlier hand, besides the 
 union of some bishoprics and the division of others, there 
 has been a -wandering to and fro of the immediate seats 
 of episcopal rule to which there has been no parallel in 
 Gaul. In Ganl but few bishoprics have been moved— as 
 distinguished from being united or divided — from their 
 original seats ; in England it is rather the rule than the 
 exception that a bishopric should have changed its place 
 once or twice since its foundation. The causes of these 
 differences go very deep into the history of the two 
 countries : it is enough to say here that the character 
 of the English Conquest, as a heathen conquest, hin- 
 dered any place within the oldest England from being 
 the unbroken seat of any Eoman and Christian institution. 
 Add too that in Britain neither Celts nor Teutons, unused 
 as both of them were to the fully-developed city-life of the 
 South, ever strictly followed the rule which was universal 
 in Italy, Spain, and Gaul, that of placing the seat of the 
 bishop in the chief town of his diocese. Hence, while on 
 the Continent, the city and its bishopric are both, from a 
 Teutonic point of view, immemorial, — that is to say, both 
 existed before and lived through the Teutonic conquest — 
 in not a few English cities the bishopric is a comparatively 
 modern institution. The bishop has not been there from 
 the beginning ; he has been placed there by the Confessor 
 or by the Conqueror, by Henry the First or by Henry the 
 Eighth, or by virtue of acts of Parliament which we can 
 ourselves remember. So it is conspicuously at Exeter. 
 The hill-fort has grown into the city ; the city has lived 
 through all later conquests ; but the bishopric is some- 
 thing which, in the long history of such a city, may 
 almost seem a creation of yesterday. Bishops of Exeter 
 have played an important part both in local and in general 
 history ; but the city of Exeter had begun to play an im- 
 portant part in the history of Britain ages before bishops 
 of Exeter were heard of. This fact is stamped on the 
 outward look of the city. As we now look at the city,
 
 EXETER. 69 
 
 the episcopal cliurcli seems to stand out only less con- 
 spicuously than Bonrges or Geneva, as the roof and crown 
 of all ; but for ages its predominance in the landscape 
 must have been more than disputed by the castle on 
 the Red Mount ; and Isca had lived and flourished for a 
 thousand years before its height was crowned with a stone 
 of either minster or castle. In truth, if the cathedral church 
 is the prominent object, it is so mainly because of the lack 
 or destruction of other objects. The castle is practically 
 gone, mutilated and disfigured as it is by modern build- 
 ings ; its gateway alone and the vast ditch below represent 
 it, and these do not show in the general view. There was 
 no abbey without the walls, no Saint Ouens or Saint 
 Augustines, to rival the church of the bishop. And, as in 
 some other cities, Canterbury and Winchester among 
 them, the episcopal church draws some part of its import- 
 ance from the remarkable poverty of the parish churches. 
 Prominent as Exeter cathedral is in the first view, we find, 
 when we come to study the city more minutely, that it 
 is not the real centre, like those head churches of the old 
 Gaulish cities which often supplant some older temple of 
 paganism. It is in truth a new comer stowed away in its 
 own corner. 
 
 It may here be well to compare Exeter for a moment 
 with two continental cities in which the points both of 
 likeness and of unlikeness seem to reach their highest 
 degree. As Exeter stands upon its hill, but is still sur- 
 rounded by loftier hills that look down upon it, so the 
 loftier heights of Chur and Sitten are looked down upon 
 by the snowy peaks of the Pennine and Rsetian Alps. Vast 
 as is the difference of scale, there is a real likeness of 
 position, as compared with the isolated hill of Chartres, 
 rising in the midst of its vast corn-land. Like the Dam- 
 nonian Isca, Sedunum and Curia Rsetorum are cities which 
 have lived on from Roman to modern times. But in them, 
 not only the city, but the bishopric also has lived on 
 through all changes. And, following the common law of
 
 60 WES8EX. 
 
 the bishoprics within the Empire, the bishops of those 
 cities grew to a height of temporal power to which no 
 prelate, not the Pahitine of Durham himself, ever reached 
 in Eng-Iaud, and which the bishops of Exeter were among 
 those who were furthest from reaching. At Chur the 
 church and palace of the bishop, with its surrounding 
 quarter, grew into a fortified akropolis, where the bishop 
 still reigned as prince, even when the lower city had 
 become independent of his rule. At Sitten church and 
 castle stand perched on the twin peaks of Valeria and 
 Tourbillon. But the castle was the fortress, not of king 
 or duke, but of the prelate himself. In some English 
 bishoprics too the bishop was, if not prince, at least 
 temporal lord. At Wells, for instance, the city simply 
 arose outside the close, and its municipal franchises were 
 the grant of its episcopal lords. At Exeter, where the 
 bishop came as something new into a city which had 
 stood for ages, it was as much as he could do if he could 
 maintain the exemption of his own immediate precinct, 
 at all events when the civic sword was wielded by a mayor 
 of the ready wit and the stubborn vigour of John 
 Shillingford. 
 
 It is not however my business to dwell at any detail on 
 either the ecclesiastical or municipal history of the city. 
 My business is with the city in its more general aspect. 
 I have pointed out two of the characteristic features of its 
 history, how it is rather continental than English in its posi- 
 tion, as a hill-fort city living on from Roman and British 
 times, while it is specially English in the modern date 
 of the foundation of its bishopric. The first question 
 which now suggests itself is one which I cannot answer. 
 When did the city first become a West-Saxon possession? 
 When did the British Caer-Wisc, ihe Eoman Isca, pass 
 into the English Exanceaster ? Of that event I can find 
 no date, no trustworthy mention. In the days of -Alfred, 
 as every reader of the Chronicles knows, Exeter figures 
 as an English fortress, and a fortress of great importance,
 
 EXETER. 61 
 
 more than once taken and retaken by the great king 
 and his Danish enemies. But I am as little able to fix the 
 date of the English conquest of Isca as I am to fix the date 
 of its original foundation by the Briton. John Shillingford 
 tells us that Exeter was a walled city before the Incarna- 
 tion of Christ, and, though it is not likely to have been 
 a walled city in any sense that would satisfy either 
 modern or Roman engineers, it is likely enough to have 
 been already a fortified post before Csesar landed in 
 Britain. Nor can I presume to determine whether Isca 
 ever bore the name of PenholtJceyre, which sounds rather 
 like a British name read backwards with an English word 
 thrown in by the way. Nor can I say what was the exact 
 nature of Vespasian's dealings with the city at the time 
 when we hear of a mysterious sale of thirty Jews — some 
 say, only their heads — for the price of one penny. In a later 
 age, another civic worthy, the famous John Hooker, tells 
 us that Vespasian, when Duke under the Emperor Claudius, 
 besieged the city by order of his master, but was driven 
 away, like some later besiegers, by the valour of the 
 citizens, and betook himself to Jerusalem as an easier con- 
 quest. These questions are beyond me ; but the identity 
 of the British Caer-wisc, the Roman Isca, the English 
 Exanceaster, is witnessed by a crowd of authorities. Still I 
 know of no evidence to fix the point at which Isca became 
 Exanceaster, any more than to fix the point when Isca 
 came into being. As the story of Saint Boniface runs, we 
 are told that he was born at Crediton, and brought up at 
 Exeter. This would of course imply that, before the end 
 of the seventh century, Isca was already an English town, 
 and a town where some place of education had already 
 come into being. Now for the birth of Boniface at Cre- 
 diton there is no authority earlier than the fourteenth 
 century, though the unbroken and uncontroverted tradi- 
 tion may be allowed to count for something. His educa- 
 tion at Exeter rests on the reading of a passage in his 
 biographer Willibald ; he is said to have been brought up
 
 62 w:essex. 
 
 at a place whose name, tliougli written in different ways, 
 we should certainly understand to be Exeter if there were 
 no reason to the contrary. It is certainly hard to bring 
 the West-Saxon conquerors even to the Devonshire borders 
 at any time earlier than the days of Ine, when the powerful 
 King Gerent reigned over Damnonia, and when Taunton 
 was a border fortress of the Englishman against the Briton. 
 Yet it may be that the difficulty arises only from taking 
 for granted that the West-Saxon entrance into Devonshire 
 must have been made by this line of conquest, the line, in 
 modern geography, of the Great Western Railway. It is 
 possible that the West- Saxons may have come in by the 
 South-Western line, by way of Dorset and not of Somerset, 
 and Exeter may have been an English possession when 
 Taunton was still a border fortress against Britons dwelling 
 north of Exeter. And this view is strengthened by the 
 fact which has been very ingeniously put forward, that the 
 dedications of the churches of the city fall into two classes, 
 English and Welsh, and that the Welsh dedications are 
 found in its northern part. One thing is certain, that under 
 -^thelwulf Devonshire was English, and that the men of 
 Devonshire, as West-Saxon subjects, fought valiantly and 
 successfully against the Danish invader. This is the first dis- 
 tinct mention in our Chronicles which marks the district as 
 an English possession, while their first mention of the city, 
 as I have already said, comes later in the same century, in 
 the wars of -Alfred. But though it was E nglish by alle- 
 giance, it was not till two generations later that the city 
 became wholly English in blood and speech. In jiEthel- 
 stan's day the city was still partly Welsh, partly English. 
 We can, if we please, according to many analogies else- 
 where, conceive the two rival nations dwelling side by 
 side within the same enclosure, but- separate d again by 
 enclosures of their own. Britons and Englishmen would 
 thus each form a city within a city, the British city lying 
 north of the English. To this state of things the Lord of 
 all Britain, the conqueror of Scot and Northman, the law-
 
 EXETER. 63 
 
 giver of England, deemed it time to put a stop, and to 
 place the supremacy of the conquering nation in the 
 chief city of the western peninsula beyond all doubt. 
 Exeter was a post which needed to be strongly fortified, 
 and its fortification was to be j)ut in no hands but such as 
 were thorouglily trustworthy. The British inhabitants 
 were driven out ; the city became purely English ; and, to 
 the confusion of those who tell us that Englishmen could 
 not put stones and mortar together till a hundred and 
 forty years later, it was encircled by a wall of square 
 stones, and strengthened by towers, marking a fourth 
 stage in the history of English fortification. Ida first 
 defended Bamburgh with a hedge or palisade ; a later 
 Northumbrian ruler strengthened it with a wall or dyke 
 of earth. Eadward the Elder surrounded Towcester with 
 a wall of stone ; ^thelstan surrounded Exeter with a wall 
 of squared stones. This is is not theory, but history. If 
 any one asks me where the wall of Jiithelstan is now, I 
 can only say that a later visitor to Exeter took care that 
 there should not be much of it left for us to see. Yet 
 there are some small fragments, huge stones put together 
 in clear imitation of the Roman fashion of building, 
 which may well enough be remains of the wall of ^thel- 
 stan. His defences doubtless followed the line of the 
 Roman wall which doubtless helped at least to supply 
 them with materials, and the plan of the city has not 
 been seriously interfered with in later repairs. It still 
 keeps the plan of the Roman Chester, modified some- 
 what by the ground. The four limbs are there, though 
 the course of one of them has been changed in later times. 
 The gates, as we have seen, are gone, though in some 
 cases they have left their memorial in the shape of hinges. 
 Now the distinguishing point in this stage of the his- 
 tory of Exeter is this, that it, alone of the great cities of 
 Britain, did not fall into the hands of the English inva- 
 ders till after the horrors of conquest had been softened 
 by the influence of Christianity. Whatever was the exact
 
 64 WSSSEX. 
 
 date of the conquest of Devonshire, it was certainly after 
 Birinus had preached the faith to that most heathen nation 
 of the Gewissas, after Cynegils and Cwichelm had been 
 phmged beneath the waters of baptism, and had built the 
 minster of Dorchester and the Old Minster of Winchester. 
 "When Caer-Wisc became an English possession, there was 
 no fear that any West-Saxon prince should deal with it as 
 jEthelfrith had dealt by Deva, as Ceawlin had dealt by 
 Uriconium and Aquse Solis, as ^lle and Cissa had dealt 
 by Anderida. The Norman came to Exeter as he came to 
 Pevensey, but he did not find the walls of Isca, like the 
 walls of Anderida, standing with no dwelling-place of 
 man within them. Neither did they stand, like the walls 
 of Deva, again to become a city and a fortress after a deso- 
 lation of three hundred years. When Isca was taken, 
 the West-Saxons had ceased to be destroyers and deemed 
 it enough to be conquerors. Thus it was that Exeter 
 stands alone, as the one great English city which has 
 lived an unbroken life from prse-English and even from 
 prse-Roman days. Whatever was the exact date at which 
 the city first became an English possession, it was not 
 till the driving out of the Welsh inhabitants under 
 ^thelstan that it became a purely English city. As 
 such it fills, during the whole of the tenth and eleventh 
 centuries, a prominent place among the cities of England, 
 and a place altogether without a rival among the cities of 
 its own part of England. Its complete adoption into the 
 English fold was accompanied by a meeting of the Witan 
 of the whole realm within the newly-raised walls, and at 
 that meeting one of the collections of laws which bear the 
 name of ^thelstan was put forth. Later in the century 
 the fortress by the Exe begins to play its part as the chief 
 bulwai'k of Western England durii>g the renewed Danish 
 invasions of the reign of jEthelred. That it could play 
 such a part, that such a site as Exeter was for ages 
 deemed a position of great strength, is a good commentary 
 on the difference between ancient and modern warfare.
 
 EXETER. 65 
 
 A siege of Exeter would be a very easy business to an 
 army possessed of modern cannon; but as against tbe 
 offensive arms of the tentb and eleventh centuries, few 
 positions could be stronger. The hill is peninsular, cut 
 off by ravines, which on each side lead nearly to the river 
 and form a kind of natural moat. The only approach on 
 level ground is the narrow isthmus to the north-east lead- 
 ing to the great eastern gate, and by that path those con- 
 querors of Exeter whose path can be traced seem always 
 to have entered it. ^ 
 
 These early sieges of Exeter form a spirit-stirring 
 tale. In our national Chronicles the second millennium 
 of the Christian a3ra is ushered in by the record which 
 tells us how the heathen host sailed up the Exe and strove 
 to break down the wall which guarded the city — how the 
 wall of jEthelstan defended by the valiant burghers bore 
 up against every onslaught, how fastly the invaders were 
 fighting, and how fastly and hardly the citizens withstood 
 them. It was no fault of those valiant citizens that, as 
 ever in that wretched reign, the valiant resistance of one 
 town or district only led to the further desolation of 
 another. Exeter was saved, but the Unready King- 
 had no help, no reward, for the men who saved it ; the 
 local force of Devonshire and Somerset had to strive how 
 they could against the full might of the invader ; and the 
 overthrow of Pinhoe and the wasting of the land around 
 followed at once upon the successful defence of the city. 
 The very next year Exeter became part of the morning- 
 gift of the Norman Lady, and for the first time — a fore- 
 taste of what was to come before the century was out — a 
 man of foreign blood, Hugh the French churl, as our 
 chroniclers call him, was set by his foreign mistress to 
 command in an English city. With no traitor, with no 
 stranger, within their walls, the men of Exeter had beaten 
 off all the attacks of the barbarians ; but now we read 
 how, through the cowardice or treason of its foreign chief, 
 Swegen was able to break down and s^Joil the city, and 
 
 p
 
 66 WHSSEX. 
 
 how the wall of ^thelstan was battered down from the 
 east gate to the west. I do not pretend to rule whether 
 this means the utter destruction of the wall or only the 
 destruction of two sides of it ; but it is certain that sixty 
 years later, when Exeter had to strive, not against Nor- 
 man traitors within but against Norman enemies without, 
 the city was again strongly fortified according to the best 
 military art of the times. It may be noticed that, in the 
 description of Swegen's taking of Exeter, though we read 
 of plundering and of breaking down the walls, we do not, 
 as we commonly do when a town is taken, hear of burn- 
 ing. As a rule, houses in those days were of wood ; and 
 it is sometimes amazing how, when a town has been 
 burned, we find it spring up again a year or two later, 
 sometimes only to be burned again. Whether in a city 
 which was so early fortified with towers and walls of 
 squared stones, other buildings too may not have been built 
 of stone earlier than was usual in other places, I leave to 
 local inquirers to settle. 
 
 After the capture by Swegen, we hear nothing more of 
 the city itself during the rest of the Danish wars. Doubt- 
 less it submitted, along with the rest of western England, 
 when ^thelmser the Ealdorman of Devonshire and all the 
 thegns of the west acknowledged Swegen as King at 
 Bath. In the war of Cnut and Eadmund the men of 
 Devonshire fought on the side of England at Sherstone, 
 but we hear nothing specially of the city. Our only know- 
 ledge of Exeter between the Danish and the Norman inva- 
 sions consists of the fact of the foundation of the bishopric, 
 and of the further fact that the city which had been part 
 of the morning-gift of Emma became also part of the 
 moruing-gift of her successor Eadgyth. The two facts 
 are connected. The special relation of the Lady to the 
 city accounts for the peculiar ceremony which, though the 
 charter in which it is recorded is marked by Mr. Kemble 
 as doubtful, can hardly be mere matter of invention. In 
 that charter we are told that Leofric, the first bishop of
 
 TIXETER. 67 
 
 the new see, was led to liis episcopal throne bj the King- 
 and the Lady, the King on his right side and the Lady 
 on his left. Here, as everywhere else in these times, 
 in every expression and in every ceremony, the strong 
 Regale, the undoubted ecclesiastical supremacy of the King 
 and his Witan, or to speak more truly, the identity of 
 the nation and the national Church, comes out plainly. 
 The Bishop is not only placed in his bishopric by the 
 King, but the Lady, as the immediate superior of the 
 city, has her part in the ceremony. The foundation of 
 the bishoi^ric was accompanied by several circumstances 
 which mark it as an event belonging to an age of transi- 
 tion. It was among the last instances of one set of 
 tendencies, among the earliest instances of another. The 
 reign of Eadward the Confessor is the last time in English 
 history, unless we are to except the reign of Edward the 
 Sixth, when two English bishoprics were joined together, 
 without a new one being founded to keep up the number. 
 Such an union had happened more than once in earlier 
 times : it happened twice under Eadward, when the bishop- 
 rics of Devonshire and Cornwall were united under Leofric, 
 and when the bishoprics of Dorset and Wiltshire were 
 united under Hermann. But this translation is also the 
 first instance of a movement which, like so many other 
 movements, began under the Normannizing Eadward and 
 went on under his Norman successors. This was the 
 change which brought England under the continental rule 
 that the bishopric should be placed in the greatest city of the 
 diocese. The translation of the see of Saint Cuthberht to 
 Durham was not a case in point ; Ealdhun sought a place 
 of safety, and he chose one so wisely that a city presently 
 grew up around his church. But the translation of the 
 West-Welsh bishopric from Bodmin and Crediton to Exeter 
 was the beginning of a system which was further carried 
 out when the great Mid-English bishopric was moved 
 from Dorchester to Lincoln, and when the East- Anglian 
 bishopric was moved from Elmhani, first to Thetford and 
 
 v2
 
 OS 1FESSEX. 
 
 then to Norwich. Again, the first bishop himself repre- 
 sents in his own person more than one of the tendencies 
 of the age. He represents the dominion of the English- 
 man over the Bi'iton ; he represents the close connexion 
 of the Englishman of that generation with liis Teutonic 
 kinsmen beyond the sea. Leofric, a native of his own 
 diocese, is described as a Briton, that is, I conceive, a 
 native of Cornwall. But, like the great mass of the land- 
 owners of Cornwall in his day, he bears a purely Englisb 
 name. Either he was the descendant of English settlers 
 iu the British land, or else he was the descendant of Britons 
 who had so far gone over to English ways as to take to 
 English, proper names, just as the English a generation or 
 two later took to Norman proper names. In either way 
 he represents the process through which the list which 
 Domesday gives us of tlie landowners of his diocese in the 
 days of King Eadward reads only one degree less English 
 than the list of the landowners of Kent and Sussex. But 
 Leofric, whether English or British by blood, was neither 
 English nor British by education. His bringing up was 
 Lotharingian, and he was the first prelate of his age to 
 bring the Lotharingian discix3line into England. He thus 
 represents the high position which was held at the time, 
 :is seminaries of ecclesiastical learning and discipline, by 
 the secular churches of Germany, by those especially of 
 that corner of the Teutonic kingdom which might be looked 
 on as the border-land of i/'rmany, Gaul, and Britain, 
 and which drew scholars from all those lands. Leofric 
 represents further that close connexion, especially in 
 ecclesiastical matters, between England and the Teutonic 
 mainland which began under ^thelstan and Eadgar, 
 which went on under Cnut, and which reached its height 
 ^/hen Godwine and Harold found it aii useful counterpoise 
 to the Norman and French tendencies of King Eadward. 
 Leofric again, in the constitution which he brought into 
 his church, the stricter discipline of Chrodegang, marks 
 the beginning of a tendency which was afterwards carried
 
 EXETER. 69 
 
 on by Gisa at Wells, and for a moment by Thomas at 
 York, but which presently gave way to the system which 
 Eemigins brought from Eonen to Lincoln, and which, in 
 theory at least, still remains the constitution of the old- 
 foundation churches of England. Leofric survived the 
 Norman invasion ; he survived the great siege of Exeter, 
 in which his name is not mentioned. Insular by birth, 
 but continental in feeling, he was succeeded by one of 
 the Norman settlers in England who became an English- 
 man at heart. Osbern, a son of the famous Gilbert of 
 Brionne, a brother of the fierce Earl of Hereford, came 
 to England, like so many of his countrymen, to seek 
 his fortune at the court of King Eadward. Of him 
 alone among the foreign prelates of that day we read 
 that in his manner of life he followed the customs of 
 England, and had no love for the pomp of Normandy. Of 
 his English tastes we have still a negative witness among 
 us. Throughout his episcopate, down to the fourth year of 
 Henry the First, the church in which Englishmen had 
 been content to worship still stood. The oldest parts of 
 the present church of Exeter date from the time of his 
 successor, William of Warelwast, the former enemy of 
 Anselm, and it is his work that gives the church its distinc- 
 tive character. Every one knows its strange and unique 
 outline. No western towers, no central lantern but those 
 two side towers which have been irreverently likened to 
 paddle-boxes, and which the smaller church of Ottery Saint 
 Mary has, perhaps dutifully, but somewhat servilely, re- 
 produced. And the outside has affected the inside in a 
 way which, whether we approve or not, is at least unique. 
 The absence of a central tower, or of a lantern of any kind, 
 has made room for what is likely to be the longest un- 
 broken vaulted roof in the world. 
 
 The great ecclesiastical change of the eleventh century 
 has carried us on, in point of date, beyond the great time 
 which stands out above all others in the history of 
 Exeter, the time when we may say that for eighteen days
 
 70 WESSEX. 
 
 Exeter was England. The iale of iLe resistance of 
 the western lands and their capital to the full power of 
 the Conqueror is one which ought never to pass away from 
 the memories of Englishmen. The city, with its walls 
 and towers again made ready for defence — the mother and 
 the sons of Harold within its walls — the march of the 
 conqueror to the Eastern gate — the faint-heartedness of 
 the leaders — the strong heart of the commons, who en- 
 dured to see their hostage blinded before their eyes — 
 the resistance as stubborn against William as it had been 
 against Swegen — the breach of the walls by arts which to 
 the simpler generalship of Swegen were unknown — the 
 escape of Gytha and her companions by the water-gate — 
 the bloodless entry of the Conqueror — the foundation of 
 the castle to curb the stout-hearted city — the raising of 
 its tribute to lessen the wealth which had enabled it to 
 resist — all form a tale than which, even in that stirring 
 time, none, save the tale of the great battle itself, speaks 
 more home to the hearts of all who love to bear in mind how 
 long and how hard a work it was to make England yield 
 to her foreign master. Our hearts beat with those of the 
 defenders of Exeter ; we mourn as the mother of the last 
 English king flees from the last English city which 
 maintained the cause of the house of God wine. But we 
 see none the less that it was for the good of England that 
 Exeter should fall. A question was there decided, greater 
 than the question whether England should be ruled by 
 Harold, Eadgar, or William, the question whether England 
 should be one. When Exeter stood forth for one moment 
 to claim the rank of a free Imperial city, the chief of a 
 confederation of the lesser towns of the West — when she, 
 or at least her rulers, professed themselves willing to 
 receive William as an external lord, to ^Day him the tribute 
 which had been paid to the old kings, but refused to 
 admit him within her walls as her immediate sovereign — 
 we see that the tendency was at work in England by which 
 the kingdoms of the Empire were split up into loose col-
 
 EXETER. 71 
 
 lections of independent cities and principalities. We see 
 that the path was opening by -which Exeter might have 
 come to be another Llibeck, the head of a Damnonian 
 Hansa ; another Bern, the mistress of the subject lands of 
 the western peninsula. Such a dream sounds wild in our 
 ears, and we may be sure that no such ideas were present 
 in any such definite shape to the minds of the defenders 
 of Exeter. But any such conscious designs were as little 
 likely to be present to the minds of those who, in any 
 German or Italian city, took the first steps in the course 
 by which, from a municipality or less than a municipality, 
 the city grew into a sovereign commonwealth. In a record 
 of what did happen that separate defence of the western 
 lands which ended in a separate defence of Exeter is simply 
 an instance of the way in which, after Harold was gone, 
 England was conquered bit by bit. York never dreamed 
 of helping Exeter, and Exeter, if it had the wish, had not 
 the power to help York. But it is none the less true that, 
 when a confederation of western towns with the great 
 city of the district at their head, suddenly started into life, 
 to check the progress of the Conqueror, it shows that a 
 spirit had been kindled, which, had it not been checked 
 at once, might have grown into something of which those 
 who manned the walls of Exeter assuredly never thought. 
 We cannot mourn that such a tendency was stopped, even 
 by the arm of a foreign conqueror. We cannot mourn 
 that the greatness of Exeter was not purchased at the 
 cost of the greatness of England. But it is worth while 
 to stop and think how near England once was to running 
 the same course as other lands, how easily the Earls of 
 Chester and Shrewsbury might have grown into sovereign 
 princes, margraves of their border principalities — how 
 easily the Palatine Bishops of Durham might have grown 
 into spiritual princes, like their brethren of Speier and 
 Bamberg — how easily Exeter and Lincoln might have 
 taken their places as the heads of confederations of free 
 cities in the Wealh-cyn and among the Five Danish
 
 72 WESSEX. 
 
 borouglis. From sucli a fate as this, from the sacrifice of 
 the general welfare of the whole to the greater brilliance 
 of particular members of the whole, we have been saved 
 by a variety of causes, and not the least of them, by the 
 personal character of a series of great kings, working in 
 the cause of national unity, from West-Saxon Ecgberht 
 to Norman Henry. The tendency of the patriotic move- 
 ments in William's reign was a tendency to division. 
 The tendency of William's own rule was a tendency to 
 union. The aims of the Exeter patricians could not have 
 been long reconciled with the aims of the sons of Harold, 
 nor could the aims of either have been reconciled for a 
 moment with the aims of the partisans of the iEtheling 
 Eadgar, of the sons of -^Ifgar, or of the Danish Swegen. 
 Our hearts are with the defenders of Exeter, with the 
 defenders of York and Ely and Durham, but we feel that 
 from the moment when England lost the one man among 
 her own sons who was fit to guide her, her best fate in 
 the long run was to pass as an undivided kingdom into 
 the hands of his victorious rival. 
 
 With the submission of Exeter to William we might 
 fau'ly end our tale of the place of Exeter in English his- 
 tory. It was now ruled for ever that the city by the Exe 
 was to be a city of the English realm. It was to be no 
 separate commonwealth, but a member of the undivided 
 English kingdom, yet still a city that was to remain the 
 undisputed head of its own district. Its history from this 
 time, as far as I am concerned with it, is less the history of 
 Exeter than the history of those events in English history 
 which took place at Exeter. It still has its municipal, its 
 ecclesiastical, its commercial, history ; it still had to strive 
 for its rights against earls and countesses and bishops ; 
 it could, in later days, bear its share in the great sea- 
 faring enterprises of commerce and discovery. But from 
 the entry of William, Exeter has no longer a separate 
 political being of its owii. It is no longer an object to be 
 striven for by men of contending nations. It is no longer
 
 EXETER. 73 
 
 something which might conceivably he cut off from the 
 English realm, either by the success of a foreign con- 
 queror or by the independence of its own citizens. In 
 the other sense of the words, as pointing out those events 
 of English history of which Exeter was the scene, the 
 place of Exeter in English history is one which yields to 
 that of no city in the land save London itself. It was with 
 a true instinct that the two men who open the two great 
 seras in local history, English JEthelstan and Norman 
 William, both gave such special heed to the military 
 defences of the city. No city in England has stood more 
 sieges. It stood one, perhaps two more, before William's 
 own reign was ended, indeed before William had brought 
 the Conquest of the whole land to an end by the taking of 
 Chester. The men of Exeter had withstood William as 
 long as he came before them as a foreign invader ; when 
 his power was once fully established, when the Castle on 
 the Eed Mount, reared by the stranger on the earthworks 
 of earlier days, held down the city in fetters, they seem 
 to have had no mood to join in hopeless insurrections 
 against him. When, a year and a half after the great 
 siege, the castle was again besieged by the West-Saxoj^ 
 insurgents, the citizens seem to have joined the Norman 
 garrison in resisting their attacks. According to one 
 account, they had already done the like to the sons of 
 Harold and their Irish allies. The wars of Stephen's 
 reign did not pass without a siege of Exeter, in which 
 King and citizens joined to besiege the rebellious lord of 
 Rongemont, and at last to starve him out within the 
 towers which legend was already beginning to speak of 
 as the work of the Csesars. I pass on to later times ; the 
 days of the Tudors saw two sieges of the city, one at the 
 hands of a pretender to the crown, another at the hands of 
 the religious insurgents of the further West. Twice again 
 in the wars of the next century do we find Exeter passing 
 from one side to the other by dint of siege, and at last we 
 see her receiving an invader at whose coming no siege
 
 74 WESSEX. 
 
 was needed. The entry ofWilliam the Deliverer through 
 the Western Gate forms the balance, the contrast, and 
 yet in some sort the counterpart, to the entry of William 
 the Conqueror through the Eastern Gate. The city had 
 resisted to the utmost, when a foreign invader, under the 
 guise of an English king, came to demand her obedience. 
 But no eighteen days' siege, no blinded hostage, no 
 undermined ramparts, were needed when a kinsman and 
 a deliverer came under the guise of a foreign invader. In 
 the army of William of Normandy Englishmen were 
 pressed to complete the Conquest of England ; in the 
 army of William of Orange strangers came to call her 
 sons to the work of her deliverance. In the person of 
 tlie earlier William the crown of England passed away 
 for the first time to a king wholly alien in speech and 
 feeling ; in the later William it in truth came back to 
 one who, even in mere descent, and yet more fully in his 
 native land and native speech, was nearer than all that 
 came between them to the old stock of Hengest and 
 Cerdic. The one was the first king who reigned over 
 England purely by the edge of the sword; the other 
 was the last king who reigned over England purely 
 by the choice of the nation. The coming of each of 
 the men who entered Exeter in such opposite characters 
 marks an aera in our history. And yet the work of the two 
 was not wholly alien to each other. The later William 
 came to undo the work of the earlier, so far as it 
 was evil, to confirm it so far as it was good. With the 
 one began the period of foreign domination which seemed 
 to sweep away our ancient tongue and our ancient law. 
 With the other began that period of internal progress, 
 every step of which has been in truth a return to the old 
 laws of England before the Norman set foot upon her 
 shores. And yet, after all, William the Conqueror did but 
 preserve what William the Deliverer came to restore. 
 His conquest ruled for ever that England should remain 
 an undivided kingdom, and, in so ruling, it ruled that
 
 EXETER. 76 
 
 the old laws and freedom, trampled on indeed but never 
 trampled out, should live to spring up again in newer forms. 
 When the one William renewed the laws of Eadward, it 
 was but a link in the same chain as when the other William 
 gave his assent to the Bill of Eights. In the one case the 
 invader came to conquer, in the other he came to deliver ; 
 but in both cases alike the effect of his coming was to 
 preserve and not to destroy; the Conqueror and the 
 Deliverer alike has had his share in working out the con- 
 tinuous being of English law and of English national life. 
 The unwilling greeting which Exeter gave to the one 
 William, the willing greeting which she gave to the 
 other, marked the wide difference in the external aspect 
 of the two revolutions. And yet both revolutions have 
 worked for the same end ; the great actors in both were, 
 however unwittingly, fellow-workers in the same cause. 
 And it is no small place in English history which belongs 
 to the city whose name stands out in so marked a way in 
 the tale alike of the revolution of the eleventh century 
 and of the revolution of the seventeenth. It is no small 
 matter, as we draw near by the western bridge or by the 
 eastern isthmus, as we pass where once stood the Eastern 
 and the Western Gate, as we tread the line of the ancient 
 streets, to think that we are following the march of the 
 Conqueror or of the Deliverer. It is no small matter, as 
 we enter the minster of Leofric and Warelwast and 
 Grandison, to think that on that spot Te Deum was sung 
 alike for the overthrow of English freedom and for its 
 recovery. It is no mean lesson if we learn to connect 
 with the remembrance of this ancient city, among so 
 many associations of British, Roman, and English days, 
 two thoughts which rise above all the rest — the thought 
 that there is no city in the land whose name marks a 
 greater stage in the history of its conquest and in the 
 history of its deliverance.
 
 76 
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 
 
 [Eead as the President's Opening Address at the Meeting of the Somerset 
 Archaeological and Natural History Society at Glastonbury, August 17, 
 1880. I have cut short some minute discussions, and worked in some 
 passages from another address.] 
 
 The history of Glastonbury follows in some sort natur- 
 ally upon the history of Exeter. The two spots have a 
 common characteristic ; and that characteristic is the one 
 which gives its historic position to both. What Exeter 
 is among the cities of Britain, that Glastonbury is among 
 the churches of Britain. Let us ask then more minutely, 
 What is the history of Glastonbury ? Every one can 
 at once answer that it is the history of a great monastery. 
 The history of Glastonbury is the history of its abbey. 
 Without its abbey, Glastonbury were nothing. The his- 
 tory of Glastonbury is not as the history of York or 
 Chester or Lincoln ; it is not as the history of Bristol or 
 Oxford or Norwich or Coventry. It is not the stirring 
 histoiy of a great city or of a great military post. The 
 military, the municipal, and the commercial history of 
 Glastonburj' might be written in a small compass, and it 
 would very largely belong to very modern times. The 
 history of Glastonbury is a purely ecclesiastical history, a 
 history like that of Wells and Lichfield, of Peterborough 
 and Crowland. Again, unlike the history of Wells and 
 Lichfield, but like the history of Peterborough and Crow- 
 land, it is a purely monastic history. No one who has 
 read the signatures to the Great Charter can fail to know 
 that there have been bishops of Glastonbury ; but Glas- 
 tonbury looked on its bishops only as momentary intru-
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 77 
 
 ders, and was glad to pay a great price to get rid of them. . 
 But even the short reign of the bishops did not afiect the 
 purely monastic character of Glastonbury ; no one ever 
 tried at Glastonbury, as was tried at Winchester, at 
 Coventry, and at Malmesbury, to displace the monks in 
 favour of secular priests. But again, among monastic 
 histories, the history of Glastonbury has a character of its 
 own which is wholly unique. I will not insult its vener- 
 able age by so much as contrasting it with the foundations 
 of yesterday which arose under the influence of the Cis- 
 tercian movement, which have covered some parts of 
 England with the loveliest of ruins in the loveliest of 
 sites, but which play but a small part indeed in the 
 history of this church and realm. Glastonbury is some- 
 thing more than Netley and Tintern, than Rievaux and 
 Fountains. But it is something more again than the 
 Benedictine houses which arose at the bidding of the 
 Norman Conqueror, of his house or of his companions. 
 It is something more than Selby and Battle, than Shrews- 
 bury and Reading. It is, in its own special aspect, some- 
 thing more even than that royal minster of Saint Peter, 
 the crowning-place of Harold and of William, which came 
 to supplant Glastonbury as the burial-place of kings. 
 Nay, it stands out distinct, as having a special character 
 of its own, even among the great and venerable founda- 
 tions of English birth which were already great and 
 venerable when the Conqueror came. There is something 
 at Glastonbury which there is not at Peterborough and 
 Crowland and Evesham, in the two minsters of Canter- 
 bury and in the two minsters of Winchester. Those are 
 the works of our own people ; they go back to the days of 
 our ancient kingship ; they go back, some of them, to the 
 days of our earliest Christianity ; but they go back no 
 further. We know their beginnings ; we know their 
 founders ; their history, their very legends, do not dare 
 to trace up their foundations beyond the time of our own 
 coming into this island. Winchester indeed has a tale
 
 78 WESSEX. 
 
 •which carries up the sanctity of the spot to Lucius the 
 King and Eleutherius the Pope ; but legend itself does 
 not attempt to bridge over the whole space ; it does not 
 venture to deny that, whatever Lucius and Eleutherius 
 may have done, Cenwealh and Birinus had to do over 
 again, as though it had never been done. The mighty 
 house of Saint Alban, in its site, in its name, in the very 
 materials of its gigantic minster, carries us back beyond 
 the days of our own being in this land. But it is only in 
 its site, in its name, in its materials, that it does so. If 
 the church of Eoman Alban was built of Roman bricks 
 on the site of Alban's martyrdom, it was built by English 
 and Norman hands ; it was built because an English 
 king had of his own choice thought good to honour the 
 saint of another people who had died ages before his 
 time. But there is no historic or even legendary con- 
 tinuity between the days of Alban the saint and the days 
 of Oifa the founder. It is at Glastonbury, alone among 
 the great churches of Britain — we instinctively feel that 
 on this spot the name of England is out of place — that 
 we walk with easy steps, with no thought of any impass- 
 able barrier, from the realm of Arthur into the realm of 
 Ine. Here alone does legend take upon itself to go up, 
 not only to the beginnings of English Christianity, but to 
 the beginnings of Christianity itself. Here alone do the 
 early memories of the other nations and other Churches 
 of the British islands gather round a holy place which 
 long possession at least made English. Here alone, 
 alongside of the memory and the tombs of West-Saxon 
 princes who broke the power of the Northman, there still 
 abides the memory, for ages there was shown the tomb, 
 of the British prince who, if he did not break, at least 
 checked for a generation, the advancing power of the 
 West-Saxon. The church which was the resting-place of 
 Eadgar, of his father and of his grandson, claimed to be 
 also the resting-place of Arthur. But at Glastonbury^ this 
 is a small matter. The legends of the spot go back to
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 79 
 
 the days of the Apostles. We are met at the very begin- 
 ning by the names of Saint PhiKp and Saint James, of the 
 twelve disciples, with Joseph of Arimatheea at their head. 
 Had Wells or even Bath laid claim to such an illustrious 
 antiquity, their claims might have been laughed to scorn 
 by the most ignorant ; at Glastonbury such claims, if not 
 easy to prove, were at least not easy to disprove. If the 
 Belgian Venta claims ten parts in her own Lucius, the 
 isle of Avalon claims some smaller share in him. We 
 read the tale of Fagan and Deruvian ; we read of In- 
 dractus and Gildas and Patrick and David and Columb 
 and Bridget, all dwellers in or visitors to the first spot 
 where the Gospel had shone in Britain. No fiction, no 
 dream, could have dared to set down the names of so 
 many worthies of the earlier races of the British islands 
 in the Liber Vitce of Durham or of Peterborough. Now I 
 do not ask you to believe these legends ; I do ask you to 
 believe that there was some special cause why legends of 
 this kind should grow, at all events why they should 
 grow in such a shape and in such abundance, round 
 Glastonbury alone of all the great monastic churches of 
 Britain. And I ask you to come on to something more 
 like history. Elsewhere even forged charters do not ven- 
 ture to go beyond the days of ^Ethelberht. But Glaston- 
 bury professed to have a charter, dating, as far as chrono- 
 logy goes, only from the days of -^thelberht, but which 
 claimed, truly or falsely, to belong to a state of things 
 which in Kent would carry us back before the days of 
 Hengest. In one page of his history William of Malmes- 
 bury records a charter of the year 601 granted by a king 
 of Damnonia whose name he could not make out, to an 
 abbot whose name — will our Welsh friends, if any are 
 here to-day, forgive him ? — at once proclaimed his British 
 barbarism. Then follows a charter of 670 of our own 
 West-Saxon Cenwealh. Then follows one of 678 of Cent- 
 wine the King, then one of Baldred the King, then the 
 smaller and greater charters of Ine the glorious King.
 
 80 WESSEX. 
 
 Except the difficulty of making out his name, there is 
 nothing to hint that any greater gap parted the unknown 
 Daninoniiui from Oenwealh than that which parted Cen- 
 wealh from Centwine, Bakh'ed, and Ine. One to be sure 
 is King of Damnonia, another is Kiug of the West- 
 Saxons. But that might be a mere change of title, as 
 when the Kiug of the West-Saxons grew into the King of 
 the English. The feeling with which we read that page 
 of William of Malmesbm'y's History of Glastonbury is the 
 same as the feeling with which we read those lists of 
 Emperors in which Charles the Great succeeds Con- 
 stantine the Sixth, with no sign of break or change. It 
 is the feeling with which we read those endless entries in 
 Domesday from which we might be led to believe that 
 William the Conqueror was the peaceful successor of 
 Eadward the Confessor. In this, as in ten thousand other 
 cases, the language of formal documents would by itself 
 never lead us to understand the great facts and revolu- 
 tions which lurk beneath their formal language. 
 
 But we must stop to see what legends and documents 
 prove as well as what they do not prove. We need not 
 believe that the Glastonbuiy legends are records of facts ; 
 but the existence of those legends is a very great fact. 
 I will not as yet search into the genuineness of either the 
 Damnonian or the West-Saxon document . They are 
 equally good for my purpose, even if both of them can be 
 shown to be forgeries. The point is this. Compare 
 Glastonbury and Canterbury. We have no legends tracing 
 up the foundation of Christ Church or Saint Augustine's 
 to the days of the Apostles, or to the days of any Roman 
 emperor or British king. Instead of such legends we 
 have a bit, perhaps of genuine history, at all events of 
 highly probable tradition, which seems to show that, in 
 setting up new churches for men of English race, some 
 regard was paid to the still remembered sites and ruins 
 which had once been the churches of men of Roman or 
 British race. In most places we do not find even this
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 81 
 
 mucli of remembrance of the state of things which had 
 passed away ; at Canterbury we do find this much. But 
 this is widely different from the absokite continuity of 
 the Glastonbury legends, in which Joseph of Arimathsea 
 and Dunstan appear as actors in different scenes of the 
 same drama. So again, no monk of Christ Church 
 or Saint Augustine's, not the boldest forger that ever 
 took pen in hand, would have dared to put forward a 
 charter of Vortigern in favour of his house, immediately' 
 followed by a charter of Hengest. In Kent at least the 
 temporal conquest of the Briton by the Jute, the spiritual 
 conquest of the Jute by the Roman, were too clearly 
 stamped on the memories of men, tliey were too clearly 
 written in the pages of Bseda, to allow of any confusion 
 about such matters. There at least men knew that, if 
 the reign of Woden had given way to the reign of Christ 
 and Gregory, the reign of Christ and CsDsar had once 
 given way to the reign of Woden. There at least the 
 great gulf of Teutonic conquest still yawned too wide for 
 either legends or documents to bridge it over. But here, 
 in the isle of Avalon, legends and documents go on as if 
 no such gulf had ever yawned at all. The truth is that 
 this unbroken continuity of legends — it matters not 
 whether true or false — of documents — it matters not 
 whether genuine or spurious — is the surest witness of the 
 fact that in the isle of Avalon Teutonic conquest meant 
 something widely different from what it meant in the isle 
 of Thanet. In our Glastonbury story Teutonic conquest 
 simply goes for nothing. My argument is that it could 
 not have gone for nothing, even in the mind of an in- 
 ventor of legends or a forger of documents, unless it had 
 been, to say the least, something much less frightful on 
 the banks of the Brue than it was on the banks of the 
 Stour. I argue that the coming of our forefathers was 
 not here, as it was there, something which made an utter 
 break between the days before it and the days after it. 
 It was a mighty change indeed, but still a change through 
 
 G
 
 a^ WESSEX. 
 
 which men and their institutions might contrive to live. 
 Tliey were not driven simpl}'- to perish or to flee away, 
 leaving behind them only feeble memories or shattered 
 ruins. 
 
 The simple tnith then is this : among all the greater 
 churches of England, Glastonbury is the only one where 
 we may be content to lay aside the name of England and 
 to fall back on the older name of Britain. As Exeter is 
 the one great city of Britain that lived on an unbroken life 
 through the storm of English Conquest, the one city which 
 lived on as equally great in the old state of things and in 
 the new, so Glastonbury is the one great religious founda- 
 tion of Britain which lived through the storm of English 
 conquest, and in which Briton and Englishman have an 
 equal share. At no other place do we so fully stand face 
 to face with the special history of the land which lies 
 south-westward from the Axe. Nowhere else can we so 
 plainly see the living on of a certain Celtic element under 
 Teutonic rule; nowhere else can we so plainly see the 
 process by whicK the Britons of certain parts of the 
 island were neither wholly slaughtered nor Avholly driven 
 out, but were to a great extent, step by step, assimilated 
 with Englishmen. Nowhere else, in short, do we so clearly 
 see the state of things which is pictured to us as still fresh 
 in the laws of Ine, but which had come to an end before 
 the putting forth of the laws of JElfred. The church of 
 Glastonbury, founded by the Briton, honoured and enriched 
 by the Enghshman, is the material memorial of the days 
 when Briton and Englishman, conquered and conqueror, 
 lived under the same law, though not an equal law, under 
 the same protection, though not an equal protection, on 
 the part of the West-Saxon king. Nowhere is there the 
 same unbroken continuity, at all events of religious life. 
 At Canterbury Christ was worshipped by the Englishman 
 on the same spot on which he had been worshipped by 
 the Briton. But there was a time between, a time m 
 which, on the same spot or on some spot not far from
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 83 
 
 it, Englishmen liad bowed to Woden. But, as there never 
 was a moment when men of any race bowed to Woden on 
 the hill of Exeter, so there never was a moment when men 
 bowed to Woden in the isle of A.valon. Men on either spot 
 had doubtless bowed, in days which in Cenwealh's days were 
 ancient, to the gods of the Briton and the Roman ; but no 
 altars ever smoked to our Teutonic gods within the shores 
 of the holy island or on the peak of the holy mount which 
 soars above it. The cause of the difference is a simple 
 one. Whatever was the date of the English conquest of 
 Exeter, it was assuredly later than the English conquest 
 of Avalon. And we read in the Chronicle thirteen years 
 before that fight at the Pens which made Avalon English — 
 'Her Cenwealh wses gefullod.' Here then the Teutonic con- 
 queror was one who had been himself washed, enlightened, 
 made whole ; in other words baptized into the faith of 
 Christ. Those whom he conquered were his brethren. 
 He therefore came not, as Hengest and ^Elle, simply to 
 destroy. In other parts of the West-Saxon realm the 
 coming of Cerdic and Ceawlin had been as fearful as the 
 coming of Hengest and ^lle. But Avalon and the coasts 
 thereof, the land of the Sumorsa^tan from the Axe west- 
 ward, was the prize of a conqueror who was Hengest and 
 ^thelberht in one. Under him the bounds of English 
 conquest were still enlarged ; but English conquest no 
 longer meant death or slavery to the conquered ; it no 
 longer meant the plunder and overthrow of the temples of 
 the Christian faith. The victor of Bradford and the Pens 
 had, before he marched forth to victory, done over ao-ain 
 what men fondly deemed to be the work of Lucius ; he had 
 timbered the old church at Winchester. He was therefore 
 ready to spare, to protect, to enrich, to cherish as the 
 choicest trophy of his conquest, the church which he found 
 already timbered to his hand in Ynysvitrin. 
 
 And now what will be said if, after all this, I go on to 
 tell you that I am strongly inclined to the belief that the 
 monastery of Glastonbury, with all its long legendary 
 
 a 2
 
 84 WESSEX. 
 
 liistoiy, is not a foundation of any astounding antiquity ? 
 I believe tliat, in mere point of years, it may, as Dr. Guest 
 hinted long ago, very likely be younger than Christ Church 
 at Canterbury. If ever anything bore on the face of it the 
 stamp of utter fiction, it is what professes to be the early 
 history of Glastonbury. It is going too far when the tale 
 brings in such an amazing gathering of saints from all times 
 and places to shed their lustre on a single spot. Setting 
 aside the Apostles and Joseph of Arimathsea and King 
 Lucius, the object is too apparent by which Patrick and 
 David and Columb and Bridget and a crowd of others are 
 all carried into the isle of Avalon. It is too much in the 
 style of the process which invented a translation of Dun- 
 stan's body from Canterbury to Glastonbury. It is too 
 much in the style of that amazing Joseph-worship which 
 sprang up in the fifteenth century, while in the earlier 
 legend Saint Joseph holds a very modest place among the 
 other AYOrthies of the spot. This legendary history will 
 be found in two works of the same writer, in .the first book 
 of William of Malmesbury's History of the Kings and in 
 his special treatise on the Antiquity of the Church of 
 Glastonbury. The main story is much the same in the 
 two, but there is a good deal of difference in the way of 
 telling it, and also in many of the details. The History 
 of the Kings was written apart from any special Glaston- 
 bury influences, and it gives the legend in a comparatively 
 moderate shape. The tale contains plenty that is purely 
 fictitious ; but fiction is as it were kept in some degree of 
 order by being embedded in a work of which the main 
 substance is historical. But the treatise on the Antiquity 
 of the Church of Glastonbury is a work of another kind. 
 The object of its writer was to put in a clear and attractive 
 shape such stories as the Glastonbury monks of his day 
 told him. Wonderful things, to be sure, they did tell him ; 
 still they did not tell him the .same things which Glas- 
 tonbury monks would have told him a very few years later. 
 The object of the stories which they told him was to exalt
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 85 
 
 the glory and the antiquity of Glastonbury ; it was not to 
 exalt the glory of Arthur, or in any way to connect Glas- 
 tonbury and Arthur together. A few years after William 
 of Malmesbury wrote, the wonderful tale of his younger 
 contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth had come into vogue. 
 But when William of Malmesbury wrote, the tale of 
 Geoffrey had not yet come into vogue, if it had been 
 written or thought of at all. As we see from several 
 passages in the History of the Kings, the fame of Arthur 
 was great and growing ; but it had not yet reached its 
 full height. When it did reach its full height in the 
 hands of Geoffrey, we see its eflect at Glastonbury. Not 
 long after the complete legend of Arthur had been in- 
 vented, the tomb of Arthur was fittingly invented also. 
 The tale of William of Malmesbury no longer suited those 
 who had an interest in the new form of the story. His 
 original work, wonderful enough in itself, was further 
 interpolated to suit the new local creed. In the His- 
 tory of the Kings the name of Arthur appears in several 
 passages which have no reference to Glastonbury, but in 
 no passage which has a reference to Glastonbury. Least 
 of all does William, in the History of the Kings, look on 
 Glastonbury as the burial-place of Arthur, for he distinctly 
 says that the burial-place of Arthur was unknown. We 
 must then, I think, unhesitatingly cast away, as the in- 
 terpolation of some Glastonbur}' monk, a passage in his 
 Glastonbury History in which he is made to assert the 
 burial of Arthur at Glastonbury. For this directly con- 
 tradicts the deliberate statement of his graver work. But 
 I shall not object if any one chooses to claim as a genuine 
 piece of William of Malmesbury a passage in which 
 Arthur appears simply as one prince and one benefactor 
 among others. He is made to found certain monks in 
 memory of the valiant Ider who overthrew the giants who 
 infested Brent Knoll, a knoll which then was doubtless, like 
 our other knolls great and small, an island, and which, it 
 seems, was then known as the mount of frogs. Such a
 
 86 WHSSEX. 
 
 story is very silly, very mytliical, it sounds very much like 
 an interpolation ; but it is just possible that William of 
 Malmesbury may have heard it at Glastonbury and have 
 written it down ; for it at least does not contradict anything 
 in the History of the Kings. We must carefully distin- 
 guish between two sets of legends, both of which are equally 
 untrustworthy, but which are put together with quite 
 different purposes. It is the more needful to distinguish 
 them, because the second set of tales comes so very closely 
 upon the heels of the first. William of Malmesbury and 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth were both alive at the same time ; 
 very likely they were both writing at the same moment. 
 But William, while he had his own stories of Arthur, knew 
 nothing of those more famous stories of Arthur which 
 Geoffrey presently gave to the world. 
 
 I look then on the Glastonbury History of William of 
 Malmesbury, even as he wrote it, as essentially legendary ; 
 but I do not at all deny that these legends, like other 
 legends, may very likely contain here and there some 
 kernel of truth. But if we are in search, not of mere 
 kernels of truth, but of direct statements of fact, we may 
 safely cast aside everything earlier than the first year of 
 the seventh century. We may see our first bit of any- 
 thing savouring of real history in the grant of the Dam- 
 nonian Iring whose name so puzzled William of Malmes- 
 bury, but which Dr. Guest, with the greatest likelihood, 
 supplies as Gwrgan Yarvtrwch. Dr. Guest holds that 
 Glastonbury did not become the head sanctuary of the 
 Britons till after the loss of Ambresbury. It is hard to 
 rule such a point ; but do not let any one think that, if 
 this date of 601 should be accepted as marking the begin- 
 ning of the greatness of Glastonbury, it therefore neces- 
 sarily marks the beginning of the -existence of Glaston- 
 bury, even as the place of a religious foundation, much 
 less as a place of human dwelling. We may be sure that 
 such a site as Glastonbury, a site which had so many 
 attractions in early times, was inhabited from a very early
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 87 
 
 time indeed, thongh ages may have passed before its name 
 found a place in history or legend. If we fix 601 as the 
 li kely date for the beginning of a great monastery on this 
 spot, let no one take me as fixing that year as the date of 
 the coming of the first human being, of the coming of 
 the first Christian man, or even of the coming of the first 
 monk. And indeed this first entry, if we can at all trust 
 its words, points, not to the setting up of anything abso- 
 lutely new, but to the enlarging and enriching of some- 
 thing which was there already. The king — Gwrgan, we 
 will say — is made to give Ynysvitrin to the old church. 
 Now the ' old church ' may simply mean old in the time 
 of William of Malmesbury, not old in the time of Gwrgan. 
 But the grant of Ynysvitrin, that is, of Glastonbury 
 itself, strikes me as having a special force. Gwrgan may 
 have found a church, he may have found a monastery, 
 already in the island. But it is he who is represented as 
 giving the monastery its great temporal position ; it is he 
 who first makes the island itself a monastic island. Now 
 this kind of statement has at least a negative force. It 
 fixes our date one way. The document may be forged ; 
 the grant may be imaginary ; the position bestowed by 
 the grant may not have begun till much later. But we 
 may be quite sure that it did not begin earlier. I am 
 inclined to attribute to the document a higher value than 
 this. Let it even be a forgery : I do not believe that any 
 man would go forging charters of Gwrgan — men might 
 have forged charters of Arthur — unless he had seen or 
 heard of a real charter of Gwrgan. And a forger would 
 most likely have written the name of his king clearly 
 enough for William of Malmesbury to read it. I am 
 therefore disposed to attach some positive importance to 
 the entry of 601. But in any case it has a negative 
 importance ; it gets rid of all earlier claims of the monastic 
 house of Ynysvitrin to have held the temporal possession 
 of the soil of Ynysvitrin. 
 
 There is another quite independent legend which
 
 88 WESSEX. 
 
 seems to me to fall in -witli a belief in the earlier existence 
 of Ynysvitrin, but wbicli sets Ynysvitrin before us in a 
 state quite unlike that of the seat of a great monastic 
 body. This is the story contained in the Life of Saint 
 Gildas. The date and aiithor of the piece are uncertain ; 
 but it must be older than the great days of the fame of 
 Arthur ; that is, it must be older than Geoffrey of Mon- 
 mouth. It gives us a familiar part of the Arthurian story 
 in a much earlier and simpler shape than that in which 
 we are used to see it. In this story, Arthur is not con- 
 queror of the world ; he is not even King of all Britain ; 
 he is simply 'tyrant' in Cornwall and Devonshire. His 
 overlord is Meluas, who is king in the ' sestiva regio,' that 
 is surely in Somerset. We must of course take the word 
 ' tyrant,' neither in its old Greek sense nor in its common 
 modern sense ; it must be taken in that later Latin sense 
 in which it means a rebel prince, one who has set himself 
 up against a lawful emperor or king. And so, directly 
 ■after the place where he is called tyrant, Arthur is yet 
 more distinctly called ' rex rebellis.' But the lawful king- 
 has done the tyrant a great private wrong by carrying ofi" 
 his wife Guenever. He has carried her off to Ynysvitrin, 
 to keep her safe in the inaccessible island, where he is 
 presently besieged by the tyrant Arthur with a countless 
 host of the men of Cornwall and Devonshire. At this 
 moment Gildas comes to the island, an exile, driven by 
 the pirates of Orkney — wikings put a little out of their 
 place — from his hermitage on the Steep Holm, where for 
 seven years he had lived on fish and birds' eggs. He 
 wrote, as we know, a ' Liber Querulus ; ' one might ex- 
 pect that, if it was during this time of his life that he 
 wrote it, it would be a 'Liber Querulus.' He now sails 
 up to Ynysvitrin ; he is there received by the abbot ; he 
 reconciles the two kings by persuading Meluas to give up 
 Guenever ; they become sworn brothers, and promise for 
 the future to obey the abbot. 
 
 NoAv I hold this Life to be purely legendary, if for
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 89 
 
 no other cause, yet for this, that it represents Gildas as 
 having' a great deal to do with Arthur. (Hildas himself, 
 while speaking of so many other British princes, has not, 
 in his extant writings, one word to say about Arthur. 
 The tyrant of Cornwall, even if he won the fight of Bad- 
 bury, was clearly, in the eyes of Gildas, a much smaller 
 person than Maelgwyn of Gwynedd, the great dragon of 
 the isle of Dywyganwy. Giraldus indeed gives a good 
 reason for this silence. He explains how Gildas actually 
 wrote a book of the acts of Arthur ; but, having a private 
 quarrel with the King, he threw his book into the sea. I 
 venture to look on this as simply an attempt to account 
 for the silence of Gildas about Arthur, and I look on any 
 story which brings Gildas and Arthur together as legendary 
 on the face of it. But this legend, like many other legends, 
 unconsciously preserves a kernel of truth. I must not 
 hide the fact that there is another passage in the Life 
 which speaks of Arthur as ' rex totius majoris Britannise.' 
 But this only makes the other passage more precious. 
 The two descriptions come from different sources. The 
 writer, clearly writing in days when the fame of Arthur 
 was growing but had not yet reached its full height, pre- 
 served, without marking the inconsistency, an older story 
 which painted Arthur in a much lowlier guise. The 
 tyrant Arthur, in rebellion against the king of the ' sestiva 
 regio,' is something which neither the biographer of 
 Gildas nor any one else would have invented ; it must be 
 a bit of genuine tradition. And that tradition represents 
 Glastonbury as a place to which a king who carried off 
 the wife of one of his under-kings was likely to carry her. 
 This is not the picture of Glastonbury to which we are 
 used. If any later king, any of our West-Saxon kings, 
 had designed such a crime as that of Meluas, he would 
 not have chosen Glastonbury for the scene of it. The 
 wildest scandal-monger did not make Eadgar take Wulf- 
 thryth or ^Elfthryth to the old home of Dunstan. The 
 story indeed brings in an abbot; but the abbot is most
 
 90 IVESSEX. 
 
 likely broii glit in simply because men conld not conceive 
 Glastonbury in any ag-e without an abbot. The value of 
 a tale of this kind always lies in those parts which are 
 most likely to have happened, because they are least 
 likely to have been invented. I am very far from pledging 
 myself to the historical truth of the statement that 
 Meluas carried off Guenever wife of the tyrant Arthur, 
 and hid her in the isle of Avalon. But I do say that 
 that statement belongs to a stage of Arthurian legend 
 much earlier than any of those to which we are used. I 
 do believe that, whether it does or does not preserve a 
 memory of real facts, it does preserve a memory of a real 
 state of things. It helps us to a picture of the isle of 
 Avalon very different either from the Glastonbury of 
 Eadgar or from the Ynysvitrin of Gwrgan. 
 
 We get another incidental notice of early Glaston- 
 bury in a better quarter than the Life of Gildas. This 
 is in the Life of Dunstan by a Saxon from the Old 
 Saxony. We here find that, in the days of Dunstan's 
 youth, Irish pilgrims, learned men from whose books 
 Dunstan himself learned much, were in the habit of 
 coming to Glastonbury to worship at the tomb of one of 
 their own worthies, either the elder or the younger Patrick. 
 It must therefore have been believed in Ireland that 
 Glastonbury was the resting-place of an ancient Irish 
 saint. Now such a belief as this could not have taken 
 root, if the connexion between Glastonbury and the elder 
 Celtic Church had been the invention of West-Saxon 
 monks at any time between Cenwealh and Dunsta^n. 
 Surely nothing but an independent Irish tradition could 
 have led Irish pilgrims across the sea. This tradition 
 clearly sets Glastonbury before us as being already a holy 
 place even before Gwrgan. But it, is quite consistent 
 with the belief that it was Gwrgan who raised Ynysvitrin 
 to be, according to the British formula, one of the three 
 great choirs of the isle of Britain. 
 
 I am thus, on the whole, strongly inclined to believe.
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 91 
 
 on the one hand, that it was a true tradition, something 
 indeed more than tradition, which connected Glastonbnry, 
 as an ecclesiastical foundation, with days before the Eng- 
 lish invasion, but to believe also, on the other hand, that, 
 at the time of the English invasion, it was not a founda- 
 tion of any great antiquity. I am inclined to believe, 
 though I would not take upon myself at all positively to 
 assert, that, perhaps not the existence, but anyhow the 
 greatness, of Glastonbury as a religious foundation, dates 
 from Gwrgan at the beginning of the seventh century. 
 I am inclined to think that it was then that Ynysvitrin 
 took its place as the great sanctuary of the Britons, to 
 supply the loss of fallen Ambresbury. As a great monastic 
 house it would thus have stood little more than fifty years 
 when it passed into West-Saxon hands. It would be, as 
 I said, actually younger in years than Christ Church at 
 Canterbury. But what is younger in years may often 
 belong to an older state of things. I have constantly to 
 insist on this fact in the history of buildings. I have to 
 try to make people understand that the fact that some 
 buildings of the Old-English type are later in date than 
 some buildings of the Norman type is the strongest of all 
 proofs that there was an Old-English style earlier than the 
 Norman style. There are few buildings more deeply in- 
 teresting than the work of Prsetextatus beneath the Eoman 
 Capitol, a pagan temple younger than the oldest Christian 
 churches on the Lateran and the Vatican. And may I 
 class with this last my own neighbour church of Wookey, 
 with its chapel built and fitted up for the worship of the 
 days of Philip and Mary, younger therefore than the 
 Cornish church of Probus, built and fitted up for the 
 worship of the days of Edward the Sixth ? In the like 
 sort, if, in a reckoning of years, we set down Glastonbury 
 at the beginning of the seventh century as younger than 
 Canterbury at the end of the sixth, yet in historic order, 
 Glastonbury still remains older than Canterbury. If 
 we should accept Gwrgan, not only as the benefactor
 
 92 WFSSEX. 
 
 aiul eiilarger, but as the very beginner, of the house of 
 Ynysvitrin, there still will be no need to nnsay a single 
 ■word of Avliat I said earlier in this discourse. The senti- 
 ment of antiquity would doubtless be more fully gratified 
 if we could give the house of Ynysvitrin a British exist- 
 ence of five hundred years than if we give it a British 
 existence of only fifty. But the unique historic position 
 of the place is the same in either case. In either case 
 Glastonbury is the one great church of the Briton which 
 passed unhurt into the hands of the Englishman. In 
 either case it is, in a way that no other great church is, 
 a tie between the state of things represented by the names 
 of Arthur and Gildas and the state of things represented by 
 the names of Eadgar and Dunstan. In either case we may 
 truly say, as I have often said, that that talk about the 
 ancient British Church, which is simply childish nonsense 
 when it is talked at Canterbury or York or London, ceases 
 to be childish nonsense when it is talked at Glastonbury, 
 Nay, as tending to draw the tie still tighter, we can forgive 
 the invention of the tomb of British Arthur to match the 
 real tombs of our West-Saxon Eadgar and our two mighty 
 Eadmunds. We can almost forgive the baser fraud 
 which changed the western church, the true church of the 
 Briton, into the freshly devised chapel of Saint Joseph, 
 and which must have gone far to bring down that lovely 
 building by so daringly scooping out a crypt beneath it. 
 The fraud almost becomes pious when it helps to keep 
 up, even in an exaggerated and distorted shape, the 
 memory of a connexion with the elder time which here, 
 and here alone, is history and not fable. 
 
 But there is no need to carry back the memories of the 
 spot one moment further than sober history will let us. 
 If we believe that Glastonbury was a British foundation, 
 but that, as one of the great monastic houses of Britain, 
 it dates only from the last age of British occupation, from 
 days when the English conquest had already begun, we 
 surely open a new source of historic interest. There is
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 93 
 
 surely something striking in the picture of the British 
 king and his people, driven from their elder sanctuary by 
 the advancing tide of English invasion, still keeping up 
 their hearts, still cleaving to their faith, raising or renewing 
 for themselves another holy place in the venerated island, 
 in the very teeth of triumphant heathendom entrenched 
 upon the hills which bounded their landscape. Let us 
 try and call up before us the general look of the ' sestiva 
 regio,' in the days when Avalon and all its fellows were 
 truly islands in the deep fen. The mount that crowns 
 the holy isle itself looked down, through long months at 
 least, on a waste of waters, relieved here and there by 
 smaller spots of land where alone man could dwell and 
 till and worship. In truth the dwelling-places of man, 
 still almost wholly confined to the ridges and the bases of 
 the isolated hills, must have then occupied very much 
 the same extent which they do still ; the change lies in 
 the state of the flats — what we call the moors — between 
 them. Avalon, larger and loftier than its fellow islands, 
 was a shelter admirably suited either for devout monks 
 or for runaway queens. By Gwrgan's day it had become 
 one of the last shelters, at once centre and outpost, of a 
 race and a creed which must have seemed to be sJirinkinsf 
 up step by step, till both should pass away from the soil 
 of Britain. That race has not passed away ; that faith 
 has won back the lands which it had lost. We are tempted 
 to ask whether Gwrgan, in the summer land, wh.en he 
 bade Yny svitrin take the place of Amb resbury, had heard 
 that one realm of the heathen invaders had become the 
 spiritual conquest of teachers from beyond the sea, and 
 that new temples were at the same moment rising for the 
 same faith at the bidding of British and of English rulers. 
 But the Christian Jute was far away ; the heathen Saxon 
 was at his gates. Tlie high ground to the north and 
 to the east, the long range of Mendip, the hills of the 
 Wiltshire border, stood like a mighty castle- wall fencing 
 in the strongholds of Woden and Thunder. At any
 
 04 : WESSEX. 
 
 moment tlie great march of Ceawliu might be renewed 
 towards ubav points; the summer land and the long 
 peninsula beyond it might be as the land by the Severn 
 and the two Avons ; the holy place of Avalon in its island, 
 the strong city of Isca on its hill, might be as Glevum 
 and Aqute Solis, as Coriuium and Uriconium. It was not 
 then as when men hear of their enemies in distant lands 
 or on some distant frontier of their own land. It was as 
 when the Corinthian, jealous of the growth and power 
 of Athens, had but to climb the steep of his own citadel 
 to see with his own eyes the mighty works which were 
 rising on the lowlier height of the rival akropolis. And, 
 from our side too, what was it that kept our fathers from 
 swooping down on the prey which lay before their eyes ? 
 Why did they pause for nearly eighty j^ears before they 
 came down from their hill fortress to make a lasting spoil 
 of the rich plains and islands at their feet ? Could there be 
 some dim feeling that Woden and Thunder were gods of the 
 hills, but were not gods of the valleys ? Whatever was the 
 cause, the work was not to be done by men who bowed to 
 Woden and Thunder. Gwrgan could build and endow his 
 church in safety, while the gorges of Cheddar and Ebber, 
 while Crook's Peak and Shutshelf and Eookham, were 
 strongholds of heathen men. The Saxon was at last to pour 
 down fi'omhis height, to smite the Briton by the Pens and to 
 chase him to the banks of Parret. But the blow was not to 
 come till it was lightened by coming from the hands of men 
 who were brethren in the same faith. The Saxon was 
 to win Avalon ; he was to win Isca ; but he was not to 
 deal by them as he had dealt by Uriconium and Corinium. 
 Through the long years of watching between the march 
 of Ceawlin and the march of Cenwealh, the Tor of Avalon, 
 the island mount of Saint Michael, >not perhaps as yet 
 hallowed by the archangel's name, but standing as the 
 guardian of the holy places, new and old, which gathered 
 at its foot, might look forth day by day towards the 
 threatening rampart, with somewhat of the old note of
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 95 
 
 Hebrew defiance — ' Why hop ye so, ye high hills ? This 
 is God's hill, in the which it pleaseth him to dwell, yea 
 the Lord will abide in it for ever.' 
 
 The day at last came, the day when one race was to 
 give way to another, but when the transfer of dominion 
 from race to race no longer carried with it the transfer 
 from creed to creed. The founder of Winchester became 
 at once the conqueror and the protector of Ynysvitrin. 
 With the change of race came a change of name, and 
 British Ynysvitrin passed into English Glastonbury. I 
 have in this discourse freely used the names Ynysvitrin 
 and Avalon, while speaking of this place in its British 
 stage. I have done so, because I needed some name to 
 speak of the place by in its British stage, and so to bring 
 out more clearly the fact that the place had a British 
 stage. But if any one chooses to arraign those particular 
 names of Avalon and Ynysvitrin as lacking in authority, 
 I shall not be over careful to answer him in that matter. 
 I believe that there is no authority for either earlier than 
 the treatise of William of Malmesbury and the Life of 
 Gildas. And we have seen that the treatise of William of 
 Malmesbury is a work written to order in the interests 
 of Glastonbury, and which has further been largely in- 
 terpolated. There is something very odd in an English 
 gentile name suddenly displacing the British name ; there 
 is something suspicious in the evident attempts to make 
 the English and British names translate one another, in 
 the transparent striving to see an element of glass in both. 
 Glcestingahurh, it must be borne in mind, is as distinctly 
 an English gentile name as any in the whole range of 
 English nomenclature ; Glastonbury is a mere corruption ; 
 the syllable which has taken a place to which it has no 
 right in Huntm^/don and Abmrydon has in Glas^owbury 
 been driven out of a place to which it has the most perfect 
 right. The true origin of the name lurks, in a grotesque 
 shape, in that legend of Gla^stirig and his sow, a manifestly 
 English legend, which either William of Malmesbury him-
 
 96 irJiSSJBX. 
 
 self or some interpolator at Glastonbury has strangely 
 tlirnst into the midst of the British legends. Glsesting's 
 lost sow leads him bj^ a long journey to an apple-tree by 
 the old church ; pleased with the land, he takes his family, 
 the Ghvstingas, to d^vell there. This might almost be 
 taken as a kind of parable of the West-Saxon settlement 
 under Cenwealh. There is no mention of earlier inhabi- 
 tants ; but the mention of the church implies that there 
 were or had been such ; in any case the Glsestingas settle 
 by the old church — the main work of the middle of the 
 seventh century, as far as Glastonbury is concerned. But 
 there is certainly something strange in the sudden way 
 in which we find the Glwstingas so comfortably settled 
 in their own burh within the isle which has so lately been 
 British Avalon. The old-world gentile name seems in a 
 mamier out of place in a conquest so recent and so illus- 
 trious. There is something unusual - in such a place al- 
 together changing its name, above all in its taking the 
 gentile name of a certainly not famous gens. Other chief 
 places which passed in the same manner from British to 
 English rule, if they changed their names at all, did not 
 change them after this sort. Isca, for instance, to look 
 back again to the greatest case of all, lived on under its 
 old name as English Exeter. Still we have the fact which 
 we cannot get over, that Glastonbury was already spoken 
 of as an old name in the days of Winf rith, at the end of the 
 seventh century or the beginning of the eighth . And on 
 the other hand, unless we throw aside the whole history of 
 West- Saxon advance, as we have learned it from Dr. Guest 
 and as, to me at least, it seems to be clearly written in the 
 pages of the Chronicle, we cannot carry our Glcestingas to 
 Glrestingahvrh at any time earlier than the time of Cenwealh, 
 As for the British names themselv-es, the two names 
 of Avalon and Ynysvitrin stand to some extent on different 
 grounds. There certainly is a degree of suspicion about 
 the name Ynysvitrin and its alleged meaning of insula 
 vitrea. It is tempting to look upon it as simply a name
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 97 
 
 made up as a kind of translation of the supposed meaning- 
 of (r^astonburj. But it is just as likely that it is a real 
 British name, having no more to do with glass than Glas- 
 tonbury has, but on which that meaning was put by the 
 same kind of etymological pun of which we have many 
 examples, and of which the turning of Jerusalem into 
 Hierosolyma is a familiar case. At all events it is older 
 than the tales of Arthur and Glastonbury in their present 
 shape. It may be that Avalon is a name transferred 
 hither with a purpose, after that name had become famous • 
 in the legends of Arthur. But it is just as likely that, as 
 there undoubtedly were Avalons in other Celtic lands, so 
 there may have been an Avalon here also. The spot on 
 which we are met may stand to the Avalon of legend in 
 the same relation in which the Olympos of geography 
 stands to the Olympos of legend. As for the external 
 authority for the names, it is much stronger in the case 
 of Ynysvitrin than in the case of Avalon. Yet even on 
 behalf of Avalon I think it may be possible to find a small 
 piece of negative evidence. It comes in the legend of 
 Glsesting and his sow. I do not greatly care whether 
 this legend comes from William of Malmesbury or from 
 an interpolator. Surely no interpolator writing after the 
 invention of Arthur would have brought in the name of 
 Avalon in so lowly a connexion. This strikes me as going 
 a long way to show that Avalon was known as a name of 
 Glastonbury before the legends of Arthur had taken 
 possession of the name. But I have no wish to insist 
 positively on a matter which is certainly difficult and 
 doubtful. On one point I think we shall all agree : if 
 Glastonbury really be Avalon, we must cast aside the 
 belief that no rain falls in Avalon as a poet's dream. 
 
 On the architectural details of the buildings I shall 
 not enter. But there is one general aspect of those 
 buildings which directly connects their peculiar character 
 with the peculiar history of the place. There is a special 
 
 II
 
 98 wi:ssi:x. 
 
 character about the church — to be perfectly accurate, 
 I should say the churches — of Glastonbury, because there 
 is a special character about the history of Glastonbury. 
 There the old British sanctuary lived on under English 
 rule, and fell only at the hands of destroyers of baser 
 mould in days which, by comparison, seem as yesterday. 
 The very arrangements of the ruined minster still live as 
 a speaking witness to tell us Avhat stood on that venerable 
 spot in days before our fathers came. I conceive that 
 there was a time when Ynysvitrin had, like Glendalough 
 or Clonmacnois, a group of small churches, the Celtic 
 fiishion of building where Roman usage would have dic- 
 tated the building of one large church. One of these, the 
 oldest and most venerated, the old church, the wooden 
 church, the church of wicker and timber, ' vetusta ecclesia,' 
 ' lignea basilica,' lived on, and by living on stamped the 
 buildings of Glastonbury with their special character. It 
 lived on through English, Danish, and Norman conquests. 
 It was enriched by the gifts of Ine. It beheld the devo- 
 tions of Cnut when he made his offerings for the soul of 
 the murdered Eadmund. To the east of that primaeval 
 church there arose in English times a church of English 
 fashion, a church of stone, of which Ine was the first 
 founder, and which was rebuilt in a statelier guise by 
 Dunstan himself. The two churches, differing so greatly 
 in scale and in material, stood side by side, witnesses of the 
 presence of two successive nations, till both alike yielded 
 to the grander conceptions of the architects of the twelfth 
 century. Then the wooden church of the Briton gave way 
 to the loveliest building that Glastonbury has to show, the 
 gem of late Eomanesque on a small scale, the western 
 church, the western Lady chapel, corruptly known since the 
 fifteenth century as the chapel of Saint Joseph. Mean- 
 while the English church, the stone church, the church 
 of Dunstan, gave way in the course of the same century 
 to the church of Norman Herlwin, as that before long gave 
 way to the mighty pile which still stands in ruins. The
 
 hfi 
 
 [Ln 
 
 §> o o <0 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 o 
 
 ^ 
 
 o 
 
 ^ 
 
 ♦ 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 ^ o 
 
 Ifcitern Lady Chaf-e/. '■f/'ieseiilirj; 
 llie ircsterit Kritish i liunh. fJie o/if 
 Chunh or "LigiitiX lut^ihia". 
 
 Church o/ thfTwelftli C.-iUiiiy ,i ii,i 
 onwards, re/resentiiig tlu liaslerit 
 or JingHsh Chiin/t . fhe LliKrck of 
 Iii,;Vini^l,!>i. and //er/wili. 
 
 Tliirlcfnlh Ci-nlury hidlduij; lOitnctt 
 ing (he two Chiinhfs. 
 
 Typogr.tphU l-lihiiig': 
 To /(ire /. q8.
 
 GLASTONBURY BlilTlSH AND ENGLISH. 90 
 
 wooden basilica and the cliiirch of Dunstan have both 
 perished ; not a stick is left of one, not a stone is left of the 
 other. But both live in a figure there still. Each has its 
 abiding representative. The western church still stands 
 in the site and stead of the wooden building of the Briton, 
 the representative of the church in which Arthur may 
 have prayed. The greater church to the east of it no less 
 represents the church which Ine built, which Dunstan 
 built afresh, and around whose altar were gathered the 
 tombs of the greatest rulers of the tenth and eleventh cen- 
 turies. Had the two vanished churches not stood there, 
 in the relation in which they did stand to one another, the 
 minster of Glastonbury could never have put on a shape 
 so unlike that of any other minster in England. No- 
 where else do we find, as we find here, two churches — two 
 monastic churches — thrown together indeed in after times 
 into one continuous building as seen from without, but 
 always keeping up the character of two wholly distinct in- 
 teriors. For nowhere but at Glastonbury was there the his- 
 torical state of things out of which such an architectural 
 arrangement could grow. Nowhere else did the church of 
 the Briton live on untouched and reverenced by the side of 
 the church of the Englishman, a witness of the Christianity 
 of those ancient times when our fathers still pressed on 
 in the name of Woden and Thunder to overthrow the 
 altars and smite the ministers of Christ. 
 
 But the material fabric is not all. Within its walls the 
 memories still live which, while the fabric was still un- 
 touched, were something more than memories. The 
 Briton, the Norman who had listened to his lore, believed 
 that Arthur lay before the high altar in the tomb which 
 bore his name. The Englishman knew that those walls 
 sheltered the shrine of Eadgar the Giver-of-peace, the 
 tomb of Eadmund the Doer-of-great-deeds, and the tomb 
 of his descendant and namesake, the mighty Ironside. 
 There is no other spot in Britain which, like this, gathers 
 round it all the noblest memories, alike of the older and 
 
 H 2
 
 100 w:essex. 
 
 of the newer dwellers in tlie land. Less exalted in eccle- 
 siastical rank, less often in later times the scene of great 
 events, less happy in having been handed over to the 
 wanton will of the most ruthless of destroyers, the church 
 of Glastonbury, in its ruined state, still keeps a charm 
 which does not belong either to the mother church of 
 Canterbury or to the royal abbey of Westminster. From 
 one form of wrong its ruin has saved it. The pile is roof- 
 less ; the Christian tombs which it once sheltered have 
 vanished, and the dust of kings and saints and heroes has 
 been scattered to the winds. But it has been spared the 
 intrusion of the debased art and the depraved fashion of 
 modern times. Its walls and pillars have been broken 
 down ; they have at least not lived on to be blistered with 
 busts and tablets and fulsome panegyrics in prose and 
 verse. Its aisles are open to the sky ; they are at least 
 not darkened by statues in the garb of modern debate or 
 modern warfare — happy when they keep the garb of 
 modern debate and modern warfare, and have not fallen 
 back on a garb which they never wore, or on the lack of 
 any garb at all. The altars of God, the images of his 
 saints, have vanished. They are at least not shouldered by 
 the graven forms of the very daemons of heathendom. The 
 fall of Glastonbury is great ; but there is a fall still lower. 
 Amid the ruins of Avalon we may at least be thankful that 
 Avalon is not as Westminster. 
 
 Through the long later history of Glastonbury I am 
 not called to go on at length. My special subject has been 
 those early fortunes of the place which have given its church 
 a character wholly unique among the minsters of England. 
 I would fain say somewhat of the stern rule of Thurstan, 
 when the monks were shot down before the altar, because 
 they chose still to sing their psalms after the ancient use 
 of Glastonbury and not after a new use of Fecamp. I 
 would fain say somewhat of the lights thrown upon the 
 state of Glastonbury and all Somerset by the Glastonbury
 
 GLASTONBURY BRITISH AND ENGLISH. 101 
 
 entries in Domesday. I would fain say somewhat of the 
 long struggle with the Bishops which makes up so great a 
 part of the local history both of Glastonbury and of Wells. 
 I would fain say somewhat of the last scene of all, 
 of the heroic end which winds up the tale which, 
 at Glastonbury as in other monastic houses, had for 
 some centuries become undoubtedly unheroic. The mar- 
 tyrdom of Eichard Whiting, following on the ordinary 
 story of an English abbey after abbeys had lost their first 
 love, reads like the fall of the last Constantine winding up 
 the weary annals of the house of Palaiologos. But of one 
 group of names, of one name pre-eminently among them, I 
 must speak. We cannot meet at Glastonbury without in 
 some shape doing our homage to the greatest ruler of 
 the church of Glastonbury, the greatest man born and 
 reared on Glastonbury soil. Earliest among the undoubted 
 worthies of Somerset, surpassed by none who have come 
 after him in his fame and in his deeds, we see, on this 
 spot, rising above the mists of error and of slander, the 
 great churchman, the great statesman, of the tenth cen- 
 tury, the mighty form of Dunstan. Not a few famous 
 men in our history have been deeply wronged by coming 
 to be known only as the subjects of silly legends or, worse 
 still, of perverted and calumnious history. So have Leof- 
 ric and Godgifu suffered ; so has iElf red himself suffered ; 
 but Dunstan has suffered more than all. I doubt not 
 that to many minds his name still calls up no thoughts 
 but that of one of the silliest of silly legends ; or, worse 
 still, it calls up the picture, most unlike the original, of a 
 grovelling and merciless fanatic. Think, I would ask 
 you, under the guidance of true history, more worthily of 
 the greatest son, the greatest ruler, that Glastonbury ever 
 saw. Think more worthily of one who was indeed the 
 strict churchman, the monastic reformer, who called up 
 again the religious life at Glastonbury after a season of 
 decay — but who stands charged in no authentic record 
 as guilty of any act of cruelty or persecution, but who
 
 lO-J WFSSEX. 
 
 does stand forth in authentic records as the great minister 
 of successive West-Saxon kings, of successive Lords of all 
 Britain, in days when Wcssex was the hearth and centre 
 of English rule, and when Glastonbury stood first among 
 English sanctuaries, the chosen burial-place of kings. Let 
 us think of him as the friend of Eadmund, the counsellor 
 of Eadred, the victim of Eadwig, the friend and guide of 
 Eadgar the Giver-of-peace. So mightily under him grew 
 the fame of Glastonbury that a greater name than all was 
 drawn within its spell, and men at the other end of Eng- 
 land deemed that it was at Glastonbury, and not at Athel- 
 ney, that Alfred himself held his last shelter, when the 
 bounds of Wessex, the bounds of England, reached not 
 beyond the coasts of a single island of the Sumorssetan. 
 But, in that century of West-Saxon greatness, the local 
 history of this spot can dispense with any single word or 
 touch that the strictest criticism would reject. The home 
 of Dunstan, the burial-place of Eadgar and the Eadmunds, 
 gathers around it the greatest memories of the great age 
 which made the English kingdom. Yet these memories 
 are all of a kind which are shared by other famous spots 
 within the English realm. What Glastonbury has to itself, 
 alone and without rival, is its historical position as the 
 tie, at once national and religious, which binds the history 
 and memories of our own race to the history and memories 
 of the race which we supplanted.
 
 103 
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 
 
 [Read as the President's Opening Address to the Historical Section of 
 the Archasological Institute, at Taunton, August 7, 1879.] 
 
 The Archaeological Institute met last year in Northamp- 
 tonshire ; it has met this year in Somerset. In neither 
 case has it shown itself for the first time within the 
 borders of the district in which it came together. But 
 in each case its earlier visit was to a border city, an 
 ecclesiastical city; it is only at the second gathering 
 in each district that a temporal centre has been chosen 
 as the place of meeting. The Institute met at Peter- 
 borough before it met at Northampton ; it met at Bath 
 before it met at Taunton. It would be hard to find 
 two English cities whose histories are more unlike than 
 the places of those two meetings. The settlement which 
 grew up around the great fenland monastery of Saint 
 Peter, the holy house of Medeshampstead, grew by 
 degrees into a borough, and, by later ecclesiastical 
 arrangements, into a city, a city and borough to which 
 the changes of our own day have given a growth such as 
 it never knew before. Here is a marked history, old 
 and new ; yet, far nobler as are its existing architectural 
 monuments, we should hardly venture to compare the 
 history of Peterborough with the history of the Eoman 
 city, the English monastery, the Norman bishopric — the 
 old borough Acemannesceaster, which by another name 
 men Bath call. Yet, in the history of this Institute, a 
 meeting at Bath and a meeting at Peterborough have 
 thus much in common. From neither point would it
 
 104 WHSSEX. 
 
 be possible to make anything like an exhanstive examina- 
 tion of the land in which the city stands. In both cases 
 it is the second meeting- which first gives the opportunity 
 for any study of the land itself, as a land. A North- 
 hampton meeting ought to lead to a typical, even, as far 
 as opportunities may allow, to an exhaustive examination 
 of the region of which Northampton is the centre, and 
 to which Northampton gives its name. A Taunton 
 meeting ought to lead, if not to an exhaustive, at least ' 
 to a typical, examination of the region of which, I 
 must remind you at starting, Taunton is not the centre, 
 and to which it does not give its name. Bear in mind 
 that distinction from the beginning. Taunton does not 
 stand to Somerset in the same relation in which North- 
 hampton stands to Northamptonshire. Still, if we look 
 on the land of the Sumorssetan, not as a circle but as 
 an ellipse, those who, like myself, come from the spot 
 which is in some sort the rival of Taunton, must freely 
 allow that Taunton is one centre out of two. 
 
 In passing from Northamptonshire to Somerset, the 
 Institute passes from one of the regions of England most 
 favoured in antiquarian wealth to another region no less 
 favoured. The comparison and contrast between the two 
 with regard to their buildings is attractive, almost fasci- 
 nating ; but I will not enter on it here at any length ; it 
 belongs to another section. I will point out one feature 
 of contrast only, one which is in some sort connected 
 with my present subject. Northamptonshire is, among 
 all the shires of England, one of the richest, perhaps 
 the very richest, in buildings of Eomanesque date and 
 style. It abounds in every variety of round-arched 
 architecture, from those arches in the basilica of Brix- 
 worth which, whatever may be their- date, are surely 
 Eoman in material, Eoman in style, to those arches in the 
 minster of Peterborough whose mouldings show that 
 nothing but conformity to an elder design kej)t their 
 builders back from adopting the constructive forms of the
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE OA. 105 
 
 then new-born Gothic. In the average Northamptonshire 
 parish church we look at least for a Norman doorway, 
 while in not a few we find other features of that style, 
 reaching their climax in the rich capitals and arches of 
 Saint Peter's in Northampton. And Northamptonshire 
 has relics more precious still. Fragments of earlier days, 
 arches, doorways, whole towers, built in that Primitive 
 style which our earliest teachers brought from Rome, are 
 there usual enough to cease to be wonderful. Here in 
 Somerset, one may go miles without seeing a trace of even 
 Norman work, and I doubt whether a midwall shaft is to 
 be found between the Avon and Exmoor. I would ask 
 you to bear in mind this single point of architectural 
 difference between Northamptonshire and Somerset. The 
 difference is incidental ; it may be accidental ; but, from 
 my point of view, it is not without its teaching. 
 
 But my immediate point is that, while Northampton- 
 shire and Somerset alike claim their place among the 
 most historic regions of England, the historic interest of 
 the two regions is of quite a different kind in each, and 
 that the difference is of a kind which is not acci- 
 dental, but one the cause of which goes up to the very 
 beginnings of the English nation. The difference may be 
 summed up in a few words. To what proportion of my 
 hearers will my words convey a meaning, if I say that the 
 difference is this, that Somerset is an immemorial gd, 
 while Northamptonshire is a comparatively modern depart- 
 ment, a shire in the literal sense ? If these words do not 
 convey a meaning as yet, I trust to make them convey a 
 very distinct meaning before I have done. As yet I will 
 only ask you to notice some outward points of difference 
 between the two regions, some palpable facts, some 
 familiar ways of speaking, by which I hope to lead you 
 up to that perhaps still mysterious definition as the only 
 key which will explain them. I have already asked you to 
 remark that Taunton does not hold the same position in 
 the land where we are now met which Northampton holds
 
 100 WESSEX. 
 
 ill the land where the Institute met last year. I asked you 
 to notice the very obvious truth that Northamptonshire is 
 called after the town of Northampton, while Somerset is 
 not culled after the town of Taunton. But, more than 
 this, as the land of Somerset is not called after the 
 town of Taunton, so neither is it called after any other 
 town. There is indeed within its borders a town bearing 
 a kindred name, the King's town of Somerton. But 
 the land of Somerset is not called after the town of 
 Somerton ; the names of the land and of the town 
 are simply cognate, derived from a common source, but 
 neither of them derived from the other. But the dif- 
 ference is not merely a difference of names : it is also 
 a difference of facts. There is no town, Taunton or 
 any other, which stands to the land of Somerset in the 
 same relation in which the town of Northampton stands 
 to the shu-e of Northampton. Northampton is beyond all 
 doubt the local capital; no other town in the shire is 
 likely to dispute its precedence. It has every claim to 
 that rank. First of all, it is very central. It is possible 
 that some of the smaller towns may be geographically 
 still more central ; but, if so, the difference is so slight as 
 to be altogether overbalanced by the fact that Northamp- 
 ton is, and always has been, the greatest town in the 
 shire. If it happens that there is any Northamptonshire 
 magistrate here present, I would ask him whether it ever 
 came into his head to propose that the assizes or sessions 
 of his county should be held anywhere but at Northamp- 
 ton. I can remember when, at a Northamptonshire 
 election, the one polling-place was Northampton ; and, if 
 there was to be only one polling-place, it was certainly 
 the best place for the purpose. But here in Somerset we 
 have no one town which holds, or ever did hold, the same 
 indisputable position as the local capital. The largest 
 town is the Roman city of Bath ; but that, lying as it 
 does in a corner, is wholly unsuitable for such a purpose. 
 Taunton does not lie so completely in a corner as Bath ;
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 107 
 
 but we of Wells sometimes keenly feel that Taunton is not 
 a geographical centre, and the map will show you that it 
 is a great deal nearer to Devonshire than it is to Glou- 
 cestershire. Wells, more central than Taunton, is much 
 smaller ; Glastonbury, most central of all, is smaller still. 
 Somerton has its kindred name and its precedence in 
 Domesday ; but it would hardly assert any more recent 
 claims to the rank of a capital. Ilchester, rival of Bath 
 in antiquity, has really more historic claim to be looked 
 on as the local capital than any of the towns which I 
 have spoken of. It was the place of the county elections 
 down to the first Reform Bill ; it kept its county gaol 
 later still. But Ilchester lives only in the past ; it has 
 the memory of its elections and the memory of its siege ; 
 it has the presence of the beautiful mace of its chief 
 magistrate ; but it would hardly venture now to put 
 forward a claim to be deemed the head of Somerset. As 
 for assizes and sessions, they have been held at all manner 
 of places, at Bridgewater and at Chard, and I doubt not at 
 other places also, as well as at the towns which I have 
 named. The present arrangement is to hold them alter- 
 nately at Wells and at Taunton ; and I do not think that 
 it has ever been proposed at Wells that Taunton should 
 be deprived of that privilege. In short, while there is no 
 question as to what town is the one capital of North- 
 hamptonshire, there is no town which has any grounds, 
 geographical, historical, or practical, for putting itself 
 forward as the one capital of Somerset. Now such a 
 difference as this is not accidental; it must have some 
 ancient historical cause. What that cause is we shall see 
 presently ; but before we come to it, I will ask you to 
 notice one or two more points of difference between the 
 two regions. 
 
 Look then at the names of the two districts. When I 
 have spoken of Northamptonshire, I have always called it 
 Northamptonshire ; there is no choice in the matter ; 
 there is nothing else to call it, except the more formal
 
 108 WESSEX. 
 
 style of ' county of Northampton,' which comes to the 
 same thing. But have any of you noticed that, up to this 
 point in my discourse, I have avoided using the word 
 Soniersetcs7i //•(? ? I have spoken either of Somerset, or, 
 when I meant to be a bit archaic, of the land of the 
 Sumorscctan. I do not know whether anybody has noticed 
 it as a peculiarity that I said Somerset rather than Somerset- 
 shire; but I am sure that, if any one noticed it as a 
 peculiarity, no one had any difl&culty in knowing what I 
 meant. Now one must always say NorthamptonsArre, 
 because a distinction must be drawn between the shire 
 and its capital. Here, where there is no capital, Somerset 
 and Somersetshire are both justified by common usage. 
 But Somerset is the form to be preferred on the ground of 
 ancient usage, and in some phrases it is preferred in 
 modern usage. I think we always speak of the parlia- 
 mentary divisions as East-, West-, and Mid->S'omersei. I 
 believe that a point of view might be found from which the 
 form Somersetshire may be thought to be more correct than 
 Somerset ; for it might be argued that in strictness a 
 Somerset was a man, one of the Sumorscetan, and that 
 Somersetshire was the proper name of the ' shire of the 
 Sumorssetan.' And I hope very soon to show you an actual 
 ancient instance of such an use of the word. But in 
 actual use the word Somerset represents the tribe-name 
 Sumorscetan, the Sumersete of Domesday being an inter- 
 mediate stage. Now, in my own centuries, eleventh 
 and twelfth, the ending in shire was familiarly added to 
 the name of some pagi, only the ' pagus Sumersetensis ' is 
 one of those to which, as a rule, it is not added. In 
 several passages the contrast is very marked between 
 Somerset and other lands bearing tribe-names, and those 
 lands which are commonly sj)oken of as shires. Take for 
 instance some entries in the Chronicles. In 878 the 
 inhabitants of three pagi of Wessex flock to the banner of 
 Alfred. They are ' Sumors^te ealle and Wils^te and 
 Hamtunscir se ddel pe hire beheonan see was.' In 1015
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 109 
 
 Cnut harries 'on Dorssetura and on Wiltunscire and on 
 Sumorsseton.' In 1051 Odda is made Earl ' ofer Defena- 
 scire, and ofer Sumorssston, and ofer Dorseton, and ofer 
 Wealas [West-Wales or Cornwall] .' The next year Harold 
 lands at Porlock ' neh Sumers86tan gemseran and Defene- 
 scire.' Henry of Huntingdon represents the second of these 
 passages in his Latin by 'preedavit Dorset et Sumerset 
 et Wiltsire.' In Domesday the forms are ' Sumersete,' 
 ' Sumerseta,' while we have * Devenescire,' and ' Wiltscire.' 
 One passage alone looks the other way ; but it is very clearly 
 one of those cases where, according to the true force of the 
 saying, the exception proves the rule. On the night of 
 July 24, 1122, among other fearful things seen and heard, 
 there was an earthquake * ofer eal Sumersetescire and on 
 Gleauccestrescire.' The ' eal ' here makes all the differ- 
 ence. It is like Cnut's special title of King of all England, 
 as distinguished from the title of * King of England ' un- 
 known till long after his day. Remembering that this is 
 the one case in which the land of the Sumorssetan has the 
 shire-ending, we may fairly translate it, as I hinted above, 
 ' over all the shire of the Sumorssetan and in Gloucester- 
 shire.' It would have been hard to mark in any other 
 way the whole land of Somerset as distinguished from the 
 seemingly partial range of the phsenomenon in Glouces- 
 tershire. But throughout the period of English history 
 with which I have had most to do, save in this single 
 case, the ending shire is no more added to Somerset — or to 
 Dorset either — than it is added to Kent or to Cornwall. 
 
 Why then is this? I answer for the present that 
 certain pagi of England were called shires because they 
 were shires, that certain other pagi were not called shires 
 because they were not shires. Somerset belongs to one 
 class, Northamptonshire belongs to the other. I ask you 
 . for the present to put up with this very unsatisfactory 
 answer. I am yet only piling together my points of 
 difference ; I have not yet come to their explanation. 
 We have as yet established these points of difference
 
 110 7FESSEX. 
 
 between the two districts which I am comparing. Somerset 
 is not in early times called a shire ; it is not called after 
 a town ; it has not, and never has had, any one town as 
 its undoubted capital. It is essentially what in Switzer- 
 land is called Land as opposed to Stadt. It is a land of 
 certain extent, meted out simply as a land, without refer- 
 ence to towns at all. It has no one natural centre and 
 meeting-place ; its meeting-places have shifted from time 
 to time, as has been found convenient from time to time. 
 Northamptonshire, on the other hand, is strictly the dis- 
 trict attached to a town. It takes its name from a town ; 
 it gathers round that town as its natural centre and 
 meeting-place. One in short is the shire of Northampton ; . 
 the other is the land of the Sumorssetan. 
 
 I would again crave your indulgence while I go off into 
 another most important point of contrast ; in short, I 
 would ask to complete my collection of phsenomeua before 
 I begin the explanation of the phsenomena. Let us now 
 compare the position which the two districts hold in the 
 general history of the larger whole, the kingdom of which 
 they alike form parts. The contrast which is thus sup- 
 plied is most striking and instructive. Both are historic 
 regions, full of great historic associations ; but their 
 historic memories are of different kinds, and for the most 
 part they belong to different ages. Northamptonshire is 
 the richer of the two in contributions to the general 
 history of England, while Somerset may claim the special 
 interest which belongs to a land which has a history of its 
 own. Let me put it in another way ; the land of the 
 Sumorssetan is older than England ; the shire of North- 
 hampton is younger than England. Northamptonshire is 
 simply part of England : it has no sej)arate historic being 
 of its own ; Somerset is one of the earlier wholes by 
 whose union England was made up. It has, in a certain 
 sense, a history which may be said to end when the history 
 of England as England begins. If we look through the 
 history of England, at least from the eleventh century
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE QA. Ill 
 
 onwards, we shall find that an unusually large proijortion 
 of great national events, of battles, of councils, of national 
 settlements, took place within the borders of North- 
 hamptonshire ; but there is no history of Northamptonshire 
 itself. There is a history of the borough of North- 
 hampton ; there is a history of the abbey of Peterborough ; 
 there is doubtless a history, if we could only get at it, of 
 every smaller town and parish within the shire. But of the 
 shire itself, as a shire, there is no history. Northampton- 
 shire doubtless has its local annals, its lists of sheriffs and 
 parliamentary representatives ; but it has no history in 
 the sense which I mean. Here in Somerset the case is 
 different. The list of great events in English history 
 which took place within its borders is not small ; but we 
 shall hardly be wise if we set up our land as in this 
 respect a rival to Northamptonshire. We have made our 
 contributions to tlie general history of the kingdom, 
 even in later times ; but we shall do well to allow that 
 Northamptonshire surpasses Somerset both in the number 
 and in the greatness of the national events which it has 
 beheld. But, if we go back to times before the eleventh 
 century, the prominence of Somerset over Northampton- 
 shire in our national annals is yet more undoubted. That 
 is to say, Somerset has, what Northamptonshire has not, 
 a history of its own, a history set down in our national 
 Chronicles, which carefully record the gradual making of 
 Somerset as no small part of the gradual making of Eng- 
 land. We hear of the land, its towns, its fortresses, as 
 early as the sixth century ; we hear of its folk by their own 
 name early in the ninth. Of Northampton town we get 
 our first mention early in the tenth century ; its great 
 historic importance begins in the second half of the 
 eleventh. The first mention of the northern Hamptonshire 
 —carefully to be distinguished from the much earlier 
 mention of the southern — as a separate district bearing 
 that name, comes earlier in that century, in the year 
 1011.
 
 112 WESSEX. 
 
 The name of Nortliainpton borough thus first comes 
 before us in the wars of Eadward the Unconquerod ; it 
 ■was one of the towns which had to be won back from 
 the Dane. The name of Northamptonshire first comes 
 before us in the later struggle with the new Danish 
 invaders, Swegen and Cnut. From that time onward, the 
 shire, and above all its capital, stand forth, as I have 
 already said, as the scene of a very large proportion of 
 the great events of English history. Northampton might 
 dispute with Oxford the honour of being the great 
 national meeting-place of northern and southern England. 
 If it was at Oxford that under Cnut Danes and English 
 agreed to dwell together under Eadgar's law; it was at 
 Northampton that Harold held the great Gem6t which 
 acknowledged the earl whom Northumberland had chosen, 
 and in which northern and southern England agreed to 
 dwell together under the law of Cnut. If Oxford saw 
 the granting of the great Provisions, Northampton saw 
 the Parliament which carried on the work of Harold's 
 Gemot yet further, by acknowledging Scotland as an inde- 
 pendent kingdom. How high a rank Northampton held 
 among the cities and boroughs of England, how it had 
 supplanted cities of far greater and earlier fame, we see 
 by a witness which is none the less certain because of the 
 strange form that it takes. On the day that King Ead- 
 ward was alive and dead, the fonr greatest cities of England 
 were held to be London, York, Winchester, Lincoln. In 
 the reign of Stephen, Exeter had supplanted Lincoln. 
 But when the body of the quartered David had to be 
 divided among the chief towns of England according to 
 their rank, London got the head without doubt ; York and 
 Winchester disputed over the shoulders, which should 
 have the right ; the right leg went to Bristol, the left to 
 Northampton. That is to say, the inland borough, of 
 comparatively recent origin, no centre of trade, no dwell- 
 ing-place of ancient kings or bishops, had risen to rank 
 fifth among the towns of England, next after the ancient
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 113 
 
 and immemorial cities and after the mercliant borough, 
 whose happy position and far-reaching trafiic had raised 
 it to a level with them. 
 
 But the historical associations belonging to North- 
 hampton and Northamptonshire press thick upon us. 
 It was the earldom of Waltheof, his old earldom along 
 with Huntingdon, before he received Northumberland from 
 the Conqueror. After his death, his martyrdom as his 
 countrymen deemed it, it passed with his daughter to 
 Simon of Senlis, the founder alike of the priory of Saint 
 Andrew and of the castle which overlooked the river. This 
 was after the survey, after the death of the Conqueror, so 
 that of Northampton castle there is no notice in Domes- 
 day. The entries of both shire and borough in that great 
 record are meagre, but they are instructive in their 
 meagreness. They show that, while Lincolnshire and Bed- 
 fordshire were among the parts of England where Eng- 
 lishmen most largely kept their own, Northampton and 
 Northamptonshire were among the parts which were most 
 thoroughly handed over to the possession of strangers. 
 This, I need not say, speaks well for the people of a land on 
 whom the Conqueror's hand fell thus heavy. In the follow- 
 ing reigns the borough is again called to fill its old place 
 as one of the great seats of national gatherings ; but now 
 that calling begins to be shared with the local capital by 
 other points within its shire. It was within the borders 
 of the shire, though not within the walls of its capital, in 
 the castle and by the forest of Eockingham, that Anselm, 
 the born saint, in the simple might of his true holiness, 
 stood face to face with the power and the wrath of the Red 
 King. It was in the castle of Northampton itself that his 
 imitator, Thomas, the artificial saint, withstood in another 
 spirit a king of another mould, when in more than a figure 
 cross and sword met as hostile weapons, and when the 
 appeal was made from the king of Angles to the king of 
 angels. It was again within the borders of the shire, 
 in the vanished monastery of Pipewell, that Eichard of 
 
 I
 
 114 WESSEX, 
 
 Poitou, ill the former of Lis two short visits to England, 
 held his great market for the sale of lands, honours, and 
 pardons. It was there that — within the same shire Avhicli 
 saw the aclviiowledgement of Morkere of Northumberland 
 and of David of Scotland — he sold back to the Scottish 
 Lion the special rights which his father had won over the 
 Scottish realm. And these are only a few out of a crowd 
 of councils and parliaments held within the shire, most of 
 them in its capital. If we take in the history of the 
 great abbey of Peterborough, we may bring it many a 
 stirring tale, from the raid of Hereward and the stern rule 
 of Turold to the days when old Scarlett buried two queens 
 within the minster. And, if report speak true, it was the 
 fact that the minster of Peterborough held the grave 
 of Katharine which caused it to be spared to receive the 
 grave of Mary. And the same land which saw Mary's 
 burial, saw also her beheading. Not many miles ofi", by 
 the banks of the same sluggish river, stands Fothering- 
 hay, where the fallen choir of the church held the tombs 
 of the princes of the house of York, where the small frag- 
 ments of the castle remind us of the day when their de- 
 scendant laid her head on the block within its hall. Once 
 landed in the region of personal incident, we might even 
 mention that a Northamptonshire village was the scene of 
 the romantic adventure which led Edward the Fourth to 
 raise the widow of Sir John Gray to the throne which had 
 been meant for a princess of Castile or of Savoy. And, 
 going back again to the wider events of history, if 
 Northampton and Northamptonshire have been the scene 
 of councils, they have no less been the scene of battles. 
 The great year whose later months saw the victory of 
 freedom at Lewes had seen in its earlier months a heavy 
 blow dealt to freedom at Northampton. The town was 
 taken by the forces of Henry the Third; its defender, 
 the younger Simon, was made a prisoner; the burghers 
 were mercilessly plundered ; according to one account they 
 were ruthlessly slaughtered, on a charge, strange indeed,
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 115 
 
 of a design to burn the city of London. In another and 
 less noble strife two hundred years later, when English- 
 men were wasting their blood in genealogical disputes, 
 the spot which had seen the victory of one Henry saw the 
 captivity of another ; in the meadows below Northampton 
 the king-maker won the second of his battles, and for the 
 second time had his king at his mercy. And, last of all, 
 when the strife of the thirteenth century was fought 
 again in the seventeenth, it was not indeed at North- 
 hampton itself, but within the bounds of Northamptonshire, 
 that the victors of Naseby could give their glad answer 
 to the question — 
 
 O wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North, 
 With j^our hands and your feet and your raiment all red ? 
 
 And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout, 
 
 And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread ? ' 
 
 Now I think that, after going through this long string 
 of great events in our national history, we must allow 
 that, for many centuries past, at least from the twelfth 
 century onwards, more great questions have been disputed 
 or decided, more great assemblies have been held, more 
 great battles have been fought, on the soil of Nortli- 
 hamptonshire than on the soil of Somerset. The reason 
 is plain ; it is a geographical reason. It is the central 
 position of Northampton and Northamptonshire which 
 caused so many important scenes of national history to be 
 acted within the borders of the shire, and specially within 
 or under the walls of the town. The central land of Eng- 
 land, the land into which not a brook flows from any other 
 shire, but out of Avhich rivers flow into three seas, swell- 
 ing the waters of the Wash, the Thames, and our own 
 Severn sea, was, from its mere place in the map, likely to 
 be the scene of great events. A national assembly must 
 be held somewhere. In days when there is free choice in 
 such matters, when all the business of three kingdoms is not 
 done in a single town in a corner of one of them, that 
 national assembly is most naturally held in some place 
 
 1 2
 
 116 wmsEX. 
 
 near the centre of tlio kiugdoin. So, when armies are 
 in the field, they will meet in battle somewhere ; and, 
 when two armies of Englishmen are engaged in civil war, 
 they are more likelj^ to meet for their decisive struggle in 
 Northamptonshire than in Northumberland or in Corn- 
 wall. But mark that the exact place depends on the 
 accidents of warfare. If one army had been a little 
 quicker or another a little slower, the battle of Edgehill 
 might have been fought in Northamptonshire or Oxford- 
 shire, and the battle of Naseby might have been fought 
 in Leicestershire. Those battles were not fought in the 
 shires in which they were fought out of any reason 
 specially affecting those shires ; the}^ were not struggles 
 waged by the men of those shires for any special objects 
 of their own. Nearly all the events which I have gone 
 through help to bear out my proposition that, though 
 Northamptonshire is a land which plays so great and 
 constant a part in English history, there is no such thing 
 as a history of Northamptonshire itself. 
 
 And I do not any the more shrink from saying this, 
 because there is one most important point in which we 
 may truly say, perhaps that Northamptonshire itself, cer- 
 tainly that a region of which Northamptonshire is a very 
 considerable member, has in some sort given the law to 
 England. I mean in the matter of language. The polite 
 and literary speech of England, while it is neither the 
 speech of Northumberland nor the speech of Wessex, is 
 the speech, if not exclusively of Northamptonshire, at 
 least of a region of which Northamptonshire is part. But 
 again what is the cause ? Doubtless the central position 
 of that region. The strongly marked Saxon speecli which 
 has fallen back from Kent to Somerset was not likely 
 to make disciples in Yorkshire. The"" strongly marked 
 Anglian speech, fresh wrought under Danish influences 
 throughout a large region, was not likely to make disciples 
 either in Kent or in Somerset. But Yorkshire, Kent, and 
 Somerset might all silently agree to take as their common
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE OA. 117 
 
 classical standard the intermediate speech of the inter- 
 mediate lands, a speech which could be understood by the 
 men at either end, while the men a,t either end could 
 hardly understand one another. 
 
 Now my position was that, while Somerset cannot pre- 
 tend to have been the scene of so many of the great events 
 of Enghsh history as Northamptonshire has been, it has the 
 advantage of Northamptonshire in having in the strictest 
 sense a history of its own. This feature actually comes 
 out most strongly in the earliest parts of English history ; 
 but it comes out in the latest parts also. In the civil war 
 of the seventeenth century Somerset can boast of no one 
 event like the fight of Naseby ; the land had its share in 
 the struggle, but its share was mainly of a local kind. 
 What we most think of iji connexion with Somerset during 
 the whole of the seventeenth century is the number of 
 names which it contributes to the roll of the worthies of 
 the age. The name of Phelips still lives at Montacute ; 
 the greater name of Pym is not forgotten at Brymore ; 
 the memory of Blake dwells at Bridgewater where he was 
 born and at Taunton which he defended ; none, I should 
 deem, visit Wrington without giving a thought to the 
 memory of Locke. Nor are the worthies all on one side ; 
 all cavaliers were not like E-upex't and Goring ; and Wells, 
 ever prudent in the choice of its members, need not be 
 ashamed of having been represented by Sir Ralph Hopton. 
 But here I would again notice that the chief local events 
 of Somerset in the seventeenth century are essentially 
 local events ; they are local in a sense in which the fight 
 of Naseby is not a local event in Northamptonshire. When 
 Blake defended Taunton, he was not merely defending a 
 strong military post which military needs required should be 
 defended; he was something like the defender of a free city ; 
 he was the defender of a town which had a character and 
 an interest of its om'u ; he was the leader of burghers who 
 knew for what they were fighting and whose hearts were 
 thoroughly in the cause. Taunton in the West was as eager
 
 to keep Goriug outside its walls as Colchester in tlie East 
 was eager to get vid of liim when he had got inside. Only 
 Taunton has the advantage over Colchester that its siege 
 has not become the subject of a myth. But go on a little 
 later, to the last fighting which this part of England has 
 seen, to the days of Monmouth's insurrection. Perhaps I 
 should not call Sedgemoor the last fighting, as there was 
 a skirmish at Wincanton a few years later ; but Sedge- 
 moor was, as Macaulay says, the last fighting in England 
 which deserves the name of battle. Now that battle was 
 essentially a local battle ; it was not merely part of a 
 general struggle which happened to be decided in Somer- 
 set, as the fight of Naseby happened to be decided in 
 Northamptonshire ; it was a local warfare, a warfare which 
 the men of the shire, or a large party among them, waged 
 on their own account. It was strictly local ; it was strictly 
 popular ; it was a struggle in which Taunton again plays 
 its characteristic part ; it is a struggle which is but a 
 small matter in the general history of England, but which 
 fills a great space in the special history of Somerset. 
 
 But it is after all in the earliest days of the history of 
 England that we can best see the special character of the 
 history of Somerset. Nowhere else can we so well see a 
 land in its making. Nowhere else can we so well trace 
 out the process by which a land became bit by bit an 
 English possession, how this battle gave our forefathers 
 the dominion of such an amount of British soil; how, 
 after a lapse, sometimes only of a few years, sometimes of 
 a whole generation, the frontier was again pushed forward 
 as the result of another battle. Three, perhaps four, 
 periods of conquest, three or four swoops down on the 
 devoted land, made the whole region from the Avon to 
 Blackdown English. The territory thus won bit by bit 
 from the Briton became one of the constituent parts of 
 the West-Saxon realm, the land of the Sumorssetan. The 
 same process doubtless went on in other parts of Britain ; 
 but nowhere else are we allowed to see it before our eyes
 
 ________ ^SOMERSET AND THE 
 
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 .. u/it ^uie X-Ine ^mmmmtmm^ ^ syi 
 
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 r
 
 EIGHBOURING LANDS
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 119 
 
 with the same clearness. In Kent and Sussex we can 
 trace the formation of a kingdom ; but those kingdoms 
 reached their full extent at an earlier period of their 
 growth. It is in the history of the West-Saxon kingdom 
 that we can best see how a kingdom went on growing ; 
 how it made a conquest ; how it i-eceived a check ; how it 
 waited years before it made another conquest ; how it lost 
 on one side and gained on another, till it took the final 
 shape in which it became one of the component parts of 
 the greater whole of England. And no part of the growth 
 of Wessex is so clearly written as that which sets before 
 us the making of the land of Somerset by the conquests 
 of Ceawlin, Cenwalh, Centwine, and Ine. The process is 
 a part of general English history ; for it is a part of the 
 growth of England. But it is part of the growth of Eng- 
 land only by being the growth of one of those smaller 
 settlements by whose union England was to be made. 
 
 The land of the Sumorssetan was thus formed, in the 
 space between the years 577 and 710, as one of the 
 states which made up the kingdom of the West-Saxons. 
 It was ruled, we can hardly doubt, by one of the under- 
 kings of the royal house, of whom we know that there 
 were at one time as many as five at once. As the unity 
 of the kingdom grew, under-kings gave way to ealdor- 
 men, and more than one ealdorman of the Sumorsse- 
 tan plays his part in the great struggle with the Danes. 
 And I need not add that one, and the greatest, of the 
 kings of the West-Saxons made one spot in Somerset the 
 centre from which to win back the West-Saxon realm 
 when for a moment it was lost. But remember that it 
 was only for a moment that Wessex was lost, and it is the 
 fact that it was only for a moment that it was lost which 
 makes the main difference between the historical position 
 of Somerset and of Northamptonshire, between the his- 
 torical position of the West-Saxon and the Mercian shires 
 generally. We have seen that we have a history of 
 Wessex, a history of Somerset, from the earliest possible
 
 120 WESSEX. 
 
 moment. We have no sucli history of Mercia as we have of 
 Wessex; but that is simply because it is not recorded; 
 the same process of gradual conquest from the Briton 
 must have gone on in both cases. And as we have a 
 history of Somerset, so we might, if it had chanced to be 
 recorded, have had a history of any of the states which 
 went to make up the Mercian whole, of the Wocensaitan, 
 the Cilternssetan, the Pecssetan, and the Elmetssetan, of 
 the Gyrwas and the Lindesfaras, of Noxga gd and of Ohta 
 get. None of them could have had so long a history as the 
 history of Somerset, because those divisions and names had 
 perished before the tenth century, while Somerset, both 
 division and name, has lived on till now. Neither could 
 Northamptonshire, as Northamptonshire, have so long a 
 history, because Northamptonshire, as Northamptonshire, 
 is not heard of till the making of England is over. Or 
 rather it is not heard of till a large part of England has 
 to be made again, and till Northampton came into being 
 as part of this second making. 
 
 I think you will see by this time that there is an essen- 
 tial difference between a land of which we can trace the 
 gradual formation from the sixth century onwards and a 
 land whose name is not heard of till the eleventh century 
 — between a laud gathered round a town, called from a 
 town, of which that town is the natural head and centre, 
 and a land which has no head town, no natural or his- 
 torical centre, above all, which does not bear the name of 
 a people. Here we at last come to the main difference : 
 the one is the shire of Northampton, the other is the gd of 
 the Sumorssetan. Let me use this old word gd, the High- 
 German gau. We can just prove that it was in English 
 use ; for we know that there was somewhere in Mercia a 
 Noxga gd and an Ohta gd, though Mr. Kemble himself 
 was unable to find out exactly where those gds lay. This 
 most ancient name has been fairly driven out of the lan- 
 guage by a name younger, though still very ancient, the 
 name shire, Gd and sclr alike translate the liSitin pag us,
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 121 
 
 tlie district which we now call shire or county. But the 
 two names look at the district from different lights ; their 
 own etymological meaning is wholly different ; they seem 
 to point to difference in the districts called by each. 
 Now in English the name gd or gaii, still familiar in 
 Germany, everywhere died out, but the name shire did not 
 everywhere come in. To many counties of England the 
 ending shire is never added. Some of us may have heard 
 the phrase of going into ' the shires,' as distinguished 
 from those parts of England which are not shires. No 
 one ever adds the word to Kent, Cornwall, Sussex, Essex, 
 Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Northumberland, Cumber- 
 land, or Westmoreland. No one who knows local usage 
 ever adds it to Rutland. And, leaving that last mysterious 
 little district alone, the reason in the other cases is plain. 
 None of those districts are historically shires. A shire 
 is in strictness a division, something sheared off from a 
 greater whole. Now the lands which I have mentioned 
 are not divisions ; they are not sheared off from anything 
 greater ; they are not divisions of the kingdom of Eng- 
 land ; they are ancient kingdoms and principalities whose 
 union helped to make the kingdom of England. And the 
 like rank I claim for the lands of Somerset and Dorset. 
 They are not shires cut off from anything greater ; they 
 are the territories of tribes, in other words gas, which went 
 to make up the kingdom of Wessex, and thereby the 
 kingdom of England. 
 
 The root of the whole matter is that the names Somer- 
 set and Dorset are strictly tribal names. The name of 
 the tribe and the name of their land is one. A thing is 
 always^done 'onSumorssetan,' 'on Dorsaetan,' while things 
 done in the neighbouring lands may be done ' on Defenan,' 
 ' on Wilssetan,' but may also be done ' on Defenascire,' ' on 
 Wiltunscire.' This usage of language is exactly as when 
 a thing is done 'on West-Seaxum,' 'on East-Englum,' 
 * on Myrcnan ; ' the land has no name apart from its 
 people. So it is with old Greek names like LoJcroi and
 
 W£:SSEX. 
 
 Leontinoi ; so it is with modern German names, like Preus- 
 sen, Hessen, Sachsen. In our own language the plural form 
 TT^[i/t\s' is another case of the same usage : it is clearly Wealas, 
 the name of the people used as the name of the land. Somer- 
 set then, Sumei-setey 8umerseta, Somersetania, all the forms 
 that the name takes in English or in Latin, is the land of 
 the Siimorscetan ; Somerton is their town. I will not pre- 
 tend to decide what is the origin of the first half of the 
 name ; the derivation which makes Somerset the cvstiva 
 regio is so easy and tempting that one is half afraid that 
 it cannot be right. But as to the second half of the name 
 there is no doubt. Swtan is a word of the same origin as 
 sit, settle, and other kindred words ; we use the same 
 phrase every day when we talk of settlers and settlements 
 in Australia and elsewhere. The scetan in any district are 
 those who sit down or settle in it ; the form is therefore a 
 common ending of tribe-names. In Wessex we have the 
 Sumorsaetan, the Dorseetan, the Wilssetan. In Mercia 
 we have seen the names of some ancient tribes whose 
 memory has perished from the map and even from history. 
 Such are the Pecswtan or settlers on the Peak, the Wocen- 
 scetan, whom Mr. Kemble takes to be rather Wrocenswtan, 
 the settlers by the Wrekin. So among a kindred folk we 
 have the land of Elsass. Its English form would be Ilscetan, 
 Uset. Or was the river which gave its name to Alsatia once 
 the Ivel, to bring us as strangely near to our own Ivelchester 
 and Ivelminster, Ilchester and Ilminster, as Strasshurg, 
 Stratehurg, brings us near to our own Street ? So again 
 there is Holsntia, Holtset, the land of the Holtscetan, the 
 woodfolk, whose High-Dutch name of Holstein might easily 
 put us on a wrong scent. And there are two Mercian 
 tribe names which have not perished with the rest. The 
 land of the Magesoetan is now known" as Herefordshire ; 
 but their name is not wholly lost ; it lives possibly in 
 Maisemore, more surely on 3fay Hill, the high hill between 
 Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. Had Herefordshire 
 kept its tribe name, the modern shape of that name would
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 123 
 
 be Mayset. But the Scrohscetan have done more than this ; 
 they have given their name to Shropslm-e, the only Mercian 
 shire which keeps a tribe-name ; and like our own Siimer- 
 swtan, Dorswtan, and Wilscetan, the shire contains a town 
 with a cognate name, the borough of the Scrohswtan, 
 Scrohbeshurh or Shrewsbury. Shropshire and Rutland are 
 the only two Mercian shires which have strictly names of 
 their own, not taken from any town. 
 
 A crowd of curious questions might be asked as to the 
 names and the origin of the West-Saxon lands and shires. 
 Some of them I have tried to answer elsewhere ; some I 
 might find it a little hard to answer. But I cannot enter 
 upon them here. My object now is to contrast counties 
 which are undoubted tribal settlements and which bear 
 undoubted tribal names, a class of which Somerset is the 
 best example, with counties which are mere shires or 
 divisions, a class of which Northamptonshire is as good 
 an example as any other. All the Mercian shires, save 
 Shropshire and Eutland, are called, like Northampton, 
 directly after a town. And, just as in the case of North- 
 hamptonshire, the town after which the shire is named is 
 commonly one which lies conveniently central, and, except 
 when it has been outstripped by the growth of other towns 
 in later times, it is the greatest town in the county. I 
 could go through the few apparent exceptions at some 
 length, but I will mention only one, because I think it is 
 the only one which concerns us. - Buckinghamshire, a 
 land once West-Saxon, is the only Mercian shire in which 
 there is any room for questionings as to which town is to 
 be deemed the local capital. But there is room for such 
 questionings in every shire of Wessex in the later and 
 wider sense — that is, in every shire south of the Thames — 
 save only in Devonshire and Dorset, where the position of 
 the Eoman cities of Exeter and Dorchester forbade all 
 rivalry. 
 
 The name of every one of these shires suggests some 
 curious point or other. But all that concerns us now is
 
 124 IVFSSEX. 
 
 to point out tbo Jifference between comities like Somerset 
 keeping an immemorial tribe-name, and whieli have no 
 central town, and counties like Northamptonshire which 
 have a central town, and which bear its name. Now 
 what is the cause of this distinction ? I believe it to be 
 this, that West-Saxon England was made only once, 
 while Mercian England had to be made twice. The 
 Mercian shire is another thing from the West-Saxon gd, 
 because Mercia, or the greater part of it, was conquered 
 and divided by the Danes in 877, while the Danes tried in 
 vain to conquer and divide Wessex in 878. In Mercia, 
 save, it would seem, in the land of the Scrobssetan, the old 
 divisions, Gyrvan, Pecssetan, and the rest, passed away, 
 as the ancient names of Derby and Whitby passed away, 
 as the elder names of a crowd of smaller places must have 
 passed away when they took names from Danish lords. 
 When Eadward the Unconquered and his sister the Lady 
 of the Mercians won the land back for England and for 
 Christendom, when they founded many towns and for- 
 tresses, they seem to have mapped out the recovered land 
 afresh. It may be, though I will not insist on what can- 
 not be proved, that Alfred himself began the Avork in that 
 part of Mercia which he held with his West- Saxon king- 
 dom, and that we have here the kernel of truth in the 
 myth which describes him as dividing all England into 
 shires. Perhaps then partly the great king himself, in 
 any case his children, made new shires, shires in the 
 strictest sense, divisions, departments. Only, unlike 
 modern French departments, they called them after the 
 chief towns ; they called a shire Northamptonshire ; they 
 did not call it the department of Nen and Welland. And 
 to each of these chief towns they allotted such a territory, 
 such a sJm-e, as lay conveniently round the town as a 
 central meeting-place. There are some anomalies ; nothing 
 human is without them. But this account is true of Mercia 
 as a whole ; it is emphatically true of Northamptonshire, 
 especially if we look on the soke of Peterborough as a
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE OA. 125 
 
 separate district. In Wessex, on the other hand, and in 
 the South of England generally, the Danes never settled. 
 They came and ravaged ; for a moment they conquered ; 
 but they never occupied the land or divided it among 
 themselves. At no time then was there any need for any 
 general recasting of the districts which made up southern 
 England. There was nothing to hinder an old kingdom, 
 an old cjd, from living on as a modern county. And some 
 at least of the old kingdoms, of the old gets, have lived on 
 as modern counties. We have Kent and Sussex ; we have 
 Somerset and Dorset. Somerset and Dorset therefore, no 
 less than Kent and Sussex, are no shires, no divisions, no 
 departments, but component elements of England, older 
 than England. Northamptonshire was made by the great 
 King or the great Lady of the tenth century. Somerset 
 was never made ; it grew ; it grew bit by bit from the 
 victories of Ceawlin to the victories of Ine. It has there- 
 fore a history of its own, a history of its own growth, a 
 history which in the nature of things comes to an end 
 at a time somewhat earlier than the time when the new- 
 made Mercian departments, which in the nature of things 
 have no history of their own, first begin to show them- 
 selves on the general field of the history of England. 
 
 Up to a certain point then, a point early in the eighth 
 century, the history of Somerset and the history of Wessex 
 are in some sort the same. The growth of the gd was the 
 growth of the kingdom. In Ine's day the new land was 
 fully formed, as one of the lands which make up the king- 
 dom. From that time of course its local history becomes 
 secondary to the general history of the kingdom, first of 
 Wessex, then of England. But till Wessex is finally 
 merged in England, or rather has grown into England — 
 till the West-Saxon name has passed away, lost in the 
 name of the kingdom into which Wessex has grown — the 
 land of the Sumorssetan keeps its place as one of the parts 
 of the kingdom which is richest in its supply of historical 
 incident and historical instruction.
 
 126 WJESSEX. 
 
 And now comes in the distinction wliicli I drew long 
 ago as to tlie nature of tlie strictly architectural wealth of 
 the two regions. We all know that the architectural 
 wealth of Somerset consists mainly of works in the later 
 styles. Both lands are rich in ancient houses ; but among 
 houses we take a lower standard of antiquity than we do 
 among churches, and whether in Northamptonshire, in 
 Somerset, or in anywhere else, we set down a house older 
 than the fourteenth century as something remarkable in 
 itself. It is in the churches that the distinction comes 
 out. The churches of Somerset, as I have already noticed, 
 contain but little of Romanesque of any kind, while of the 
 earliest form of Romanesque I think I may safely say 
 that they contain none at all. I hardly know why this 
 is, as the abundance of good building-stone in both dis- 
 tricts would doubtless cause stone to be freely used in 
 both earlier than in most parts of England. But as a 
 matter of fact, the memorials of the earliest style may be 
 almost said to abound in Northamptonshire ; in Somerset, 
 if they ever existed, they have vanished. Now, even if 
 this fact be accidental, there is a kind of poetical justice 
 in it. Northamptonshire, which, setting aside the great 
 abbey which hardly belongs to it, is barely visible in the 
 earliest records of English history, keeps abundance of 
 material memorials of those days, to remind us that 
 the land which became Northamptonshire was already 
 there, though under some other name. Somerset, where 
 so large a part of the earliest English history happened, 
 which holds so prominent a place in our earliest records, 
 could better dispense with material memorials of the days 
 of which its very name is a witness. 
 
 For if the land — I may now say the get — of the 
 Sumorstetan is less rich than Northamptonshire in great 
 historical associations from the time of the Norman con- 
 quest onward, yet, wherever the visitor treads in that land, 
 he is treading in the very thick of West-Saxon history. 
 Almost every spot has made its contribution to the history
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 127 
 
 of the West- Saxon realm; almost every s^jot has its 
 memories of kings and saints and heroes. We meet in 
 the castle of Taunton, in the fortress of Norman times 
 hard by the ancient hurh of Ine. That later fortress at 
 least represents the town and stronghold which Ine reared 
 to guard his newly- won land against the British enemy, 
 the town and stronghold which Jl^thelburh did not shrink 
 from burning, when it was turned about to purposes of 
 home-born strife. We make our way to Dunster ; there 
 we look down on a coast almost every inch of which has 
 beheld some stage of the warfare of the ninth, tenth, 
 and eleventh centuries. There is the Parret's mouth, 
 where in Ecgberlit's day the invaders were smitten by 
 Bishop Ealhstan and Ealdorman Osric; there, on either 
 side, are Watchet and Porlock, where again they were 
 smitten in the days of Eadward the Unconquered — Porlock 
 where again Harold and Leofwine landed on their return 
 from their Irish shelter. And some have placed within 
 the circuit of the same bay the site of the Danish landino- 
 which led to the camp of Athelney and the fight of 
 Ethandun, to the baptism at AUer and the chrisom-loosin fl- 
 at Wedmore. The geographical position of the land, the 
 wide flat fenced in by hills, enables us to trace out the 
 successive waves of conquest almost as in a map. The 
 long line of Mendip guards the frontier stream of Ceawlin ; 
 the wilder heights of Quantock and Exmoor proclaim 
 themselves as the natural strongholds where the Briton 
 held out till the days of Centwine and Ine. The inter- 
 mediate frontier of the Parret is less strongly marked in 
 the general view of the landscape ; but the conquest of 
 Cenwalh is not without its visible memorial ; the tor of 
 Glastonbury stands as at once the sanctuary and the 
 central point of the land which the second wave of settle- 
 ment added to Somerset, to Wessex, and to England. In 
 the Mendip line the greatest of its natural features, the 
 pass of Cheddar, forms no marked object in a distant view; 
 we cannot, save in their own immediate neighbourhood,
 
 128 WUSSJEX. 
 
 look on the rocks which saw the perilous chase and 
 deliverance of Eadrannd the Doer-of-great-deeds ; but the 
 memory of his repentance and gratitude may rise before 
 us even among the great memories of Glastonbury. We 
 visit the ground which once bore ^thelstan's minster of 
 Machelney, and thence we pass to the more famous spot 
 of Montacute. And at Montacute, Montacute itself must 
 nof be forgotten. Besides the church, the priory, the 
 houses of the town, the mansion which preserves the 
 memory of one of our local worthies, the hill of Leodgares- 
 burh, the true Mons Acutus, may claim some thoughts. 
 We may surely find our feelings as Englishmen stirred as 
 we look on the hill round which gather so many memories 
 of the days of England's struggle and overthrow and 
 second birth. It was on that hill that the pious sacristan 
 found, so the tale went, the wonder-working rood ; it was 
 at the foot of that hill that the willing oxen of the proud 
 Tofig, unwilling as long as the names of the greatest 
 English minsters were spoken, started at once as soon as 
 they heard the name of Waltham as the goal of their 
 journey. It was in honour of the cross of Leodgaresburh 
 that Tofig first reared his minster, that Harold enlarged 
 alike its foundation and its material fabric. It was the 
 name of the Holy Cross, the holy cross found on that West- 
 Saxon hill, which gave the war-cry to the host which 
 gathered around England's last native king, alike on the 
 day of victory at Stamfordbridge and on the day of over- 
 throw on Senlac. And surely that cry was heard again 
 when Leodgaresburh had newly become Montacute, when 
 the sharp peak, hallowed in English eyes, had become the 
 vulture's nest of the stranger, when the stronghold of the 
 devouring Count of Mortain crowned the venerable height, 
 foremost n.mong those dens of oppression which made 
 Englishmen shudder at the name of castle. There it was, 
 around that height, that the last fight was fought for the 
 freedom of the Western lands, the fight which sets the 
 name of Montacute beside the names of York and Ely.
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE QA. 129 
 
 When Exeter had fallen, when the whole land seemed 
 conqnered, when London and Salisbury were constrained 
 to send their English contingents to the foreign host, 
 the men of Somerset and Devonshire still rose in arms 
 to wage war against the hated fortress, to fight, but to 
 fight in vain against overwhelming odds, to be borne 
 down by the arms of their own countrymen, and to feel in 
 their hour of overthrow that the plunderings of the Norman 
 Count were after all less sharp than the subtler cruelty of 
 the Norman Bishop. No one name lives at Montacute, 
 as the name of Waltheof lives at York, as the name of 
 Hereward lives at Ely ; but the men who last fought for 
 England on the spot which gave England her war-cry are 
 as worthy of a place in the bede-roU of England's defenders 
 as their fellow-workers in other parts of our land whose 
 personal exploits still live in history and legend. 
 
 I change the scene to give a few words to another spot 
 whose memories are not of warfare. If it were not a safe 
 rule that comparisons and contrasts are but of little value, 
 except when there is some strong groundwork of likeness 
 between the objects contrasted, it might be curious to 
 contrast in detail the two greatest ecclesiastical buildings 
 in the two districts of which we are speaking. But the 
 churches of Wells and Peterborough are so utterly un- 
 like, both in history and in architectural character, that it 
 is almost impossible to contrast them. The one monastic, 
 the other secular, the one among the greatest triumphs of 
 Romanesque, the other a building in which not a Roman- 
 esque stone is to be found, they stand too far apart for 
 comparison. The west fronts indeed are pretty much of 
 the same date and style, but here again comparison is 
 forbidden. The portico of Peterborough is unique ; the 
 noblest conception of the old Greek translated into the 
 speech of Christendom and of England has no fellow 
 before it or after it. As for the front of Wells, T would 
 only hint in the most delicate way that those who wish to 
 admire really good design, and who come to the church 
 
 K
 
 130 WESSEX. 
 
 of Saint Andrew to look for it, had better go to the 
 north, to the south, or above all to the east. But when 
 we get beyond the walls of the two churches, Wells 
 certainly has the advantage. It has more to show in its 
 own way. Peterborough has some grand remains of its 
 monastic buildings, but it has hardly so mnch to show as 
 some of its monastic fellows. But we can better mark at 
 Wells than anywhere else the arrangements of a great 
 secular foundation which never, like so many others, put 
 on the monastic garb. At Wells a greater number of the 
 original ecclesiastical buildings, palace, prebendal houses, 
 and vicars' close, still remain than in any other foundation 
 of the same class. Nowhere else is so large a number of 
 ancient buildings still applied to the purposes for which 
 they were first designed. And mark too at Wells how an 
 English bishopric differs from a continental one. The 
 continental bishop was the bishop of a city ; the English 
 bishop, in the sees which are most purely of English origin, 
 was the bishop of a land or a people. Bishop of Wells, still 
 more Bishop of Bath and Wells, is the style of a later day. 
 The Bishop of the Sumorssetan did not fix his hishopsettle in 
 any city, as bishops afterwards did at Exeter and Norwich. 
 He fixed it in his church of Wells, within his lordship of 
 W^ells. The little city grew up at the bishop's gate, and 
 received its municipal rights from the bishop's grant. 
 Here then is another class of town, a class specially Eng- 
 lish. An abbot's borough might arise anywhere ; no better 
 instance can be found than the borough of Saint Peter 
 itself, that Golden Borough which often came to be called 
 distinctively the Borough without further epithet. But a 
 bishop's borough could hardly arise out of Britain. Here 
 is one to speak for itself, a bishop's borough and nothing 
 else. By the king's town of Somerton, by the abbot's town 
 of Glastonbury, by the lay lord's town of Dunster, we 
 place, as an example of a rarer class than any of those, 
 and as having a special history, the bishop's town of 
 WeUs.
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE OA. 181 
 
 But in the general history of Wessex and of England, 
 I might say with truth, in the history of Britain and of 
 Europe, the abbot's town counts for more than the bishop's 
 town. Glastonbury, the common sanctuary of Briton and 
 Englishman, sets before us, as we have clearly seen, more 
 strongly than any other spot in the land of the Sumor- 
 ssetan, one special historic characteristic of the land where, 
 for the first time on a large scale, Englishman and Briton 
 sat down side by side as subjects of a common king, 
 obeying a common law, and living under its protection. 
 The laws of Ine are a marked contrast to the laws both of 
 earlier and of later date. The earlier laws of the Kentish 
 kings know only one race and speech in the land; all 
 their enactments are made for men of English race only. 
 So again, the later West-Saxon laws, the laws of Ji^lfred 
 and his successors, are the laws of a realm in which, if all 
 men are not of the same blood, all at least are of the same 
 speech and the same law. In the intermediate time of 
 Ine we see another state of things. In his day the King 
 of the West-Saxons ruled over a realm in which the 
 barrier between two distinct races was broadly drawn. 
 He legislates for a land in which Englishmen and Welsh- 
 men dwelled side by side, not yet indeed on terms of 
 perfect equality, but still as subjects of the same prince, 
 each in his place protected by that prince's law. In the 
 realm of Ine, as there were Englishmen, so there were 
 Welshmen, of various ranks. Among both nations there 
 were bond and free ; among the free there were men 
 without land and men holding large estates. But in all 
 cases the value of the Welshman, the value of his life, 
 the value of his oath, is appraised at a lower rate than 
 the value of an Englishman of the same rank. This 
 clearly marks the position of the conquered, as men per- 
 sonally free, under the protection of the law, not forbidden 
 the possession of landed property and its accompanying 
 privileges, but still clearly marked as a race inferior to 
 their conquerors. This is something widely different from 
 
 K 2
 
 182 WESSEX. 
 
 tlie grievous choice of death, exile, and bondage which 
 ^Yas all that the Briton had set before him in the days of 
 Ceawlin. But it is also something widely different from 
 the state of things a hundred and eighty or two hundred 
 years later, when in the laws of jElfred the distinction of 
 Englishman and Welshman is found no longer. A British 
 population had remained in the land, but they had learned 
 to adopt the name, tongue, and the feelings of English- 
 men. And it must have been in Somerset that this new 
 state of things, this dwelling of Englishman and Welsh- 
 man side by side, was first seen on a great scale. It was 
 to Somerset and to a small part of Wiltshire that this 
 portion of the laws of Ine must have mainly applied. 
 There could have been no great need of them in the older 
 West-Saxon lands. If we had those laws of Offa of which 
 Alfred made use no less than of those of Ine, we should 
 most likely find that legislation of the same kind as that 
 of Ine was needed on the British march of Mercia, no less 
 than on the British march of Wessex. But such legisla- 
 tion could not have been needed in the days of Ine or of 
 Offa either in the Northern or in the Southern Hampton- 
 shire. There could have been few or no free Britons, 
 whether eorls or ceorls, dwelling on the banks of the 
 Itchin or of the Nen. 
 
 Thus in the days between Ine and Alfred the British 
 population in the land of the Sumorseetan must have been 
 so thoroughly anglicized that the distinction between them 
 and the English was forgotten. In the central land of 
 England there could have been no such distinction to 
 forget. Northamptonshire, long before it was known by 
 that name, must have been wholly English. It remains 
 so still. If a Danish hy here and there, the Ashby of the 
 Castle and the Ashby of the Canons, reminds us that other 
 Teutonic settlers have made their way into the land, yet 
 Englishman and Dane are one as opposed to either the 
 Briton or the Norman. Here again comes in the broad 
 distinction between the two lands. Northamptonshire is
 
 THE SHIRE AND THE GA. 133 
 
 simply part of England. Somerset bad to take a part in 
 making England. In one part of the work which made 
 Britain England a large share fell to the lot of the West- 
 Saxon settlers in the cestiva regio. Among them and 
 among their neighbours the Englishman had to assimilate 
 the conquered Briton, as he had afterwards throughout 
 the land to assimilate the conquering Norman. It was 
 as the chief of an united realm that the greatest of West- 
 Saxon kings, the greatest of English kings, v/ent forth 
 from his shelter at Athelney to the fight at Ethandiin, 
 the storm at Chippenham, the meeting of diplomatists at 
 Wedmore. The spot which sheltered u3i]lfred when all 
 hearts but his had failed is after all the most memorable 
 spot in this historic land. No trace is left of the abbey 
 which the thankful heart of the great king bade to arise 
 on the small island in the marsh which for a few weeks 
 was the whole extent of free English soil in Britain. Yet 
 the spot speaks perhaps more eloquently in its desolation. 
 The patriotic magistrates of the oldest Wessex sold the 
 lead of j^lfred's coffin to ease the burthens of Hampshire 
 ratepayers. His foundation at Athelney, his burial-place 
 at Hyde, keep no outward memorial of him. But his 
 memory still lives wherever the English tongue is spoken ; 
 above all should it live, as the highest and noblest of many 
 high and noble memories, in the land which his sojourn 
 in his dark hour has made more truly his own than either 
 the burying-place from which he has been cast forth or 
 the birth-place where he is still held in honour.
 
 134 
 
 BRADFORD-ON-AVON 
 
 1858-1872. 
 
 The name Bradford conveys to the world in general the 
 idea of a huge Yorkshire mannfacturing town, which has 
 covered a site which in itself must have been not un- 
 picturesque, and where an unusual number of stately 
 public buildings of late erection may raise some questions 
 as to the architectural taste of its inhabitants, but leave 
 no doubt as to their public spirit. It suggests a place 
 which has had a considerable share in many of the political 
 movements of our own time ; but no name seems less 
 connected with the history of ancient times. Manchester 
 is mentioned in the Chronicles ; Leeds hands down to us 
 the name of a British kingdom ; Wakefield at once calls 
 to mind a memorable fight of later days ; but Bradford 
 has, as far as we remember, no such place in our early 
 history. The records of the town are purely local — its 
 entry in Domesday, its connexion with the house of Lacy 
 and the Castle of Pontefract, the notices of its infant 
 mills as early as the fourteenth century. Local pride 
 may well remember the comparison made by Leland, that 
 Leeds, though as large as Bradford, was not so ' quick,' 
 a description which some have hinted is not wholly untrue 
 in our own time. Still this is no very great amount ot 
 history for eleven centuries ; the real share of the northern 
 Bradford in the history of England begins with the civil 
 wars of the seventeenth century. But, as some people 
 are gradually awakening to the truth that there are two 
 Dorchesters, so it is well to put on record the further
 
 BRADFORD-ON-AVON. 135 
 
 truth that there are also two Bradfords. Indeed, if we 
 come to minute accuracy, there are more than two, as is 
 not wonderful, seeing that wherever there is a river there 
 is the chance of a broad ford. But besides the better 
 known place of the name, there is one otlier Bradford 
 which is of historical importance. Bradford-on-Avon, in 
 the north-western part of Wiltshire, is far less known to 
 the world in general than its Yorkshire namesake, but 
 there are points of analogy between the two besides the 
 mere likeness of name. In fact the likeness of name 
 necessarily implies a certain likeness of site. Where 
 there is a ford there must be a stream, and thus is esta- 
 blished at least as much of likeness as was to be found 
 between Macedon and Monmouth, though it may be 
 doubted whether the stream at the northern Bradford is 
 entitled to so dignified a name as that of river. Whether 
 there are salmons in either we should think more than 
 doubtful ; indeed whether any fish at all could live in 
 the neighbourhood of so many mills is a point which we 
 may leave to the proper authorities of the two districts. 
 This last sentence implies that there are mills at the 
 southern as well as the northern Bradford, and in truth 
 the southern Bradford is, and has been for ages, a seat 
 of manufactures, though hardly on the same scale as its 
 namesake. A consciousness of this last fact has perhaps 
 led the Post-Office authorities to decree that the Wiltshire 
 town should exchange its later name of Great Bradford 
 for the more picturesque and more ancient description of 
 Bradford-on-Avon. The Isle of Britain, we all know, is 
 rich in Avons, and Wiltshire alone can boast of at least two. 
 Of these the Bradford Avon is not that which runs south- 
 ward by Salisbury and Christchurch, but that which makes 
 its way into the estuary of the Severn by the greater 
 cities of Bath and Bristol. Those cities, we may add, 
 have free communication with Bradford, being the only 
 parts of the world thus privileged. From other places 
 the ancient town is somewhat hard to get at, being placed
 
 186 tFJSSSUX. 
 
 on that tangled mass of branch railways whicli join toge- 
 ther, or keep asunder, Salisbury, Chii^penham, We^miouth, 
 Devizes, and Wells. When it is reached, Bradford is 
 found to lie on both sides of its own Avon, occupying a 
 site of unusual picturesqueness among English towns. 
 The houses and other buildings are spread irregularly 
 over the immediate height, and they command wider 
 views of the hills in the further distance. But Bradford, 
 as its name implies, is a river town ; it has climbed the 
 hill, like Bristol and Bamberg. Its ancient buildings 
 stand mainly on the lower ground ; a single small chapel 
 alone crowns the height. The parish church, a building 
 of various dates from the twelfth century onwards, the 
 vast barn, the stately mansion known as the Duke's 
 house, the ancient bridge, with its chapel suggesting that 
 of Wakefield, but at once humbler in itself, and shorn of 
 its projecting chancel — all stand at the bottom, or but a 
 very little way up the hill. The building which gives 
 Bradford its chief attraction in antiquarian eyes stands a 
 little higher, but it hardly reveals itself at the first sight. 
 It is a remarkable thing that Mr. Kemble should, in 
 the Index to the Codex Diplomaticus, have transferred 
 to a Bradford in Dorset — Bradford Abbas we presume — 
 several notices in the charters which clearly belong to 
 Bradford-on-Avon. We do not know whether he would 
 have done the same by the notice of Bradford in the 
 Chronicles, which has been so clearly explained by Dr. 
 Guest. Bradford was the site of a battle which marks 
 one of the great stages in the advance of the English 
 power in the Western peninsula. It was the scene of the 
 first victory of the Christian West-Saxon over the Chris- 
 tian Briton, the first English victory after which the 
 conquerors dealt with the vanquished, no longer as wild 
 beasts to be slaughtered, driven out, or enslaved, but as 
 men, looked on undoubtedly as men of a lower race, but 
 still fellow-men and fellow-Christians, whose lives and 
 goods and oaths had their value in the eye of the law.
 
 
 U 
 
 r 
 
 p^loQimMi. i)Kid]orlot[ J1yoi\, 
 
 Jrad|oi'cl3 
 
 na^?,. 
 
 /'(» /'.rrr /. i^6.
 
 BRADFORD-ON-AVON. 137 
 
 In 652, seven years after his own bax^tism, a year before 
 tbe conversion of the Middle- Angles, six years before tlie 
 fight that gave him Avalon, ' Cenwealh fought at Bradford 
 by Avon.' This battle, as Dr. Guest has shown, won for 
 Wessex that long strip of land in the modern Wiltshire 
 which held out after the conquests of Ceawlin. The battle 
 of Bradford gave to Wessex, not only the site of Bradford 
 but the site of Malmesbury, and the two i^laces are brought 
 together in the next notice of Bradford which we come 
 across. William of Malmesbury, in his Life of Saint 
 Ealdhelm, traces out a crowd of monasteries and churches 
 which were founded or enlarged by him. First and fore- 
 most was William's own Malmesbury. Ealdhelm increased 
 the original foundation of Meildulf and built a more stately 
 church, which William himself had seen, and which did 
 not seem to him contemptible in point either of size or 
 of ornament (' tota majoris ecclesise fabrica Celebris et 
 illibata nostro quoque perstitit sevo, vincens decore et 
 magnitudine quicquid usquam ecclesiarum antiquitus 
 factum visebatur in Anglia '). The church of Ealdhelm 
 at Malmesbury was thus the immediate predecessor of 
 the present building, of which at least the destroyed 
 eastern parts were doubtless built in William's own day. 
 But, besides this chief minster, there was also standing 
 at Malmesbury within William's memory, though seem- 
 ingly not when he wrote, a smaller church, which local 
 tradition believed to be the original building of Meildulf 
 (' parva ibi admodum basilica paucis ante hoc tempus 
 annis visebatur, quam Meildulfum sedificasse antiquitas 
 incertum si fabulabatur '). This custom of building 
 two churches, a greater and a lesser, for the use of the 
 same foundation, a custom of which Glastonbury is so 
 conspicuous an example, seems to have prevailed in most 
 of the monasteries of this time. There were also two 
 churches at Bruton, the greater of which, whose choir had 
 been enlarged in William's own time, was also attributed 
 to Ealdhelm (' est ibidem et alia major ecclesia in sancti
 
 138 WESSEX. 
 
 Petri nomine, quam a beato viro factam et consecratam 
 non neg'lig'enter asseverat opinio. Hujus orientalem fron- 
 teni nnper in majus porrexit recentis cedificationis am- 
 bitio ') . In William's day then there might have been seen 
 at Bruton a church with a new Norman choir, but whose 
 nave was believed to be the work of Ealdhelm. At 
 Frome too he founded a monastery, which in William's 
 time had come to nought as a monastery, but one at 
 least of its churches was supposed still to be standing 
 (' stat ibi adhuc, et vicit diuturnitate sua tot ssecula ecclesia 
 ab eo in houorem sancti Johannis Baptistse constructa ') . 
 Lastly, he founded the monastery at Bradford, which, like 
 Frome, had vanished as a monastery, but the little church 
 of Saint Lawrence was still standing. Besides these 
 there was also a church at Wareham which was built 
 by Ealdhelm, but of which the ruins only remained in 
 William's time (•' ejus domus macerise adhuc superstites 
 cselo patuli tecto vacant ; nisi quod quiddam super altare 
 prominet, quod a foeditate volucrum sacratum lapidem 
 tueatur'). There is certainly nothing now standing at 
 Wareham, Malmesbury, Bruton, or Frome, which can 
 have the least claim to be looked on as a work of Ealdhelm 
 or his time. But at Bradford the case is widely different. 
 A building is there standing which there can be no 
 reasonable doubt is the ' ecclesiola ' spoken of by William 
 of Malmesbury, and which he believed to be the work of 
 Ealdhelm. Even those whom some strange superstition 
 makes so eager to maintain that no Englishman before 
 1066 could have put two stones together do not venture 
 to pretend tliat it is later than the time of William 
 of Malmesbury. We see therefore still standing the 
 original 'ecclesiola,' the little church of which William 
 of Malmesbury speaks. The only question is whether 
 William of Malmesbury was right in believing it to be 
 the work of Ealdhelm. 
 
 The building of which we speak stands at a little 
 distance to the north-east of the parish church, and is an
 
 BRADFORD-ON-A VON. 139 
 
 ecclesiola indeed, consisting of a nave, chancel, and nortli 
 porch, but measuring within from east to west less than 
 forty feet. But its proportionate height is most remark- 
 able ; the walls of the nave are as high as the nave 
 is long, while in the chancel the height again, without 
 reckoning the roof, is considerably greater than the 
 length. Its style is undoubtedly Primitive Romanesque. 
 We believe that we are safe in saying that no one ever 
 mistook it for Norman, though at a first distant glance 
 it is easy to mistake it for cinque-cento. But it has some 
 peculiarities of its own. As it has no tower, there is no 
 opportunity for mid wall shafts in belfry- windows. The 
 single perfect window has the double splay, but it is by 
 no means so rude as those of Benedict Biscop at Jarrow. 
 Both nave and chancel are enriched with flat pilaster-strips, 
 and with a flat arcade cut out of single stones, which also 
 runs round the flat east end, there being no east window. 
 In the gables and in the porch the arcade seems to have 
 been exchanged for small shafts not supporting arches, as 
 in many Italian churches. The masonry is remarkably 
 good, being made of square stones, though now unluckily 
 some ugly gaps are seen between them. The doorway 
 and the chancel-arch are of distinctly Primitive Roman- 
 esque, and very narrow, the chancel arch especially won- 
 derfully so. Over the chancel are two carved figures 
 of angels very like some of those in early manuscripts, 
 especially in the Benedictional of Saint iEthelwold. 
 
 Such is the ' ecclesiola ' which William of Malmesbury 
 believed to be the genuine work of Ealdhelm. Was he 
 right in so thinking ? We know of only one historical 
 notice of the church or monastery of Bradford at any date 
 between the days of Ealdhelm and those of William. 
 This is in a charter of ^thelred (Cod. Dipl. iii. 319), in 
 which the monastery of Bradford is given to the nuns of 
 Shaftesbury as a place of refuge to which they might flee 
 with tbe body of the newly martyred King Eadward in 
 case of Danish incursions (' quatenus adversus barbaroriim
 
 140 TTHSSEX. 
 
 iusidias ipsa religiosa congregatio cum beati martyris 
 ca^terorumque sanctorum reliquiis ibidem Deo serviendi 
 impenetrabile obiiiieat coiifugiuin ') . This description of 
 Bradford as a jilace likely to be safe against invaders 
 falls in singularly well with the fact that the district had 
 held out against the West-Saxon arms for seventy-five 
 years after the first conquest of Ceawlin. In the words 
 of the charter there is nothing which directly proves any- 
 thing as to the date of the building. The words would 
 seem to imply an existing building, but it is of course 
 possible that the nuns of Shaftesbury, on coming into 
 possession, rebuilt such buildings as they found, and that 
 of such rebuilding the ' ecclesiola ' is the result. But this 
 is pure surmise. All that we really know is that William 
 of Malmesbury believed the church to have been built by 
 Ealdhelm, and that we have no other historical statement 
 which either confirms or contradicts his belief. Is his 
 belief then so incredible in itself that it must be set aside 
 on a priori grounds P For our own part, we see no diffi- 
 culty whatever in believing as William did. We see no 
 objection to his belief, except the vague notion that Eald- 
 helm, at the end of the seventh century or beginning of the 
 eighth, could not have built anything. But this is simply 
 the dream of people to whom all Old-English history is a 
 blank, who fancy that all ' the Saxons ' lived at one time, 
 and who sometimes argue as if Bseda's account of the 
 rudeness of Scottish buildings in the seventh century proved 
 something about English buildings three or four hundred 
 years afterwards. The masonry at Bradford is certainly 
 smoother than most early Romanesque work in England. 
 It has a good deal the air of the work of Stilicho by the 
 Porta Maggiore at Rome. But this is the characteristic 
 of finished Primitive work. It is built ' more Romano ' in 
 a sense in which Norman is not. But, before Ealdhelm, 
 Wilfrith had already built at Ripou ' ex polito lapide.' 
 The work at Bradford is better finished than the Avork at 
 J arrow ; but Jarrow is a generation older, and Ealdhelm,
 
 BRADFORD-ON-A VON. 141 
 
 witli King Ine at his back, mig-lit be expected to build in 
 tbe very best way that anybody could build in his time. 
 In fact, as we see the matter, we have William of 
 Malmesbury's statement on the one hand ; we have a 
 mere snperstition on the other. We have very little 
 doubt as to which of the two we should choose. 
 
 The ' ecclesiola ' of Bradford was long desecrated and 
 disfigured, almost hidden by parasitic buildings. It has 
 now been saved, and restored, in the true but rare sense 
 of that word. The building itself has been preserved ; it 
 has not had something else put in its place. It is in fact 
 the one perfect surviving Old-English church in the land. 
 The ground-plan is absolutely untouched, and there are 
 no mediaeval insertions at all. So perfect a specimen of 
 Primitive Romanesque is certainly unique in England ; we 
 should not be surprised if it is unique of its own kind in 
 Europe.
 
 142 
 
 DEVIZES. 
 
 1874. 
 
 The name of the town of Devizes at once strikes tlae ear 
 as something which does not readily fall under any of the 
 classes into which English place-names commonly fall. 
 It is not a Roman or British name which has lived through 
 the English Conquest. Nor is it an English name, either 
 describing the place itself or else preserving the memory of 
 a tribe or of an early owner. Nor yet is it, like Beaulieu 
 and Richmond, a name palpably French, witnessing to the 
 days when Norman and other foreign settlers had made 
 French the polite speech of the land. The name is Latin 
 without being Roman. For once the Latin name is not 
 made from the English, but the English from the Latin. 
 The castle ' ad Divisas ' has become Devizes, or rather ' the 
 Devizes.' The article was used as late as Clarendon's time, 
 and, we fancy, much later ; the popular local name of the 
 place is ' the Vize.' It is plainly called from a boundary 
 or division of some kind, but what boundary or division 
 is not at first sight very clear. It must be remembered 
 that the name ' Divisse ' is not found till the foundation 
 of the castle by Bishox? Roger of Salisbury in the time of 
 Henry the First, of which more anon. The town is one of 
 the same class as Richmond, one which has arisen around 
 a castle of comparatively late foundation. Why then did 
 Bishop Roger give his fortress so odd a name ? Dr. Guest 
 points out that the town of Devizes overlooks the Avon 
 valley, that it stands just on the border of that narrow 
 slip of territory which the Britons kept up to the battle
 
 DEVIZES. 143 
 
 of Bradford in 652. He holds that the march district was 
 called ' Divisse,' and that the castle took its name from 
 the district. He refers to the town of Mere in the same 
 county, a good deal south-west of Devizes, where the 
 name, an English equivalent, as he remarks, of Divisce, 
 is clearly derived from the border position of the place. 
 It is very seldom, and always with great diffidence, that 
 we set up our judgement against that of Dr. Guest, but 
 this is a case in which we are strongly tempted to do so. 
 Mere is an English word, and the name may be as old as 
 the first English occupation of the district. Divism is a 
 Latin word, and Dr. Guest does not bring any instance of 
 the name being used before Bishop Roger's time. It 
 would certainly be strange if a district had, for five 
 hundred years, kept a Latin name of which no trace 
 can be found. It certainly seems more likely that the 
 ' divisse ' from which the castle took its name were some 
 smaller local boundary, and we believe that local anti- 
 quaries are ready with more than one explanation of this 
 kind. And as for the oddness of the name, it must be 
 remembered that it is not a name which arises from any 
 settlement or tradition, but from the fancy of one man. 
 In such cases eccentric names have often been given in 
 all ages. 
 
 Another question may arise, what was the nature of 
 the place before the foundation of the famous castle. 
 Most of the great Norman castles were reared on earlier 
 sites ; the mound and the ditch, as we have been taught 
 by Mr. Clark, are for the most part English works — works 
 most commonly of EadAvard the Elder, or of his sister the 
 Lady of the Mercian a. But their works are placed along 
 the line of defence against the Danes, and they are found 
 in places which bear intelligible names, whether of English 
 or earlier origin. One hardly sees why Eadward should 
 fortify a post in the heart of Wessex, and, if he did, the 
 place would bear some name, and it is not likely that tliat 
 name would be Divisw. But, whether the earthworks
 
 144 WESSEX. 
 
 belong to their day or to some earlier time, it is certain that 
 it was hy Bishop Roger that the vast ditch, the mighty 
 mound which the unseen railway now passes under, were 
 first crowned by a castle in the later sense. Certainly no 
 place brings more strongly home to us the temporal position 
 of a bishop in those days. The episcopal castle and the epi- 
 scopal palace are two very different things. The palace, in 
 strictness of speech, is the bishop's dwelling in the epi- 
 scopal city. It is only a piece of modern affectation which, 
 since both the English metropolitans have forsaken their 
 natural homes, speaks of the manors of Lambeth and 
 Bishopthorpe as palaces. The episcopal palace, hard by 
 the episcopal church, sometimes actually joining it, is for 
 the most part in strictness a house. Standing most com- 
 monly within a walled town, it needed no great amount 
 of defence ; even when, as at Wells, some degree of for- 
 tification was needed, it was plainly no more than was 
 needed for protection in case of danger. Episcopal 
 castles in the episcopal city, castles like those of Durham 
 and Llandaff, are quite exceptional, though they may 
 be easily explained by the circumstances and history of 
 the places where they are found. At Durham Bishop 
 Walcher was placed by William as both temporal and 
 spiritual ruler among a fierce and half-conquered people, 
 who had slain two former earls, and who were in the end 
 to slay the bishop himself. It is not wonderful that he 
 was set to dwell in a fortress, even within the episcoi3al 
 city. At Llandaff a bishop placed among the turbulent 
 Welsh, and whose city was a mere un walled village, 
 needed a fortress no less than his more princely brother of 
 Durham. Wolvesey, the castle of the bishops of Win- 
 chester, not actually within the city, but just outside of it, 
 was more remarkable and unusual. " But among episcopal 
 dwellings away from the cities, the castle is, in the days with 
 which we are dealing, the rule. The bishop of the days at 
 once following the Norman Conquest, turned by the Nor- 
 man polity into a military tenant of the Crown, dwelling
 
 DEVIZES. 146 
 
 commonly as a stranger among a strange and often hos- 
 tile people, often raised to his see as the reward of 
 temporal services to the Crown, as soon as he got away 
 from the episcopal city and its more peaceful associations, 
 as soon as he found himself on his rural estates, began to 
 feel like any other baron on his rural estates. He raised 
 for himself, not a house, not a palace, but a castle in the 
 strictest sense ; a fortress not merely capable of defence 
 in case of any sudden attack, but capable of being made 
 a centre of military operations in case the bishop should 
 take a fancy, in times of civil strife, to make war upon 
 some other baron or upon the King himself. And Eoger 
 of Salisbury was not likely to be behind his brethren in 
 this matter. The poor clerk who had won the fancy of 
 the ^theling Henry by the speed with which he gabbled 
 over the service in his lowly church in a suburb of Caen, 
 and who was thereon declared to be the fittest of all 
 chaplains for soldiers, had risen with the fortunes of his 
 patron. As the chief minister of the Lion of Justice, 
 he was the most powerful man in the realm. Archi- 
 tecture, both military and ecclesiastical, was a special 
 taste of his, and it would seem from the description of his 
 works given by William of Malmesbury that the later form 
 of the Norman style, the form where a finer masonry and 
 more elaborate kind of ornament came into use, was in 
 some measure his creation. As Bishop of Salisbury — that 
 is, not of the new Salisbury in the plain, but of that elder 
 Salisbury where the city itself was the mightiest of 
 fortresses, but where the bishop was not the lord of 
 the city — Roger was not unnaturally stirred up to the 
 raising of fortresses on the episcopal estates which might 
 be wholly his own. At Malmesbury he gave great offence 
 to the monks by building a castle within the very precincts 
 of their monastery. At Sherborne, the town which his 
 last predecessor but one, the Lotharingian Hermann, had 
 forsaken for the old British hill-fort, he built another 
 castle ; but, unlike Malmesbury, it stands quite distinct, 
 
 L
 
 146 TJ^SSEX. 
 
 and at some distance from the minster. But liis great 
 work was at the Devizes ; the huge earthAvork which he 
 found there was crowned with a castle which was said not 
 to be surpassed by any castle in EuroiDC. Its fragments 
 show that it must have been an example of a rich form of 
 the style of which its founder was such a master, a form 
 intermediate between the stern simplicity of the days of 
 the Conqueror and the lavish gorgeousness of the days of 
 Henry the Second. But unluckily all that is now to be 
 seen consists of mere fragments here and there, fragments 
 for the most part built up again as meaningless ornaments 
 in the midst of the most fearful piece of modern gimcrack 
 that human eyes ever beheld. But the mound and the 
 ditch at least are there. It would need more than ano- 
 ther Roger to get rid of them, and we can without much 
 difficulty call up before our eyes that remarkable episode 
 in the most troubled time of our history of which the 
 castle of the Devizes was the scene. 
 
 The sudden imprisonment of Bishop Roger by com- 
 mand of Stephen seems to have been the turning point of 
 his reio-n. It at once set the clergy against him, and it 
 seems besides this to have awakened general wonder as 
 something so unlike the general character of the King. 
 He who was held to be, in the Avords of the Chroniclers, 
 a ' mild man and soft and good, and who did no justice,' 
 suddenly turns about, and, without any very clear reason, 
 seizes in the most ignominious way on two of the chief 
 men both in Church and State. People were struck both 
 with the act in itself and with its strangeness in a man 
 like Stephen, who, whatever were his faults, is not at any 
 other time charged with cruelty, or even with lack of 
 generosity, in his own person. But the moral difficult}^ 
 is perhaps not very great. When^ a man like Stephen, 
 mild and gentle rather from temper than from principle, 
 is once stirred up to what he is told is an act of energy, 
 he is very likely to overdo matters, and to be energetic at 
 the wrong time and in the wrong way. Anyhow, here
 
 DEVIZES. 147 
 
 was the great Bishop Roger, the most powerful man in 
 England, the minister of the late King, suddenly seized 
 along with his nephew Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, 
 and his avowed son Roger the King's Chancellor, during 
 the sitting of a great Council at Oxford, and threatened 
 with all manner of threats, unless all their castles and 
 possessions were surrendered to the King. But our con- 
 cern is only with the one castle which was Roger's great 
 work. Another nephew, Richard Bishop of Ely, man- 
 aged to escape to his uncle's fortress, ' ad Divisas for- 
 tissimum oppidum,' where the chief tower (' principalis 
 munitio ') was held by the younger Roger's mother, Ma- 
 tilda of Ramsbury, wlio was likely enough the Bishop 
 of Salisbury's unacknowledged wife. The King comes 
 before the castle, on the site doubtless of the present 
 approach from the town, swearing in his wrath that 
 the younger Roger shall be hanged and the elder kept 
 without food, unless the castle is at once surrendered. 
 Another version indeed makes the fast a voluntary offer 
 on the part of the Bishop of Salisbury ; he promises, in 
 the hope of making his nephew yield, that he will not eat 
 or drink till the castle is given up. In short, according 
 to what may be a general Aryan usage, one certainly well 
 known in India and not unknown in Ireland, he * sits 
 dharna ' at his nephew's door. In either case we have 
 the picture of the mild Stephen suddenly turned as fierce 
 as William Rufus, with his three prisoners, the two bishops 
 and the Chancellor, the bishops just released, it would 
 seem, from their wretched imprisonment, one in an ox's 
 stall, the other in some miserable shed not otherwise de- 
 fined. There is the great Bishop Roger, suddenly fallen 
 from his pomp and power, standing faint and hungry before 
 the walls, to do what he can, by the sad sight and by his 
 sad words, to move his obstinate nephew the Bishop of 
 Ely to surrender, if only to save the life of his uncle. Wo 
 see the pair on the walls ; the Bishop of Ely is unmoved by 
 his uncle's pleading and ready to let him or anybody else 
 
 L 2
 
 1 48 WHSSEX. 
 
 starve rather than give up the stronghold within which 
 he has found shelter. Then the King is moved to further 
 wrath ; a gibbet is set up ; the Chancellor is to be hanged 
 at once. But his mother holds the strongest tower ; her 
 heart is moved for her son, if the Bishop's heart is not 
 moved for his uncle; she will give up anything for her 
 child. The great tower is at once surrendered, and after 
 that the resistance of the Bishop of Ely and his followers 
 is all in vain. We read the story ; we go to the spot and 
 try to call up the scene. If the castle stood there un- 
 touched, it would be easy ; if nothing stood there at all, 
 it would not be very hard ; but when the castle of Bishop 
 Koger is turned into a grotesque modern mockery, what 
 is to be done? 
 
 Some comfort however may be drawn from a visit to 
 the two churches of the town. They have not fared worse 
 than churches commonly do in the space of seven hundred 
 years. They have at least not been deliberately and of 
 malice aforethought turned into shams. There are not 
 many towns in England which still keep two vaulted 
 Norman choirs, one of which is not unlikely to be the 
 work of Roger himself.
 
 149 
 
 WAREHAM AND CORFE CASTLE. 
 
 1875—1882. 
 
 The name of Corfe Castle is familiar to most people as 
 the scene of one of those isolated legends which, in so 
 many eyes, make up the whole of our earliest history ; 
 and the name of its neighbour Wareham, less familiar 
 perhaps to the world in general, must be well known to 
 all who have studied modern parliamentary history. Up 
 to the first Reform Bill, Wareham and Corfe Castle each 
 sent two members to Parliament ; now a district which 
 takes in both places sends one only. As Wareham thus 
 belongs to the class of rural boroughs, it was spared at 
 the last suppression, when other boroughs fell which had 
 a larger number of real burgesses than Wareham, but 
 whose nominal population was not swelled in the same 
 way by the addition of the neighbouring villages. A re- 
 former from Yorkshire or Lancashire would most likely 
 sneer at Wareham and Corfe alike as ' miserable villages 
 in the south of England.' But, as Wareham is still a 
 good deal bigger than Corfe, so the parliamentary history 
 of the two places is quite different. Wareham has sent 
 members ever since the reign of Edward the First. Corfe 
 sent them for the first time in the reign of Elizabeth. 
 That is to say, Wareham is represented in Parliament 
 because there was a time when it deserved to be repre- 
 sented ; Corfe never deserved to be represented at all, 
 and was enfranchised simply in order to be corrupt. Both 
 places play an important part in English history, and
 
 loO WESSEX. 
 
 that mainly in military history, as the seats of two re- 
 noAvned castles. But Wareham is a case of a castle 
 founded in an existing- toAvn. Corfe is a case of a town, 
 or rather village, growing up round a castle. We cannot 
 conceive that Corfe was ever greater than it is now ; of 
 Wareham we have the evidence of our own eyes that it 
 once was far greater. Wareham, in short, is one of those 
 towns which have not only, like most of the ancient towns 
 of England, been outstripped by younger rivals, but which 
 have absolutely decayed. It is like Rome or Autun or 
 the Westphalian Soest, where, starting from the centre of 
 the town, we gradually leave the streets and find ourselves 
 among lanes, fields, and gardens, till we at last come to 
 the town wall. Wareham has in the same way shrunk up. 
 It is not, as at Chester and Colchester, where there are 
 fields and gardens within the walls, but where the space 
 thus left void is more than made up by the growth of 
 the town in other directions beyond the walls. Wareham 
 has not grown at all, except in the sense of growing* 
 smaller ; the walls are there, but the modern town is very 
 far from filling up the whole space within them. But 
 the walls of Wareham differ from the walls of Colchester 
 in another most important point. They are indeed rect- 
 angular, or nearly so ; but they are not walls in the 
 stricter sense, walls of stone or brick, but vast ramparts 
 of earth. Their nearest parallel is to be found in the 
 kindred earthworks of Wallingford, a town whose history 
 has in many points a near likeness to that of Wareham. 
 In each case a rectangular earthwork forms three sides of 
 a space, square or nearly so, leaving the fourth side to be 
 defended by a river. Wallingford has but one river, but 
 that is one of the great rivers of England, the great border 
 stream of Thames. Wareham has \vjo rivers, but rivers 
 of less renown. The town stands at the head of its land- 
 locked haven, a branch of the greater haven of Poole, on 
 the isthmus of a peninsula formed by the confluence of 
 the southern Frome and the Piddle. This last stream in
 
 WA.REHAM AND COJRFE CASTLE. 16l 
 
 older writers shares the name of Trent with one of the 
 great rivers of central England ; for, when Asser and 
 Florenec speak of Wareham as lying ' inter duo flumina 
 Fraw et Terente/ they can hardly mean that the place 
 lies between the Frome and the more distant Tarrant. 
 But the position of Wareham between its two streams is 
 one of its characteristic features. The side towards the 
 south, which is sheltered by the greater stream of the 
 Frome and the once doubtless swampy land beyond it, 
 was left wholly unfortified. The northern side, towards 
 the lesser stream of the Piddle, is fortified, but less 
 strongly than the eastern and western sides, where there 
 is no river at all. Now the question at once arises, by 
 whom were these earthworks thrown up ; that is to say, 
 by whom was the town of Wareham first founded ? The 
 defences are, in a certain vague sense, Roman. That is 
 to say, their rectangular shape shows they are the work 
 of men who had some knowledge of the rules of Roman 
 castrametation. But they are not Roman in material ; 
 and that they are not Roman in date — that is, that they 
 are not older than a.d. 410 — is almost proved by the place 
 bearing the purely English name of Wareham, instead of 
 being marked as Roman by the ending Chester. The most 
 probable opinion is that the earthworks both of Wareham 
 and of Wallingford were thrown up by the Welsh, who at 
 Wallingford have left their name, as defences against the 
 invading English. The argument which attributes these 
 works to the Danes, on the ground that they must be the 
 work of men who already commanded the water, does not 
 apply. By the time that the West- Saxon arms reached 
 Wareham, the days of invasion by sea had come to an 
 end, and Cerdic or his descendants were pushing their 
 way both westward and northward by land. 
 
 The mihtary importance of Wareham arose from its 
 commanding the approach to the peninsula which lies 
 between it and the open sea, that island of Purbeck 
 which is still less of an island than the greater island
 
 162 JFESSEX. 
 
 of Pelops. The isle of marble is one of the ends of 
 the world. The nineteenth ceutur}^ has effected a lodge- 
 ment in the shape of the watering-place of Swanwich ; 
 otherwise Pnrbeck, with its cliffs, its long views, along 
 the coast on either side, its ancient houses, its venerable 
 church of Studland, seem all cut off from the everyday 
 world by an impassable barrier. And the barrier is 
 physically there. A little south-east of Wareham lies 
 Corfe. A glance shows the essential difference between 
 the two places. Wareham is a fortified town ; Corfe is a 
 simple fortress. The great line of hills which runs along 
 the peninsula, and which shuts off both Corfe and Ware- 
 ham from the open sea, here makes a sudden gap. Such 
 a gap bears in all languages names which translate one 
 another. The endless Pylai of the Greeks have their 
 parallel in Corfes-geat. In the midst of the gate, like the 
 massive pier in the middle of the double gateways of 
 the Roman Wall, stands a lower conical hill, crowned 
 first by a West- Saxon royal house, and then by the 
 famous Norman castle. Not far from the little town is a 
 clearly marked earthwork, which must have played its 
 23art in the days before castles were. Both Corfe and 
 Wareham figure in our early history, and the first time 
 that Corfe is spoken of, the second time that Wareham is 
 spoken of, the two places have both their share. Ware- 
 ham first appears in history in 876, when the Danes 
 marched thither from Cambridge, therefore by land, and 
 after swearing oaths and giving hostages to Alfred, 
 marched the next year to Exeter. The words of Asser 
 and Florence, ' castellum quod dicitur Werham ' — the 
 Chronicles simply say ' bestsel se here into Werham West- 
 seaxna fyrde ' — might seem to imply that they made use 
 of the existing fortifications as they did of the * waste 
 Chester ' further north in 894. Our next mention of the 
 two places is at the death of Eadward the Martyr in 979. 
 Every one must have seen the picture of the young King 
 stabbed at the gate of the castle, a confusion doubtless
 
 WAREItAM AND CORFE CASTLE. 163 
 
 ■with the Corfes Gate itself. The Chroniclers merely record 
 the fact of his death with the time and place, and add a 
 bitter wail for a deed than which none worse had been 
 done since the English came into Britain. But their very 
 silence as to the doer of the deed strongly confirms the story 
 which is found in its simplest form in Florence, and which 
 gathers fresh details in every later writer, that according 
 to which the murder was the deed of Eadward's stepmother 
 ^Ifthryth. The murdered king was buried without any 
 kingly worship at Wareham, but was in the next year 
 translated by Ealdorman ^Ifhere, the enemy of monks, 
 with mickle worship to King j^lfred's minster at Shaftes- 
 bury. The steps by which the tale grew into the elaborate 
 piece of hagiology to be found in Brompton form, like 
 everything else of the kind, a curious study of compara- 
 tive mythology. The main facts there is no reason to 
 doubt; but the common way of treating such stories is 
 not honest, namely, to take the legend in its full-blown 
 form, and, leaving out all that is miraculous, to treat the 
 remainder as authentic history. 
 
 In Domesday Wareham appears as a borough, and, 
 as if to keep up the parallel with Wallingford in 
 every point, it appears that in King Eadward's days it 
 formed one of the special quarters of the King's house- 
 carls. Many houses had been destroyed, perhaps on 
 William's march to Exeter. No castle of Wareham is 
 mentioned in the account of Wareham itself, but there is 
 an incidental entry which says that William obtained its 
 site by an exchange with the abbey of Shaftesbury. Nor 
 is any castle of Corfe, by that name, entered in the 
 Survey, and before William's coming the dwelling of 
 jiElfthryth had ceased to be a royal possession. Corfe 
 appears in Domesday as the former holding of two 
 Englishmen named Wada and ^gelric, and as the pre- 
 sent possession of Robert son of Gerold. From this a 
 local antiquary of high authority lias argued that the 
 Domesday entry of Wareham Castle really refers to Corfe.
 
 154 WESSJEX. 
 
 The confusion of names would be much the same as when 
 the castle of Tickhill not uncommonly bears the name of 
 Blyth, a place several miles distant and in another county. 
 But it is strange if a castle did not arise on the mound 
 of Wareham, a place which had so long been a fortress, 
 in the early days of the Conquest ; and, if the Domesday 
 entry of ' Wareham ' refers to Corfe, we shall be driven 
 to understand of Corfe not a few other entries which more 
 naturally refer to Wareham, Wareham castle was one 
 of the many places of imprisonment of Duke Robert and 
 the more lasting prison of Eobert of Belleme. Are we to 
 infer that here too Corfe and not Wareham is meant ? In 
 the beginning of Stephen's reign both castles were certainly 
 in being. Among the long string of fortresses which the 
 Winchester annalist reckons up as built or strengthened 
 by Earl Robert of Gloucester, Wareham and Corfe are both 
 found. This sets aside anything that might be inferred 
 from the language of the ' Gesta Stephani,' where Baldwin 
 of Eedvers lands at the city of Wareham, and occupies 
 the strong castle of Corfe (' apud civitatem Warham 
 applicuit, susceptusque in Corpha uno omnium Anglorum 
 castello munitissimo '), with no mention of the castle of 
 Wareham. 
 
 At Wareham the castle has vanished, but its site is 
 plain enough. Like so many others, it has arisen on a 
 mound of English work in the south-east corner of the 
 town, overlooking the Frome. At Corfe no artificial 
 mound was needed. There nature had thrown up a 
 mound greater than the works of the Lady of the Mercians 
 at Warwick or at Tamworth, On that hill the castle still 
 stands, more utterly shattered by the great siege of the 
 seventeenth century than perhaps any other building 
 which has not been purposely destroyed. The square keep, 
 the Conqueror's work, as some hold, crowns the height, 
 and graceful fragments of later work are left beside it. 
 Below it are the remains of a building of earlier masonry 
 which inquirers not given to credulity on such points have
 
 WAREHAM AND CORFU CASTLE. 166 
 
 deemed to be most likely the remains of the house of 
 Eadgar's widow. Both fortresses are constantly mentioned 
 in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Wareham being 
 more prominent in the earlier and Corfe in the later 
 period. Both were often chosen as the places of safe 
 confinement of important prisoners. Among notable 
 prisoners at Corfe we find the Welsh prince Grufiydd in 
 1198, and Henry of Montfort in 1275. But between those 
 dates Corfe had been chosen as the scene of two of the 
 blackest of the crimes of John. Had they but met with 
 a sacred poet, the two-and-twenty continental supporters 
 of the cause of Arthur who were starved to death in the 
 still existing tower of Corfe in 1202 might have been as 
 famous as those who, before the century had run its 
 course, shared the same doom in Pisa's vanished Tower 
 of Hunger. Again, twelve years later, it was at Corfe 
 that the unlucky Peter of Pontefract, whose prophecy 
 had been so strangely fulfilled, was drawn and hanged as 
 the first act of authority of the new papal vassal. It 
 would even seem that Corfe had fixed itself in men's 
 minds as the special scene of deeds of horror, as one 
 chronicler, the annalist of Bermondsey, transfers thither 
 from Berkeley the fate of the second Edward. Of the 
 importance of the post we have other and. less hideous 
 reminders, in the constant occurrence of the name Corfe 
 in lists of the great fortresses of the kingdom. 
 
 Neither Wareham nor Corfe was ever the seat of any 
 great ecclesiastical foundation. A monastery of nuns is 
 mentioned as being there at the time of the Danish 
 occupation ; and, as it is not mentioned afterwards, it 
 probably perished then. In the time of Henry the First, 
 Robert Earl of Leicester — is this the famous Count of 
 Meulan or his son ? — founded a priory at Wareham, as a 
 cell to the abbey of Lire in Normandy, which, at the 
 suppression of alien houses, passed to the Carthusians of 
 Shene. This priory seems to have been attached to the 
 chief, if not only, surviving church of Wareham, known,
 
 156 WESSEX. 
 
 by a kind of tautology, as Lady Saint Mary. It will hardly 
 be believed that, about thirty years back, the great Nor- 
 man nave of this church was destroyed at the instance 
 of one of the Church Building- Societies, whose grant for 
 some repairs or reseating was made conditional on an act 
 worthy of a Pope's nephew or of the grantee of a suppressed 
 monastery. But in a side chapel, alongside of some fine 
 thirteenth century tombs, are some fragments of Primitive 
 Romanesque, which are said to have been built into the 
 wall of the Norman building, and which may have seen 
 the hasty burial of the martyred king. Instead of this 
 hideous destruction, it would have been a better work to 
 call to life again one of the disused and mutilated churches 
 which show how much Wareham has fallen from its 
 greatness either in the days of Cerdic or in the days of 
 Stephen.
 
 167 
 
 SILCHESTER. 
 
 1873. 
 
 The Britain wlaicli our forefathers turned into England 
 is, for the most part, to be looked for below the ground. 
 That so it should be was one of the necessary results of 
 the means by which that great change was made. At 
 first sight it might seem as if the phsenomena of our 
 own country in this respect differed but little from the 
 phsenomena of other lands. Take for example the city 
 which, of all the cities of Northern Europe, is richest in 
 vestiges of Roman dominion. Rich as Trier still is in its 
 remains above ground, its amphitheatre, its basilica, its 
 palace, and the mighty pile of its Porta Nigra, there can 
 be no doubt that far more extensive remains of Augusta 
 Treverorum lurk below. The vaults, the pavements, 
 which are hidden under the mediaeval and modern houses 
 must be endless. But this is what always happens in a 
 town which has never ceased to be inhabited. Nothing is 
 so lasting as a street ; nothing is so little lasting as the 
 particular houses of which the street is made up. In 
 Exeter, for instance, there are few houses even of mediaeval 
 date, but the main lines of the Roman city are there as plain 
 as ever. Not a fragment, to the best of our knowledge, 
 of the Damnonian Isca is standing above ground, but we 
 should be surprised if there is not a good deal of it to be 
 still found underneath. In cases like these the city is 
 destroyed by the fact of its being preserved. It perishes 
 piecemeal, because there was no moment when it was 
 utterly swept away. Now on the Continent, as a rule.
 
 158 WESSEX. 
 
 the Roman cities have been continuously inhabited down 
 to onr own time ; in Italy, Gaul, and Spain, the Eoman 
 life 1ms never wholly died out. If therefore the Eoman 
 remains in those countries are on the whole much more 
 scanty than we should have looked for, it is chiefly be- 
 cause they have perished through the wear and tear of 
 ages ; mediaeval buildings gradually supplanted buildings 
 of Roman date, as modern buildings are gradually supplant- 
 ing buildings of mediaeval date. The exceptions are to 
 be found in those parts of the Continent where the cir- 
 cumstances were nearly the same as in our own island, in 
 those border lands of Germany, Gaul, and Italy, where 
 the Teutonic conquest or reconquest trod out the remains 
 of Roman life almost as thoroughly as it did in Britain. 
 But, comparing the Continent in general with our own 
 island, especially comparing that land of Gaul which it is 
 most natural to compare Avith our own island, we find one 
 main distinction to be, that in Gaul, as a rule, the Roman 
 towns have been continuously inhabited, while in Britain, 
 as a rule, they have not. We cannot in every place 
 pronounce dogmatically. We know that Exeter, as not 
 having been conquered by the English till after their 
 conversion, has never ceased to be inhabited. But we 
 know also that Chester, Bath, and Cambridge stood 
 desolate for several centuries, and we know that Anderida 
 has stood desolate till our own time. On the other hand, 
 if Canterbury, York, London, and Lincoln ever stood 
 desolate, the time of their desolation could not have been 
 very long. But the point is that, in marked contrast to 
 the continental rule, a great number of the Roman cities 
 of Britain were utterly wasted, and that many of them 
 have never been rebuilt. Parts of some sites have been 
 occupied by small villages ; other sites stand altogether 
 waste ; of some Roman settlements it is even hard to find 
 the site at all. The cases where a Roman town still 
 exists as a considerable English town can hardly be the 
 majority. Those which can be shown to have been unin-
 
 SILCHESTER. 169 
 
 terruptedly inhabited are a very small minority indeed. 
 In France and Aquitaine, on the other hand, in utter con- 
 trast to Britain, the chief Roman towns still remain the 
 chief towns in our own day. In Aquitaine and Provence 
 they even commonly retain their names of Roman or 
 earlier date, not forgetting- that the still surviving names 
 of Massalia and Antipolis carry us back to a state of things 
 to which Britain has no parallel at all. 
 
 Now this utter destruction of the Roman cities, the 
 desolation of so many of their sites down to our own day, 
 is the most speaking witness of the wasting and exter- 
 minating character of the English Conquest. The fact 
 that we know so little about it, the yawning gap between 
 Roman and English history in Britain, a gap which has no 
 parallel in continental lands, teaches us better than any- 
 thing else what was the real nature of the settlement made 
 by our forefathers. It is a striking fact that no ornamental 
 Roman building is to be found standing above ground in 
 Britain. Not a single perfect Roman column remains in 
 its place throughout the whole land. This is not the 
 mere work of time. To say nothing of Egyptian remains, 
 Greece, Italy, and Sicily still keep abundant remains of 
 Hellenic antiquity; it is owing to a mere accident of 
 modern warfare that the Parthenon itself does not remain 
 as perfect as when the Slayer of the Bulgarians paid his 
 thanksgiving within its walls. It is because Britain was 
 overrun by an enemy far more destructive than the Goth, 
 the Frank, or the Turk himself. It is a speaking fact 
 that of what must have been one of the greatest Roman 
 cities of Britain we have absolutely no history whatever. 
 Antiquaries are, we believe, now pretty well agreed that 
 Silchester is the Roman Calleva Atrebatum — in Gaul the 
 place might have been called Arras and its district Artois 
 — and it is so marked in Dr. Guest's map. But this is 
 merely a geographical and not an historical fact. Calleva 
 is simply a name in the Itineraries ; nothing that we ever 
 heard of is recorded to have happened there. Nor do we
 
 160 WHSSHX. 
 
 add very much to our knowledge if we conceive Silchester 
 to have been the Caer Segeint of the so-called Nennius ; for 
 his one fact, that the elder Constantius was buried some- 
 where in those parts, can hardly be true, seeing that he 
 died at York. Of the origin of the city Ave have no ac- 
 count ; nor have we, as we have in the case of Anderida, 
 Bath, and other cities, any statement, or even any direct 
 clue, as to the time of its destruction. That we know 
 nothing of its origin is most likely owing to the fact that 
 Calleva was more of a town and less of a fortress than 
 most of the Roman settlements in Britain. Its polygonal 
 shape, which it shares with Durolipons or Godmanchester, 
 stands in marked contrast to the quadrangular shape of 
 the camps which grew into York and Lincoln, Chester, 
 Gloucester, and Exeter, And the space contained within 
 the walls is far greater than what is contained within 
 the walls of their Chester's. The cause of the diflPerence 
 doubtless is that those were chesters in the very strictest 
 sense, foundations of the early age of warfare ; the city 
 arose out of the camp, and spread itself around the walls 
 of the camp. Here there was no camp, no Chester in the 
 strictest sense. The sj)ot was settled after the Roman 
 Peace was fully established in southern Britain ; in after 
 days, when the Roman power was threatened, the inhabited 
 space, as it then stood, was walled in. So it was at Rome 
 itself, in this matter the least Roman of Roman cities, 
 alike in the days of Servius and in the days of Aurelian. 
 As to the time of its destruction, it is plain from the dis- 
 covery of coins of Honorius and Arcadius that the site 
 was occupied as long as the Roman occupation of Britain 
 lasted. The general indications which have been followed 
 by Dr. Guest in tracing out his maps lead us to set it down 
 as having been in English occupation^— and English occupa- 
 tion just then was the same thing as destruction — before 
 the great check which the English arms received at the 
 hand of Arthur in 520. The destroyers therefore were 
 Cerdic and Cynric ; but we have no such notice of its over-
 
 SILCHESTER. 161 
 
 throw as we get in Henry of Huntingdon, and even in 
 the Clironicles, of the overthrow of Anderida at the hands 
 of -^lle and Cissa. The whole history of the site is 
 shrouded in darkness, but it is darkness more instructive 
 than any amount of light. 
 
 The place is easy of access, lying from three to four 
 miles from the Mortimer station of the branch of the 
 Great Western Railway between Reading and Basingstoke. 
 The French name of Mortimer, coming between the two 
 Teutonic tribe names of the Rsedingas and the Basingas, 
 and serving as the point of starting for the old Roman city, 
 gives us a lesson in British nomenclature. As usual, the 
 Roman, the Englishman, and the Norman have all left 
 their mark ; the Briton alone is utterly wiped out. When 
 we reach the spot, the first feeling is perhaps one of dis- 
 appointment ; the walls do not stand out in the same 
 stately sort as the walls of Anderida, those walls which 
 stood as they stand now when William landed beneath 
 them. We doubt whether there is any place in the whole 
 circuit where the outer surface has not been thoroughly 
 picked away. In a country where stone is precious, Sil- 
 chester walls and Reading abbey church have alike been 
 found useful as quarries. The wall is there in its whole ex- 
 tent, save where the gates have utterly perished, whether 
 as part of the special work of the first conquerors, or because 
 they supplied a tempting store of good stones in after- 
 times. The wall is there, but it is often sadly broken down ; 
 in some places it has to be traced. Nowhere is its Roman 
 character forced upon the eye as it is at Anderida, and 
 in the smaller fragments at York and Lincoln. Bat, 
 when we get within the enclosure, utterly unoccupied 
 except by a small church and a single farmhouse in one 
 corner, our feeling is that of amazement at its great ex- 
 tent. The two largest diameters of the irregular polygon 
 are, one rather more, one rather less, than half a mile. 
 And when we come to examine the treasures below ground 
 which have been brought to light by the zealous care of
 
 162 WESSEX. 
 
 Mr. Joyce, we find that Silchester is indeed one of the 
 great spots of our ishind. The excavations have as yet 
 been carried over only a small part of the enclosure, but 
 the foundations of a great number of public and private 
 buildings have been brought to light. In some cases it 
 is plain that changes took place while the city was still 
 inhabited. An ingenious conjecture has found a name 
 and a probable use for everything that has been brought 
 to light. We cannot enter into all of these ; but two 
 buildings of extraordinary interest must be spoken of. The 
 excavations of the Forum, which seems to be almost per- 
 fectly made out, have brought to light the unmistakeable 
 foundations of a gigantic basilica. The foundations of the 
 two rows of columns are there, and here and there frag- 
 ments of the columns themselves, with noble Corinthian 
 capitals, have been brought to light. They doubtless sup- 
 ported entablatures ; there is no reason to think that the 
 great invention of Spalato had been forestalled at Calleva 
 Atrebatum. The intern il arrang3m3nt of the basilica 
 must have been awkward as compared with that of the 
 ecclesiastical basilicas at Ravenna and elsewhere. In 
 these the semicircle of the apse continues on either side 
 the lines formed by the two ranges of columns. At Sil- 
 chester it is otherwise. Here the semicircle is greater 
 than a semicircle would be which continued the ranges of 
 columns, so that the ends of the columns, the two ranges 
 of which seem to an ecclesiastical eye to stand strangely 
 near together, must have abutted upon the chord of the 
 semicircle, so as -to throw the two ends of the apse itself 
 into obscurity. Any one who remembers Torcello or 
 Classis will feel how utterly the effect of the apse must 
 have been ruined by such a ground plan. Still, though 
 the perfection of the basilicau "arrangement was not 
 reached all at once, yet the building of Silchester must at 
 least have shown two noble ranges of columns ; and it is 
 something to trace, and that on our own soil, the gradual 
 developement of the type which is in truth the germ of all
 
 SILCHESTER. 163 
 
 ecclesiastical architecture. Is there any man who can 
 believe that, in the island, almost even in the neighbour- 
 hood, where these noble colonnades had been reared, 
 even a Celt could be so perverse as to go back and build 
 the rude masses of Stonehenge ? 
 
 Another most remarkable discovery is that of a round 
 temple. Two circular foundations, one within the other, 
 may be clearly seen. It did flash across the mind for 
 a moment that these might be the foundations of a 
 Christian church, a British S-iint Vital ; for it must not 
 be forgotten that a city which formed a part of the Empire 
 of Honorius could hardly have been without Christian 
 buildings. The absence of the projecting sanctuary is not 
 absolutely conclusive against the possibility of its Chris- 
 tian use ; still it is perhaps safer to set it down as a pagan 
 building. It must be remembered that, if it were Christian, 
 the outer circle of foundation would be for a wall, and the 
 inner one for columns ; in a pagan building it would be 
 the other way. 
 
 But one relic has been found at Silchester the interest 
 of which, from a certain point of view, is beyond all others. 
 Among the ruins of one of the houses, one which had 
 plainly been destroyed by fire, stowed away, it would seem, 
 with care in a secret place, was a legionary eagle, broken 
 away from its stem. This fact would seem to show that 
 the Britons who withstood Cerdic and Cynric still so far 
 looked upon themselves as Romans as to bear the ensign 
 of Marius in their wars, and still to look on it as a sacred 
 thing, which they strove by every means to keep from fall- 
 ing into the hands of the invaders. Such a piece of detail 
 as this brings before us at once the unbroken march of 
 history and the strange ups and downs along which that 
 march has to be traced. We are all used to pictures of 
 the landing of Caesar, with the eagle brandished before the 
 eyes of tho astonished Britons. We have never seen a 
 picture of the Briton keeping tho ensigns which h ad been 
 handed on to him by the conqueror who was also his 
 
 SI 2
 
 1G4 wnssmx. 
 
 teacher, aud hiding them out of the sight of the conqueror 
 who must have been, not his teacher but his destroyer. 
 Yet it is the latter scene which most concerns us. It is 
 because Silchester and places like Silchester were left 
 waste without inhabitants — because those who dwelled in 
 them were cut off by the sword or driven to save their 
 lives in remote corners of Britain or Gaul — because for a 
 hundred years the faith of Christ was wiped out before the 
 faith of Woden — it is because of all this that Britain has 
 not been as Gaul and Spain, aud that we still keep the laws 
 and the tongue which we brought from the mouths of the 
 Elbe and the Eider. Calleva and its people were swept 
 away that the Esedingas and the Basingas might grow 
 up as purely English settlements on the conquered soil.
 
 165 
 
 CHRISTCHURCH, TWINHAM. 
 
 1871. 
 
 There are not a few objects in the world which have alto- 
 gether lost their original names, and have taken a name 
 from some incidental circumstance. Thus in French the 
 fox has wholly lost his real name of volpil, and has taken 
 the new name of renard out of the famous beast-epic in 
 which he plays the chief part. In England an animal of 
 quite another kind, the little redbreast, has not wholly 
 lost its real name, but is called by it far less commonly 
 than by the personal pet name of Robin. Among places, 
 the fact that the town of Kingston stands on the river 
 Hull, and is distinguished from other Kingstons by the 
 name of Kingston-upon-Hull, has caused the name of the 
 river to supplant the name of the town everywhere except 
 in formal documents. In the place of which we now 
 speak the real name of the town has been wholly forgotten ; 
 we do not know whether it survives even in formal use, but 
 it is quite certain that, if we spoke in ordinary talk of the 
 town of Twinham in Hampshire, no one would know what 
 place we meant. The dedication of the church has 
 wholly driven out the name of the town, and the place is 
 never called anylhing but Chrisfchurch. The change is 
 not unreasonable, for, except as the site of its minster, 
 Twinham plays no prominent part in history. In early 
 days it was a royal possession ; as such it is casually 
 mentioned along with its neighbour Wimborne, when the 
 ^theling ^thelwald rebelled against Eadward the Elder. 
 This rebellion may pass as a very early assertion of
 
 166 WJRSSEX. 
 
 the doctrine of hereditary right, ^thelwald, the son of 
 iElfred's elder brother, clearly thought himself wronged 
 by the election of iElfred's son. Bnt Twinham — Twe- 
 oxneam, as it appears in the Chronicles — placed only a 
 secondary part in the business, while Wimborne stood 
 something- like a siege. In Domesday Thuinam appears 
 as a royal lordship and as a borough, but a borough of no 
 great account, containing only thii'ty houses. It is a 
 suspicious fact that Christchurch was not rejpresented in 
 Parliament till the time of Elizabeth, and it is not likely 
 that it would be represented now, had not the first Reform 
 Bill, while docking it of a member, enlarged its bound- 
 aries. It stands, like several of the neighbouring towns, 
 as the centre of a large parish in a thinly inhabited region 
 of heath and wood. The great minster, standing on a 
 comparative height, the stump of a small castle, and, more 
 precious in its own way than either, a ruined house of the 
 twelfth century, form altogether as striking a group as 
 can often be found. They are indeed helped by their 
 position, rising as they do above the Avon, the southern 
 Avon which runs by Salisbury and Ringwood, and which is 
 here spanned by a picturesque mediaeval bridge. But the 
 minster of course soars above all ; it is so completely the 
 all in all of the place, both in its past history and in its 
 present being, that we can neither wonder nor complain 
 that it has driven out the earlier name of the town. 
 
 But when we come to examine the church in detail, we 
 feel something about it which is not wholly satisfactory. 
 The parts taken separately are splendid, but they do not 
 hang well together. A building of great length, not of 
 course of the length of Winchester or Saint Albans, but of 
 a very great length among churches of the second rank, has 
 only a single western tower, and that one which, as the 
 single tower of such a church, is utterly insignificant. No- 
 where do we more instinctively and bitterly cry out for the 
 central tower. It is not merely any personal or national 
 fancy for the peculiar outline which distinguishes English
 
 CHRISTCHURCH, TWINHAM. 1G7 
 
 and Norman minsters from those of the rest of the world ; 
 we do not miss the central tower at Bourges or at Alby, we 
 are not sure that we miss it even at Llandaff. Bourges 
 and Alby were designed on a plan which altogether for- 
 bade the central tower, and the question between them and 
 the churches of England and Normandy is not a question 
 between particular buildings, but between two rival systems 
 of ground-plan and outline. But Christchurch, of all 
 churches in the world, asks for a central tower and does 
 not get it. The central tower may be best dispensed with 
 when the church is all of a piece, built on one regular 
 plan in which the central tower found no place; such is 
 Bourges ; such is Alby ; such, to come down several degrees 
 on our scale, is Manchester. But, when a church is, like 
 most English churches, a jumble of dates and styles — a 
 nave of one kind, a choir of another, transepts of a third 
 — a central tower is above all things needed to hold them 
 together and to fuse them into a whole of some kind. 
 However incongruous they may be with one another, yet 
 when they all group round the central lantern, there is 
 something which stands in a relation to all of them, 
 though they may stand in no relation to one another. If 
 a great unbroken length begs for a central tower to break 
 it, a great length broken up into bits b|iegs still more 
 earnestly for a central tower to keep the pieces together. 
 There is no doubt that a central tower was designed at 
 Christchurch; the four great arches of the lantern are 
 there ready to bear it up ; it may even have been carried 
 up to a cer tain height; but, as a matter of fact, it is not 
 there now, and the result is that the building, as a whole, 
 is utterly incongruous. A nave whose Romanesque cha- 
 racter is partly disguised by the clerestory windows of the 
 next age, a nave which is the only part of the building 
 that still keeps its high-pitched roof, transepts somewhat 
 lower than the main body of the nave, transepts essentially 
 Eomanesque, but much altered in detail; a Perpendicular 
 choir, with vast clerestoiy windows like those of Bath or
 
 168 WSSSEX. 
 
 Sherborne or EedcliflP; a Lady chapel of the same external 
 height as the choir, bnt of course with a wholly diflPer- 
 ent arrangement of windows — all these, with the farther 
 appendages of a large northern porch and a small western 
 tower, do not form, as they stand, a harmonions whole. If 
 the central tower were there, the several parts would at 
 once become, if not exactly harmo nious, yet at any rate 
 not painfully inharmonious. The difference of arrangement 
 between the nave and the choir, instead of a glaring con- 
 trast, would be little more than a pleasing variety. The 
 transepts, instead of mere appendages to the nave, would 
 take their proper place as independent parts of the 
 buildino-. The one contrast which it could not reconcile 
 would be the contrast between the choir and the Lady 
 chapel, and the contrast between these most violently 
 opposed parts of the building is a contrast, not of date or 
 style, but, we must suppose, of intentional design. The 
 only question is as to the present western tower, which a 
 central lantern of any dignity would of course throw into 
 still greater insignificance. The arrangement would be 
 the same as that at Wimborne, but at Wimborne a certain 
 equality is kept between the two towers, by giving a 
 slight advantage of bulk to the lantern in the middle, and 
 a slight advantage of height to the bell-tower at the 
 west end. Each therefore has a character and a dignit}' 
 of its own, and they group well together without each 
 being a mere double of the other. But at Christchurch, 
 if there was to be a western tower, either alone or in 
 company with a central lantern, it ought to have been far 
 larger than it is. 
 
 The part of the church most deserving of detailed study 
 is naturally the Eomanesque nave. This, according to all 
 local tradition, was the work of the> famous or infamous 
 Eandolf Flambard or Passeflambard. But on this spot we 
 have nothing to do with his infamies, but only to com- 
 nare his real or alleged architectural works at two places. 
 It was he that built the noblest work of Romanesque
 
 CHRISTCRURCH, TWINHAM. 169 
 
 architecture, the mighty nave of Durham. He built 
 it as a direct continuation in a more ornamented form 
 of the choir of William of Saint-Calais, despising- the 
 plainer and feebler work which the monks had meanwhile 
 done in the transepts. This is the point which gives his 
 name a special interest in connexion with Christchurch. 
 We need not argue as to the exact nature of his connexion 
 with the place, whether he was ever its ecclesiastical head 
 by the title of Dean or any other. In some character 
 or other, it seems clear, he had authority at Twinham 
 which enabled him to pull down and to build up. Twin- 
 ham, we are told, must then have looked more like Glen- 
 dalough or Clonmacnois than like anything which we are 
 used to in England. Besides the principal church, there 
 were nine others in the churchyard, as well as the houses 
 of the canons. All these Flam bard swept away. He built 
 new prebendal houses, and, if we rightly understand the 
 story, he made ten small churches give way to one great 
 one. Of this building the nave and transepts still remain. 
 The first thing that strikes us in reading this history 
 is that there is no likeness whatever between the known 
 work of Eandolf Flambard at Durham and his alleged 
 work at Christchurch. Waltham, Durham, Dunfermline, 
 and Lindesfarn, all hang together, but Christchurch has 
 nothing to do with any of them. The pillars are wholly 
 different. Instead of the vast channelled columns of 
 Durham, we have rectangular piers set with nook-shafts, 
 according to one of the commonest forms of the style. 
 Both cushioned and voluted capitals, in several varieties, 
 are freely used. The proportions are quite different from 
 those of Durham, the arcade being much lower and the 
 triforium much larger. In fact, there is no kind of likeness 
 between the two. Durham is a great work of real genius. 
 What William of Saint-Calais began, Randolf Flam- 
 bard appreciated, carried on, and improved. The Roman- 
 esque church at Christchurch is good and bold ; it has no 
 glaring faults like Gloucester and Tewkesbury ; but it is
 
 170 WJESSEX. 
 
 ordinary work siicli as may be seen in a great many other 
 places. It has no special character to a\\'aken any par- 
 ticular interest in its designer. On the whole, it looks 
 earlier than Durham. But Durham itself, of all places, 
 teaches us that a building- which is earlier in look is not 
 alwajs earlier in date. Did Kandolf Flambard then build 
 the nave of Christchurch before that of Durham, before 
 he had been struck with the new forms brought in by 
 William of Saint-Calais 'P Or was he the builder simply in 
 the sense of bearing the cost without troubling himself 
 personally about the design ? 
 
 The lack of a central tower tends to throw the tran- 
 septs into insignificance, especially as that arrangement 
 is followed which was so common in Romanesque minsters, 
 that by which very little projection was given to the east- 
 ern and western piers of the lantern, in order to make a 
 better backing for the stalls, the choir of course occupying 
 the crossing. The later change of arrangements moved the 
 choir, as usual, into the eastern limb, leaving the crossing 
 practically a part of the nave. The rood-screen of this 
 later arrangement is still standing, and it forms the great 
 difficulty in the arrangement of the church for modern 
 purposes. Under 'this we pass into the Perpendicular 
 choir, and the effect is singular indeed. We pass from a 
 minster nave into what seems to be a college chapel. For 
 the great importance given to the clerestory makes the 
 pier arches so low that they hardly rise above the canopies, 
 and go for nothing in the general effect. The high altar 
 still keeps its steps and its magnificent reredos. Less 
 vast than those of Winchester and Saint Albans, it shows 
 more real grace in its sculptured representation of the 
 Root of Jesse, the fellow of that which has been defaced 
 in Saint Cuthberht's church at Wells,-and of the kindred 
 work in glass in the east window at Dorchester. North 
 of the altar stands the stately shrine, doubtless the ceno- 
 taph, of the martyred Margaret of Salisbury, the last of 
 the Plantagenets. It is basely burrowed into by modern
 
 CHRI8TCHURCH, TWINHAM. 171 
 
 tablets, and balanced on the south side of the altar by one 
 of the most grotesque instances of the monumental bad 
 taste of later times. 
 
 The ancient foundation of secular canons, with their 
 seal ' Sigillum Ecclesise Trinitatis de Toinham,' gave way, 
 about 1150, as in so many other places, to a body of 
 regular or Austin canons. Christchurch remained a 
 priory of that order till the Dissolution, when, among the 
 buildings set down as ' superfluous,' we find ' the church, 
 a cloister, dormytary, chaptrehouse, frayter, infirmary, 
 the subpriours lodging too the utter cloister and galery, 
 the chapell in the same cloister, and all the houses there- 
 unto adjoyning.' The lead of the church and cloister, 
 besides abundance of gold and silver plate, and two of the 
 seven bells, were reserved for the King's Majesty, five 
 being left for the parish. This might suggest that 
 Christchurch was an example of a divided church, and 
 that the ' church ' referred to in the above extract means 
 the eastern part only ; but the arrangements of the in- 
 terior do not confirm this idea. The rood-screen is pal- 
 pably a rood-screen and not a reredos. But it is of course 
 possible that a parish reredos may have stood across the 
 western arch of the lantern. 
 
 Besides the minster, the twelfth-century house by the 
 river must not be forgotten. A Eomanesque minster is at 
 least not a rarity ; a house of that date and style is. This 
 at Christchurch, though unroofed, is nearly perfect, and 
 it would hold a worthy place among the kindred remains 
 at Lincoln, Dol, and Bury Saint Edmunds. It is however 
 much to be wished that it were cleared from the disfigur- 
 ing ivy which hides nearly every detail.
 
 172 
 
 CARISBROOKE. 
 
 1871. 
 
 The Isle of Wight has more claim to be made the subject 
 of a distinct history than many much larger districts. 
 First and foremost, it is a distinct island, and not merely 
 so many square miles of the isle of Britain. Its history 
 has of course always stood in the closest relations of 
 connexion and dependence towards the history of the 
 greater island ; still it is not simply part of it. It 
 distinctly has a history, while one can hardly say that 
 Bedfordshire, for instance, has any. Politically part of 
 England, yet not physically part of Britain, it has been for 
 ages included in one of the territorial divisions of England, 
 yet it still keeps a separate being. The Isle of Wight is, 
 for most civil purposes, part of the county of South- 
 hampton, yet no one would say of a man who lives in the 
 Isle of Wight that he lives in Hampshire. In the early 
 days of English occupation the island formed the centre 
 of a small but distinct kingdom, which spread itself also 
 over a part of the adjacent island ; a small strip of what 
 is now the mainland of Hampshire formed part of the 
 little realm of Wight, just like the Peraia held by many 
 of the Greek insular cities on the neighbouring coasts of 
 Thrace or Asia. Indeed the phrase of 'overers,' applied 
 by the natives of the island to immigrants from Britain, 
 expresses pretty much the same idea as the Greek word. 
 Wight too has another point of interest in our earliest 
 history. It was one of the two settlements of that tribe 
 which, though the smallest in number, formed the van-
 
 CARISBROOKE. 173 
 
 guard of the Teutonic invasion, and led the way for the 
 greater settlements of the Angles and Saxons. For the 
 original Teutonic settlers of Wight, like those of Kent, 
 were of the mysterious race of the Jutes. ''Of lotan 
 comon Cantwara and Wihtwara,' and the Jutish name 
 was remembered, both in the island and in its Peraia, as 
 late as the days of Florence of Worcester, who places the 
 death of William Rufas ' in Jutarum provincia.' But 
 while the Jutish settlement in Kent was not only inde- 
 pendent, but was the very beginning of English conquest 
 before Angles or Saxons made any permanent settlement, 
 the Jutish settlement in Wight always appears as more 
 or less dependent on the great Saxon settlement on the 
 neighbouring mainland. The first English princes of 
 Wight, Stuf and Wihtgar, appear in the story of the first 
 conquest as the nephews of the actual conquerors, Cerdic 
 and Cynric, and as holding the island by their grant. As 
 Cynric was the son of Cerdic, the words, if they are to be 
 taken literally, would mean that Stuf and Wihtgar were 
 nephews of Cynric and great-nephews of Cerdic. But it 
 is more likely that the expression is somewhat lax, and 
 that, as Asser understood the passage, they were the 
 nephews of Cerdic and the first cousins of Cyni-ic. We 
 here probably find the key to the fact of a Jutish settle- 
 ment under Saxon supremacy. The Jutish chieftains 
 were doubtless the sisters' sons of the Saxon Ealdorman ; 
 for in early times it was always the sister's son, the surest 
 kinsman of all, who was first in the affections and most 
 closely attached to the fortunes of his uncle. Stuf and 
 Wihtgar had played their part in the conquest of the 
 mainland, and they were rewarded by a grant of the 
 island after the conquest in the bloody light of Wihtgares- 
 burh, a name which we shall presently discuss. There 
 the Chronicles tell us that many Britons were slain, and 
 Asser gives some curious though meagre details of the 
 conquest. The fight was in his eyes a final massacre of 
 the few Britons who remained in the island, the rest
 
 174 WESSEX. 
 
 having either died in earlier fights or sought shelter 
 elsewhere. It is clear that he looked on the conquest 
 of AViglit as a conquest which carried with it the utter 
 extermination of the vanquished. 
 
 The history of the little state thus formed records 
 more than one interesting revolution. Among the wars 
 of the seventh century, Wulfhere of Mercia overran the 
 island, and transferred it, or rather the allegiance of its 
 dependent Icing, from Wessex to the South-Saxon ^thel- 
 wealli. Fast upon this follows the pathetic story of the 
 conquest of the island by Ceadwalla, of the sentence 
 of extermination pronounced by the fierce catechumen 
 ao-ainst the heathen islanders, and of the deliverance of 
 at least a portion of them by the intercession of Bishop 
 Wilfrith. The whole is crowned by the affecting tale of 
 the two j'oung ^thelings doomed to death by the fero- 
 cious conqueror, but whom the good Abbot Cyneberht 
 obtains leave at least fco teach and baptize before they 
 die. The story is in itself one of the most touching in 
 our early history ; it also gives us another phase of the 
 ubiquitous Wilfrith, who appears as an apostle alike in 
 Northumberland, Sussex, Frieslaud, and lastly in Wight. 
 But the historic importance of the story is its showing 
 that, while the Jutes of Kent were the first, the Jates 
 of Wight were the last, among the English tribes to 
 accept the Christian religion. The South- Saxons were 
 the latest converts on the mainland ; the Jutes of Wight 
 were the last of all. Their conversion was an appendage 
 to the conversion of the South- Saxons; Wilfrith was 
 their apostle, and it might have been expected that the 
 island would have remained part of the South- Saxon 
 diocese. But the invariable rule by which ecclesiastical 
 divisions followed the civil divisions of the time pre- 
 vailed here also, and Wight, as a conquest of the West- 
 Saxon Ceadwalla, has ever since remained part of the 
 West-Saxon diocese of Winchester. 
 
 It is a thing to be noticed that, while Kent was the
 
 CARISBROOKE. 175 
 
 first part of England to embrace Christianity, the neigh- 
 bouring land of Sussex and the kindred land of Wight 
 should be the latest of all. The explanation perhaps is 
 to be found in the insular position of Wight, in the 
 position, if not insular, at least isolated, of Sussex, 
 with its inhabited districts cut off from the rest of Bri- 
 tain by the great Andredesweald. The long heathenism of 
 Wight is indeed more remarkable than that of Sussex. 
 Sussex, though part of the mainland, was really more 
 isolated than Wight, which seems designed as the high- 
 way between Wessex and Northern Gaul. It is strange 
 to conceive Thunder and Woden being still worshipped 
 in the island more than a generation after Winchester 
 had become a Christian city. The fasion of Briton 
 and Englishman in the West had begun, Glastonbury 
 had already become a common sanctuary of the two 
 races, while the Jutes of Wight still remained untouched 
 by the faith which was now professed uninterruptedly 
 from Thanet to Scilly. The further question arises, how 
 far the plan of extermination designed by Ceadwalla was 
 really carried out, and how far the Jutish population — 
 save those who were spared to form the patrimony of 
 Wilfrith — made way at this time for Saxon immigrants. 
 
 With the West-Saxon conquest the history of the 
 island as a separate state of course comes to an end. 
 Bat Wight makes its full share of contributions to Eng- 
 lish history in various ages. In the eleventh century it 
 is spoken of over and over again, very often as a place 
 of passage between Britain and Gaul. JE thelred tarried 
 there on his flight to Normandy, and William appears 
 there also at two important times in the last years of his 
 reign. There it was that he arrested his brother Odo, who 
 was himself using the island as a highway between Eng- 
 land and Rome. And there it was that the Conqueror 
 himself tarried on his last voyage from England to Nor- 
 mandy, while his last taxation of England was gathering 
 in. In every expedition which touched southern England,
 
 1 :t^ n'FssEX. 
 
 whether il was (ioilwiiic who (Miiii'to ilclivor KiiltIihuI, or 
 Tos(i>; who iMino to r!i\'ii«j^o il, (ho Isle of Wi^ht coiii- 
 luoiily pliijs its [>iirt in the oourso of the ^•;lmpaiJ^ll. In 
 hvt<»r history a^aiti the island is nut uneotnnionly mentioned. 
 In the iitteenth century the kingdom of Stuf and Wihti^ar 
 is said tohav«» heen revived in favour of llenry Beauehanip, 
 Duke of Warwiek. lint it is in the seventeenth century 
 that the ishiud wius its hi<i^hest historical interest in the 
 l)oi)ular uiiud, throu^^h the captivity o[' (^hiirles the First 
 in the castU' of Carisbrooke. 
 
 Hul the history of Oarisbrooke is far from being 
 eontiued to the seventeenth century. It is in fact the 
 history of the island ; its history, as recorded both in 
 written annals and in existing remains, goes back to the 
 earliest tiuies when we have any notice o[' Wii^ht itself. 
 The general aspect of the place is strikiug. Two oppo- 
 site heights of no great positive elevation, and overtopped 
 again by loftier hills, are crowned severally bj the castle 
 and the church, of both of which we shall have to speak 
 again. It is in the valley between the two that the 
 rennvins of the earliest surviving building in the island 
 may still be seen. These are tlie large remains oi' a 
 Koman house, laid open not nniny years siuct\ and which 
 seems to divide the attention of visitors with the later 
 buildings on either side of them. Tlie position is one 
 which sets one thiidciug on the ditlerent motives by 
 which men in different ages have been guided in the 
 choice of sit<»s for their dwellings. In a purely warlike 
 age a lofty site was desirable. The Gaulish settlement 
 which so often grew into a Koman town, the castle of the 
 Nornuin invader, or indeed of the military chief of any 
 kind, was set by |>reference on a hill-top. But till very 
 modern times, till the sense of the .picturesque and the 
 wish to obtain a view begati to have an intlueuce in such 
 matters, the purely peaceful dwelling of a more peaceful 
 time was placed by preference in spots which show that 
 warmth and shelter were the chief objects. The Roman
 
 (JAlimiiR OOKE. 1 77 
 
 villa, the British bishopric, the Cistercian monastery, the 
 mediicval manor hons(^, all follow this same law. The 
 Roman honse at Oarisbrooke is placed where no Norman 
 baroii would ever liavo placed his castle, where no modern 
 seeker after the picturesque would ever think of [)lacin<»" 
 either palace or cotta^-e. It stands at the very bottom of 
 the dell, commanding no view of any kind ; but then to 
 connnand a view was one of the last things which were 
 likely to come into the mind of its builders. To special 
 students of Roman antiquity the remains are valuable as 
 what has been described as a first-rate example of a 
 second-rate class. The walls remain throughout a little 
 way above the ground ; the rooms can all be traced, as 
 well as those arrangements for warmth and cleanliness 
 which the Romans never forgot ; there is a perfect store 
 of pavements, from the very plainest type to one of con- 
 siderable richness. But to the student of English his- 
 tory the house has, like all other Roman remains, a higher 
 interest than any which the study of the Roman anti- 
 quities themselves can supply. The singUj villa at 
 Oarisbrooke, like the desolate walls of Anderida, like the 
 varied remains of Uriconium, stands as one of the 
 memorials of English conquest, as one of the signs of 
 that utter havoc and destruction which alone caused 
 England to be England. We read in our Chronicles ' Her 
 Cerdic and Cynric genamon Wihte ealand and ofslogon 
 feala men on Wihtgarasbyrg.' Here Mre see before our 
 eyes part of the process. In the eyes of the first English 
 invaders a Roman house, with all the appendages of a 
 civilization which they did not understand, was a thing 
 to be swept awa,y at once if the needs of warfare called for 
 so doing. In any other case it was a thing to be left to 
 fall to pieces of itself as it might happen. To dwell in 
 the Roman house n'> more came into their heads than to 
 adopt the Roman religion or to learn the Roman language. 
 Had it been otherwise, had the slaughter and havoc 
 wrought by our fathers been less complete, Englishmen.
 
 178 jmSSEX. 
 
 ■would not liave remained Englishmen, and Britain would 
 never have become England. 
 
 There seems no kind of reason to doubt that Caris- 
 brooke is the site of the battle of 530 which made Wight 
 English. The present castle, we may fairly infer, repre- 
 sents the ' burh ' which then yielded to the English con- 
 querors, and which witnessed the slaughter of so many 
 men at their hands. Nor can we doubt that the same 
 place, whether the same exact spot or not, is meant in 
 the entry under the year 544 which records the death' 
 and burial of Wihtgar. But what are we to make of the 
 name which appears in so many shapes, and which seems 
 so closely connected with that of the hero himself? We 
 read of Wihtgaras hyrg, Wihtgara byrig, Wiht garwshyrg, 
 Wihtgares hyri, Witgareshurcg, Witgareshrig, Gwihtgara- 
 hurJig. The varieties of the latter half of the name are of 
 no importance, except so far as they illustrate the process 
 by which burh or hyrig has, in this and in other names, 
 got changed into hrooh and bridge. The modern name 
 Carisbrooke doubtless comes, by dropping the first syllable, 
 as in the modern form of Thessalonica, from the form 
 Wihtgaresburh. But the real difficulty is as to the middle 
 part of the word. The form Wihtgaresburh {Wihtgari 
 castrum) seems to be a later form, as it is found only in 
 the latest manuscript of the Chronicle and in Henry 
 of Huntingdon. This form would be perfectly intel- 
 ligible, if we could only believe that the conqueror of 
 the island bore its name. If the conqueror of Wight 
 really was named ' the sjjear of Wight,' it is plain that he 
 must have taken the name after the conquest. But in none 
 of the earlier forms do we find the unmistakable singular 
 genitive es, while in some we seem to get the plural geni- 
 tive in a. It has been thought that Wihtgaraburh is a 
 form analogous to Gantwaraburh, Canterbury, that Wiht- 
 garesburh is a corruption, and that the hero Wihtgar 
 has been simply inferred from this corrupted form. But 
 gara is not ivara — Gantwaraburh is the borough of Kent-
 
 CARISBROOKE. 179 
 
 ish men; Wihtgarahurh would rather be the borough of 
 the Wightish spears. Mr. Earle doubtingly suggests that 
 gar may be the Welsh caer. The addition of an English 
 form of the same meaning would be no great wonder, if 
 any parallel formation could be found. But surely the 
 British form would be Caergwiht, not Gwihtcaer; nor can 
 we remember any name in which caer is retained in 
 English. Winchester is not Wentgarahurh. And Asser, 
 from whom we might have looked for the British form of 
 the name, gives us nothing nearer than GwiJitgaraburhg, 
 where the gw is a clear attempt to give the name something 
 of the Welsh sound, but where caer has left no trace at 
 all. We must be content to leave the matter unsettled ; 
 only, while looking at the ruins of the Eoman house, we 
 would fain believe in a personal Stuf and Wihtgar as its 
 destroyers. 
 
 The later antiquities of Carisbrooke are the church and 
 the castle. Oddly enough, there is no distinct mention of 
 either in Domesday, but the church probably lurks under 
 the entry of that of Bovecome, Bowcombe, and the castle 
 under that of Alwinestone. We can hardly doubt that it 
 contained the ' regia aula ' which beheld the arrest of Odo. 
 The island was granted by the Conqueror to William Fitz- 
 Osbern, but the local notion of a ' conquest ' of the Isle 
 by the Earl of Hereford comes only from a blundering 
 cartulary, which certainly says that William Fitz-Osbern 
 ' conquisivit insulam Vectam tempore quo dictus Willel- 
 mus Bastardus conquisivit terram Angliaa.' But the 
 trustworthiness of the document may be judged of by its 
 giving Earl William, instead of his real and well-known 
 sons William and Eoger, two imaginary sons John and 
 Richard, who are made to die before their father. Most 
 likely, ' conquisivit ' was used merely in the legal sense of 
 ' purchased,' and most likely not without a play upon the 
 word. 
 
 The priory of Carisbrooke is always said to have been 
 founded by Earl William, but no evidence of the fact is 
 
 n2
 
 180 WESSEX. 
 
 shown. It seems however to have been one of the 
 churches which were granted by him to the abbey of Lire 
 iu the diocese of Evreux of his own foundation. A cell 
 or dependent house arose at Carisbrooke, which lasted 
 till the suppression of alien priories under Henry the 
 Fifth. The remains are wortli studying, as an example of 
 monastic arrangements on the smallest scale. The church 
 is purely parochial in its type, with a double nave, after a 
 pattern common in the island. The choir was single, pro- 
 jecting from the northern body. It is said to have been 
 pulled down by the famous Walsingham in Elizabeth's 
 time, and its loss sadly mars both the appearance and the 
 arrangements of the building. Till however it can be 
 rebuilt in its full proportions, it is better to leave it alone 
 than to rum the whole thing by some imperfect substitute. 
 On the north side stood a small cloister, which did not 
 take up the whole length of the nave, a gateway ranging 
 with its west wall. The tower, of Perpendicular date, is 
 locally held to rival those of the West of England. But 
 any one who knows either the West or the East will not 
 set much store by it, except as a curious mixture of two 
 types. It suggests, the idea of a South- Welsh military 
 tower, with the squarest and narrowest of belfry- windows, 
 trying to bring in something of the more elaborate type 
 in its buttresses and parapet. Much of singularity, 
 somethmg even of stateliness, is the result ; but it cannot 
 be called a good work of art. 
 
 On the whole Carisbrooke supplies several objects to 
 examine and muse over, besides the donkey who turns the 
 wheel, and the window where legend fixes the sticking fast 
 of Charles the First.
 
 181 
 
 MERTON PRIORY. 
 
 1873, 
 
 A MONASTIC ruin, if ruin is exactly the word in the case 
 of which we speak, in what may now pass as a London 
 suburb has something almost more incongruous about it 
 than if it stood in the heart of London itself. London — 
 at any rate the proper London with its daughter West- 
 minster — is, after all, an ancient city ; it is mainly owing 
 to the CO mparatively recent fire that it does not proclaim 
 its antiquity as clearly as Chester or York. London has 
 been going on in one shape or another at least from the 
 days of Aulus Plautius ; many will doubtless be offended 
 if we are not prepared to place its beginnings any number 
 of thousand years earlier. It has gone on since that 
 time, constantly changing, but changing in that kind of 
 way which is the surest mark of permanence. London 
 differs now from the London of William and the London 
 of Constantino, as a modern city must differ from a 
 mediaeval and a Roman city. But the likeness at all 
 those times is much stronger than the unlikeness; the 
 London of all those dates agrees in being a city and one 
 of the chief cities of Britain. With the suburbs of London, 
 and with the neighbourhood of London generally, the case 
 is quite different. No part of England changes more, and 
 it changes at once gradually and suddenly. Till quite 
 lately a great part of Surrey must have been one of the 
 wildest parts of England ; parts of it are so still. Large 
 districts look as if they had been untouched by man's hand 
 during all the time from the battle of Wimbledon — that
 
 182 WL'SSEX. 
 
 tight of Ceawliu and .l^tlielberlit wliicli added Surrey to 
 tlie West-Saxon realm— till people began to build villas a 
 few years back. The passenger who goes from London to 
 Basingstoke or from London to Reading by the Surrey 
 route, goes through a laud wilder than anything that he 
 will see again till he gets to the New Forest, wilder 
 perhaps than anything that he will see till he gets to 
 Dartmoor. The incongruity of a piece of wild heath, 
 with spick and span houses scattered here and there, is 
 something like the process which goes on at Bourne- 
 mouth, where every man cuts down so much of the 
 wood as is needful for the site of his house, and leaves 
 the trees growing ready made in his garden. One feature 
 of the country not the least striking to the passer-by is 
 that, at one stage of his journey, he goes through a dis- 
 trict which seems to be inhabited by dead people only. 
 Nearer again to London, at Wimbledon, Tooting, Streat- 
 ham, Clapham, and in all that district, we are still struck 
 by the unenclosed lands, the commons, some of them 
 more or less famous. Oi^en spaces of this kind are 
 certainly more common round London than in most parts 
 of England, and when surrounded by houses, they have a 
 distinctly suburban character which is seldom seen else- 
 where. Near Wakefield there is something of the kind, 
 a large open space surrounded by houses of considerable size 
 and considerable age, and the feeling which it at once sug- 
 gests is that we have been suddenly moved into the neigh- 
 bourhood of London. All this shows that the country was 
 never fully reclaimed till it became suburban ; it could never 
 have had the look of an ordinaiy agricultural or grazing 
 district ; it passed from a more natural state into a more 
 artificial one. Still here and there, among the scattered 
 dwellings of greater size, among the- respectable houses 
 of a century back and the prim villas of our own time, 
 we come upon remains — survivals one might almost call 
 them — of the old villages, as they stood before they be- 
 came thoroughly suburban. And among them, in a spot
 
 MEET ON PRIORY. 183 
 
 jammed in in a strange way by roads and railways, in a 
 low and certainly not attractive spot, we find tlie remains 
 of a house whicli at once suggests a long string of historic 
 memories, the priory of Austin canons of Merton. 
 
 The name of Merton, Merantun, Meretun, appears in 
 our history long before the foundation of the priory. 
 This last dates only from the reign of Henry the First, but 
 we first hear of Merton in the eighth century. It was the 
 scene of that remarkable story of the death of Cynewulf 
 which so strongly brings out the old institution of the 
 comitatus, the personal tie which bound a man to his lord, 
 and which, as in this case, was often held more binding 
 than the common duty to the law and to the King as the 
 common head of the state. In this story Cynewulf is 
 killed by his kinsman, the banished ^theling Cyneheard, 
 and his following, and the King's death is avenged by his 
 own following on his murderer. The King's men show 
 all zeal and loyalty ; but their feeling is evidently one of 
 attachment to their own personal lord rather than to the 
 head of the state. The men of the outlawed ^theling 
 are as faithful to him as the King's men are to the King, 
 and each side seems to make it a point of honour to re- 
 fuse all offers made by the other. Each side alike fights 
 to the death, and on each side one wounded man only 
 escapes with life. Of the King's men a British hostage 
 only survives ; he may well have had less loyalty than his 
 fellows to the West- Saxon king, who had fought many 
 fights with his countrymen. In the case of the one who 
 escaped on the ^theling's side the personal tie again 
 comes in in another shape. The one man who was spared 
 was the godson of the Ealdorman Osric, the leader of the 
 King's party, and he owed his life to that spiritual kin- 
 dred. In the next century, in 871, Merton was the scene 
 of one of the battles of ^thelred and Alfred, one of those 
 puzzling stories in which we read that the Danes were 
 put to flight, and yet that they kept possession of the 
 place of slaughter. This seeming contradiction has some-
 
 184 WESSEX. 
 
 times been tiinied against the credibility of tlie Chronicles. 
 Yet it is quite possible that the Danes, every man of them 
 a trained soldier, -who had no homes and no hope except 
 in keeping together, might give way before an impetu- 
 ous charge of the raw English levies, and yet be able 
 to recover themselves while the momentary victors were 
 scattered abroad, while some perhaps, in the blind im^julse 
 of victory, were already beginning to go to their own 
 homes. "When Merton was the scene of events which 
 stand out in our annals like these, it is remarkable that 
 its name is hardly ever found in the ancient charters — 
 only once, as far as we can find, in an alleged charter 
 of Eadgar which Mr. Kemble marks as spurious. The 
 foundation of the priory in 1117 brought the place into 
 more importance. One Gilbert Norman — possibly Gilbert 
 son of Northman — Sheriff of Surrey, is called the founder ; 
 but in the foundation charter of Henry the Fu'st no 
 founder is spoken of but the King himself. This how- 
 ever may only be by the same courtly fiction by which 
 Edward the Second and Queen Elizabeth are held to have 
 been the founders of Oriel and Jesus College respec- 
 tively. In the time of its first prior, Robert, who bears 
 the surname of Bayle, the house of the canons of Merton 
 became for a while the dwelling-place of a guest and 
 scholar who was to win himself a name far beyond the 
 bounds of Merton or of England. Thomas of London, 
 the son of Gilbert of Rouen and Eohesia of Caen, the 
 future Chancellor and Archbishop, came in his boyhood 
 to learn the first beginnings of knowledge at Merton, 
 before he went on to his more inatured studies at Paris, 
 Auxerre, and Bologna. And, according to the legend, it 
 was at Merton that the future greatness of the son was 
 revealed to the father. William Fitz-Stephen tells us 
 how Gilbert, coming to see his child, amazed and scanda- 
 lized Prior Robert by falling down before him. The 
 Prior rebuked the mad old man who paid to his own son 
 the honour which his son should have paid to him. But
 
 MERTON PBIOBY. 185 
 
 Gilbert, so the tale runs, knew better, and privately told 
 the Prior that he bowed to one who would one day be 
 great in the eyes of the Lord. 
 
 But it is in the thirteenth century that Merton plays 
 its most important part in the history of England. There 
 are no Merton Annals that we know of, but the annals 
 of other houses contain several entries of local Merton 
 matters, besides their notices of events happening at 
 Merton which concerned the whole kingdom. And more- 
 over Merton was the place of an event which was the 
 indirect cause of great results. If Merton was the seat of 
 the early learning of Thomas in days when Oxford was 
 not a seat of learning at all, it was also the birthplace of 
 a man who did more than any other to make Oxford a 
 seat of learning. At Merton, where -Alfred fought a battle 
 and where Walter of Merton was born, the real and the 
 imaginary founder of the collegiate system in Oxford are 
 in a manner brought face to face. But during this century 
 events connected with Merton, both local and general, 
 press fast upon us. In 1222 the Dunstable Annals tell 
 us that the tower fell, doubtless from the same cause 
 which brought down so many towers in those days and 
 that of Chichester in our own. In 1230 a Bishop of 
 LlandafF, Elias of Radnor, treasurer of Hereford, was con- 
 secrated at Merton by the obscure Archbishop Richard 
 Grant, who covers the short time between the great names 
 of Stephen Langton and Edmund Rich. The monks of 
 Christ Church, as we are pointedly told, did not fail to 
 protest against this breach of privileges of the metro- 
 politan church. Two years later the priory of Merton 
 finds its way into the general stream of English history. 
 Then it was that the famous Hubert de Burgh, charged 
 with all manner of crimes, took shelter and hid himself 
 all trembling among the canons — ' ad ecclesiam MeritonisG 
 fugit inter canonicos pavidus delitescens,' says Roger of 
 Wendover. Then King Henry bade the Mayor of London 
 to march at the head of the citizens and seize Hubert and
 
 1S6 WJESSEX. 
 
 bring him before tliem alive or dead. Set out they did, 
 an army — it is called exercitus — of twenty thousand ; but, 
 whOe they -were on their way, the Earl of Chester wisely 
 suggested to the King that such a force, when once got 
 together, might be dangerous (' si talem excitaret sedi- 
 tiouem in vulgo irrationabili et fatuo, posset rex timere 
 ne seditiouem semel inchoatam sedare non valeret cum 
 vellet'). So the citizens marched back again, and the 
 rest of the history of Hubert is in no way connected with 
 Merton. 
 
 In the course of the same century Merton was the 
 scene of two important meetings, a great Council of the 
 realm, and a Synod of the Chui'ch. The Council of 
 Merton in 1236 was an assembly whose acts won the ap- 
 proval of Matthew Paris ; and it is ever famous for the 
 answer of the barons, which has been cut short into the 
 phrase which has almost passed into a proverb — ' nolumus 
 leges Anglice mutare.' The saying is perhaps sometimes 
 quoted by people who do not remember what was the 
 question at issue. It was no other than the proposal to 
 make the law of England agree with the canon and civil 
 law — that is to say, speaking generally, with the law of 
 the rest of Christendom, — in allowing children born before 
 wedlock to be made legitimate by a subsequent marriage. 
 There is an extant letter of Eobert Grosseteste, in which 
 he pours forth a flood of scriptural and canonical argument 
 on the point. But the barons were not to be moved, and 
 this has ever since been one of the points in which English 
 law stands by itself. The other assembly of Merton was 
 a purely ecclesiastical one, held in 1258 by Archbishop 
 Boniface of Savoy, who had by that time tamed down a 
 little fi-om the days, eight years before, when he had held 
 his wonderful visitation of Saint Ba'i'tholomew's priory. 
 He had now changed into a vigorous asserter of ecclesias- 
 tical discipline and ecclesiastical rights, and in the canons 
 which he put forth at Merton the immunities of the 
 Church are strongly stated, and the secular power in all
 
 MERTON PBIORY. 187 
 
 its forms, from the King downwards, is strictly taken to 
 task for various breaches of alleged ecclesiastical rights. 
 
 A place which has seen all this, a place which so 
 closely coimects itself with the developement and the 
 special insular character of the English law, is certainly 
 entitled to rank high among the historic spots of Eng- 
 land. But we cannot say that the place is now parti- 
 cularly impressive. We could have wished to see some 
 stately remains of the priory itself, some castle or royal 
 hall, or, better still, some untouched piece of hill and 
 plain on which Ave could trace out the battle-field of 
 Alfred. But the roads, the railways, the factories, the 
 general atmosphere of a somewhat mean suburban village, 
 are less favourable for research and contemplation than 
 the hillside of Assandun or the keep and hall of Kenil- 
 worth. Yet Merton priory, a rich foundation, whose 
 income at the time of the Dissolution was over a thousand 
 pounds yearly, has by no means vanished without leaving 
 traces of itself. No remains that we could see of the 
 church or of the domestic buildings of the house are 
 left, but the wall which enclosed the monastic precinct is 
 still nearly perfect; we suspect that it was quite perfect 
 till the coming of the railways. And the preservation of 
 this particular trace of the ancient building is not without 
 its effect. Though, as far as we can make out, there is posi- 
 tively nothing to be studied within the walls, yet there is 
 something striking in linding the old precinct in this way 
 still fenced off; it is a reminder which is quite as speaking 
 as any mere fragment of the church or monastery could 
 have been. And the old associations of the place are 
 not" quite forgotten. The priory, exalted as usual into 
 an abbey, has left its name on more than one point of 
 local nomenclature, and vague traditions still hang about 
 of its having been the scene of events beyond the common. 
 Still the old associations are, perhaps not unnaturally, not 
 quite so strong as some later ones. Merton has been the 
 dwelling-place of a modern hero. Nelson once lived
 
 18S WESSEX. 
 
 tliere, iiud several names of streets and sncli like places 
 remind the visitor of the fact. And after all the latest 
 associations of Merton are not incongruous with those 
 ■svhich are all but the earliest. If we can conceive the 
 great king who fought at Merton feeling as it were 
 abashed in the presence of a man whose real glory has 
 been so shamelessly transferred to himself, the latest 
 associations of Merton connect his name with one who 
 really carried out a work which he began. The fictitious 
 deeds of Alfred may be forgotten in the presence of the 
 real. A place which beheld the exploits, though on 
 another element, of the first founder of the English navy 
 was no unfit dwelling-place for the man who raised the 
 English navy to its highest pitch of glory. On a spot where 
 the two names of Alfred and Nelson meet together, we 
 may well hail one of the many cycles which bind the 
 earliest and the latest stages of English history together.
 
 MEECTA
 
 191 
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 
 
 [Read before the Lincolnshire Architectural Society at Grantham, June 16, 
 1875. I have here also worked in some matter from an earlier article 
 in the ' Saturday Review,' October 1, 1870.] 
 
 The last time that I Avas called on to speak to a gathering 
 of this kind on a matter of local history, it was in a part 
 of England far away from that in which we are now met. 
 Wheli the Archseological Institute held its meeting two 
 years back in the city of Exeter, it fell to my lot to speak 
 of the place of that city in the general history of Eng- 
 land. I am now bidden to deal in somewhat the same 
 way with the shire in which I now stand, and with the 
 famous city which is its capital. Let no one grudge, if, 
 in dealing with such a subject, I find more to say about 
 the capital than about the shire at large. Let me not be 
 thought to disparage a land which fills so great a place in 
 our history, and whose records in the great Survey are so 
 full of legal information and of personal interest, I will 
 readily believe that Henry of Huntingdon, or the poet 
 whom he quotes, spoke of the shire at large, and not of 
 the city only, when he said : — 
 
 Testis Lincolife gens infinita decore. 
 
 As he makes the shire a partaker in the glories of the 
 city and its bishopric, as he speaks of the seven provinces 
 which are subject to the province whose head is Lincoln, 
 I trust that no part of the shire will look on itself as 
 being wholly shut out from anything that I may say of 
 the city itself. The history of the shire and of its capital
 
 \9-2 MERCIA. 
 
 cuimot be separatetl ; the sliire is a botly of Avliicli the 
 capital is the head. But to one who has studied Liiicohi 
 city carefully through its whole length — breadth is in 
 this case a matter of less importance — but who has 
 studied no other part of the shire with the same attention, 
 and to whom large parts of it are altogether unknown, 
 the city itself cannot fail to be the foremost object in 
 dealing with such a theme. 
 
 Forgive me then, if, while I stand in Grantham for 
 the first time, my heart is still in Lincoln, where I have 
 lately been tarrjdng, not for the first time. The city too 
 gives me the one thread which enables me to carry back 
 my tale to the earliest days of recorded history, and even 
 to days before recorded history. With Celtic Coritani you. 
 Angles and Danes of Lindesey, Kesteven, and Holland, 
 have nothing in common save the possession of the soil 
 which your forefathers wrested from them. But the city 
 has kept up its continuous being through Eoman, English, 
 Danish, and Norman conquests. Lincoln still in its name 
 proclaims itself one with Roman Lindum — that Lindum in 
 the isle of Britain which has a namesake in distant Kilikia 
 — that Lindum of the Coritani which has a namesake in 
 the isle of Britain at some unfixed spot among the Damnii. 
 But it is the ending of the English name which is charac- 
 teristic of the Lindum with which we deal, an ending 
 which it shares with no other English town or village, and, 
 as far as I remember, with but one other spot throughout 
 the whole dominion of Rome. Our endless chesters every- 
 where proclaim the fact of their former Roman occupation. 
 But they proclaim it by the mouths of English destroyers, 
 or restorers ; they proclaim it by the name given to it by 
 foreign conquerors, not by any title which the place bore 
 while the rule of Rome lasted. It is otherwise with the 
 unique name of Lincoln. The ending of that name pro- 
 claims the rank which Lindum held among Roman cities; 
 it is surely enough to tell us, even if the geographer of 
 Ravenna had failed to set it down in writing, that
 
 LINDUM COLON! A. 193 
 
 Lindum was a colony of Rome, no less than the greater 
 city by the Rhine, the colony of Agrippina. Koln and 
 Lincoln are cities kindred in origin and uame ; only, while 
 the city by the Rhine has lost her earlier name and 
 proclaims herself simply as the Roman Colonia, the city 
 by the Witham keeps her earlier name as well as the 
 title of her Roman rank, and proclaims herself through 
 the whole of her long history as the Colony of Lindum. 
 
 Coming, as by some license of speech I may be said 
 to have come, from Exeter to Lincoln, it comes naturally 
 to me to point out some points of likeness and unlikeness 
 between the history of the two cities and the two shires 
 of which they were the heads. In the history of the 
 shires there is little to be pointed out but the broadest 
 contrasts ; in the history of the cities, among many 
 contrasts, there are some striking points of likeness. 
 The names of the shires and the cities tell their own 
 story. Lincoln has ever been so thoroughly the Colony 
 that no one has ever ventured to add to it any of the 
 common endings of the name of an English town. 
 London herself, the Augusta by the Thames, appears as 
 Lundenivic and Lunclenhiirk, but Lindum never put on any 
 such ending as wic or bm-h, or even ceaster, like the 
 Damnonian city with which we are comparing it. Caer- 
 loitchoit might well have become Lincaster, to match 
 Exeter and a crowd of others ; but the name of the Colony 
 stood its ground. The name of Exeter, in short, follows 
 the rule, while that of Lincoln is an exception. The 
 explanation of the difference may well be that Lincoln 
 became English in an early stage of English conquest, 
 while Roman memories were still fresh, and when Lindum 
 was still remembered as the Colony. But at Exeter, an 
 English conquest of so much later date, purely Roman 
 memories had died away under the rule of indej)endent 
 Damnonian kings ; Isca was, like every other Roman site 
 throughout the land, a chester ; but there was nothing, 
 as there was at Lindum, to mark it out from a crowd of 
 
 o
 
 IIU MERCIA. 
 
 other chesters. Liudum was the conquest of heathen Eng- 
 lishmen in Jays when Britain had hardly ceased to be 
 Roman ; Isca was the conquest of Christian Englishmen 
 after the Briton had fallen back upon his own tongue and 
 his own national being. 
 
 If we turn to the names of the two shires, we learn 
 the same lesson in another shape. Damnonia has never 
 ceased to be Damnonia. The land still keeps its name 
 under the slightly corrupted form of Defennscir, Devonshire ; 
 it had the privilege, shared only by kingdoms or by dis- 
 tricts whose special character is very strongly marked, 
 of keeping a gentile adjective. The Chronicles indeed 
 speak of a lady of Northampton, Cnut's earlier ^Elfgifu, 
 as Hamptonish ; but in modern English we could hardly 
 speak oi Lincoln ish. But, as we speak of English, Scottish, 
 Irish, and Kentish, so we speak of Cornish, and so we once 
 s]3oke of Devenish. I am not ready at this moment with 
 an instance of the current use of the word ; but it exists 
 as a surname, and that is enough. But while the Dam- 
 nonii still keep their being, we shall seek in vain for the 
 Coritani. They have left no trace in the name either of 
 the shire as a whole or of any of its ridings. I trust no 
 one will start at the word riding, as if I were using a word 
 here which is in place only on the other side of the 
 Humber. Every one who knows his Domesdaj- must know 
 that the name trithing, corruptedly riding, belongs by as 
 good a right to the three divisions of Lincolnshire as to the 
 three divisions of Yorkshire, though it is hardly in place 
 when it is applied to the twofold divisions of Cork and 
 Tipperary. But neither shire nor riding keeps any sign 
 of the Briton. The later name of the shire comes straight 
 from the English name of the city. The name which once 
 belonged to the whole shire, but which now belongs only 
 to its north riding, comes independently from the Roman 
 name. Lindesey, Lindesig, which in Domesday alternates 
 with Lincoleshire as the general name, is, I need not say, 
 simply the island of Lindum. The name of the south
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 195 
 
 riding speaks for itself: Holland, Hollandia cismarina, is 
 so called for exactly the same reason as Hollandia trans- 
 marina, the land like to it in name and nature beyond the 
 sea. Of Kesteven I can say nothing ; I shall be glad of 
 a local interpreter. But he must be a daring etymologist 
 who can see in it either the Coritani or any other class of 
 Welshmen. The utter vanishing of the British names is 
 a sign of the utter vanishing of the British people. The 
 British names of districts, as a rule, live on only where 
 a large British element in the people has lived on. The 
 exceptions are such as prove the rule. The Jutish island 
 of Wight, Vectis, kept its name, because it was a mere 
 island, much as rivers and great cities kept their name. 
 Kent too, the greater Jutish realm, kept its name. And 
 why? Kent was the first conquest. If we accept the 
 tale which makes the English Conquest to be immediately 
 caused by the invitation of a British prince, the invaders 
 had had dealings with the land of Kent before their actual 
 settlement in it. They must have been familiar with the 
 name of the Cantii in a way in which the invaders of this 
 part of England are not likely to have been with the name 
 of the Coritani. And, more than this, Kent is not merely 
 the name of a people, but the name of a district. There 
 is the land of Cantium as well as the people of the Cantii. 
 But, though there were Coritani, we hear nothing of any 
 land of Coritania. The Damnonian name then lived on, 
 because the Damnonian people were not wholly swept 
 away. The Cantii were swept away, but they had so 
 thoroughly given their name to the land that from the 
 land it passed to a new race of Kentishmen, the Cantwaru 
 of our own blood. The Coritani were swept away also, 
 and their name perished with them. 
 
 To turn again to the cities, another point of difference 
 between Exeter and Lincoln suggests itself. Lincoln is 
 the more strictly Eoman of the two. At Lincoln we may 
 speak with perfect strictness of Roman origin, a form of 
 words which at Exeter would be out of place. For there 
 
 o 2
 
 VM\ MERCIA. 
 
 is every reason to think that the Lincoln that now is, 
 the Colony of Lindnin, was strictly a creation of the 
 Roman conquerors. The Roman site was not the British 
 site. Lincoln, as every one knows who has seen it 
 at all, is remarkable for its position. It is, like Laon, 
 a city set on a hill. Its minster is emphatically the 
 visible church. It stands on a ridge of ground which 
 forms the backbone, not only of Lincolnshire but of all 
 eastern England, and which, though never reaching any 
 great positive height, is still high enough to be very 
 conspicuous in a land where mole-hills might pass for 
 mountains. At this point it dips to the south suddenly 
 and steeply, and rises again at a little distance. This 
 dip is the valley of the river Witham, which flows — 
 if the rivers of eastern England can be said to flow — 
 at the base of the hill, and it gives Lincoln its peculiar 
 character. As at Laon, the oldest quarters, with the 
 minster and the castle, stand on the height; but at 
 Laon the city has ever remained on the height, while 
 its suburbs lie detached at the foot, and the slope of the 
 hill itself remains uncovered by houses. At Lincoln, on 
 the other hand, the city has spread itself continuously 
 downwards, covering the steep sides of the hill as well 
 as the level ground at its foot, and spreading its suburbs 
 far beyond the sluggish stream of the Witham. The 
 original Lindum stood wholly on the brow of the hill. 
 Portions of its walls remain in several places, and the 
 Roman road passing through the city to the north along 
 the ridge of the hill is still spanned by the massive Roman 
 arch which formed the northern gate of Lindum. But 
 this ancient relic goes by the name of the Newport 
 Gate, — surely, if a Teutoaic synoay m is needed, it 
 should be Bar ; the ancient road too is known as the 
 New Street, and outside the gate to the north may be 
 traced the lines of an earlier settlement, which there 
 can be little doubt marks the original B ritishtown, whose 
 site was changed by the conquerors to a point which gave
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 197 
 
 them the full advantage of the steepness of the hill. 
 Thus the Colony of Linduui arose, and it has left, in the 
 gate and in the portions of its wall which are still above 
 ground, larger traces of itself than most of the Roman 
 towns in Britain. But it is well to notice that to the 
 north, where its remains chiefly survive, they stand now 
 in what may pass as mere suburb, almost as open country. 
 The city in fact has moved southwards, that is, downhill ; 
 it began to move downhill even in Roman times. The 
 very small area of the original Chester was enlarged by 
 a Roman suburb, and that suburb was again enlarged ages 
 later through great historical causes which form the most 
 important chapter in the annals of Lincoln, and which, we 
 are inclined to think, give Lincoln a higher interest than 
 any other city of England. 
 
 The exact date of the English conquest of this district 
 it is hopeless to try to fix. We have no record, such as 
 we have of Anderida, of Bath and Gloucester and Ciren- 
 cester, of the time or the way by which the city passed into 
 the hands of the conquerors. We know not whether they 
 at once took it as a dwelling-place, or whether, like Bath 
 and Chester, it lay for a while ruined and forsaken. Of the 
 process by which central Britain, the lands which went to 
 make up the later Mercian kingdom, came into the hands 
 of the Teutonic invaders we know next to nothing. Legend 
 indeed has something to say about the matter. One of 
 the stories preserved by Henry of Huntingdon makes 
 Teutonic warriors, still in the service of the British prince, 
 overthrow the Picts and Scots in a fight at Stamford, 
 before they turned their arms against their employers 
 and settled themselves in Kent. Another tale, preserved 
 by the so-called Nennius, makes Lindum the burial-place 
 of the British Vortemir, slain, as it would seem, in some 
 of the Kentish battles. Of tales like these we can say 
 nothing. Nor can we trace the course of Anglian settle- 
 ment in this part of Britain so clearly as we can trace 
 the course of Jutish and Saxon settlement further south.
 
 198 MERCIA. 
 
 The Northumbrian, Mercian, and East- Anglian kingdoms 
 have no personal foiuulors like Hengest, ^lle, and Cerdic. 
 Each of them grew up by the union of a number of older 
 and smaller Anglian settlements. Among these we can 
 discern a kingdom of the Southumbrians, which would 
 seem, even as late as the beginning of the eighth century, 
 to have been sometimes ruled by a separate under-king. 
 In 702 Coenred, afterwards head king of the Mercians, 
 became king of the Southumbrians, and his dominions 
 are carefuU}^ marked out by the French poet Geoffrey 
 Gaimar, who, here as elsewhere, seems to have written 
 from lost records or traditions : — 
 
 Kenret regna sur Suthumbreis •, 
 Co est Lindeseye e Holmedene, 
 Kestevene e Holland e Hestdene ; 
 Del Humbre tresk en Eoteland 
 Donrout eel regne, e plus avante. 
 
 And within the Southumbrian border we can discern 
 several of those ancient tribe-names which died out 
 before the later division into shires, and some of them 
 have still left their traces in modern nomenclature. 
 There were the Gyrwas, North and South, who appear 
 more than once in Beeda ; there were the Spaldas, whose 
 name still lives in the town of Spalding, famous both in 
 the real and in the legendary histor}^ of the shire. The 
 Gainas, among whom Alfred found a wife, have left their 
 name to the town of Gaiusburgh, where Saint Edmund of 
 East-Anglia took his vengeance on the tyrant Swegen. 
 But above all, we are ever meeting, in general as well as in 
 local histoiy, with the greater name of the Lmdesfaras, the 
 men of Lindesey, of whom I do not take upon myself to 
 pronounce how often their name takqs in the whole shire 
 and how often its northern riding only. This is the most 
 important name of all. It is not only the name that fills 
 the greatest place in history, but it is the one name which 
 forms a tie between the earlier and later state of things.
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 199 
 
 The Englisli tribe took for themselves, and for their land, 
 the name of the Roman city. The British inhabitants of 
 the district vanished, name and thing; but, name and 
 thing, the Roman city lived on. Its conquerors called 
 themselves the men of Lindum, and their land the isle of 
 Lindum. I doubt if there is another example in England 
 of an English tribe and its district so directly taking its 
 name from a Roman city. The southern Dorchester of 
 the Dorssetan is the nearest case that I can think of; and 
 even there v\^e have not, as in the case of Lindesey and 
 the Lindesfaras, a distinct name for the land and for its 
 people. It is plain that there was no Roman town in 
 Britain whose strength and majesty made a deeper im- 
 pression on our fathers than the Colony of Lindum. 
 
 But, even if Lindum lay for a while in ruins, yet 
 the city set on an hill could not have been hid. Its 
 walls, which the Roman, forsaking the earlier site of the 
 Briton, had placed on the very brow of its promontory, 
 if they ever did stand utterly desolate, must, as they 
 rose over the plain like the ghost of the fallen Empire, 
 have set their mark all the more deeply on the minds of 
 the men whose swords had left them without inhabitants. 
 The Norman minster, the Norman castle, the mighty 
 mounds and dykes, the work of our own people, which 
 bear up the fortress of the stranger, had as yet no being, 
 and even no forerunners. But the walls were there, walls 
 speaking of the last days of Roman power, when Theo- 
 dosius and Stilicho were guarding the land against inroads 
 from the independent Celtic North, and against the more 
 dano-erous invaders of the Saxon shore. There were the 
 gates, the massive arch which still abides, while the site 
 of its southern fellow may be still traced on the very 
 brow of the hill. The gate of Lindum may seem poor 
 beside those of Trier, of Aosta, or even of Mmes, but the 
 gate of the colony may have made as good a show as 
 some of the gates of Rome herself. Within the walls we 
 may call up at pleasure the works of Roman skill, such as
 
 200 MERCIA. 
 
 the researches of onr own day have brought to light 
 beneath the nioiikl of Silchester. We may call up the 
 forum, the basilica, changed perhaps from the heathen 
 hall of judgement into the place of Christian worship, and 
 the temples of Roman or British gods, either standing 
 desolate or themselves consecrated to Christian uses. 
 We may see the colnmns Avhose bases have been brought 
 to Kght but yesterday, standing erect as no column in 
 Britain is now left to stand. We may call up the 
 snburb spreading itself from the southern gate of the 
 city down the slope to the river at its foot. And we may 
 people the land arounrl with some traces at least of those 
 scattered dwellings, rich with the art of bygone times, 
 which the Eoman conqueror loved to spread over the face 
 of the conquered land. All this, at Lindum as elsewhere, 
 must have been swept away in the first storm of heathen 
 conquest. We have no song of the taking of Lindum, 
 as we have, in a foreign garb at least, some fragments of 
 the song of the taking of Anderida. We know that the 
 work was done ; of the date of the deed, of the name of 
 the doer, we have no record. 
 
 Whatever was the fate of the city in the first moment of 
 English conquest, it is certain that, if Lindum ever ceased 
 to be a dwelling-place of man, its time of utter ruin was 
 not long. The abiding Latin name of the gate, the Nova 
 Porta, of itself goes far to show that there could have been 
 no long gap between Roman or British and English occu- 
 pation. While Chester lay forsaken for the three hundred 
 years between ^thelfrith of Northumberland and ^Ethel- 
 fla3d of Mercia, Lincoln, if it ever was forsaken, was again 
 inhabited within a few years after the fall of Chester. Our 
 first historical mention of Lindesey and the Lindesfaras 
 sets Lincoln before us as an inhabited spot, an English 
 and an heathen city. The first recorded fact in the 
 history of shire and city is its conversion to Christianity 
 in the early years of the seventh century. Paulinus, the 
 apostle of the Northumbrians, was the apostle of the
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 201 
 
 kindred Southumbrians also. Bseda tells us how the Prse- 
 fect, as he calls him, of the city, Blecca his name or nick- 
 name, was the first to embrace the new faith. The words 
 used, ' praefectus Lindocolina3 civitatis,' connecting him in 
 such a marked way with the city, would hardly be used of 
 the ealdorman of the whole tribe. Are we to see in Blecca 
 simply the king's reeve in the town ? or may we venture 
 to think that Lincoln had already made some steps 
 towards that municipal independence of which it enjoyed 
 so high a degree in later times ? At all events, Lincoln 
 now became a Christian city. A church of stone — mate- 
 rials could not be lacking among the ruins of the colony 
 — was built, its site in the north-western square of the 
 Chester being doubtless marked by that most unworthy 
 successor which still bears the name of its founder in a 
 corrupt form. In the days of Bseda that church was 
 roofless ; but, before it thus fell into ruin, it had beheld 
 the consecration of the southern primate Honorius. Either 
 now or later, as Domesday witnesses, a church of Saint 
 Mary arose, the forerunner of the mighty minster of 
 Eemigius and Saint Hugh. The district followed the 
 city : Lindesey became a Christian land, and crowds of its 
 people were baptized by Paulinus in the waters of Trent 
 in the presence of the Bretwalda Eadwine. 
 
 I dwell on these details, familiar as they must be 
 to all in the narrative of Bseda, because they have an 
 important bearing on the later ecclesiastical and even 
 political history. In the final settlement of English 
 kingdoms and English bishoprics, Lindesey became part 
 of the kingdom of Mercia and of the province of Canter- 
 bury. But north of the Humber it was never forgotten 
 that Lindesey had been won to the faith by a Northum- 
 brian bishop under the auspices of a Northumbrian 
 king. Long after, in the days of Thomas of Bayeux, 
 the claim of York to spiritual jurisdiction over Lindesey 
 was strongly put forward, once at the very moment when 
 the minster of Eemigius stood ready for its hallowing.
 
 202 MERCIA. 
 
 The Primate of Nortliumberland did not dispute the right 
 of the Bishop of Dorchester to dwell where he would, and 
 build what he pleased, in the far-away parts of his vast 
 diocese. But Lindesey was part of the spiritual conquest 
 of Paulinus ; if there was to be a Bishop of Lincoln, he, 
 the Primate of York, claimed him as one of the suffragans 
 of his province. Nor was it always by spiritual arms only 
 that the Northern Angles strove to make good their claim 
 to the kindred Southumbrian land. No tale better brings 
 home to us the identity of the Church and the nation in 
 early times, the identity of the ecclesiastical and civil 
 divisions, than the tale of the momentary conquest of 
 Lindesey by Ecgfrith of Northumberland. The con- 
 queror had won a new realm ; in his eyes a new realm 
 meant a new diocese. He at once founds a bishopric 
 of Lindesey, and nominates a bishop, whom Archbishop 
 Theodore consecrates without scruple. In the very next 
 year the land is won back to Mercia by the arms of 
 ^thelred. The newly founded bishopric lives on ; but its 
 Northumbrian bishop at once, seemingly as a matter of 
 course, goes back to his own land, to receive a Northum- 
 brian see from his own sovereign, ^thelred appoints a 
 Mercian successor and the line of Mercian Bishops of 
 Lindesey begins. 
 
 This brings us to a point of instructive likeness be- 
 tween the history of Lincoln and that of Exeter. Up to 
 this stage the history of the two cities has been richer in 
 contrast than in likeness. There never was at Exeter such 
 a time of heathen English rule as there was at Lincoln. 
 There is nothing in the history of the capital of Damnonia 
 which answers to the preaching of Paulinus and the con- 
 version of Blecca in the history of the capital of Lindesey. 
 But there is one point in which the two cities are strik- 
 ingly alike, a point which strikingly illustrates one char- 
 acteristic feature of English ecclesiastical history, that 
 custom in which we differed from continental churches, 
 and so strangely agreed with our Celtic neighbours, the
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 203 
 
 custom by whicli the temporal capital was often in early 
 times not the seat of the bishopstool. As the seat of the 
 Bishop of Damnonia was placed, not at Exeter but at 
 Crediton, so the seat of the Bishop of Lindsey was placed, 
 not at Lincoln but at Sidnaceaster, in that venerable 
 church of Stow-in- Lindesey which still keeps such massive 
 relics of early times. When England began to conform 
 in this matter to the practice of other lands, the chairs of 
 the bishops of what Norman writers scornfully called 
 the villages of Crediton and Dorchester were translated 
 to the walled cities of Exeter and Lincoln. There is 
 thus a wide difference between cities like Lincoln. and 
 Exeter, which were chosen as the seats of bishoprics 
 because they were already great and flourishing towns, 
 and cities like Wells and Lichfield, which owe their 
 whole importance to their ecclesiastical foundations, and 
 where the town simply grew up under the shadow 
 of the minster. In a city like Lincoln we are now 
 tempted to look, first at the minster, then at the castle ; 
 and, when we have seen the minster and the castle, 
 we are tempted to think that we have seen pretty 
 well all that the city has to show us. In so doing, we 
 pass by something older and greater than minster or 
 castle, namely, the city itself. At Exeter as at Lincoln, 
 the fact that a minster and a castle were in after days 
 planted in each of them is simply a witness to the great- 
 ness of the city in days before the minster or the castle 
 was thought of. Lincoln now suggests to us mainly 
 the minster with its memories of bishops, the castle with 
 its memories of kings and earls ; but the cause why Lin- 
 coln ever came to have bishops or earls is because Lincoln 
 had become great in a day when it had neither. Lincoln 
 had played its part in history — it had risen to importance 
 municipal and military — it had fallen into the hands of 
 the stranger — it had its deliverance recorded in national 
 songs — it had come to be counted as the fourth among 
 the cities of England — before the Conqueror chose the
 
 204 MERCIA. 
 
 Eoman colony as the site of a Norman castle. It was 
 because Lincoln was already great that Remigius of 
 Fecamp, seeking to move his see to the greatest town of 
 his diocese, forsook the spot where such relics as the bar- 
 barism of our own times may have spared of the Roman 
 dykes of Dorchester still look up across the winding 
 Thames to the British fort on Sinodun. But he moved only 
 from one seat of Roman power to another : he fixed his 
 home on the spot where the works of all ages and races, 
 from the rude earthwork of the Briton to the newly-rising 
 castle of the Norman, already looked down on the land 
 beuQath them from the brow of the promontory of Lincoln. 
 From that height we can look forth, as it were, on the 
 course of those great events in our early history of which 
 the height of Lincoln was the centre. When the storm 
 of the great Danish invasion of the ninth century burst 
 upon England, Lindesey was one of the districts where 
 the Scandinavian invader really found himself a home. 
 While Damnonia saw the Dane merely as a passing 
 ravager, while Exeter knew him, sometimes as a suc- 
 cessful, sometimes as an unsuccessful, besieger, Lindesey 
 became largely a Danish land, and Lincoln became pre- 
 eminently a Danish city. In 874 the heathen men took 
 their winter-settle in Lindesey at Torkesey. The next year 
 we read how they passed from Lindesey to Repton, and 
 took wmter-settle there — how they drove out King Burhred, 
 and how, much as Alaric gave the Roman purple to Attains, 
 they gave the Mercian crown to the unwise king's thegn 
 Ceolwulf — how in 876 Halfdene divided the land of the 
 Northumbrians, and how the next year the host came again 
 into the Mercian land and divided some and gave some to 
 Ceolwulf. Here we have the record of that Danish settle- 
 ment which gave new lords to so large a part of England, 
 and new names to so many of its towns and villages. Lin- 
 desey was among the parts of Mercia which the invaders 
 clealed or divided among them. The name of many a Lin- 
 colnshire parish bears witness, in the Danish ending 6j/, to
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 205 
 
 the presence of the new conquerors, and it often preserves 
 the personal name of the new lord to whom it passed in 
 the division. Osbernby, Hacconby, Asgarby, Thoresby, 
 Grimsby, Hemingby, Ormsby, Ulceby — in which two last 
 we may see the names of men called after the worm and 
 the wolf, the monsters of Northern legend — all live to tell 
 us in how sweeping a way it was that the Northern in- 
 vaders dealed out the land among themselves, and how 
 truly, like men in elder days, they called the lands after 
 their own names. Yet it was not in Lindesey as it was in 
 two other shires, where, not mere lordships and villages, 
 but towns of note, a local capital and a famous monasterj-, 
 had to take new names from the new comers. JSforth- 
 weorthig became Deorahy and Streoneshalh became Whithy ; 
 but the city on the hill remained as unchanged in Danish 
 as it had remained in Anglian hands. The Colony of 
 Lindum was the Colony of Lindum still. In Danish 
 hands, the city kept up its greatness in a new form, a 
 form rich in political instruction, the form of an aristo- 
 cratic commonwealth bound together with others of its 
 fellows by a federal tie. ' Five boroughs, Leicester and 
 Lincoln and Nottingham, swilk Stamford eke and Derby, 
 where to the Danes erewhile, under Northmen.' So sings 
 the poet of their deliverance by Eadmund the Doer-of- 
 great-deeds ; but the work had been already begun by 
 his father. In the long and thrilling tale of English 
 victory, when our annals tells us, year by year, how 
 Eadward the Unconquered and his glorious sister went 
 forth, year after year, winning back some portion of Eng- 
 lish ground and fortifying some new stronghold against the 
 enemy, one only of the Lincolnshire boroughs, the frontier 
 town of Stamford, is spoken of. In 921 Eadward fortified 
 Towcester, and received the submission of Northampton 
 and all the land to the Welland. One quarter of Stam- 
 ford lies on the Northamptonshire side of the river ; this 
 was now his. The next year he went and fortified his 
 new conquest, the borough on the south side of the river.
 
 206 MERCIA. 
 
 Then we read how all the folk in the northern borough 
 bowed to him and songht him to lord. The same year he 
 won Nottingham ; Leicester and Derby had already been 
 among the conquests of the Lady of the Mercians. Of 
 Lincoln alone we hear nothing. Yet we cannot believe 
 that, when all the rest of England and of all Britain had 
 bowed to the West-Saxon king, even the proud colony 
 could have stood apart from the rest of the island. And 
 nineteen years later the poet of Eadmund's victory sings 
 how he released the Five Boroughs when they were bowed 
 low in heathen chains. We must believe that Eadward 
 simply received the submission of the Confederate towns 
 and secured their obedience by fortresses, without med- 
 dling with their internal constitutions ; that, in short, 
 he dealt with the Confederacy as he dealt with the North- 
 humbrian, Scottish, and Welsh princes. Most likely the 
 boroughs joined in the Northumbrian revolt on the death 
 of ^thelstan, and now Eadmund more thoroughly in- 
 corporated them with the English Icingdom, and seem- 
 ingly delivered their English inhabitants from Danish 
 supremacy. Yet the Pentapolis still went on with more 
 or less of federal connexion ; the Five Boroughs are 
 spoken of as submitting to Swegen in 1013, and in 1015 
 Sigefrith and Morkere, the victims of Eadric, are spoken 
 of as the eldest thegns of the Seven Boroughs. The two 
 new members of the body have been thought to be York 
 and Chester, a theory which I can neither affirm nor deny. 
 But, whether five or seven, they could not have been 
 spoken of in this way if they had not kept up some strong 
 bond of union among themselves. In this way, the history 
 of Lincoln, and of the confederation of which it formed a 
 member, teaches us, just as the history of Exeter does, that 
 the tendency of the great cities of England generally was 
 towards the same more than municipal independence, to the 
 same kind of federal unions, which the cities of Italy won 
 for a season, which some of the cities of Germany have kept 
 down to our own days. The Danish Pentapolis was older
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 207 
 
 than the Lombard League ; it is far older than the first 
 existing- document which records the union of the Three 
 Lands. Had these tendencies been followed unchecked, 
 the history of England might have been as the history of 
 the Imperial kingdoms. But other tendencies were every- 
 where at work, tendencies which within the Empire 
 proved the weaker, but which in England proved the 
 stronger. The destiny of England forbade that the 
 patricians of Lincoln should ever be as their brethren of 
 Rome and Sparta., of Bern and Venice. 
 
 In the renewed Danish wars, the wars of Swegen and 
 Cnut, Lindesey plays a great part, but of LincoJn itself 
 we hear but little. Lindesey beheld the fate of the tyrant 
 at Gainsburgh, and the one warlike exploit of ^thelred 
 against the tyrant's nobler son. Nor can we forget the 
 career of the local chief, God wine the Ealdorman of 
 Lindesey, how he redeemed the weakness of his earlier 
 day by dying a hero's death by the side of Ulfcytel at 
 Assandun. The Norman came ; the Conqueror became 
 master of Lincoln in the same year in which he became 
 master of Exeter ; but we have no such record as we have 
 in the case of Exeter of the campaign or the negotiations 
 by which he became its master. The shire, as a whole, 
 and its chief boroughs of Lincoln and Stamford, suffered 
 indeed much of change and confiscation at the hands of 
 the Conqueror; but they suffered little indeed as com- 
 pared with the fate of other shires and other cities and 
 boroughs. The witness of Domesday shows us that in 
 no city and shire of England did so many Englishmen, 
 by whatever means, contrive to keep large estates and 
 high offices as they did in Lincoln and Lincolnshire. 
 
 And it is indeed a vivid picture of the Danish city 
 which Domesday sets before us. It is plain that the con- 
 quest of the Danish Confederacy by Eadmund had not 
 wholly destroyed the internal constitution of the common- 
 wealth. When William came, Lincoln was ruled by a 
 patriciate of twelve hereditary Lawmen, whose names
 
 208 MERCIA. 
 
 speak their Danish descent. They had their common 
 land and their hereditary jnrisdictions, and we get per- 
 sonal details of not a i'ew of their number. Two of them, 
 it should be noticed, were men in holy orders, nor do the 
 compilers of Domesday show any holy horror at the men- 
 tion of the wives and children of these early clerical 
 magistrates. The privileges of the city and of its rulers 
 were great, and gave Lincoln almost the position of a dis- 
 tinct commonwealth, buying its internal independence by 
 a simple tribute to the King. That is to say, Lincoln 
 held, as Exeter wished to hold, very much the position 
 of a Free Imperial City in Germany or Italy. And, as 
 Lincoln did not submit to William till the summer of 
 1068, the city must for nearly two years have been practi- 
 cally independent, and the Lawmen must have ruled as a 
 corporate sovereign. The city, as a commonwealth, was 
 treated with unusual gentleness ; William left its formal 
 privileges unimpaired and its formal constitution un- 
 altered. The Lawmen and their hereditary succession 
 were undisturbed ; at the drawing up of the Survey Danish 
 son still succeeded to Danish father, and one Norman 
 only had found his way into the Lincoln patriciate. But 
 the outward aspect of the city, and its practical con- 
 dition also, underwent the most important of changes, 
 lioyal and favoured as Lincoln might be, its loyalty, like 
 that of English towns, needed to be secured by a Norman 
 castle. And a new ecclesiastical foundation came along 
 with the military one. In 1070, the newly-appointed 
 Norman Bishop of Dorchester moved his throne from 
 the banks of the Thames to the hill above the Witham, 
 and the church of St. Mary within the walls of Lincoln 
 became the new cathedral church of the diocese. The 
 church was of course rebuilt on a vg-ster scale, and grew 
 into the renowned minster of Saint Hugh . The palace of 
 the Bishop, the houses of his canons, sprang up around it. 
 Here was change enough ; the Lawmen might keep their 
 formal rights and their hereditary succession, but their
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 2m 
 
 real position could hardly be tlie same, now that a two- 
 fold Norman garrison, military and ecclesiastical, was esta- 
 blished within their walls. And besides tliis, the building 
 of the castle and minster led to something little short of 
 the foundation of anew town. The building of the castle 
 is recorded to have involved the destruction of a great 
 number of houses, and the building of the minster must 
 have done the same. Let us add however, in justice to 
 all men, that the new bishop from Fecamp paid for the 
 land which he took for the building of the church and 
 the canons' houses. But through these two processes a 
 large number of the English or Danish citizens of Lincoln 
 were left homeless. A place was soon found for them ; 
 at the foot of the hill beyond the river arose that lower 
 town of Lincoln than which there are few spots in England 
 which ought to speak with a more stirring voice to the 
 hearts of Englishmen. 
 
 We have seen that, not only in th3 city, but in the 
 shire generall}^, among the local landowners not a few 
 Englishmen kept a much higher place than was com- 
 mon in other districts. It is for local inquirers, not for 
 me, to know whether the blood of any of these men can 
 be traced among the living inhabitants of city or shire. 
 That such should be the case is perfectly possible ; only, 
 if it is to be proved, it must be proved by the unde- 
 signed evidence of genuine documents, not by the fables 
 of a family tree. And remember too that, though it is 
 qidte possible that descendants of Harthacnut the Law- 
 man, of Ulfkill who sold the ship to William, of Colegrim 
 and Northman and Coles wegen, or of the married priests 
 Leofwine and Siward, may be among my hearers to-day, 
 yet, as none of those worthies bore hereditary surnames, 
 they cannot have left any hereditary surnames to their 
 descendants. As I suppose that none of us wish to be 
 Normans, Frenchmen, or Bretons, we may liope that the 
 forefathers of all of us were ' here when the Conqueror 
 came.' Here and there some of us may be able to trace 
 
 p
 
 210 MERCIA. 
 
 our descent to forefathers living at that time. Here and 
 there a still smaller number may possibly be able to show 
 that they hold the same lands or live in the same place 
 as their forefathers. Only let no man flatter himself 
 that, however old and worthy his surname, be it even the 
 primteval Teutonic Smith, he will find forefathers bearing 
 that surname in the pages of Domesday. But there is 
 one among the Lincolnshire landowners in Domesday 
 whose name and works have such a special interest, alike 
 in the history of arcliitecture and in the history of Eng- 
 land, that, even at the risk of telling a thrice-told tale, I 
 cannot hurry through the age to which they belong witlio ut 
 stopping to pay him and them yet again a passing tribute. 
 Coles wegen of Lincoln, a man of whom I have spoken 
 more at large elsewhere, is a man of whom we may well 
 Avish to know more. How he came so highly to enjoy the 
 favour of the Conqueror as to keex3 his lands and largely to 
 increase them, and to have men with Norman names as his 
 tenants, is nowhere recorded ; but there is incidental 
 evidence which, shows that he was nearly connected with 
 several persons of note both in England and in Normandy. 
 From the Conqueror he received as a grant a piece of land 
 beyond the river, on which at the time of the Survey, thirty 
 houses, the beginning of the lower town, had risen. And 
 for their inhabitants he built two churches, churches 
 which stand high above all the other buildings of shire 
 and city in deep and thrilling interest. Not the varied 
 beauties of the churches of Holland — not the soarin«: 
 spires of Louth and Grantham and the mighty octagon of 
 Boston — not the works of Eemigius and Alexander and 
 Saint Hugh, and the Angels' choir itself — not the hoary 
 relics of earliir days at Barton-on-Humber and Stow-in- 
 Lindesey — none of these can conipare with the special 
 charm of those towers of Saint Mary's and Saint Peter's — 
 towers whose forms would be as much at home by the 
 banks of the Adige as by the banks of the Witham — 
 towers which, even in the days of bondage, rose under the
 
 
 <^^f|£aL at S<H^-t^ 
 
 SY/<T^^i^ 
 
 To /«<£• /. -'II.
 
 LINDUM COLON I A. 211 
 
 hands of Englislimen, in the ancient style of Englishmen, 
 while minster and castle, the works of strangers, were 
 rising above their heads in the newer style which strangers 
 had brought with them from beyond the sea. There they 
 stand, witnesses of the days of England's ancient freedom, 
 even more precious than if they had themselves been built 
 in the days of freedom. While Remigius built his minster 
 on the height in the new style of his own Normandy, 
 Coleswegen still built his towers in the ancient style of 
 England — the style once common to England with all 
 Western Christendom — the style which meets us in all 
 lands from the Tyne to the Tiber, which is at home alike 
 on the plains of Lindesey and in the passes of the 
 Alps and Pyrenees — the style which, when our own land 
 adopted the novel forms of Normandy, still lived on for 
 another hundred years in the kindred mainland. The 
 towers of Coleswegen, begun after William entered Lin- 
 coln, finished before the great Survey was taken, still 
 belonged to the same class which Britain and Gaul and 
 Germany all learned from their Italian masters. They 
 are, on their lowlier scale, the fellows of Saint Zeno at 
 Verona and of All Hallows at SchafFliausen. What clearer 
 evidence can we need that Englishmen had an indepen- 
 dent Romanesque style before the Norman came, than 
 the fact that Englishmen still went on building in their 
 national style, while they had but to cast up their eyes 
 and see the works of the Norman, ecclesiastical and 
 military, rising on the hill above them? 
 
 Yet the foreign style in which Remigius rebuilt the 
 church of Saint Mary for its new use did in some sort 
 influence the ideas even of those who clave to the style 
 of their fathers. That Coleswegen's towers show sio-ns of 
 Norman influence, that they are clearly the work of men 
 who had seen Norman detail, only heightens their interest. 
 They show us the old style slightly touched by the new. It 
 adds deeper interest still that in the aisle which I saw in 
 times past, but which I can see no longer, he conformed 
 
 p 2
 
 212 MERCIA. 
 
 more distinctly to the newer model. Coleswegen or his 
 architect was eclectic in his taste. The older style supplied 
 the better model for towers, the later style supplied the 
 better model for cohirans and arches, and he chose what was 
 best in each. The ancient style of tower lived on in Lin- 
 desey longer than in any other district. There are not a few 
 examples, as at Hale, as at Bracebridge, which must not 
 only be later than the coming of William, but must be as 
 lat« as the architectural improvements of Bishop Roger of 
 Salisbury. In another building in the lower town, far later 
 than Coleswegen's day, in the house of Saint Mary's Guild, 
 commonly known as the stables of John of Gaunt, we see 
 perhaj)s the last examples of Avindows which keep about 
 them something of the character of the primitive type. 
 The example of Coleswegen seems to have impressed on 
 the district a conservative taste in architectural matters. 
 But it was a taste which, if conservative, was also progres- 
 sive, a taste which, as long as it could, stood fast in the 
 old paths, but which was far from casting aside every 
 modern improvement. 
 
 But Coleswegen is only one among many names in 
 the Domesday of Lindesey over which we may well pause 
 and wish for more knowledge. The body of the Lincoln- 
 shire Survey is, to those who have no local knowledge of 
 most of the places, less interesting than the Survey of many 
 other shires. The way in which the work was done in 
 different districts differs widely, and the account of some 
 shires is much richer in personal detail than that of others. 
 In Lincolnshire the body of the report consists of little 
 but dry statistics; the interest gathers round the minute 
 and lifelike account of the city at one end, and round the 
 clamores at the other. These last, the reports of cases 
 when men claimed lands which were in^he actual posses- 
 sion of others, are full of curious personal matter and 
 of illustrations of points of law. Among other things , it 
 is from them that we get a large part of our small amount 
 of knowledge of one of the foremost heroes of Lincolnshire
 
 
 LLLi 
 
 j] niccLridcje ffovthjoor. 
 
 "^rcLCtkd;^^ 
 
 - pr(LcebH(ln{, 
 
 ^^M«^^Q* 
 
 To face /. .'I,
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 213 
 
 and of England. We there come face to face witli one 
 who, like Coleswegen, won in the end the favour of the 
 Conqueror, but who won it, first by fighting against him 
 and then by fighting at his side. As Coleswegen did not 
 scruple to learn from the Norman in his architectural 
 works, so Hereward did not scruple to do service to the 
 Norman in the war of Maine. In speaking of the hero 
 of Ely, I assume that I need not, at this time of day, go 
 again through the evidence which parts off his real from 
 his legendary history. As there are still a few people who 
 believe that the earth is flat, so there may be here and 
 there a novel-reader or a local antiquary who takes the 
 false Ingulf and the Gesta Herwardi Saxonis for true 
 histories, and who fancies that Hereward was the son of 
 Earl Leofric, the uncle of Eadwine and Morkere. With 
 such I cannot argue. I can only say that, little as we 
 really know of the true Hereward, that little is enough to 
 make us wish to know much more. I may perhaps be 
 allowed to sum up his story in the words in which I have 
 summed it up elsewhere. ' He defended the last shelter 
 of English freedom against the might of William. His 
 heart failed not when the hearts of the noblest of the 
 land quaked within them. Our most patriotic Latin 
 annalist adorns his name with the standing epithet with 
 which he adorns the name of Harold, and our native 
 Chronicler records his deeds in words which seem bor- 
 rowed from the earlier record of the deeds of ^Elfred.' 
 
 But from the exploits of the hero of the fenland we must 
 go back to the city on the hill. I will go on to note a few 
 cases in which Lincoln comes incidentally into notice in 
 times which are more specially my own. I speak mainly of 
 the city and its citizens ; of its bishops and earls there is 
 much to tell ; but my own thoughts dwell rather with 
 every mention which brings into life the abiding greatness 
 of the Roman colony, of the Danish confederate borough. 
 We must remember that Lincoln was, in the eleventh and 
 twelfth centuries, one of the greatest trading towns of Eng-
 
 214 MERCIA. 
 
 land, rich witli tlie commerce of foreign lands, lying open 
 for special intercourse with the kindred land of Denmark. 
 It ^Yas from the fortress of Lincoln that the hostage Tiirgot 
 — on the soil of Lindesey he may keep his name of Thurgod 
 — escaped to become, among endless other characters in his 
 own and other lands, the spiritual guide of a Norwegian 
 king, and both the guide and the biographer of a sainted 
 Scottish queen. The citizens of Lincoln indeed seem 
 to have had a special gift of winning the confidence of 
 foreign princes. When, in the later days of William 
 Rufus, the great fleet of Magnus Barefoot drew near to 
 the coast of Anglesey, with Harold the son of our own 
 Harold in his train, in the graphic tale which tells us of 
 the death of Hugh of Shrewsbury, we light incidentally on 
 the fact that the treasure of the Norwegian king was 
 entrusted to the keeping of a citizen of Lincoln. A few 
 years later another citizen of Lincoln is found filling- 
 higher functions in the service of a sovereign of higher 
 rank, though hardly of greater power. When the Caesar 
 of the East, the famous Alexios, sent an embassy to our 
 Henry and Matilda, the representative of Imperial majesty 
 was not one of the great ones of the New Kome, but an 
 Englishman born, bearing an English name, Wulfric, a 
 man born in Lincoln city. Had he or his father fled from 
 the Norman rule to take service in the armies of Augus- 
 tus, in the ranks of those English axemen who met the 
 Norman as manfully at Dyrrhachion as they had done on 
 Senlac? It is a piece of the irony of history that ques- 
 tions like these we cannot answer ; we should never have 
 heard of Wulfric or his embassy, striking as that em- 
 bassy is both in general and in local history, had not a 
 local historian in a distant shire deemed it worthy of 
 record, because Wulfric brought with him an arm of Saint 
 John Chrysostom as an offering to the house of Saint 
 Mary of Abingdon. 
 
 But, if the men of Lincoln thus flourished in other 
 lands, men of other races than the Norman and the
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 215 
 
 Englishman also flourished in Lincoln. In the latter 
 days of Henry the Second, we come across more than one 
 notice of an inhabitant of Lincoln whom we can hardly 
 call a citizen. In 1187, as the king' was crossing to 
 JSTormandy, part of his train was wrecked and drowned, 
 and along with them was lost a great part of the treasure 
 of the deceased Jew, Aaron of Lincoln. The wealth of 
 Aaron was clearly such as to make a palpable difference 
 to the royal exchequer. And Aaron of Lincoln, who 
 went so proudly to the gate of Saint Albans abbey and bade 
 its inmates know that the very shrines of their saints 
 belonged to him, the creditor, and not to them, the 
 debtors, can hardly be forgotten by those who have 
 read the annals of that English abbey in their genuine 
 shape in the Gesta Abhatum. In the local history he bears 
 a name, as the reputed builder, not of the famous Jews' 
 house, but of the other house of the same style higher 
 up the hill, which, had it not been so much worse 
 treated, might have preserved as much of graceful detail. 
 Here we have, as at Saint Eadmundsbury, examples 
 of the stately houses belonging to the favoured chattels 
 of the King, houses to which men in those days pointed 
 with envy as rivalling the King's own palaces. The 
 Jews of Lincoln flourished in the same way, suffered 
 in the same way, and had the same charges brought 
 against them, as the Jews of other places. At Lincoln, as 
 elsewhere, in days of enthusiasm and excitement, the race 
 which men in common times feared, if they hated, became 
 the victims of popular vengeance. When men were setting 
 forth with King Richard for the crusade, the pious and 
 valiant youth of England thought at once to add to their 
 stock of good works and to provide themselves with 
 treasures for their voyage, by slaying and plundering the 
 Jews at Lincoln and Stamford, as well as at York and 
 Lynn. And in Lincoln, as in other places, we find the 
 ever-recurring tale of the Christian child crucified by the 
 Jews ; Saint Hugh of Lincoln, little Saint Hugh, as dis-
 
 216 MEBCIA. 
 
 tinguislied from the great Bnrgnndian "bishop, fills the 
 same place in the annals of the thirteenth century which 
 Saint William of Norwich and the uncanonized Harold of 
 Gloucester play in the twelfth. 
 
 I pass by every-day events, fires and other accidents 
 common to Lincoln with the rest of the world, specially 
 common in days when houses were mainly of wood, 
 when houses of stone were seemingly marks of the 
 envied wealth of the detested Hebrew. But in the wars 
 of the eleventh and twelfth centuries there are several 
 times when Lincoln stands out as the scene of great and 
 stirring events, events all of which have a special signifi- 
 cance in general history, some of which may be looked on. 
 as actual turning points in the history of the kingdom. 
 Take the great fight in the days of Stephen, which stands 
 forth in all its vividness in the pages of Henry of Hunt- 
 ingdon and John of Hexham, and which is the last great 
 event on English soil which was recorded in his distant 
 Norman monastery by the pen of Orderic the Englishman. 
 Read the tale for yourselves, as it was written down by 
 men to whom the news that the King was taken captive 
 was the last news of those stirring and evil days. Read 
 in Orderic the tale of the stratagem of the two countesses, 
 loyal to their husbands, if disloyal to their king, in days 
 when every other form of good faith seems to have vanished 
 from the earth, but when every wife was still a zealous 
 champion of her husband. Read, not in the monk of 
 far Saint Evroul, but in Henry the Archdeacon, an arch- 
 deacon of Lincoln diocese, the speeches, real or imaginary, 
 in which the leaders on both sides, in their exhortations 
 to their soldiers, are made to rake up all the fashionable 
 scandal of the time. But, as a matter of personal and 
 picturesque narrative, the interest of that day of battle 
 gathers round the King, perjured perhaj)S in his own person, 
 but not the less the choice of England, who lacked indeed 
 the voice of the orator and bade another speak in his 
 name, but who on that day wielded his weapons well,
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 217 
 
 and "wielded the weapons of Englishmen. We seem to 
 be carried back to earlier days and a nobler warfare, 
 when we see the King* of the English, forsaken by his 
 foreign mercenaries, trusting to no Norman tactics of 
 lance and destrier, but standing in old Teutonic guise on 
 the soil of his own kingdom; wielding, each in turn, the 
 weapons of ancient English warfare ; first dealing death 
 around him with the sword of Eadmund, and then, when 
 its blade is broken by many blows, receiving in its stead, 
 from the hands of a citizen of Lincoln, the mightier weapon 
 of Cnut and Harold, the Danish axe which was plied so 
 well in English hands, alike in defence of the Colony of 
 Lindum and in defence of the New Rome herself. We 
 see him at last overpowered by numbers, smitten down 
 with a huge stone, like Hektor by the hand of Aias, 
 seized as the most precious plunder of the day, and 
 brought in as a prisoner within the walls of the loyal city, 
 to see it given up to such a pitiless harrying as neither 
 Exeter nor Lincoln had ever suffered at the hands of the 
 great William. Six years later the tide has turned ; the 
 king is again at liberty, he is again within the walls of 
 Lincoln. It was deemed in those days that it was un- 
 lucky for any king to set foot within those walls, and 
 Stephen, of all kings, had every reason to put faith in 
 such a warning. But it is set down as a sign of Stephen's 
 stoutness of heart that he scorned all such warnings, that 
 he kept his Christmas feast in the recovered city, and wore 
 his crown in Lincoln, as kings did before him at West- 
 minster, Winchester, and Gloucester. Nor was his trust 
 misplaced ; the traitor Randolf of Chester came again 
 for a second siege ; but this time his hopes were blasted ; 
 the captain of his host, whose name is not told us, but 
 who is spoken of as one who had never before known 
 defeat, lay dead before the Roman gate, while the Earl 
 and the rest of his host were driven to flight, and the 
 rescued citizens, spared from a second harrying, hastened 
 to pay their thanks for their deliverance in the minster of
 
 218 MERCIA. 
 
 our Lady. A few years later another king wears his 
 crown in Lincohi, but this time not in the minster on the 
 height. The fear which Stephen had scorned was not 
 scorned by his greater successor, and Henry the Second 
 deemed it wiser not to set foot within the city walls. He 
 kept his feast in the lower suburb, not in the prouder Saint 
 Marys which had arisen at the bidding of Remigius, but 
 in the lower Saint Marys of Coleswegen. The place was 
 well chosen for such a rite. England was rejoicing that 
 the days of strife and of foreign rule were over, that the 
 land had come again under the rule of a king who 
 sprang, by the spindle side at least, of the blood of Alfred, 
 Cerdic, and Woden. Henry, as much and as little Eng- 
 lish as he was Norman, the king in whom the green tree 
 had come back to its place and had borne its kingly fruit 
 — Henry, the son of Matilda the Empress, the daughter 
 of Matilda the Queen, the daughter of Margaret, the 
 daughter of Eadward, the son of Eadmund, the son of 
 ^thelred, the son of Eadgar, the son of the earlier Ead- 
 mund — fitly kept his feast in the suburb of the city which 
 Eadmund had won back for England and for Christendom, 
 perhaps on the spot where earlier English warriors had 
 first won Lindesey for England and for heathendom. The 
 king in whom Englishman and Norman rejoiced to see 
 contending races united, could hold his feast in no fitter 
 spot than in one of the churches of Coleswegen, in a 
 church reared for Englishmen, in English guise, by an 
 Englishman who, by whatever means, had learned to hold 
 his own under the rule of the Norman. 
 
 With such a day of union we might well end our sur- 
 vey ; yet there are later events still which may pass as 
 links of the same chain. The siege of the city by William 
 of Longchamp, Bishop and Chancellor, during the days of 
 Richard's absence, may pass as a mere piece of military 
 history, save that one is tempted to rejoice as one sees the 
 man who did such despite to England and Englishmen 
 driven back even by John Lackland himself. And once
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 219 
 
 again, anotlier figlit of Lincoln, the Fair of Lincoln, as 
 men called it, ruled tliat the heir of the French crown was 
 not to reig-n in England. We can understand how, while 
 John yet lived, Englishmen, whether of English or of 
 Norman descent, may, in their despair, have deemed that 
 the Frenchman was no worse than the Angevin, that 
 Lewis would at least make a better king than John. But, 
 when the tyrant was dead, when his crown had passed to 
 a son guiltless of his crimes, our feelings change ; in the 
 partizans of Henry we see the true sons of England ; in 
 the partizans of Lewis we see her enemies. In the Fair of 
 Lincoln we may see one stage in that long strife between 
 France and England which stretches from the fight of 
 Noyon to the fight of Waterloo. It was a day when nobles 
 and commons went forth with the cross upon their 
 breasts to drive the French out of England, wishing 
 rather to have a king of their own land than a stranger. 
 And it is a day the more to be remembered, along with 
 the day when the fleet of Norman Eobert was beaten back 
 by Englishmen from the shore of Pevensey, as the last fight 
 on any threatening scale which Englishmen have had to 
 wage against the southern enemy within their own four seas. 
 
 My tale is now told ; I have but one comment now 
 to make. Local patriotism must sometimes have read with 
 indignation how King Henry the Eighth spoke of the men 
 of Lincolnshire as ' the rude commons of one shire, and 
 that the most brute and beastly in the whole realm.' I at 
 least venture to think that King Henry was wrong. I 
 cannot believe that that shire was brute and beastly above 
 all shires which made such a contribution as part of Lin- 
 colnshire certainly made to the language and literature of 
 England. In the history of every tongue some one dialect 
 comes to the front : it sets the standard ; it becomes the 
 written language, and the dialects which once were its equal 
 fellows sink into forms of speech which are merely local and 
 unwritten. Then foolish people begin to look with scorn
 
 220 MERCIA. 
 
 on these less lucky dialects, to fancy that they are corrup- 
 tions of the lucky one, and to call them bad English or bad 
 French. Every one knows that what we call Spanish is 
 Castilian, doubtless — for I do not understand Spanish — 
 some local form of Castilian ; every one knows that what we 
 call Italian is lingua Toscana in hocca Romana. It is not 
 so commonly known that what we call French is the 
 speech of Touraine ; still less is it commonly known that 
 the tongue which we call English, while it is neither the 
 Northumbrian of York nor the Saxon of Winchester, is 
 the intermediate Anglian speech of Eastern Mercia. It 
 is the speech of a district which undoubtedly takes in 
 Northamptonshire, but also undoubtedly takes in one riding 
 of Lincolnshire and part of another. We might not be going 
 very far wrong if we ruled that modern English is the lan- 
 guage of the Gyrwas. Perhaps there is some one here from 
 Bourne eager to complain that I have robbed him of Here- 
 ward. I would bid the Bourne man enlarge his patriotism 
 so as to take in the whole shire, for, if I have taken away 
 Hereward from Bourne, I have certainly not taken him 
 away from Lincolnshire. And, even if I have robbed the 
 Bourne man of one worthy, I have another to give him 
 instead. It was a Lincolnshire man, a Bourne man, who 
 gave the English language its present shape. I could 
 have been better pleased if Dan Michel of Canterbury 
 had been the patriarch of our tongue, if we had still 
 spoken the living Saxon of the ' Ayenbite of Inwyt.' But 
 so it was not to be. Standard English is the speech of 
 the Gyrwas, thrown into a literary form by Robert 
 Manning of Bourne. Winchester, York, London, have 
 been content to adopt the tongue of Holland and the 
 neighbouring lands. That may be comfort enough, either 
 for my fancied opponent from Bourne or for any man 
 from any part of the shire whose soul is vexed at the rude 
 language of King Harry. That shire can hardly be brute 
 and beastly which all England has taken as its mistress. 
 •We do not speak the tongue of Alfred} we do not speak
 
 LINDUM COLONIA. 221 
 
 the tong'ue of Waltheof ; but we do speak the tongue of 
 Hereward, the tongue in which the Chronicler of Peter- 
 borough kept on our native annals, till the pen dropped 
 from his hand as he set down the coming to tlie soil of 
 Holland of the King who wore his crown in Coleswegen's 
 church of Wigford.
 
 222 
 
 YORK AND LINCOLN MINSTERS. 
 
 1870. 
 
 Evert one who travels mucli must be amused at almost 
 every step witli the odd local superstition which makes 
 people in every place maintain, as a point of honour, that 
 their OAvn church, castle, or whatever else the local lion 
 may be, is superior to everything else of the kind in 
 the whole world. The native or inhabitant is offended if 
 the impartial visitor refuses implicitly to accept the local 
 judgement. He is glad of the opinion of the stranger as 
 long as the stranger happens to admire ; he is displeased 
 as soon as the stranger begins to exercise any independent 
 criticism. It will win a man a cheer at Beverley to 
 enlarge on the exquisite grace and proportion of the choir 
 and transepts of Saint Johns minster, and to point out the 
 delicate ingenuity with which the later nave is adapted 
 to them. And if you further hint that Saint John of 
 Beverley does in these points surpass Saint Peter of York, 
 the cheer will be louder stilL But if love of truth makes 
 you go on to say that the west front of Beverley is at 
 once a sham in itself and a bad copy of the west front of 
 York, the countenance of Beverley grows very black 
 indeed. The daughter church is engaged in a somewhat 
 undutiful rivalry with the mother, and to hint that she 
 is not in every single point ' filia pulcrior ' is as dangerous 
 at Beverley as it is at Caernarvon to hint that Edward the 
 Second could not well have been born in the tower which 
 he himself built. 
 
 Let us change the venue from York and Beverley to two
 
 YORK AND LINCOLN MINSTERS. 228 
 
 churches which may be more fittingly compared, namely 
 York and Lincoln. Beverley, with all its beauty, hardly 
 rises above the second order in point of scale. It ranges 
 with Wells and Hereford rather than with minsters of 
 the very first rank. But between York and Lincoln the 
 rivalry is not only of ol:l standing, but it is a rivalry 
 which is perfectly fair. York and Lincoln are both of 
 them churches of the highest rank in point of scale ; their 
 ground-plan and component parts are nearly the same; 
 both too are buildings of essentially Gothic character, with 
 no remains of Romanesque that are visible at once inside 
 and above ground. Both have three towers and a double 
 transept; in both the east end is square and of the full 
 height of the church ; each is vaulted throughout in 
 some material or other. And if the date and style of the 
 two differ considerably, yet in a comparison of this kind all 
 varieties of Gothic may be fairly dealt with as one style, 
 a style one in its general eflPect, though different forms 
 of it may differ widely in details. We can hardly com- 
 pare the nave of Durham with that of York, because the 
 comparison would pretty well resolve itself into a compari- 
 son between Romanesque and Gothic ; but we may fairly 
 compare the naves of York and Lincoln, although their 
 dates are a century or so apart. 
 
 Let us first look at the two from outside, and begin 
 with the two west fronts. Here there can be no doubt 
 that the palm belongs to York. And the failure of Lin- 
 coln in this repect is positively provoking, because, if the 
 Lincoln front had only been treated simply and naturally, 
 it would have far surpassed that of York. The western 
 towers of Lincoln, if they only stood out from the ground, 
 are among the very noblest towers in Christendom ; no 
 front, not those of Rheims and Abbeville themselves, 
 could outdo a front which simply consisted of those 
 two towers with an appropriately treated nave-gable be- 
 tween them. Bat the successive architects of this front 
 seem to have been possessed with the notion of making
 
 1?24 MEliCIA. 
 
 some kind of western transept. Now a western transept 
 may be very woll combined with a single western tower, 
 wliieli tlius becomes in some sort central as woll as wes- 
 tern ; but it does not agree well with two towers finishing 
 the aisles. Besides this, in the final completion of the 
 front it was thought good both to retain fragments of 
 two earlier Romanesque fronts and to run up a kind of 
 screen — the merest sham — before the towers. The front 
 thus becomes a mere blank arcaded wall, with holes cut 
 through it to show the earlier work, and with the noble 
 upper stages of the two towers looking over it like prisoners 
 eao-er to sret rid of the incumbrance in front of them. The 
 York front, on the other hand, is at least real. It does 
 consist of two towers and a gable between them, and its 
 decoration is sought in the legitimate adornment of the 
 necessary features, the windows, doorways, and buttresses. 
 And yet there is something about the York front which is 
 not wholly satisfactory. It does not make the most of its 
 real size. It somehow looks like a model. We feel sure 
 that no one, looking at the west front only, would ever 
 take in the real height of the building at which he was 
 looking; it is only by going I'ound the corner that the 
 vast bulk of the minster — visible enough from many more 
 distant points — dawns on the near beholder. We suspect 
 that this is partly owing to the space near the west end of 
 the minster having been thrown far too open ; people never 
 will understand that a great church was not meant to 
 stand all by itself, but was always designed with reference 
 to other buildings. But it is partly owing also to the design 
 of the front itself. The single large window j)laced, and 
 placed very low down, in the upper stage of the towers 
 undoubtedly takes away from their apparent height, and 
 thereby from the apparent size of the whole front. This 
 treatment seems to be characteristic of Yorkshire towers , 
 and in some positions it is effective ; but the appearance of 
 height is certainly much better brought out by two or 
 more windows of greater height, as at Lincoln, and as in
 
 YOUK AND LINCOLN MINSTUES. ^26 
 
 the towers of the West of England. In short, the towers 
 of Lincoln, simply as towers, are immeasurably finer than 
 those of York; but the front of York, as a front, far sur- 
 passes the fi'ont of Lincoln. 
 
 As for the general outline, there can be no doubt as to 
 the vast superiority of Lincoln. Lincoln has sacrificed a 
 great deal to the enormous pitch of its roofs, but it has its 
 reward in the distant view of the outside. The outline of 
 York is spoiled by the incongruity between the low roofs 
 of the nave and choir and the high roofs of the transepts. 
 The dumpiness of the central tower of York — which is, in 
 truth, the original Norman tower cased — cannot be wholly 
 made a matter of blame to the original builders. For it is 
 clear that some finish, whether a crown like those at New- 
 castle and Edinburgh or any other, was intended. Still 
 the proportion which is solemn in Romanesque becomes 
 squat in Perpendicular, and, if York has never received its 
 last finish, Lincoln has lost the last finish which it received. 
 Surely no one who is not locally sworn to the honour of 
 York can doubt about preferring the noble central tower 
 of Lincoln, soaring still, even though shorn of its spire. 
 The eastern transept again is far more skilfully manao-ed 
 at Lincoln than at York. It may well be doubted whether 
 such a transept is really an improvement ; but if it is to 
 be there at all, it is certainly better to make it the bold 
 and important feature which it is at Lincoln than to leave 
 it, as it is at York, half afraid, as it were, to proclaim its 
 own existence. Coming to the east end, we again find, as 
 at the west, Lincoln throwing away great advantages by 
 a perverse piece of sham. The east window of Lincoln is 
 the very noblest specimen of the pure and bold tracery of 
 its own date. Bat it is crushed, as it were, by the huo-e 
 gable-window above it — big enough itself to be the east 
 window of a large church — and the aisles, whose east win- 
 dows are as good on their smaller scale as the great win- 
 dow, are absurdly finished with sham gables, destroyin<T 
 the real and natural outline of the whole composition. At 
 
 <2
 
 2-26 MERCIA. 
 
 York we have no gables at all ; the vast east window, 
 with its many flimsy muUions, is wonderful rather than 
 beautiful ; still the east end of York is real, and so far it 
 surpasses that of Lincoln. 
 
 On entering either of these noble churches, the great 
 fault to be found is the lack of apparent height. To some 
 extent this is due to a cause common to both. We are 
 convinced that both churches are too long. The eastern 
 part of Lincoln — the angels' choir — is in itself one of the 
 loveliest of human works ; the proportion of the side eleva- 
 tions and the beauty of the details are both simply per- 
 fect. But its addition has sjDoiled the minster as a 
 whole. The vast length at one unbroken height gives to 
 the eastern view of the inside the effect of looking through 
 a tube, and the magnificent east window, when seen from 
 the western part of the choir, is utterly dwarfed. And 
 the same arrangement is open to the further objection 
 that it does not fall in with the ecclesiastical arrange- 
 ments of the building. When a church ends in an apse, 
 or when there is a Lady chapel of lower height than the 
 choir, in either case the high altar holds a place of special 
 dignity, marked out for it in the architecture of the build- 
 ing. But in the York and Lincoln arrangement there 
 seems no particular reason why the high altar should be 
 set down at the particular point where it stands rather 
 than at any other point. From all these reasons, com- 
 bined with the strange form given to the vaulting, it is 
 certain that the general view of Lincoln choir, Avith all 
 its beauty of detail, is not wholly satisfactory, while the 
 apparent lowness of the roof is absolutely crushing. In 
 the transepts the lack of height is more painful still ; 
 but the nave is far better ; it is positively higher by 
 several feet, and the vault is so managed as to give still 
 greater apparent height. The pier-arches however are 
 certainly too wide, and one wonders a little at the single 
 tall western arch, which gives the impression of there 
 being a single western tower, as at Ely, instead of two.
 
 YORK AND LINCOLN MINSTERS. 227 
 
 In the nave of York, looking eastwards or westwards, it 
 is hard indeed to believe that we are in a church only a few 
 feet lower than Westminster or Saint Ouens. The height 
 is utterly lost, partly through the enormous width, partly 
 through the low and crushing shape of the vaulting-arch. 
 The vault, it must be remembered, is an imitation of an 
 imitation, a modern copy of a wooden roof made to imitate 
 stone. This imitation of stone construction in wood runs 
 through the greater part of the church; it comes out 
 specially in the transepts, where a not very successful 
 attempt is made to bring the gable windows within the 
 vault — the very opposite to the vast space lost in the roofs 
 at Lincoln. Yet, with all this, many noble views may be 
 got in York nave and transepts, provided only the be- 
 holder takes care never to look due east or west. The 
 western view is still further injured by the treatment 
 of the west window — in itself an admirable piece of 
 tracery — which fits into nothing, and seems cut through 
 the wall at an arbitrary point. But the nave elevation, 
 taken bay by bay, is admirable. Looking across out of 
 the aisle — the true way to judge — the real height at last 
 comes out, and we are reminded of some of the most stately 
 minsters of France. 
 
 In one part of the subordinate buildings York has a 
 decided advantage. We mean in the approach to the 
 chapter-house. The chapter-houses themselves may fight 
 an equal fight. York pleases our eye the most, but Lin- 
 coln may put in its central pillar and the fact that its roof 
 is real. But the approach at Lincoln is badly managed. 
 A monastic idea is awkwardly applied to a secular build- 
 ing, and the entrance of the chapter-house itself is left 
 unpleasantly open. The approach at York on the other 
 hand is absolutely perfect. The need of turning round a 
 comer has been most ingeniously seized on to produce, in 
 a really small space, a wonderful effect both of dignity and 
 of a kind of mystery. Here at least there is no lack of 
 comparative height, and the windows, the vaultin g, every 
 
 q2
 
 228 MERCIA. 
 
 detail, leave uotliing to be wislied for. This one small 
 portion is really the gem of York ; it is one of the gems 
 of ecclesiastical art anywhere. 
 
 One point of difference in the history of the two 
 churches mnst be mentioned, because it is the natural 
 consequence of a difference in the history of the two 
 cities. At York the Bishop and his church may fairly 
 be called immemorial ; at least we know nothing of York 
 as a dwelling place of Englishmen before it had a bishop 
 and a church. At Lincoln the Bishop did not appear till 
 the English and Danish city had lived through some 
 centuries of stirring history. The church of Pauliuus 
 arose on ground which may have seen Christian worship 
 in the earlier day, but which, as far as Teutonic Christen- 
 dom was concerned, was virgin soil. But Eemigius fixed 
 his bishop-stool in an existing church, and his rebuilding 
 of the fabric did not affect the rights of the people of 
 Saint Marys. Lincoln minster therefore remained for 
 some ages a divided church, like a church of Austin 
 canons, or like the church of seculars at Arundel or of 
 Benedictines at Dunster. The presence of the Bishop 
 and his canons in their part of the building was the 
 novelty ; the presence of the parishioners in their part 
 was matter of immemorial right. Down to the four- 
 teenth century they kept the nave, perhaps rather only 
 part of it, as their parish church ; then, by an agreement 
 between parish and chapter, a distinct parish church was 
 built, just as has been done at Carlisle in our own day, 
 and as we believe was done at Rochester in the seven- 
 teenth century. 
 
 We have freely spoken of both these noble churches, 
 and we have freely pointed out the faults of both. In no 
 other way can art be really studied : in no other way can 
 the real merits of the buildings themselves be understood. 
 Every great mediseval church was an ex^Derimeut, and the 
 experiment commonly succeeded in some points and failed 
 in others. But we are certainly as far as possible from
 
 YORK AND LINCOLN MINSTERS. 229 
 
 wisliing- to depreciate either York or Lincoln. The scien- 
 tific student will probably always prefer Lincoln, with its 
 admirable outline and its exquisite beauty of work. But 
 he will not be insensible to the vast bulk and dignity 
 which make York so impressive to the popular mind. 
 And the same keen and fearless spirit of criticism which 
 makes him alive to faults which the common beholder 
 does not observe makes him feel beauties also far more 
 keenly.
 
 230 
 
 CHESTER. 
 
 1870. 
 
 If we were riglit in a former paper in saying that Lincoln 
 is, taking one thing with another, the most interesting of 
 English cities, we must allow that, as it has a formidable 
 rival in York, it has another formidable rival in Chester. 
 If we compare the City of the Legions with the Colony 
 of Lindum, we shall perhaps be inclined to say that the 
 mere written history of Chester surpasses in interest that 
 of Lincoln, but that Lincoln is the most striking to visit, 
 as its history has left more distinct traces in its present 
 state. The position of the two cannot be compared. 
 The Dee indeed is a far nobler stream than the polluted 
 Witham, but the nearly flat site of Chester has no chance 
 of producing the same wonderful effect as Lincoln on its 
 promontory. Chester, alone among English cities, retains 
 the perfect compass of its walls, and at more than one 
 point of those walls the traces of Roman workmanship 
 can be discerned. But Chester has no Roman remains in 
 situ to be compared to the New Port of Lincoln, to say 
 nothing of the grand fragment of Roman wa]l-work which 
 lies at some distance to the west of it. The castle of 
 Chester contains work of more ancient date than the castle 
 of Lincoln, and its position, commanding the bridge of 
 the Dee, is far from despicable. Blit it is as nothing 
 compared with the proud steep on which at Lincoln castle 
 and minster reign side by side. Chester again, nearly 
 alone among English cities, can boast of two minsters — it 
 would be only a slight stretch of language to say two
 
 CHESTER. "JSl 
 
 cathedral churches ; but Saint Johns and Saint Werburhs 
 together could never enter into rivalry with the church of 
 Eemigius and Saint Hugh. In the matter of domestic 
 architecture the two cities are more fairly balanced. The 
 general effect of Chester is far more striking ; the famous 
 rows give it a character which is absolutely unique. But 
 the real domestic antiquities of Chester are underground ; 
 what meets the eye, pleasing and picturesque as it is, is of 
 comjDaratively late date, and there is nothing to set against 
 the isolated domestic buildings in Lincoln, the Jews' 
 House, the house of Saint Marys Guild, and the other 
 rare fragments of the domestic work of the twelfth 
 century. In ecclesiastical domestic work Chester has the 
 larger store in the extensive remains of its abbey, but 
 interesting and beautiful as they are, they hardly equal in 
 general effect the stately ruins of the episcopal palace at 
 Lincoln. Lastly, Chester and Lincoln alike fill a great 
 place in the great crisis of English history, and Chester, 
 as the last English city which held out against the 
 Norman, fills a place above every other city. Still there is 
 not at Chester any living witness of those times and of 
 the changes which they wrought such as we see at Lincoln 
 in the migration to the lower town and in the still abiding 
 towers of Coleswegen's churches. Altogether, Chester 
 would supply a better subject for a local history of the 
 right kind — such an one, for instance, as Mr. Hinde has 
 left behind him of Northumberland ; while Lincoln sup- 
 plies the greater store of attractive sites and objects for 
 the musings of the historical antiquary. 
 
 The name of Chester alone proves its Roman antiquity ; 
 it also proves its importance, as having come to be known 
 as ' the city ' or ' the camp ' emphatically. Still the name 
 is historically a contraction. The Eoman Deva became 
 in later times the Givitas Legionum, the Caerlleon of the 
 Welsh, the Legeceaster (in several different spellings) of 
 the English. Both names, it will be seen, Welsh and 
 English, translate Givitas Legionum, the two tongues,
 
 282 MERCIA. 
 
 aeeordiiig^ to their several habits, placing the qualifying 
 word lirst in the English name and last in the Welsh. 
 And here we have to distinguish our Caerlleon, our Lege- 
 ceaftter, from other places which might easily be con- 
 founded with them. The name of Caerlleon on the Dee is 
 simply the same as Caerlleon on the Usk, and Welsh 
 writers naturally speak of Chester as Caerlleon. So, we 
 presume, an Old-English writer, if he had had occasion to 
 speak of Caerlleon-on-Usk, would have spoken of it as 
 Legeceaster. In the like sort the name of Winchester and 
 that of Caerwent in Monmouthshire are the abiding names, 
 English and Welsh, of Ve7ita Belgarum and Venta 8ilu- 
 rum. The old Venta Icenorum survives in the form of Gais- 
 tor, which we need not say is merely a local form of Chester. 
 But there is another danger, that of confounding Lege- 
 ceaster, which is Chester, with Legraceaster, which is Leices- 
 ter. We do not presume to guess at the origin of this 
 last name. In its many Old-English spellings it seems 
 always to have an r, while in Domesday the r becomes a 
 d, and it figures as Ledecestre. Save that Dick stands for 
 Eichard, it is hard to see how d and r can get con- 
 founded in any language but Hebrew ; so this fact may be 
 a lift for the Anglo- Israelites. It would be rash to see 
 in Leicester a third city of the legions ; for, in the passage 
 of Henry of Huntingdon which looks that way, for Kair- 
 Legion there is another reading Lirion, though it is fair to 
 add that there is a like various reading Lerion in the case 
 of Caerlleon-on-Usk. It is safer to be satisfied with our 
 two Caerlleons on Usk and on Dee, and to leave the city- — 
 for in Domesday Leicester is a city — on the Soar to look 
 after its own etymology. 
 
 It would seem likely that Deva did not receive this 
 its quasi-descriptive name till it had already fallen, till 
 it was no longer an existing city, but had passed for a 
 while into the condition of a mighty and mysterious 
 monument of past times. Let us carry our thoughts to 
 Pevensey ; let us call up the walls and towers of Ande-^
 
 CHESTER. 233 
 
 rida, the walls and towers which for so many ages have 
 stood desolate, encompassing- no single dwelling-place 
 of man. When we look at Chester, its streets, its walls, 
 its churches, its buildings old and new, it is hard to 
 believe that for several ages Chester was as Anderida. 
 The desolation and renewal of the City of the Legions are 
 facts which admit of no doubt. We read expressly that 
 in 894 a Danish army, followed by the forces of King 
 Alfred and the Ealdorman ^thelred, found shelter within 
 its forsaken walls, and found means also to defend them 
 during the whole winter. The way in which the Chronicler 
 describes the desolate site is remarkable. The event hap- 
 pened ' on anre wsestre ceastre on Wirhealum ; seo is 
 Ligeceaster haten.' The Roman city was then ' a waste 
 Chester^'' the future proper name, curiously enough, being 
 incidentally used as an appellative ; but the ' waste 
 Chester ' still kept the memory of what it had been ; it was 
 Legeceaster, the City of the Legions, as indeed it already 
 was in the days of Bseda. The site then in 894 was 
 utterly forsaken ; when had it become so ? We can 
 hardly doubt that its desolation dates from 607, from the 
 great victory of iEthelfrith, when he overthrew the Welsh 
 beneath the walls and made his famous massacre of the 
 monks of Bangor. That victory was the last great victory 
 of English heathendom over British Christianity ; Deva was 
 most likely the last city which was made to share the fate 
 of Jericho and Ai. Lincoln, as we have seen, was either 
 never destroyed at all, or else had been restored within 
 twenty years after the destruction of Chester. 
 
 The desolation of Chester lasted exactly three hundred 
 years. The defence of the forsaken rampart by the Danes 
 no doubt drew attention to the capabilities of the site, and 
 the restoration of the City of the Legions formed a part of 
 the great scheme of fortification planned by the renowned 
 daughter of iElfred. In 907 TEthelfljjed, the Lady of the 
 Mercians, renewed Legeceaster, :ind the restored fortress 
 at once took its place among the great cities of England.
 
 234 MERCIA. 
 
 It gave its name lo a shire, and presently assumed the 
 function so long held by its modern neighbour Liverpool as 
 one of the chief seats of communication with Ireland. 
 Its name constantly occurs in the history of the tenth and 
 eleventh centuries, the most famous day in its annals being 
 that when Eadgar, if our Scottish friends will let us believe 
 it, was rowed by vassal kings on the Dee. At last, as its 
 conquest by ^thelfrith marks a stage in our history as the 
 last conquest of our heathen forefathers, so its conquest 
 by William marks the last stage of his work also. Chester 
 remained unsubdued till early in 1070, and, when it fell, 
 England was finally conquered. 
 
 There is no part of the history of the Conquest which 
 we should be better pleased to read in minute detail than 
 the fall of the last independent English city, whose walls 
 sheltered the widow of Harold, as the Avails of Exeter had 
 sheltered his mother. But while we do know something 
 of the siege of Exeter, of the siege of Chester we know 
 nothing. Chester fell, but we know not how ; only the 
 fact that Cheshire, like Yorkshire, was one of the districts 
 marked out for special vengeance, seems to show that the 
 resistance of town and shire must have been formidable. 
 The city now became the capital of a great earldom, or 
 rather of a feudal principality in which the Earl well nigh 
 took the place of the King. Had all William's earls re- 
 ceived the same privileges which Hugh of Avranches 
 received at Chester, England must have fallen to pieces 
 as Germany did, and her resurrection might perchance 
 have given offence to jealous neighbours. 
 
 The site of Chester in early times was one well suited 
 for the growth of a great and a strong city. It has nothing 
 of the hill-fort about it ; the slope down to the river is 
 very inconsiderable. Its strength as well as its fitness 
 for commerce mainly lay in the river itself, which washed 
 the walls of the city to a far greater extent than it does 
 now. The bridge, which, together with the walls, the 
 men of the whole shire were of old bound to keep in repair,
 
 CHESTER. 235 
 
 stands on the south side. On this side the Roman walls 
 would seem to have been extended by ^thelflsed, who 
 raised her mound, whose site is marked by the present 
 castle, so as to command the bridge. To the west the 
 water has gone back, and has left a large plain, the present 
 race-course, between the wall and the river. The Water- 
 gate and the Water-tower no longer open immediately on 
 the stream, but the names show that the river came up 
 to the wall in days far later than those of the dominion 
 of Rome. To the north the canal occupies the site of the 
 Eoman ditch, and a walk along its banks affords some 
 most picturesque views of the wall, including some of the 
 surviving Eoman portions. To the north and to the west 
 the wall includes green fields within its bounds, a trace 
 possibly of the three hundred years' desolation ; the modern 
 city has grown towards the east, and on this side the wall 
 crosses one of the chief streets of the town. Every one 
 who has seen Chester at all knows the walk along the 
 walls, uninterrupted through its whole course, for, though 
 all the ancient gates have vanished, the path has been 
 carefully carried over their sites on modern arches. Every 
 one also knows the rows ; the double range of shops, the 
 like of which we know nowhere else. That it should often 
 have been likened to the arcades at Bern only shows how 
 many people there are who are quite unable to take in any 
 real likeness or unlikeness. 
 
 Chester, though not an ancient episcopal see, has had, 
 like the Oxfordshire Dorchester, the curious fate of being 
 at different times the seat of two distinct bishoprics. At 
 the time of the local conquest in 1070, Chester contained 
 no monastic house ; like Shrewsbury, it was a stronghold 
 of the seculars, who possessed two important churches, 
 one within and the other without the walls. Within the 
 city was the church of Saint Werburh, from which the 
 first Norman Earl Hugh, with Anselm to his counsellor, 
 removed the secular canons, rebuilt the church, and 
 turned it into a Benedictine abbey. A little before this,
 
 236 MSB CIA. 
 
 Peter, the first Norman Bishop of Lichfield, following 
 the same policj^ as Eemigius at Dorchester and John of 
 Tours at "SVells, removed the seat of his bishopric from 
 little Lichfield to greater Chester. He fixed his throne 
 in the minster of Saint John without the walls, the church 
 then famous as the scene of the devotions of Eadgar 
 after his triumphal voyage, and which soon became more 
 famous as the legendary scene of the penitence of Harold 
 and of the Emperor Henry the Fifth. The stately Norman 
 work which still remains in the church is most likely due 
 to this bishop. For his successor, Eobert of Limesey, moved 
 his throne again from Saint Johns to Earl Leofric's 
 minster at Coventry. Still the bishops were often spoken 
 of as Bishops of Chester, and Saint Johns kept up a kind 
 of vague claim to be looked on as a third cathedral church 
 alongside of Coventry and Lichfield. Its pretensions 
 however did not save it at the suppression of colleges 
 under Edward the Sixth, nor had they led Henry the 
 Eighth to make it the see of the later bishopric of Chester. 
 For that purpose he chose the suppressed abbey of Saint 
 Werburh, which became the head church of an altogether 
 new diocese, taken partly out of Lichfield and partly out 
 of York, and stretching from Cheshire into the later 
 Cumberland. Thus Chester may in a certain sense be said 
 to contain two cathedral churches, and, oddly enough, 
 the episcopal dwelling, formerly made out of the Abbot's 
 quarters at Saint Werburhs, has been lately moved to the 
 near neighbourhood of Saint Johns. 
 
 Neither of the two minsters of Chester can lay any claim 
 to be looked on as a church of the first rank, but both are 
 well worthy of careful study. Saint Johns is the smaller, 
 but it must, when perfect, have been the finer building of 
 the two. Unluckily it is cut short at both ends ; the 
 Lady chapel and part of the choir are in ruins ; the west 
 front and the central tower have vanished. The only 
 tower now left is a late but very stately addition, in nearly 
 the same position as those of Dunkeld and Brechin. Inside,
 
 CHESTER. 237 
 
 the arcades of nave and choir are examples of B,oinanesque, 
 noble in their simplicity ; but in the nave the triforium 
 and clerestory have given way to a singular but effective 
 composition of the next style. Saint Werburhs is on the 
 whole more remarkable for the preservation of so much of 
 the monastic buildings than from anything in the church 
 itself. Cloister, refectory, chapter-house, Abbot's lodgings, 
 all are there ; it is one of the very best places for studying 
 monastic arrangements. In the church but little of the 
 Romanesque of Earl Hugh remains ; the church has been 
 rebuilt in various later styles, none perhaps of first-rate 
 merit. West front it has none ; the northern towe r was 
 swallowed up by the Abbot's house ; a gigantic Perpen- 
 dicular southern tower was begun but never carried up. 
 The most striking feature on the whole is the huge south 
 transept of the fourteenth century, used as a district parish 
 church, and forming one of the jnost curious results of 
 those disputes between the monks and the parishioners 
 the result of which took so many different forms in differ- 
 ent places.
 
 288 
 
 PR.E-ACADEMIC CAMBRIDaE. 
 
 1870-1874. 
 
 [I have worked in part of an earlier article in 1864 on the discoveries and 
 buildings at Saint Johns College.] 
 
 There may be some who remember a memorable debate 
 in the House of Commons some years back on the ques- 
 tion whether it were good that Oxford should become 
 a military centre. That debate revealed the curious 
 fact that a large number of members of the House of 
 Commons believed that the University of Oxford was 
 older than the city or borough. They seem to have 
 thought that some founder of distant times — the name of 
 ..ZElfred will serve the turn as well as any other — founded 
 an university in a wilderness, and that a town grew up 
 round about it. Most likely they did not stop to make 
 comparisons, but we may say for them that they thought 
 that Oxford stood to its university in the relation which 
 Peterborough stands to its abbey. Wells to its bishop- 
 ric, and Richmond to its castle. If there had been no 
 university, there would have been no Oxford at all. These 
 speakers would have been amazed if they had been told that 
 Oxford had been a military centre and a political centre, 
 a centre in the very strictest of senses, for ages before the 
 first germs of the university showed themselves. They 
 would have been amazed to have been told that, instead 
 of the city — Oxford is already a city in Domesday — grow- 
 ing up round the university, the university seems more 
 likely to have grown up round the church of Saiut Friths- 
 wyth. And what they thought of Oxford they would most
 
 PR^- ACADEMIC CAMBRIDGE. 239 
 
 likel}' have thought of Cambridge, if anything had just 
 then put Cambridge into their heads. 
 
 To those who know anything of genuine English 
 history it is hardly needful to say that all this is the 
 merest superstition ; but it is easy to see the origin of the 
 superstition. If the towns did not grow up round the 
 universities, the universities did in a great measure swallow 
 up the towns. To see that this is not the normal result 
 of the foundation of an university, it is only needful to cast 
 the eye over the other universities of Britain and of 
 Europe. Most universities will be found to have been 
 planted in large towns, often in capitals ; and, even when 
 it is to the university that the town chiefly owes its fame, 
 it cannot be said that the town is swallowed up by it in 
 any sort. At Edinburgh, for instance, or Glasgow, the 
 university does not determine the character of the city. 
 And it is perhaps wisely ordered that in the greater, 
 though less dignified, city, where the university might 
 otherwise have been wholly invisible, its existence should 
 be strongly forced on the eye by the conspicuous robes 
 of its students. To an English eye it is hard to believe 
 that the garb which suggests either a doctor or an alder- 
 man in full dress is simply the every-day garb of an ordi- 
 nary student. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten 
 that the students thus brilliantly apparelled hold the fate of 
 Lord Rectors in their hands. At Saint Andrews, through 
 the smallness of the city, the University does become 
 somewhat more prominent ; it helps to give the city its 
 character, but it does not give it an exclusive character. 
 The University was in old times overshadowed by the 
 archbishopric to which it owed its being, and the present 
 aspect of Saint Andrews is not that of Oxford or Cam- 
 bridge, but rather that of a cross between Oxford and 
 Saint Davids, with a cross, at some times of the year, of 
 Brighton or Cheltenham. There is certainly no other place 
 in the British dominions, we doubt whether there is any 
 in Europe, where the University so completely determines
 
 240 MERC I A. 
 
 the character, both architectural and social, of the town 
 in which it is placed as it does at Oxford and Cambridge. 
 This ditference is probably owing to two special character- 
 istics in the history of the English universities. First of 
 all, the English universities, like the English constitution, 
 were not made, but grew. The Scottish, the Irish, and 
 many at least of the famous continental universities, 
 Avere the creation of some prince, prelate, or potentate ; 
 they grew up under the fostering shade of some min- 
 ster or palace. But Oxford and Cambridge were never 
 founded, never planted ; they were hardy plants which 
 sprang np of themselves, and which naturally grew to be 
 something greater than the institutions which needed 
 artificial fostering. The other cause is the foundation of 
 the colleges which so widely distinguish the English uni- 
 versities from those of Scotland and from most of those 
 on the Continent. The collegiate system, or some ap- 
 proach to it, was not absolutely unknown elsewhere, 
 but at Oxford and Cambridge it assumed an import- 
 ance which it assumed nowhere else. The founda- 
 tion of colleges was the main cause of the peculiar 
 architectural character of the two English universities, 
 as involving the erection of buildings for which there 
 was no need under the elder University system, and 
 which have gone on increasing in size and stateliness 
 to our own time. But the foundation and growth of the 
 colleges affected the relations between University and 
 town. There was no longer one academical corporation, 
 but many ; and it was of the essence of the corporations 
 ■which had arisen to become owners of lands and houses as 
 largely as they could. This was a different state of things 
 from the presence of the one academic body, the Univer- 
 sity, with its members lodged as they might be in the 
 houses of the citizens. A large part of the soil of the town 
 itself was held by the collegiate bodies, and was covered 
 by their buildings. The University and its colleges grew 
 together and strengthened one another, till the two to-
 
 PRjE-ACADEMIC CAMBRIDGE. 241 
 
 gether became far stronger than the more ancient corpo- 
 ration from whose jurisdiction they gradually managed to 
 withdraw themselves. 
 
 It is hard to throw ourselves back into the days before 
 this change, and to think of Oxford and Cambridge simply 
 as towns, just like any other towns, owing whatever im 
 portance they had to their military, commercial, or eccle- 
 siastical advantages. And modern criticism carries down 
 those days to a date at which men would have been aghast 
 a few generations back. But stories of King Sigeberht 
 will not get a hearing now, and it is to be hoped that 
 stories of King Alfred get no hearing except in the more 
 convivial moments of the members of University College. 
 The Universities must be content to look on themselves 
 as societies which began to grow up in the city of Oxford 
 and borough of Cambridge — such is their Domesday style 
 — in the course of the twelfth century. And when the 
 matter is thus brought from the land of myth into the 
 land of history, all disputes as to the comparative antiquity 
 of the two Universities become of very little profit. As 
 for the boroughs, we ought to begin with Cambridge, for 
 Roman Camboritum may fairly claim chronological prece- 
 dence ; but the palm of early historical importance must 
 be granted to Oxford. But one trembles a little as to 
 Eoman Camboritum. How are we to reconcile the claims 
 of Grantc/ies^er, which still keeps its name, and of Grant- 
 hridge, which from the days of Henry the Second has been 
 called Cambridge? Grantchester must in the nature of 
 things be a chester ; it may be Caniboritiiin ; but anyhow 
 the site of the oldest Grantbridge was a Roman site also. 
 It was perhaps Grantchester rather than Grantbridge of 
 which Bseda speaks as a desolate place, among whose ruins 
 the pious sisters of Ely could find a slab of stone, a thing 
 which in that stoneless region could be found only when 
 the ancient conquerors had left it. But it is plain that the 
 original Cambridge was a small settlement in what is 
 now the least academical and the least fashionable part
 
 24ii MERCIA. 
 
 of the town, lyiiiy;' on the lett bank of the river Cam or 
 Grant. Not only the tower in which Saint Johns has lately 
 emulated Pershore, not only the tall turrets of Kings 
 and the more massive stee^Dle of Great Saint Marys, 
 but all that is supposed to be old in Cambridge, the round 
 church of the Sepulchre, the minster of Saint Eadegund, 
 the small relics which show that there once was a minster 
 of Barnwell, must all be wiped out of the imagination. 
 The present Cambridge, as a town of colleges and private 
 houses, had no being. The two disfigured churches 
 of Saint Giles and Saint Peter, the county gaol, the 
 mound which marks the place of the castle, these are the 
 buildings and sites which mark the akropolis and pry- 
 taneion of primitive Cambridge. And an akropolis it is. 
 A hill, such as hills are in Cambridgeshire, rises above 
 the river, and on that hill stood old Camboritum. The 
 Roman walls took in only a small quadrangular circuit, 
 whose extent it is not hard to trace, and whose boundary 
 in one place coincides with the boundary wall of Magdalen 
 College. No college has arisen within the ancient en- 
 closure, and Magdalen, in its present shape a late founda- 
 tion, is the only one which has arisen immediately outside 
 of it. The Roman town was no doubt utterly overthrown, 
 to be inhabited again only when the conquerors had them- 
 selves so far advanced as to know the value of towns and 
 fortresses. But before the days of Eadward the Elder the 
 place must have risen again, as Grantbridge was of im- 
 portance enough to give its name to a shire in the new 
 division of Mercia. It had its lawmen, like Lincoln and 
 Stamford, and the privileges and customs of the borough 
 are fully set out in the great Survey. Like other places, 
 it was burned in the wars of Swegen, but a wooden town 
 — and towns in that part of England^ must have been still 
 more completely wooden than elsewhere — soon sj)rang up 
 again after a burning. William the Conqueror, on his 
 return from his first northern expedition in 1068, thought 
 the place to be one which needed a castle to guard it. On
 
 PRM- ACADEMIC CAMBRIDGE. 243 
 
 tlie mound then, partly natural, partly artificial, which 
 overlooks the Grant, the castle of Grantbridge, of which 
 now no trace remains, arose at William's bidding, and 
 played its part as a place of strength and succour for the 
 invaders, while Hereward and the revolted English held 
 the Isle of Ely against them. One relic only of the eleventh 
 century remains, a small portion of the frightfully dis- 
 figured church of Saint Giles, the work of Picot the 
 Norman Sheriff — a remorseless robber, we may add, of all 
 men, French and English, within his bailiwick. Among 
 his other evil deeds, he robbed the burghers of Grant- 
 bridge of their folkland, while those of Oxford keep theirs 
 to this day. Outside the old circuit is one most remark- 
 able work of the latter days of the twelfth century, the 
 building so strangely known as the school of Pythagoras, 
 and more accurately called Merton Hall. That name it 
 takes from its owner in the thirteenth century, Walter of 
 Merton, the renowned Bishop, Chancellor, and founder, by 
 whose grant this house at Cambridge oddly became the 
 property of a college in Oxford. We may believe that it 
 is the house of a twelfth-century gentleman — we might 
 still perhaps almost venture to say a thegn — who, without 
 actually living in the town, found it safe and convenient 
 to live under the shadow of its walls. 
 
 We are still on the left bank of the river, but it is from 
 the eleventh century that we may date the extension of the 
 old borough, the beginning of which we may call the modern 
 academic town. The building of the castle involved a large 
 destruction of houses, which would further involve a migra- 
 tion of the inhabitants to other dwellings. Probably, as at 
 Lincoln, the expelled inhabitants of the upper town found 
 their new abodes on the lower ground at the foot of the 
 hill. But there was a difference between the two cases. 
 At Lincoln the old and the new town were absolutely 
 continuous, and there is no doubt that the two ancient 
 churches of Saint Mary-le-Wigford and Saint Poter- 
 at-Gowts are the churches whose building is recorded 
 
 a 2
 
 244 MEliCIA. 
 
 ill Domesday. At Cambridge the case is less clear. The 
 church of Saiut Beue't might seem at first sight to be 
 exactly analogous to the two lower churches at Lincoln. 
 But surely it must be earlier than the Lincoln towers ; 
 it does not show the same signs of Norman influence. 
 Its work is far more elaborate, but it is work of an 
 utterly primitive and barbaric type; it is inconceivable 
 that any one who, at some time after 1068, began to build 
 so enriched a work, would have failed to give his details 
 some touch of Norman character. It is far more likely 
 that the church of Saint Bene't was the church of a dis- 
 tinct village, which, it must be remembered, was separated 
 from Camboritum or Grantbridge by the river, and by the 
 marshy ground at its banks. But it must have been now, 
 in the Conqueror's da}^, that the town itself began to 
 move to the right bank of the river. The college of 
 canons founded by Picot in the church of Saint Giles 
 migrated to the ' fields of Cambridge,' in the form of a 
 Benedictine priory. Other religious foundations grew 
 up. The town increased, and, though never walled, it 
 was encompassed by a ditch. And the University and its 
 colleges grew up also, till the old Camboritum, the old 
 Grantbridge, first the Roman, then the Old-English town, 
 sank into what we should be tempted to call an obscure 
 suburb, were it not that, as being the seat of the local 
 administration of justice, it still retains somewhat of the 
 character of an akropolis. 
 
 The age of colleges has now begun, and we may pro- 
 fitably remark, as part of our pree-academic picture, the 
 way in which, as the University in some sort swallowed 
 up the town, so its colleges largely swallowed up the 
 earlier foundations of the town. Not a few colleges, both 
 at Oxford and Cambridge, represent n;ore ancient monas- 
 teries and hospitals. That this kind of change took place 
 largely at the dissolution of monasteries is not wonderful. 
 It was an obvious thing for a pious and liberal man who ob- 
 tained possession of monastic lauds — who perhaps obtained
 
 
 t^effujXMV S^BmioD 
 
 1,, face f: -M^.
 
 PRM-ACADEMIC CAMBRIDGE. 245 
 
 possession of tliem for that very purpose — to turn some por- 
 tion of them to such pious uses as the new state of things 
 allowed. In the universities especially it would have 
 been strange if the monasteries and monastic colleges 
 had not been often converted into foundations on which 
 the new system looked with more favour. The monastic 
 colleges in particular — those which were maintained 
 by some monastic house or order for the reception of 
 students of their religion — must have cried out to be 
 restored to the nearest possible use under the new 
 system. So in Oxford, Durham and Saint Bernards 
 Colleges soon reappeared as Trinity and Saint Johns ; 
 Gloucester Hall, converted for a while into the Bishop's 
 palace, was restored to academic uses, and after a while 
 grew into Worcester College ; the house of the Austin 
 Triars, famous in early University history, appeared again 
 under the guise of the most pictviresque of the later 
 colleges, Wadham. But it is more important to observe 
 that the same system had begun already before the Dis- 
 solution. Both at Oxford and at Cambridge Henry the 
 Eighth earned himself a cheap reputation for munificence 
 by creating splendid foundations out of that which cost 
 him nothing. At Cambridge he won for himself the 
 credit of a founder by turning several small colleges 
 into one large one ; and he won for himself the like repu- 
 tation at Oxford by suppressing his own college and his 
 own cathedral church, and refounding them together in 
 the guise of that anomalous society in which each element 
 does, and cannot help doing, its very best to spoil the 
 other. But King Henry might plead that, in all this, he 
 only followed the example of better men. Wolsey sup- 
 pressed small monasteries by wholesale in order to found 
 his colleges, and Chichele had before founded All Souls 
 mainly out of the spoils of alien priories. But it is more 
 curious to notice that at Oxford Magdalen College arose 
 on the site of an hospital, which was somewhat oddly 
 merged in the college — that at Cambridge Bishop Alcock
 
 246 MERCIA. 
 
 formed Jesus College, with its minster-like cliapel, out of 
 the decayed and half-ruined nunnery of Saint Radegund — 
 and that !Saint Johns College, the noble foundation of 
 Lady Margaret, also arose out of a decaying or decayed 
 society. 
 
 This last college stands on the site of an earlier hospital, 
 which was originally founded in the twelfth century, but 
 the exact date seems not to be certain. It aj)pears to have 
 had at first no ecclesiastical character at all, but to have 
 been simply a charitable foundation for the benefit of the 
 sick. Like Rahere's great foundation in London, it came 
 nearer to the nature of a modern hospital or infirmary 
 than most mediaeval foundations. Most hospitals, not 
 being actual lazar-houses, were designed, not as places 
 of temporary relief for the sick, but as places of permanent 
 refuge for the poor and old. Our Saint Johns Hospital, 
 founded by Henry Frost, a burgess of Cambridge, seems 
 to have united both objects. Soon after its foundation, a 
 more ecclesiastical character was given to the hospital 
 by the introduction of Brethren of the order of Saint 
 Austin under a Prior or Master. In 1280 Bishop Hugh of 
 Balsham attempted a curious union of objects by intro- 
 ducing a body of scholars into the hospital, the first 
 attempt, it would seem, to connect the foundation with 
 the University. As might have been expected, the secular 
 and monastic elements did not work well together, and the 
 Bishop wisely removed his scholars to form the oldest 
 distinctly academical college in Cambridge — that venerable 
 foundation of Peterhouse, the antique savour of whose 
 name is utterly lost in its polite modern description of 
 Saint Peters College. 
 
 It is clear from this instance that there was a wish 
 from an early time to connect Saint Johns Hospital with 
 the University, of which its ecclesiastical inhabitants 
 would doubtless commonly be members. The failure of 
 Hugh of Balsham's experiment does not show any indis- 
 position on the part of the brethren to fraternize with the
 
 PR^-ACADEMIC CAMBRIDGE. 247 
 
 University; it only proves that monastic and secular 
 students did not get on well together in the same house. 
 In the fifteenth century the society was ' admitted to the 
 privileges of the University,' which must have given it 
 something of the status of an academic college. Yet we 
 are told that it had greatly decayed and nearly come to 
 nothing, before its final change into the present Saint 
 Johns College early in the next century. 
 
 The original hospital was built according to a pattern 
 common in such foundations, consisting of a hall opening 
 into a chapel at the east end. The sick and infirm in- 
 mates could thus assist at divine service without going 
 out of doors, or, if need be, even without leaving their 
 beds. Then the introduction of a distinctly ecclesiastical 
 element into the foundation naturally led to architectural 
 changes. The Austin prior and brethren were not satisfied 
 with the little oratory at the end of the hall of the sick 
 folk ; they built them a much larger church somewhat to 
 the south of it, following pretty nearly the usual type of 
 Friars' churches. The infirmary with its chapel, originally 
 the whole building, seems to have been preserved to its 
 old use, only sinking into the subordinate position held by 
 a monastic infirmary. Then the hospital, as a foundation, 
 finally gave way to the college ; parts of its buildings were 
 embedded in those of the college. It is curious to see how 
 the college, once in full possession, dealt with this relic of 
 prse-academic Cambridge. When the whole was turned into 
 a secular college, this later and larger church was at once 
 ready as the college chapel. Its nave however was longer 
 than was needed for the ante- chapel of a college ; so the 
 church was without scruple cut short at the west end, just 
 as happened to Saint Radegunds minster when it became 
 the chapel of- Jesus College, and to Saint Frithswyths at 
 Oxford when it fell into the hands of Wolsey. But the 
 academic society had no need for the infirmary and its 
 chapel ; so they were freely turned to secular uses. At 
 last, in our own day, the College found it necessary to
 
 24S MERCIA. 
 
 build a larger and more splendid cliapel. A new site was 
 chosen, and tlie old cliapel and the infirmary finally 
 perished. The work which the good old Cambridge 
 burgher made for the ' poor, infirm, and sick persons ' of 
 his own town passed altogether away. The thought 
 is forced on the mind, whether, as the universities grew 
 lip in the boroughs, as the colleges grew up in the 
 universities, some change as great as that from monasteries 
 and hospitals to colleges may, in these days of academical 
 revolution, be the destiny of the colleges themselves.
 
 249 
 
 PK^-ACADEMIC OXFORD. 
 
 1870. 
 
 It is still harder to call up an idea of Oxford in the days 
 before its University was in being than it is to conjure 
 up the same kind of vision in the case of Cambridge. 
 On the one hand, the buildings of the University and its 
 colleges have more completely given the place its archi- 
 tectural character than they have at Cambridge. On the 
 other hand, Cambridge has changed its site. The academic 
 Cambridge planted itself on ground of its own, and has made 
 the Roman and Old-English borough into a kind of suburb. 
 But academic Oxford arose in the heart of the earlier city ; 
 it has stamped on it a new character ; it has spread itself 
 far beyond its walls ; but the old site has never been 
 forsaken or shorn of its dignity. Setting aside a few 
 structures of very recent date, all the main buildings, 
 civic, ecclesiastical, and academical, and the great majority 
 of the colleges, stand within the circuit of the ancient 
 walls, except where the walls themselves have perished to 
 make way for them. In this way it is harder to fancy a 
 town which derives its chief character from a particular 
 class of buildings, as it stood in the days before any of 
 those buildings arose, than it is to conceive a site of the 
 same class in the days before it was covered with any 
 buildings whatever. 
 
 On the whole however more is left to remind us of 
 prse-academic Oxford than of pra3-academic Cambridge. 
 While at Cambridge the chief monastic establishment has 
 been wholly swept away, at Oxford it has been turned to
 
 250 MERCIA. 
 
 account in tlie latter state of tilings by being put to a 
 twofold use as the cathedral cliurcli of the diocese and as 
 the chapel of the largest college in the University. • Or, 
 if it be argued that the vanished priory of Barnwell an- 
 swers rather to the vanished abbey of Oseney, the com- 
 parison still remains true in another shape. For in 
 that case the parallel must be sought between Saint 
 Frithswyths and Saint Radegunds, and it is plain that 
 Christ Church holds a much more important place in the 
 general view ot Oxford than the chapel of Jesus College 
 occupies in the general view of Cambridge. Then, while 
 the later Cambridge remained unwalled, Oxford was al- 
 ways a walled city, and of its walls large parts remain 
 and the circuit can be traced throughout. Of the castle 
 at Cambridge the mound only survives ; at Oxford, beside 
 the mound, one tower, stern and rude but picturesque, 
 remains as the memorial of that great and historic fortress. 
 The tower of Saint Michaels church at Oxford cannot 
 be compared for stateliness, or probably for antiquity, 
 Avith the analogous tower of Saint Bene'ts at Cambridge. 
 But its more direct connexion with the history of the city 
 and its defences makes it in some sort a more speaking 
 memorial of the most stirring time in the local annals. 
 If indeed Saint Bene'ts shows that the present Cambridge 
 grew upon the site of an earlier English settlement, then 
 its importance in the local history is really greater than 
 that of Saint Michaels. But this is an importance which 
 would be at once contested by any one who chooses to 
 bring doAvn the origin of Saint Bene'ts to a later date. 
 But no one can place Saint Michaels later, and some 
 may be inclined to place it earlier, than a date contem- 
 porary with the building of the Norman castle. On the 
 whole then, though Oxford has no site which speaks so 
 clearly of the older state of things as the elder Grantbridge 
 looking down upon modern Cambridge, yet Oxford seems 
 to have a greater aggregate than Cambridge of the re- 
 mains of prse-academic days.
 
 PRM-ACADEMIC OXFORD. 251 
 
 Wlien we look to tlie early history of tlie two towns, 
 a balance of the same sort may be struck between them. 
 Cambridge, witli its distinct Eomau traces, has the advan- 
 tage of antiquity ; Oxford has the advantage of earlier 
 and more constant historic importance. The authentic 
 history of Oxford, like that of Cambridge, does not begin 
 before the tenth century. Such an assertion would doubt- 
 less sound strange enough in the ears of zealous academical 
 antiquaries of a past generation, but it is the plain truth 
 of history nevertheless. Our first historical notice of 
 Oxford occurs in the year 912, in the reign of Eadward 
 the Elder. Those who believe in the spurious passage of 
 Asser about Grimbald and the scholars with whom he 
 quarrelled may perhaps also believe that the present crypt 
 of Saint Peters church is Grimbald's work. The name 
 of Oxford does not once occur in the history of Bseda. 
 Nor does it occur in the Chronicles till the comparatively 
 late date which we have just given. The name is not 
 found in charters till a still later date, namely in the 
 days of King ^thelred. There is nothing but the 
 legend of Saint Friths wyth to connect the place with any 
 days earlier than the days of Alfred, and there is nothing 
 to connect it even with the days of Alfred, except a coin 
 the reading of which has been disputed. But when Oxford 
 does at last appear, it appears as one of the most im- 
 portant towns in England, a town fairly on a level with 
 Exeter, Lincoln, and Norwich. In the first entry where 
 the name is mentioned Oxford is coupled with London ; 
 these are the two great cities which King Eadward takes 
 into his hands on the death oi Ealdorman ^thelred to 
 secure the obedience of the Mercian realm. In the new 
 division and new nomenclature of central England it be- 
 came the head of a shire, and it is not without reason 
 that Henry of Huntingdon seems to wonder that it had 
 never become the seat of a bishopric. We hear of it, as 
 of other places, as destroyed and rising again in the 
 Danish wars, and during the greater part of the eleventh
 
 352 MERCIA. 
 
 century it appears as tlie chosen place for holding the 
 most important national assemblies. It was not indeed, 
 as Westminster, Winchester, and Gloucester became at a 
 somewhat later time, one of the fixed places where the 
 King held his court and wore his crown at the three great 
 festivals of the Church ; but the times when Oxford is 
 spoken of as the seat of great national councils point to 
 it as possessing a practical importance which set it in 
 some sort above places of higher formal dignity. When 
 a meeting was designed to be specially national, when 
 some solemn act was to be gone through which affected 
 Northern and Southern England alike, Oxford was the 
 place which was commonly chosen. Its position on the 
 great border stream of Wessex and Mercia made it ad- 
 mirably suited for such a purpose. It was at Oxford that 
 the Gemot was held after the restoration of ^thelred, at 
 which the thegns of the Five Boroughs, Sigeferth and 
 Morkere, were done to death by the traitor Eadric. To 
 this meeting a tale has been transferred which seems 
 really to belong to the massacre of Saint Brice. It is on 
 that day of slaughter that we get our first glimpse of the 
 minster of Saint Frithswyth, the predecessor of the present 
 cathedral church. Some of the threatened Danes took 
 shelter in the tower of the church, which was burned to dis- 
 lodge them. The great meeting of the early days of Cnut, 
 in which Englishmen and Danes were reconciled, when 
 both agreed in the renewal of the Law of Eadgar, was 
 held at Oxford. There too was that other great meeting 
 held in which the claims of the sons of Cnut to the 
 crown were discussed, and when the kingdom was again 
 divided. Oxford seems to have ranked as the capital of 
 the first Harold ; it was at least the place of his corona- 
 tion and of his death. Oxford was" again the seat of 
 that great, though irregular, meeting of 1065, in which 
 the claims of the Northumbrian insurgents were finally 
 granted, and when the Law of Cnut was restored, as 
 the Law of Eadgar had been in Cnut's own time. In
 
 PRM-ACADEMIC OXFORD. 253 
 
 all these cases Oxford is chosen as the place for national 
 assemblies of special importance, where it was specially 
 needed that both the Northern and Southern parts of Eng- 
 land should be represented. 
 
 All these events show the great importance of the 
 borough of Oxford in the eleventh century ; but they are 
 events which cannot be said to have left any visible memo- 
 ries behind them, except so far as the existing buildings of 
 Saint Friths wyths may be looked on as representing in a 
 figure the buildings which were destroyed and restored in 
 the days of iEthelred. Of the next epoch we have actually 
 existing traces. It is far from clear at what moment of the 
 gradual conquest of England Oxford came into the hands of 
 William ; but few towns in England suffered more, whether 
 through a capture by storm or through the oppression of 
 William's officers. But it is certain that in 1071 the famous 
 castle of Oxford was begun by Eobert of Oily, Olgi, Ouilly 
 — in half-a-dozen spellings. He most likely took his name 
 from the village of Ouilly -le-Vicomte, near Lisieux. This 
 Eobert came over with several of his kinsfolk, and with 
 his sworn brother Roger of Ivry. He was amply pro- 
 vided for by William, chiefly by a marriage with Ealdgyth, 
 one of the daughters and heiresses of Wiggod of Walling- 
 ford, one of the few Englishmen who contrived to keep 
 wealth and rank under William. This Robert and his suc- 
 cessors have left their mark on Oxford, civic and military, 
 to this day. Of their castle indeed the single tower that 
 shows itself can hardly be, as it has been often called, 
 the great keep or donjon. But in 1074 Robert, with 
 his wife and his friend Roger, began the foundation of the 
 church of Saint George in the castle of Oxford ; and, though 
 the upper structure has pei'ished, the crypt of the original 
 work still abides. It is still more interesting to read the 
 accounts of Robert in the local history of Abingdon, in 
 which, after allowing for some measure of pious exaggera- 
 tion, some amount of truth may surely lurk. We hear 
 there of his early sins and enormities, how he robbed rich
 
 254 MERCIA. 
 
 and poor, and speciall}^ the abbey of Abingdon; but 
 liow sickness and visions and the influence of his English 
 wife brought him to a better mind, and how his latter days 
 were spent as a benefactor of the Church, a friend of the 
 poor, a promoter of works of public usefulness, and a 
 doer of good deeds of every kind. Amongst these is 
 specially recorded the building of a bridge, and the 
 building of a bridge was, at Abingdon at least, looked 
 on even four centuries later as a ' blessed business,' second 
 in merit only to the building of Holy Church itself. But 
 we are more concerned with the fact that Robert built or 
 repaired various parish churches both in and out of the 
 town, and there is very little doubt that the tower of Saint 
 Michaels is a surviving part of one of his buildings. 
 Forming, as it did, part of the fortification of the town, its 
 air is rather military than ecclesiastical ; its type, like many 
 of the smaller buildings of William's reign, is distinctly of 
 the Primitive and not of the Norman Romanesque ; but, 
 while it eschews all Norman ornament, it equally eschews 
 those earlier forms of ornament of which at Saint Bene'ts 
 there is no lack. It is an exact parallel in the eleventh 
 century to the tower of New College in the fourteenth ; 
 their position, as forming part of a line of defence, has 
 stamped upon them their peculiar character. 
 
 The next century saw a still greater work arise at the 
 hands of members of the same family. This was the 
 priory, and afterwards abbey, of Oseney, a little way out 
 of the town, a church Avhich under Henry the Eighth be- 
 came for a moment the cathedral church of the new diocese. 
 The legend of its foundation is well known. The first 
 Robert and his English wife were childless, but in the 
 next generation Oxford castle was held by his nephew the 
 second Robert, whom we also find ^ married to a wife 
 bearing an English name. Edith had been one of the 
 mistresses of Henry the First, and was the mother of 
 one of his sons, Robert, who plays a part in the wars 
 of his half-sister the Empress, but who must be carefully
 
 PRM-ACADEMIC OXFORD. 255 
 
 disting-uislied from his more famous brother Robert Earl 
 of Gloucester. The tradition sets her before us as singu- 
 larly simple-minded and specially open to ecclesiastical 
 iufluences. She was struck by the constant chattering* of 
 certain magpies, and asked of her confessor, who, it seems, 
 knew the language of birds, what it might mean. A com- 
 parative raythologist would say that we have here again 
 the story, not so very distant in time, of Sultan Mahmoud 
 and the owls. But in the neighbourhood of Oxford, 
 after the good deeds of the later days of the first Robert, 
 ruined villages were hardly to be looked for. The con- 
 fessor, Ralph by name, told her — we by no means guarantee 
 the orthodoxy of his doctrine — that the pies were no other 
 than the silly souls in purgatory, thus paying part of their 
 allotted penalty. No work could better profit the lady's 
 soul than the foundation of a monastery where they might 
 be prayed for. Edith hearkened to Ralph, and her 
 husband Robert hearkened to Edith, and in their joint 
 names a house of Austin canons arose, of which Ralph 
 became the first prior. The details of the legend we can 
 neither afiirm nor deny ; but that Oseney priory was 
 founded in 1129 by Robert of Ouilly and his wife Edith, 
 and that the first prior bore the name of Ralph, are 
 points about which there is no doubt. The second prior 
 grew into an abbot, and it should be noticed that he 
 bore the name of Wiggod, clearly pointing to the keeping 
 up of a connexion in the Ouilly family with the nation and 
 blood of the father-in-law of its founder. 
 
 Oxford castle, and Robert of Ouilly himself, as well as 
 his stepson, played, as every one knows, a famous part in 
 the wars of Stephen and Matilda. In the next century 
 Oxford plays a greater part still as the place of the re- 
 nowned Provisions. But before we reach those days, 
 before even we reach the wars of Stephen and the Empress, 
 we have done with that elder Oxford whose inhabitants 
 were all either burghers, priests, monks, or soldiers. The 
 foundation of Robert and Edith was the last act in the
 
 266 MERCIA. 
 
 history of prse-academic Oxford. Four years later we read 
 in the local clironicle how ' Magister Robertus Pulein scrip- 
 turas divinas, quse in Anglia obsoluerant, apud Oxoniam 
 legere ccepit.' The faculty of divinity had now made its 
 beginning. Sixteen years later, Vacarius, first master — 
 so Gervase deemed him — of laws and lawyers, began to 
 teach the law of Rome in the very days of the anarchy. 
 Sixty years later, prse-academic Oxford came back for a 
 moment. In 1209 two — some say four — scholars, dwellers 
 in a hall of their own hiring, were hanged by the practice 
 of the citizens on a charge of murder, with which it was 
 held, by their comrades at least, that one only had any- 
 thing to do, while in him the deed was only chance-medley. 
 All the scholars, three thousand in number, left the city, 
 and Oxford was again as it had been in the days before 
 Robert Puleyn. But four years later, Nicolas, Bishop of 
 Tusculum and Legate of the Holy See, put no small 
 penance on these heady and high-minded burghers. Prse- 
 academic Oxford came to an end for ever. Academic 
 Oxford grew and flourished, and before the end of the 
 century its oldest college was in being.
 
 257 
 
 SAINT ALBANS ABBEY. 
 
 1871-1878. 
 
 It needs somewhat of an effort to apply the name of 
 * cathedral ' to the building which has been known for 
 ages as Saint Albans Abbey. It may well keep its older 
 name, as does Bath, where abbots so long ago gave way 
 to bishops, and whence bishops have long practically passed 
 away. So, among those who are behind the scenes, does 
 Durham, where there never were abbots, as distinct from 
 bishops, at all. It will need a long and illustrious suc- 
 cession of bishops of Saint Albans to make the church as 
 famous in its new character as it has for ages been in its 
 old. It is a church whose foundations lie deep in the 
 early history of our land. For the abbej' of Saint Albans, 
 like the abbey of Glastonbury, is one of the ties which 
 connect the Church of the Englishman with the Church 
 of the Briton. But at Saint Albans the tie is much less 
 direct than it is at Glastonbury. It is a material rather 
 than an historical tie. At Glastonbury the British founda- 
 tion itself lived through the English Conquest, and the 
 British church still abides in a figure. At Glastonbury there 
 is an uninterrupted continuity between the earliest days 
 of Christianity and the days of Henry the Eightli. At 
 Saint Albans we have to lengthen at one end and to shorten 
 at the other; the continuity lasts from the days of Offa 
 to our own time. A church is indeed s lid to have been 
 built over the remains of the martyr almost as soon as 
 his martyrdom happened, and the swift change from the 
 days of Maximian and Galerius to the days of Constantine 
 
 s
 
 L>5,^ MERCIA. 
 
 makes this tradition perfectly possible. But whatever 
 rose on the spot in Roman times, or in the days of dark- 
 ness between Roman and Englishman, was swept away in 
 the storm of the English Conquest. Verulam, conquered 
 by heathen invaders in the sixth century, was destroyed 
 and forsaken. Glastonbury, conquered by Christian in- 
 vaders in the seventh, was preserved and reverenced. 
 The Roman town became a desolate ruin, and it never 
 was, like Chester and Cambridge, restored on its old site. 
 The abbey, founded by Offa in the eighth century on the 
 supposed site of the martyrdom, rose at a little distance 
 from the Roman town, and the English town of course 
 grew up around the abbey. In site and foundation then 
 there is no continuity whatever between Roman Verulam 
 and English Saint Albans. But this very lack of historical 
 continuity supplied a connexion of another kind. The 
 choice which Offa made of a site and a patron for his new 
 foundation implies a sentimental reverence for the state 
 of things which had passed away, of which we have not 
 many cases in English monastic history. The British or 
 Roman worthy received a posthumous adoption into the 
 Teutonic fold, and took his place, on the abbey seal and 
 everywhere else, as ' Protomartyr Anglorum.' 
 
 But besides this historical connexion. Saint Albans 
 and Verulam have a purely material connexion of the very 
 closest kind. The site is changed, but the materials are, so 
 to speak, personally the same. At Glastonbury, with all its 
 historical continuity, we cannot point to any stone which 
 was wrought into its present shape at an earlier time than 
 the twelfth century. There is no physical identity between 
 the western Lady chapel and the wooden church of the 
 Briton. But at Saint Albans we see, though on another 
 site, the actual bricks of Roman Verulam ; possibly we 
 see the actual bricks of the first church of the protomartyr. 
 The forsaken Roman town appears in a twofold character 
 in the days of the early abbots. It was a thorn in their 
 sides, inasmuch as its ruins afforded a lurking-place for
 
 SAINT ALBANS ABBEY. 259 
 
 thieves and other evil persons. It was also a most useful 
 quarry out of whose endless store of Roman bricks they 
 dug the materials for their owu buildings. We might 
 perhaps add that it filled a third function as an occasional 
 subject of scientific research. The eighth abbot, Ealdred, 
 did his best to clear the ruins of their dangerous in- 
 habitants, and he carried off such bricks and stones as 
 were useful for the building of his church. But he also 
 explored, for the benefit of comparative mythology, a cave 
 which had once been dwelled in by a dragon, and he took 
 care not to destroy the traces of its former owner : ' ves- 
 tigia seterna habitationis serpentines derelinquens.' For 
 the benefit of geologists too he found ' conchas, quales 
 littus maris solet educare vel ejicere cum arenis sequoreis.' 
 The next abbot, Eadmer, had more of the spirit of Omar 
 about him ; he burned the idolatrous books which were 
 found in the wall, and ground to powder the altars and 
 relics of heathendom. Out of this endless store of earlier 
 remains the present church of Saint Albans was built by 
 the first foreign abbot, the Lombard Paul, the nephew of 
 Lanfranc. We say built by him, because, though much has 
 been added and altered, the impress of the original Norman 
 design still remains stamped on the whole building. The 
 enormous length of its western limb must have been some- 
 what relieved when it had a high roof and western towers, 
 and it is in some measure accounted for by the fact that at 
 Saint Albans the choir was placed, not only, as was usual in 
 Norman churches, under the central tower, but actually to 
 the west of it, as it still is at Westminster. Yet, allowing 
 for all this, the actual nave of Saint Albans, not reckoning 
 the choir, is one of the vastest that we have, ranking with 
 Ely, Winchester, and Peterborough. As the building now 
 stands, there is something uncouth and disproportionate 
 in its vast, long, and seemingly low body, neither lifted 
 up, as it were, by the high-pitched roof nor yet broken 
 by pinnacles. Yet its very strangeness and uncouthness 
 makes it the more striking ; it gives it a kind of personal 
 
 s 2
 
 260 MERC I A, 
 
 character of its own, wliicli we are not sure that we would 
 destroy, even to have the high roof and the towers back 
 ag-aiu. The very rudeness and strangeness is somehow 
 not out of phice. We hardly judge of Saint Albans by any 
 rules of art ; it seems as if it had not been made, but had 
 grown. Those massive Romanesque arches were actually 
 put together by an insolent stranger of the twelfth cen- 
 tury, who turned the English abbots out of their tombs, 
 calling them rude and ignorant barbarians. But in so 
 putting them together he only carried out the schemes 
 which had been planned by the men whom he despised, 
 and used the materials which they had collected for 
 the work. And the materials which Englishmen had 
 gathered together, and which the stranger made use of, 
 may have alrea<ly done duty, seven or eight hundred years 
 earlier, as the materials of an Imperial basilica, of a 
 heathen temple, or of the earliest church of Saint Alban 
 himself. The use of these old Roman relics gives us a 
 church, Norman in date, but with very few Norman 
 details. The massive brick arches have no details at all, 
 and in the towers and in the transepts certain baluster 
 shafts have been used which carry us back to the earliest 
 works at Jarrow and Monkswearmouth. These, we can 
 hardly doubt, were at least among the materials made 
 ready for the work by the ancient abbots, if they are not 
 actually fragments of the church of Offa used up again. 
 On the whole. Saint Albans, built after the Conquest by 
 the most scornful of the strangers whom the Conquest 
 brought into England, is still, in style, material, and feel- 
 ing, that one among our great chm-ches which most 
 thoroughly carries us back to Old-English and even to 
 earlier days. 
 
 The histoiy of the fabric of the minster ought to be 
 Avell known, as it is minutely recorded in one of the fullest 
 of mediseval local histories. But there is no case in which 
 it is more needful to proclaim the eternal precept, ' To 
 the laAV and to the testimony.' Let no man think that he
 
 SAINT ALBANS ABBEY. 261 
 
 knows anything of the history of Saint Albans, unless he has 
 read it for himself in the Latin. Otherwise he may be 
 tempted to think that the Abbot bullied the Jew, when it 
 was really the Jew that bullied the Abbot. Of the ' Gesta 
 Abbatum Sancti Albani,' the former part, including the 
 mythical parts — and the history even of Abbot Frithric 
 in the eleventh century is strangely mythical — comes from 
 no less a pen than that of Matthew Paris. Saint Albans 
 indeed was the seat of a long-continued school of his- 
 torians, who took special care to record the history of 
 their own dwelling-place, and to notice the architectural 
 history of their own church. How came the west front 
 — if it still exists — to be so poor ? To say nothing of later 
 destruction and insertions, read the story of John, the 
 twenty-first Abbot ; how he began to build and was not 
 able to finish ; how he began a stately west front of most 
 exquisite work, and how his more practical successor, 
 William of Trumpington, carried it out in a much plainer 
 style. Though the main limbs still keep the plan and 
 proportions of the original building, yet the various 
 changes have brought in a great deal of variety in style, 
 making the church a text-book of mediaeval architecture 
 from its beginning to its ending. One thing specially 
 to be noticed is that, though but little of the ancient 
 fittings remains, few churches retain the ancient arrange- 
 ments more distinctly marked. The great Saint Cuth- 
 berht's screen still spans the western limb ; not a mere 
 rood-screen, but, as its two doorways show, the reredos 
 of the people's high altar at the eastern end of the nave. 
 With this before our eyes, it is well to remember that 
 the great East-Anglian churches of Wymondham and 
 Binham, two of the best examples of the double arrange- 
 ment, were both of them cells of Saint Albans. So was 
 Tynemouth, in the far north, where we also know from 
 Matthew Paris that the same arrangement was made, and 
 where it is still to be seen, though both churches are in 
 ruins. The favourite arrangement of the Austin canons is
 
 2G2 MERCIA. 
 
 here adopted by Benedictines. But we will not venture to 
 say whether the mother church was divided in property, 
 as it clearly seems to have been in use. At the east 
 end again, behind the monastic high altar, we still see 
 the great reredos, the fellow of that at Winchester, and 
 beyond that now again stands the shrine of the proto- 
 martyr. Now tbat Saint Albans has become the seat of 
 a bishopric, it is well to remember that it is really two 
 churches under one roof. It is not a case like Hereford 
 or Lichfield, where there could be no doubt as to throw- 
 ing down all encumbrances, and making the church one 
 whole. The vast size of Saint Albans, and the ancient 
 division which made two ritual churches out of what 
 was architecturally one, make this a special case. When 
 the chapter is fully organized, we shall have, as once 
 was at Carlisle and Lincoln, the church of the canons and 
 the church of the parish ready made to hand.
 
 NOETHUMBEELAND
 
 265 
 
 POINTS IN EAELY NORTHUMBRIAN 
 HISTORY. 
 
 1876. 
 
 [Read before the Royal Institution of Kingston-on-Hull, February 22, 1876. 
 I must here, as in some other cases, make my apology to Jovius for speak- 
 ing of him as 'the great persecutor of the Christian name.' I may men- 
 tion that the formal ceremony of laying aside the Empire was done, not 
 at Salona, but at Nikomedeia.] 
 
 I HAVE been asked to come once more among you, as I 
 have done more than once in other years ; and I have 
 been farther asked to take as my subject something bear- 
 ing on the early history of your own part of England. 
 Perhaps, if I had been left wholly to myself, I might not 
 have chosen such a theme. Out of the abundance of the 
 heart the mouth speaketh ; and my mouth would be best 
 obeying the dictates of my heart if I were now to tell you 
 what I have seen among the stony hills of Herzegovina, 
 among the mountain plains of Montenegro, and among 
 the hills and islands of the Dalmatian shore. I have 
 come back thence to my own Wessex; I have passed 
 thence to your Northumberland ; yet I must confess that 
 my heart is neither in Northumberland nor in Wessex, 
 but that it lingers still in the lands beyond the Hadriatic. 
 And yet even in those lands there have been points and 
 moments when my thoughts have been carried, by no slow, 
 by no direct or unnatural process, to Britain, and in 
 Britain to its Northumbrian reojions. From the most 
 wondrous spot on the Dalmatian shore the path is easy to 
 the metropolis of Northern England. There, on one of
 
 26G NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 the many peninsulas of that broken coast, with the sea in 
 front, with the mountains at its back, with lesser hills 
 risinjjf like watch-towers on either side, with islands like 
 gnard-ships anchored off the haven, did Diocletian, weary 
 of empire, choose the place of rest for his later days. 
 There, hard b}- Salona, once one of the great cities of 
 the world, now lying ruined and desolate, he built for 
 himself the mightiest house that ever arose at the 
 bidduig of a single man. He reared the palace of Spa- 
 lato, the house which became a city, the house whose 
 walls sheltered the fugitives of fallen Salona, and which still 
 flourishes as a city of men, as a haven of the sea, while 
 the older dwelling-place of man is forsaken. There the 
 great persecutor of the Christian name reared the temple 
 of his gods, the mausoleum which was to receive his own 
 ashes. And there, as the centre of his work, he reared 
 the long rows of columns and arches which, after thirteen 
 hundred years, still claim our undiminished admiration 
 as the parents and models of every later effort of the 
 building art. A few years passed away ; the crown of 
 Diocletian rested on the broAv of a Csesar yet more famous 
 than himself; and the buildings of the bitterest foe of the 
 Christian faith became the models of the first temples 
 which the lords of the world dedicated to the use of 
 Christian worship. And he who wrought this change 
 was one whom you who hear me may claim, if not as a 
 countryman, at least as a guest. It was from your land, 
 from our own island and from your special part of it, that 
 the man went forth who was to give another face to the 
 Roman dominion and to stamp his impress on all the later 
 history of the world. The birthplace of the first Christian 
 Emperor has been disputed between Illyria and Britain, 
 between the mainland which opens to. the sea at Diocle- 
 tian's Spalato and the mainland which opens to the sea 
 at Edward's Kingston-upon-Hull. Few scholars now 
 doubt that Illyria has the better claim ; but no man has 
 ever doubted that, if Britain did not see the first days of
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 267 
 
 his life, she at least saw the first days of his empire ; no 
 man has ever doubted that the crown which Diocletian 
 laid aside at Salona was placed upon the brow of Con- 
 stantine at York. And the work which the one began 
 the other finished. The organization of the Koman power 
 on a new and firmer basis, the true creation of that long- 
 Imperial line whose fall living men can still remember, 
 was a work which was begun by the man who withdrew 
 from empire within the walls which we still may gaze on at 
 Spalato ; it was brought to perfection by the man who was 
 called to empire within the walls which we still may gaze 
 on at old Eboracum. And as it was with the political, so it 
 was with the artistic work. The forms of beauty which, 
 at the bidding of the heathen persecutor, had risen in all 
 the freshness of the new birth of art, were turned, at the 
 bidding of the Christian founder, to adorn the holy places 
 of the faith which Diocletian boasted that he had swept 
 away from off the earth. The arcades of Spalato were 
 the models of the arcades of the earliest and noblest of 
 Eoman churches, of Saint John Lateran and Saint Paul 
 without-the-Walls. They were the models of Eavenna 
 and Lucca and Pisa, the more distant models of the nave 
 of Southwell and the nave of Selby, the more distant 
 models still of Canterbury and York, of Ripon and How- 
 den, of Pievaux and Fountains, of Hedon and Patrington, 
 of Beverley and Hull. It is then, I deem, by no strained 
 process of thought that from the resting-place of Diocle- 
 tian the mind makes its way to the crowning-place of 
 Constantine. It is by no crooked path that from Dalmatia 
 the thoughts wander to Northern Britain, that the walls 
 and towers of Spalato call up the memory of the walls 
 and towers of the capital of your shire, the metropolis of 
 your province. And there is one analogy which may 
 bring us nearer still to the spot on which we are now met. 
 The origin of some of the cities of the earth is shrouded 
 in darkness ; of others we know the names of the per- 
 son al founders. No man can tell when or under whose
 
 268 yOJtTHUMBEHLAND. 
 
 guidance Salona and Eboracum first became dwelling- 
 places of man. But we know wlio called into being the 
 haven of Spalato and the haven of Kingston. And the 
 founder of Kingston holds a place in the history of Eng- 
 land at least equal to the place which the founder of 
 Spalato holds in the history of Eome. As Diocletian was 
 the organizer, the second founder of the Roman Empire, 
 so Edward was the great organizer, the last of the many 
 founders, of the English kingdom. And if the persecuted 
 Christian had cause to curse the rule of Diocletian, the 
 banished Hebrew had only less cause to curse the rule of 
 Edward. But the creation of Edward had a worthier 
 beginning than the creation of Diocletian. Diocletian, 
 weary of dominion, built himself a house, and, in the 
 chances of after times, his house grew into a city. Ed- 
 ward, in the fulness of his power, in the far-seeing keen- 
 ness of his wisdom, marked out a spot, not for himself 
 but for his kingdom ; and there sprang into being at his 
 word one of the great seats of that seafaring enterprise, 
 that commercial wealth, of England which were among 
 the objects which the great king had nearest to his heart. 
 I have thus, I hope, shown that the road from Dal- 
 matia to Deira, that the special road from Spalato to 
 Kingston-upon-Hull, is somewhat less long, somewhat 
 less crooked, than you might at first sight have thought. 
 But, having made the journe}', I must not forget at which 
 end of it my immediate duty lies. I have to speak of 
 Deira, not of Dalmatia. I must remember that my 
 business lies on the banks of the Humber and on the 
 shores of the German Ocean, not among the gulfs and 
 islands and peninsulas of the Hadriatic. I have to 
 trace out, broadly and hastily, but, if I can, truly and 
 clearly, some of the leading features of- the history of your 
 part of England and of Britain in its relations to the wider 
 history of England and of Britain in general. In so 
 doing, I must make some geographical distinctions. We 
 in the South often talk of the North of England, as you
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 269 
 
 may perhaps sometimes find occasion to talk back again 
 of the South. But I am not sure that the words ' North 
 of England ' always mean exactly the same extent of 
 country on the map. It means rather different things to 
 the political inquirer and to the picturesque tourist. If 
 we were now to begin to talk politics, and to discuss the 
 distribution of seats in the House of Commons, we should 
 not get on very far without using the words ' North of 
 England.' But we should use them in a sense which 
 would not take in the whole of the North of England ; 
 we should use them in a sense which would most likely 
 leave out the most northern part of all. We should mean 
 primarily Yorkshire and Lancashire — perhaps, if we meant 
 to be very accurate, certain parts of Yorkshire and Lan- 
 cashire. To most people in the South, the North of 
 England would, in such a discussion, mean Yorkshire and 
 Lancashire, and not much else. Those who knew some- 
 thing more of the North might go on to take in the coal- 
 fields of Durham and of the southern part of Northumber- 
 land in the modern sense. But, in such a discussion, no 
 one would take in, because there is no reason why he 
 should take in, Cumberland, Westmoreland, or the northern 
 part of Northumberland. To the picturesque tourist, on 
 the other hand, the North of England would mean mainly 
 Cumberland and Westmoreland, the Lake district in 
 short — in ignorance perhaps of the rich stores of natural 
 beauty to be found in Yorkshire, in further ignorance 
 perhaps that no small part of the Lake district itself 
 lies within the borders of Lancashire. This last is a 
 grievance which the Cartmel part of Lancashire has to 
 share with some other parts of the world. It is a hard 
 task to convince mankind that Mont Blanc is not, and 
 never was, in Switzerland. So in my own part of our 
 island, our local feelings are often trampled on by tourists 
 who calmly set down the finest scenery in Somerset as 
 being part of Devonshire. My local back was not a little 
 put up when I once read in a tourist book that the Bade,
 
 270 NORTHUMHEMLANl). 
 
 a river which no one here is likely ever to have heard of, 
 but every inch of Avhose course lies in Somerset, was the 
 best trout-sireaui in Devonshire. ' West of England ' is 
 a phrase just as vague as North. That phrase takes in 
 C{U>ucestersliire, at all events when cloth is the matter in 
 hand ; yet the city of Gloucester is a good deal nearer to 
 the North Foreland in Kent than it is to the Land's End 
 in Cornwall. Bath, which is more undoubtedly part of the 
 West of England, stands about equally distant from the 
 eastern and western euds of the island. I mention these 
 facts, because difficulties of the same kind as those which 
 meet us in our common modern speech meet us also in 
 dealing with the early history of our country. If I were to 
 speak of the early history of Northern England, I might be 
 fairly asked to detine my meaning a little more exactly. 
 There is a history of Northern England which would take 
 ill a very wide range indeed, which would have a good 
 deal to say to the history of Scotland, of Wales, and of 
 central England. Within that history there is, what the 
 mention of Northern England in early times would most 
 naturally suggest, the history of Northumberland in the 
 widest sense, sometimes as a single kingdom, sometimes 
 as the two kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. Within this 
 history again there is, what more immediately concerns 
 you here, the special history of Deira or Yorkshire. Now 
 each of these greater and smaller regions really has a 
 history of its own in the strictest sense. And what I am 
 trying to do now is, not to tell you the history of any one 
 of them in detail, but to point out some of the special 
 features of each in relation to the history of the others, 
 and to the history of England in general. 
 
 The main characteristic feature in the history of 
 Northern England may be said to .be this. Northern 
 England has over and over again had the chief place in 
 the island set before it ; it has grasped at it ; it has held it 
 for a while ;- but it has never permanently ke|)t it, till, in 
 quite modern times, it has certainly both grasped it and
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 271 
 
 kept it from one point of view. Politically and commer- 
 cially, Northern IBngland, that is, in this sense of the 
 words, chiefly Yorkshire and Lancashire, now holds, as 
 you know much better than I can tell you, the first local 
 place in our island. I say the first local place, because, 
 after all, the greatest city of the island, the capital of the 
 whole kingdom and of the whole British dominions, is 
 not within your borders. But the importance of London 
 is not a local importance, like the importance of Manches- 
 ter and Liverpool, of Leeds and Hull. London became 
 the capital of England, because, among the great cities of 
 England, it was at once the greatest and, in a certain 
 sense, the most central ; perhaps we may add that London 
 earned its place by gallant resistance to the Scandinavian 
 invader. But the modern importance of London is wholly 
 that of a capital, not that of a local city. The importance 
 of Liverpool and Manchester is the importance of Liver- 
 pool and Manchester in themselves ; the importance of 
 London is not the importance of London in itself; it is 
 the importance of the place which is the seat of the common 
 government of the whole land, the centre and meeting- 
 place of people from every part of the whole land. In 
 that vast range of buildings which is popularly called 
 'London' and vulgarly called 'the metropolis,' there is, 
 unless haply within that ancient and illustrious city round 
 which that range of buildings has grown, no real local 
 love for the place itself. People who cannot live save in 
 London, who despise everything out of London, who uncon- 
 sciously fancy that London is the whole world, have not 
 the same local patriotism for London which a man of one 
 of your great towns has for his own town. It is not Londo n 
 as London, it is the capital of England and of the British 
 dominions, which your man who cannot live out of London 
 really cherishes. For strictly local importance — for the 
 personal importance, so to speak, of the place itself, as 
 distinguished from what we may call the official import- 
 ance of the capital — Northern England now undoubtedly
 
 372 NORTHUMBERLAhD, 
 
 stands first. It stands first, all the more unmistakeably 
 first, because it is not the seat of actual dominion. If York 
 had become, as it very well might have become, the abiding 
 capital of England, the other towns of Northern England 
 could hardly have risen to the imxjortance to which they 
 have risen. The history of Northern England may there- 
 fore be said to come to this, that, after several struggles 
 for dominion, we may say after several periods of dominion, 
 it has at last come to the front in another and a better 
 form than that of dominion. 
 
 In this sense the history of Northern England begins 
 before it became Northern England, before any part of 
 Britain became England at all. York — not indeed Anglian 
 and Danish Eoforwic, but the older Eboracum which the 
 Anglian and Danish city locally continues — holds a place 
 which is unique in the history of Britain, which is shared 
 by one other city only in all the lands north of the Alps. 
 York, and York alone among the cities of Britain, has 
 been the dwelling-place of the Caesars of Rome. London 
 was even then the great seat of commerce, but York was 
 the seat of Empire. York saw the last days of Severus 
 in one ao-e and of Constautius in another ; and from York, 
 as I have already slid, Constantino went forth to change 
 the face of the European world for all time. And he 
 went forth first of all to what we may call the sister city 
 of Eboracum, to Augusta Treverorum, to Trier upon the 
 Mosel. York and Trier are the two Imperial cities be- 
 yond the Alps ; the love of Julian, and of Julian alone, 
 for his dear Lutetia does not entitle Paris on the Seine to 
 rank in Imperial history alongside of the cities on the 
 Mosel and the Ouse. Yet the history of Paris supplies a 
 certain not uninstructive analogy with the history of York 
 and of Northei'n England. Let no man beguile you into 
 thinking that Paris has been from all eternity the one 
 inevitable capital of Gaul. But it is none the less true 
 that Paris saw the headship of Gaul dangled before her 
 over and over again before the time Avhen she actually
 
 POINTS IN EARLl NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. ^73 
 
 grasped it. Under Julian, under Chlodwig, perhaps 
 under Pippin, certainly under Charles the Bald, things 
 looked for a moment as if Paris was going to be the head. 
 But it looked so only for a moment, till the day came 
 when Paris, her prince and her citizens, proved, like Lon- 
 don and her citizens, their worthiness for the post in the 
 great siege at the hands of the Northmen. In the like 
 sort this your land and its ancient capital had a glimpse 
 of Empire, in days when Empire meant dominion far be- 
 yond the bounds of the Isle o£ Britain. And when our 
 forefathers had come into the land, when so large a part 
 of Britain had become England, this northern portion of 
 the land seemed to be more than once on the full march 
 to the supremacy over the whole. These glimpses of 
 dominion form the early history of Northern England as 
 Northern England ; but before I speak of them I must 
 give a few words to the process by which the land of 
 Eboracum became Northern England. 
 
 Of the whole story of the English Conquest no part is 
 more obscure than the history of the English settlement 
 in Deira. Do not, because Deira and Bernicia were pre- 
 sently joined together under the great name of Northum- 
 berland, mix up the settlement of Deira and the settlement 
 of Bernicia. Of the settlement of Bernicia, the land from 
 the Tees to the Forth, we know something. It is not 
 much that we know, but it is something. A number of 
 scattered English settlements were gathered together 
 under Ida, the patriarch of Northumbrian kingship, him 
 whom the quaking Britons spake of as Ida the Flame- 
 bearer. But his throne was not planted within the walls 
 of Imperial York ; his dominion did not spread over the 
 hills of Cleveland or over the flats of Ilolderness. From 
 a rock overhanging the German Ocean, he ruled on the 
 estuary of the Forth, but not on the estuary of the Hum- 
 ber. On the height of Bamburgh a hedge — a palisade — 
 fenced in his royal city ; the hedge gave way to a wall of 
 earth, and in later days the site of the royal city was 
 
 T
 
 274 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 covered by the defences of a single castle. Few spots in 
 Britain have beheld "more stirring events than the fortress 
 which sits so proudly on that stern basaltic rock. But we 
 might freely give up the tale of one of the many sieges of 
 Bamburgh, could we get in exchange a single ray of light 
 to throAv on the struggle which made Eboracum English. 
 Not a detail have I to set before you of the way, of the time, 
 when the city of Severus and Constantius, the head of all 
 the Britains, came into the hands of the Anglian invaders. 
 There is indeed an uncertified British tale about an arch- 
 bishop of Eboracum withdrawing from the conquered city ; 
 but we have not a word from the other side. We have no 
 fragments of a song of Eboracum, as we have fragments 
 of the song of Anderida ; we have no such living and 
 speaking witnesses of the day of victory as the earth has 
 given u^) to the research of our times within the walls of 
 Silchester. There we may still see the very eagle which 
 yielded to the arms of Cerdic ; we have no such memorial 
 in the ca^^ital of the North. Yet no prey in the whole 
 land could have been richer. Eoman York must have 
 been a great and might}' city. The inhabited space had 
 spread far beyond the walls of the first Roman enclosure, 
 those walls of which so stately a fragment still strikes the 
 eye of every visitor in the space between Saint Leonards 
 hospital and Saint Marys abbey. We are sometimes 
 inclined to wonder at the small extent of the Roman en- 
 closure in the case of famous cities like York and Lincoln, 
 and to contrast it with the far greater space which lies 
 within the walls of a place like Silchester, which could at 
 no time have been a real rival either of the Imperial 
 dwelhng-place or of the colony of Lindum. The cause 
 doubtless is that the settlement of Eboracum and Lindum 
 belongs to the earlier days of Eoman occupation. The 
 oldest town represented simply the original camp, and 
 that small enclosure spread out into spacious suburbs while 
 the Eoman still ruled in the land. Eoman York, if under 
 that name we take in the whole inhabited circuit which
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 275 
 
 had gatliered round the first camp, stretched beyond the 
 Ouse just as modern York does. And the land round the 
 capital was full of smaller towns and detached houses, 
 rich with thie culture and splendour which the Eoman 
 carried with him into the furthest points of his do- 
 minion. I have gone over but a small part of your wide 
 shire ; but I have seen the lines of the camp at Malton ; 
 I have seen the ground thick with the rich mosaic pave- 
 ments which lurk under so many houses in what once was 
 Isurium, what now is Aldborough. Mark the name ; Isu- 
 rium did not live on by its old name ; it did not, like Tad- 
 caster and Doncaster, keep up the memory of the Roman 
 castrum in its new name. The Eoman town perished ; it 
 stood void; when men again dwelled on the site, the 
 memory of Eoman habitation had passed away ; the Eoman 
 walls stood as a mysterious relic of past times, like the 
 huge stones, reared in unrecorded days by forgotten hands, 
 which stand at no great distance. The new inhabitants 
 had no better, no more distinctive, name, than the Old 
 Borough — the fortress built long ago, they knew not when 
 or by whom — to give to the relics of the once flourishing 
 city of men which the sword of their conquering fore- 
 fathers had made a wilderness. 
 
 But if it thus fared with the lowlier settlement of 
 Isurium, how fared it with the city of the Csesars ? Was 
 there any time when the walls of Eboracum stood empty 
 with no dwelling-place of man within them ? I cannot 
 answer the question with any certainty — I know not 
 whether local research can throw any light upon the ques- 
 tion. The general history of Britain leaves the question, like 
 most questions touching the English settlement of Dcira, 
 shrouded in utter darkness. Yet one might almost ven- 
 ture the guess that so great and strong a city might be 
 able to hold out long after the surrounding country, and 
 that Eboracum may not have fallen before the English 
 arms till Englishmen had ceased to be utter destroyers, 
 and had learned to dwell in the cities which they subdued. 
 
 T 2
 
 276 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 At any rate, if York ever stood desolate, its day of desola- 
 tion conld not have been long. Early in the seventh 
 century it was again a city, and a royal city, the capital 
 of the Bretwalda Eadwine. Nay, by that time the second 
 period of dominion had begun for the city and for the land 
 of which it was the head. Our first glimpse of the city on 
 the Ouse, after it had changed from Roman Eboracum 
 into English Eoforwic, shows it to us as a city not only 
 royal, but more than royal, as the seat of a supremacy 
 acknowledged by all the Teutonic kingdoms of the island, 
 save Kent alone. 
 
 Over the settlement of Deira then a dark veil hangs ; 
 .but towards the end of the sixth century the veil is in a 
 measure lifted, and we see something of the mighty realm 
 that was formed by the union of Bernicia and Deira. The 
 great name of Northumberland is now heard for the first 
 time under kings who went forth conquering and to con- 
 quer. "We can see that the land between Humber and 
 Forth is disputed between two rival kingly houses, each 
 sprung of the stock of Woden by different lines, one re- 
 presenting the kingship of Bernicia and the other the 
 kingship of Deira. Each line alike gave kings to the 
 united realm, kings under whom the Northumbrian name 
 rose to the first place among the Teutonic settlements in 
 Britain. Under j^thelfrith grandson of Ida the Northum- 
 brian arms won one of those victories which form land- 
 marks in the history of our folk, one of those great days 
 which helped to make England England. Like many 
 a man of Northumberland after him, ^thelfrith smote 
 the Scots with a mighty overthrow ; but m his day war- 
 fare with the Scots was still of less moment than warfare 
 with the Briton. Call up before your eyes the map of our 
 island as it stood in the third quarter of the sixth century. 
 From Kent to the Forth the whole Eastern coast is Eng- 
 lish ; Canterbury, London, Lincoln, York, are English and 
 heathen cities ; but neither Angle nor Saxon has yet made 
 his way to the Western sea. The unbroken British land still
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 277 
 
 stretches from the Land's End to Dunbarton ; Isca, Aquse 
 Solis, Glevum, Uriconium, are still British ; they have not 
 yet changed into Exeter, Bath, Gloucester, and fallen 
 Wroxeter. And, if I may venture to tread the narrow 
 debateable land which parts off history from fable, I would 
 add that monks of his own race still — or shall we rather 
 say already ? — raised their song over the tomb of Arthur 
 in the isle of Avalon. But beyond all these, at the very 
 angle, the very turning point, of Northern and Southern 
 Britain, Deva, the City of the Legions, still stood un- 
 touched on its Wirhwl, the link which bound the Briton 
 of Strathclyde to the Briton of what we now specially call 
 Wales. It was clear by this time that the English had 
 won a hold on Britain from which they could never be 
 dislodged. But it was still far from clear whether their 
 power was destined to any further advance. It had still 
 to be settled whether the fate of the island was not to be 
 divided lengthways, with its western side as the lot of the 
 Celt and its eastern side as the lot of the Teuton. The 
 generation which saw the beginning of English conver- 
 sion to Christianity saw also the warfare which was to 
 settle for ever which was to be the ruling race in this 
 island. Through the still unbroken mass of unconquered 
 land which formed the western side of Britain, West- 
 Saxon Ceawlin was the first to pierce his way, and to carry 
 the English arms to the shores of the Severn sea. Wales 
 in the modern sense was thus for ever cut off from the 
 West- Welsh peninsula, the land of Devonshire and Corn- 
 wall. But to break through at another point, to cut off 
 Wales from Strathclyde as well as from Cornwall, to carry 
 the English arms to the Irish sea, was a triumph which 
 was destined not for West-Saxon but for Northumbrian 
 prowess. That Ceawlin strove after the great prize of 
 Deva there is little doubt ; but he failed to win it ; he 
 made Uriconium a desolation, but he never reached the 
 north-western sea. That was the work of ^thelfrith j the 
 grandson of the Flame-bearer smote the Britons beneath
 
 278 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 the walls of the City of the Legions, and left those walls to 
 stiinil void till Chester again rose as a city at the bidding of 
 the daughter of iElfred. You will all have heard the tale, 
 many of yon will know the nionrnful melody, of the monks 
 of Bangor. And it is not unnatural that the feelings of 
 those who hear the tale should go with suffering Christians 
 against heathen invaders. Yet we should not forget that 
 those heathen invaders were ourselves. We were the 
 Turks, and worse than the Turks, of those days ; the sword 
 was our only argument ; the persecuted Briton had not 
 even the chance of Koran or tribute. But simply because 
 we carried slaughter and havoc to a more fearful pitch 
 than any Turk ever carried them, for that very reason our 
 conquest carried with it the hopes of better things. We 
 stood on the ground which we made without inhabitants, 
 to grow up, not as a mere conquering caste, but as a new 
 people of the land. We stood ready to receive a new faith 
 and a higher civilization. The teaching which Ave cannot 
 say that we refused at the hands of the Briton, because 
 the Briton never offered it to us, we stood ready to receive 
 from the Roman and the Scot. The victory of ^thelfrith 
 at Deva was, as I said, one of those great blows which 
 made England England. The British power was now 
 broken in pieces ; the long unbroken Celtic land was split 
 into three fragments, each standing ready to be conquered 
 in detail. Northumberland, Mercia, Wessex, had now 
 each her special portion of British territory to deal with. 
 We may weep for the monks of Bangor ; but the day of 
 their massacre was none the less one of the great days in 
 the growth of the English nation. And the victory of 
 ^thelfrith was the last great victory of the heathen Eng- 
 lish ; Deva was the last city which was taken only to be 
 left desolate. When j^thelfrith slew "the British monks, 
 part of England was already Christian. Our first picture 
 of Northumberland is the picture of her first Christian 
 king. And before that same seventh century had passed, 
 Northumberland had become the brightest part of the
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 279 
 
 wliole island, the special home of learning and holiness, 
 the cradle of the history of our people, the cradle of the 
 poetry of our tongue. 
 
 The conqueror of Deva fell in battle, and his dominion 
 passed away to another house ; but the greatness of the 
 Northumbrian land was not thereby touched, j^thelfrith 
 of Bernicia gave way to Eadwine of Deira ; and we now 
 see the supremacy of Northumberland distinctly acknow- 
 ledged. Its king holds the rank of Bretwalda, accom- 
 panied, it would seem, by a more widely extended dominion 
 than had been held by any of the earlier princes who bore 
 that title. Mark too that we now distinctly see the old 
 Imperial city standing out as the capital of the newly 
 united realm. But mark too how gradual a thing the 
 progress of English conquest was, how often little scraps 
 of territory in favourable positions were held by the 
 Britons long after the neighbouring land had passed into 
 the hands of the inva.ders. Eadwine ruled in York ; but, 
 even after Deva had fallen before ^thelfrith, spots much 
 nearer to York than Deva were still British. Every one 
 knows the name of Leeds ; every Yorkshireman ought to 
 know the name of Elmet. The district still keeps its 
 British name, and so, besides Leeds, do one or two other 
 places in it. That was Eadwine's own conquest ; while 
 he was spreading his external supremacy over so large a 
 part of the island, he had still to win this little land close 
 at his own door to form part of his immediate kingdom. 
 
 Of Eadwine, in his character as the first Christian 
 king in Northumberland I need hardly speak. Every one 
 surely knows the tale, if not in Bseda's own text, yet at 
 least in some of the endless translations and followincfs of 
 his tale, to the number of which I must confess to have 
 myself added. But the tale gets fresh clearness and fresh 
 interest from a sight of the places which figure in it. I 
 suspect that most people fancy — I am sure that for a long 
 time I fancied so myself — that the famous debate among 
 the Northumbrian Witan, the old thegn's parable of the
 
 280 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 swallow, tlie worldly-wise argument of Ooifi, all happened 
 at York. But when the story gets more life by going 
 over the ground, it is plain that the council was not held 
 in the city, but in some rural hall of the king. The most 
 likely place is that spot by the Derwent which had been 
 Derventio, which was to be Aldby, not far from the battle- 
 field of Stamfordbridge. And one who has stopped at the 
 Market Weighton station, who has walked along with the 
 church of Godmundingaham on the high ground above 
 him, who has marked the church itself on its knoll, >vho 
 has found — I was not sharp-sighted enough to find — the 
 earthworks which are said to surround it, who has further 
 stood among those strangely irregular masses of ground 
 at some distance, about which the learned dispute — and 
 I am sure I will not take upon me to decide — whether 
 they are the work of nature or art — he who has gone over 
 all this ground for himself will go away with a more vivid 
 picture of the times when the temple of the old gods 
 stood in the enclosure which is now the churchyard ; he 
 will more easily call up before his eyes the headlong ride 
 of Coifi, and the amazement of men as the priest of 
 Woden hurled his spear against the holy place of the 
 creed which he cast away. I have myself seen but a few of 
 the historic spots of your great shire ; but I have seen quite 
 enough of them to carry away an idea of the events of old 
 Northumbrian history such as I could never have formed 
 if I had simply looked at it through the spectacles of books. 
 It is something to have trodden even part of the ground 
 which Ba3da and others since Bseda have made famous. 
 York of course and its minster every man has seen ; but 
 I know not what proportion of those who have seen them 
 have made their way into the inner lurking-places of the 
 crypt, to trace out, among the richly channelled columns 
 of Archbishop Roger, the few rough stones which remain 
 of the church of Eadwine and Paulinus. 
 
 But the church of Eadwine and Paulinus suo-o-ests 
 another thought which is closely connected with that
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 281 
 
 aspect of Nortliumbrian history which I am throughout 
 keeping in my eye. Look at the ecclesiastical map of 
 England : you are at once struck with the strange in- 
 equality in geographical extent between the two archi- 
 episcopal provinces. Turn over the records of ecclesiastical 
 history, so largely the records of ecclesiastical disputes, 
 and you will find that in our own land there was no more 
 fertile source of disputes than the claims of the archi- 
 episcopal see of York to equality with, sometimes to pre- 
 cedence over, the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury. It 
 sometimes strikes us as strange how there could be a 
 dispute of this kind between the Archbishop of York, who 
 for a long time had but a single suffragan bishop, and 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury who had a dozen and more. 
 But here you have, in an ecclesiastical shape, one of those 
 glimpses of dominion which were given to the Northum- 
 brian kingdom, and, along Avith it, to the Northumbrian 
 archbishopric. Look again at the map, and take in, not 
 only all England but all Britain ; conceive a province 
 stretching from the Humber to Cape Wrath, and the 
 island is not unequally divided between such a province 
 and the other province stretching from the Humber to the 
 English Channel. And this is what the ecclesiastical 
 province of York was meant to be. All Britain, Celtic 
 and Teutonic, was to be divided between the two English 
 primates. Wales and Cornwall were thrown into the lot 
 of Canterbury; Scotland, a tougher morsel, was thrown 
 into the lot of York. Canterbury did make the spiritual 
 conquest of Wales and Cornwall ; but the claims of York 
 to spiritual jurisdiction over Scotland were always some- 
 what shadowy. Still there were such claims ; they were 
 asserted, and they were, ever and anon, partially enforced, 
 fully down to the thirteenth century. And a memory of 
 the old arrangement lived on in the fact that, though the 
 churches of Scotland threw off their submission to York, 
 they had no archbishop of their own, till the claims of 
 York had utterly passed away in the Scottish war of
 
 282 . NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 independence. On the other hand, as the Northumbrian 
 kings sometimes extended their power south of the Hum- 
 ber, so the Northumbrian primates ever and anon laid 
 claim to jurisdiction over more than one diocese south of 
 the Humber also. But it is only within much later times 
 that the spiritual greatness of the North, like some aspects 
 of its temporal greatness, has made palpable advances. 
 Instead of the one suffragan of York in the eleventh cen- 
 tury, her two suflPragans in the twelfth, she now has six ; 
 and three of them are distinctly badges of conquest. The 
 sees of Chester and Manchester have arisen on ground 
 won fi'om Canterbury, and Man is a conquest from 
 Norwegian Trondhjem. 
 
 The greatness of Northumberland goes on all through 
 the seventh century and part of the eighth. It goes on 
 through momentary defeats, defeats which almost rise 
 into momentary conquests, through revolutions, through 
 divisions and unions and transfers of the crown from one 
 branch of the stock of Woden to another. Eadwine died 
 in battle, and Northumberland was overrun, not only by 
 Mercian, but by British enemies. Oswald the sainted 
 king died in battle also, and heathen Penda again over- 
 ran the land. But misfortunes of this kind were only 
 momentary ; Eadwine and Oswald were both Bretwaldas ; 
 so was the more lucky Oswiu, in whom the kingship of 
 all Northumberland finally came back to the house of Ida. 
 If Penda carried fire and sword as far as Ida's fortress by 
 the Ocean, the fight of Winwsed cost him his power aiid 
 his life, and took away from the older gods all hope of 
 winning back the folk of England to their altars. Through 
 the greater part of the seventh century, Northumberland 
 is incontestably the first power in Britain, a power ruling 
 far away to the west and north, over lands which for ages 
 we have been taught to look on as if they had been 
 Scottish from all eternity. At last, at Nectansmere the 
 Celt had his day of vengeance, and the north-western 
 dominion of the Northumbrian Angles was cut short on
 
 POINTls IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 283 
 
 the field on whicli Ecgfrith fell. Still tlie North kept for 
 a while her religions and intellectnal supremacy, as the 
 cradle of the second youth of English genius, of the first 
 birth of English learning. Do not forget that the English 
 tongue, that the earliest compositions in the English 
 tongue, are more ancient than the migration which brought 
 Englishmen to the shores of Britain. The first poets of 
 the English race belonged, not to this our island England, 
 but to the older England on the mainland. Had their 
 tongue been Greek instead of English, their fame would 
 have sounded from one end of heaven to the other. But 
 the poets of our Homeric epic and of our Homeric cata- 
 logue, the gleemen who sang the tale of Beowulf and the 
 Song of the Traveller, being English, are nameless. But 
 of the first Christian English minstrelsy, of the first 
 recorded English minstrelsy on British ground, the land 
 of Northumberland, the land of Deira, is the parent. 
 Yours is Csedmon, the bard of the Creation, the bard of 
 the battles of the patriarchs — he who, a thousand years 
 before Milton wrote, had forestalled Milton alike in his 
 daring subject and in its majestic treatment — he who 
 sang how Abraham went forth to the slaughter of the 
 kings in the same strains and with the same living 
 strength as he might have sung how heathen Penda fell 
 before the sword of the Lord and of Oswiu. And if 
 Whitby — in those days Streoneshalh — claims, as the 
 home of Csedmon, the firstfruits of English sacred song 
 for your own Deira, so Jarrow, the home of Ba3da, claims 
 the firstfruits of English learning, of English written 
 history, for your neighbours of Bernicia. Each of the 
 lands which made up England has had its share in building 
 up the tongue and the literature of England. From 
 Northumberland came her first poetry and her first 
 learning ; from Wessex came the beginnings of her prose 
 literature, her Chronicle written in our own tongue. And, 
 to make all equal, the speech which has become the 
 written English of the last five hundred years is neither
 
 284 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 the tongue of Caedmon of Nortliumberland nor the tongue 
 of Alfred of Wessex, but the tongue which lies betAveen 
 the two, the tongue of that side of Mercia which stretches 
 towards East-Anglia. Each part of the land then owes 
 something to each other part ; but that Northumberland 
 led the way, alike in poetry and in history, alike in 
 English and in Latin composition, is a fact which no 
 Mercian or West Saxon can venture to deny. 
 
 Here then, in the seventh century, we see Northum- 
 berland incontestably the first state of Britain, first in 
 arms and first in arts. But neither the poHtical nor the 
 literary supremacy of Northumberland was lasting. As 
 the Imperial position of York in Eoman days was but a 
 glimpse, so the great position of York and of all Northum- 
 berland in the second stage of English settlement in Bri- 
 tain was but a glimpse also. The power of the Northum- 
 brian Bretwaldas, the lore of the Northumbrian poets and 
 scholars, passed away to other parts of England. In the 
 course of the eighth century Northumberland was utterly 
 weakened by internal strifes, by the endless setting up 
 and pulling down of momentary kings. In the early years 
 of the ninth century, it submitted, along with the other 
 English kingdoms, to the supremacy of West-Saxon 
 Ecgberht. Mark that I say merely the supremacy ; I 
 fancy that some people still fancy that Ecgberht and ^Elfred 
 were immediate kings of all England. I suppose those 
 at least do so who believe that Alfred founded the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford or some college in it. But such old-wives' 
 fables may be left to the sect which cherishes that curious 
 belief. Those who know English history know that that 
 stage of the West-Saxon supremacy which is represented 
 by Ecgberht in no way interfered with the separate being 
 of the kingdoms of Northumberland, Mercia, and East- 
 Anglia. The external supremacy — in the next century it 
 was called the Imperial supremacy — of the head kings 
 was a supremacy purely external. What Ecgberht did 
 was simply to transfer to Wessex, more thoroughly, more
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 285 
 
 permanently, that same kind of external supremacy 
 wliicli several JSTorthumbrian kings liad held over Wessex 
 itself. 
 
 And now we come to a third glimpse of dominion again 
 held up before the eyes of the Northumbrian realm and 
 the great Northumbrian city. The land and its capital 
 had been great under the Roman, and the Roman had 
 utterly passed away ; they had been great under the 
 Angle, and the power of the Angle had passed into the 
 hands of the Saxon. Then came the great invasion of the 
 Danes, an event which must have changed the whole face 
 of Northern England, and the traces of which in speech 
 and in nomenclature abide to this day. Under a newjace 
 of conquerors Northumberland again lifted its head. I 
 will not go here into ethnological speculations, and I must 
 give one word of warning against the way in which some 
 people see Danes and Northmen everywhere, and attribute 
 to direct Scandinavian influence everything which Dane 
 and Englishmen have in common as nearly allied members 
 of one great race. People who talk in this way are in 
 much the same state of mind as those other people — or 
 perhaps the same — who think that the object of compara- 
 tive philology is to show that Greek is derived from San- 
 scrit. And those who talk in this way commonly talk so 
 fiercely, and with so wild a rush of words, that I have 
 sometimes ventured to call them the Berserker school. 
 But laying aside this Berserker madness, the effect of 
 which of course is to tempt us to underrate the real 
 amount of Danish influence in England, let us see what 
 that amount really was. It is clear that a great part of 
 Northumberland and of north-eastern Mercia received 
 Danish rulers. It is clear that, with their Danish rulers, 
 they received Danish settlers in numbers large enough to 
 hold the chief landed estates in the country and to form 
 the ruling class in the chief towns. A crowd of places 
 changed their names, and were called afresh after their 
 new Danish lords, with the Danish ending hy. That end-
 
 286 NOETHUMBERLAND. 
 
 iiig pretty well enables us to trace the extent of actual 
 Danish settlement in Northnniberland and Mercia. I say 
 in Northumberland and Mercia ; because in East-Anglia, 
 thoug-h that land was undoubtedly conquered by the Danes 
 and became the seat of a Danish dynasty, local nomencla- 
 ture was not changed in the same way. In Northumber- 
 land and Mercia, the hy ending stretches from Whitby on 
 one side and Allonby and Kirkby Kendal on the other, 
 through Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, in all 
 which shires the ending is common, on through Northamp- 
 tonshire, where it is rare, into Warwickshire, where it 
 dies out at Eugby. But in East-Anglia the h]} ending is 
 not in this way spread over the whole country ; there is a 
 group of fcy's all by themselves in one part of Norfolk, and 
 that is all. The Danish conquest then, though its effects 
 have been a good deal exaggerated, was a very important 
 event and wrought very great changes. Without working 
 such changes as the English Conquest of Britain, it must, 
 within those districts which it touched at all, have wrought 
 a greater immediate change than the Norman Conquest of 
 England. I say a greater immediate change ; because it 
 certainly did not work so great a lasting change. On the 
 one hand, the Danes were the kinsmen of the English, 
 kinsmen nearer, it would seem, to the Northern English 
 than to the Southern. On the other hand, the Danish 
 Conquest, like the earlier English Conquest, was a heathen 
 conquest, and in this respect it must have been at the time 
 a far greater change than the later Norman Conquest. 
 But the Dane, when once settled in England, among a 
 people whose language, habits, and feelings had much in 
 common with his own, soon adopted their religion also. 
 The Christian Dane soon became the countryman of the 
 Christian Angle ; but it was not till after a time in which 
 the Christian Angle was glad to welcome Saxon conquerors 
 as deliverers from his heathen masters. Here then was the 
 weakness of the Danish rule ; here was the hindrance 
 which made the third period of Northumbrian greatness 
 
 1
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 287 
 
 still more truly a mere glimpse tlian the two which went 
 before it. 
 
 I said just now that, by help of local nomenclature, 
 we are able to trace the extent of the Danish settlement 
 in Northumberland and Mercia. Now this leads us to a 
 fact which I fancy is not always taken in as it should be, 
 a fact which at any rate cost me some time, some reading, 
 some journeying, and some thought, before I fully took it 
 in. This is the fact that all Northumberland did not be- 
 come Danish in any sense. I would not rashly say even 
 that all Deira, that all Yorkshire, did. Deira, even after 
 it had taken its modern name of Yorkshire, stretched, 
 as Domesday will show, far beyond the present bounds of 
 the three ridings. It reached from sea to sea, and took 
 in much that is now Lancashire, Cumberland, and West- 
 moreland. It took in, in short, so much of Cumberland 
 and Westmoreland as was English at all. You will see 
 the exact boundaries by looking to the ecclesiastical 
 divisions — which always represent older secular di- 
 visions — as they stood before modern changes. The 
 diocese of York, as it stood down to Henry the Eighth, 
 will show you the western and northern boundaries of the 
 kingdom of Deira, the Yorkshire of Domesday. The 
 phrenomena of north-western England are exceedingly 
 puzzling ; I should not like to be bidden accurately to map 
 out the exact extent of Scandinavian settlement on that 
 side. Standing here in Hull, I would ask to be allowed to 
 keep myself in the safer region which is washed by the 
 German Ocean. Here we can trace our Danes easily. 
 They go up all through Lincolnshire and Yorkshire ; but 
 where Yorkshire ends, they end too. Yorkshire or Deira, 
 or at any rate all its central and eastern part, became 
 Danish, so far as any part of England became Danish. 
 Danish kings reigned in York ; Danish lords divided the 
 surrounding lands among them. But beyond the Tees in 
 Bernicia, in the diocese of Durham, to give it its later 
 ecclesiastical name — that is, not only the temporal bishop-
 
 288 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 vie of Durliam, Liit the whole ecclesiastical diocese — the 
 Danes conquered in a sense, but they did not settle. 
 Nomenclature proves it : the nomenclature of that district 
 opens several very curious questions ; but I will mention 
 only the one point which immediately concerns me. The 
 hy ending, so common in Deira, dies out in Bernicia. 
 That alone proves that the land was not occupied as Deira 
 was. And we know that English princes went on reign- 
 ing at Bamburgh, most likely under Danish supremacy, 
 while the Dane himself reigned at York, and threatened 
 to make York, as it had been under the Roman and 
 under the Angle, once more the head of Britain. 
 
 This time I say ' threatened ' rather than promised. 
 Whatever may be any man's feelings with regard to any 
 earlier or later time, I presume that every man, even in 
 the most Danish parts of the Danish land, must feel his 
 heart go forth with the West-Saxon champions of Eng- 
 land and of Christendom in the great struggle of the 
 tenth century. Such at least was, in the tenth century 
 itself, the feeling of the English inhabitants of the Danish 
 Five-Boroughs, when Eadmuncl the Doer-of-great-deeds 
 set free those who had so long pined in heathen bondage. 
 And, if such was the feeling at Lincoln and Nottingham, 
 at Derby and Leicester and Stamford, we may guess 
 that it was the same at York also. Y-et, looking at 
 things from a purely local and Northumbrian point of 
 view, the warfare of the children and grandchildren of 
 Alfred, the warfare of Eadward and ^thelflted, of ^thel- 
 stan and Eadmund and Eadred, was a warfare which did 
 more than anything before or after to weld England into a 
 single kingdom, but which did that work only at the cost 
 of a more distinct subjection of Northern to Southern 
 England, of the Dane and the Angle to the Saxon, than 
 had been wrought by the Bretwaldaship of Ecgberht. 
 Deira, under her Danish kings, stood forth again as a 
 rival power with Wessex ; York stood forth again as the 
 rival of Winchester ; but this time it was the rivaby of a
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 280 
 
 foreign and heathen power. A new Penda threatened 
 England from the throne of Eadwine, and the part of 
 Oswiu had now to be played by the conqueror from the 
 South. But it needed campaign after campaign, sub- 
 mission after submission, revolt after revolt, before the 
 stubborn Dane finally bowed to his West- Saxon lord. The 
 Dane rises under his native chiefs; he calls in his kinsfolk 
 from Denmark and from Ireland ; he leagues with the 
 Scot to fall at his side at Brunanburh ; again and ao-ain 
 he wrests half the kingdom from his momentary con- 
 queror. At last, after four reigns, the struggle is over, 
 the kingship of Northumberland passes away, and Deira 
 and Bernicia are ruled, sometimes by a single earl, some- 
 times by two, lieutenants of the West-Saxon prince who 
 has grown into King of the English and Emperor of 
 Britain. For the Imperial style now lives again; but 
 the seat of Empire has finally passed from York to 
 Winchester, to pass again from Winchester to London. 
 But the Northumbrian spirit was not dead ; in Bernicia 
 the line of the ancient princes still ruled as earls on the 
 rock of Bamburgh; and Northumberland as a whole 
 Dane and Angle, Deira and Bernicia, could at least turn 
 the scale between rival kings of the West-Saxon house. 
 Eadgar the Peaceful was called to the throne by the 
 voice of Northern England ; and in the Guildhall of your 
 metropolis he stands side by side with Oonstantine, as the 
 prince who confirmed the men to whom he owed his crown 
 in the possession of their local laws and their ancient 
 freedom. The third chance of Northumbrian dominion 
 had passed away ; but it passed away by the process 
 through which Northumberland and Wessex alike became 
 parts of England. 
 
 It might perhaps have seemed that yet another chance 
 of domhiion was offered to Northern — to Danish E nor- 
 land when all England passed under the dominion of a 
 Danish king. But the conquest of all England by Onut 
 was an event of quite another character from the earlier 
 
 tr
 
 i>DO NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 settlement which made Deira so largely Danish. It was 
 a personal conquest far more than a national settlement. 
 A king of Danish birth was set on the West-Saxon 
 throne ; but his dominion remained West-Saxon. The 
 reign of Cnut was in fact the highest point of West- 
 Saxon greatness. Winchester was the Imperial city of 
 Northern Europe, where the Emperor of six kingdoms, 
 the lord of the Ocean and the Baltic, wore his crown in 
 the city of Alfred as the home which he had chosen out 
 of all his realms. Under Cnut Northumberland must 
 have flourished ; for the laws of Cnut were, in the usual 
 formula, looked back to in after days, as marking the 
 good old times, the times of peace and good government. 
 But at no moment in English history was there less sign of 
 Northumberland being the rulmg land, or York the ruling 
 city, of England. Even when the kingdom was again for 
 a moment divided between the sons of Cnut, it was 
 Mercia rather than Northumberland which came to the 
 front ; the capital of the first Harold was not York but 
 Oxford. Northumberland still continues to play a great 
 part in English affairs ; but we can hardly say that she 
 ever had a fourth chance of dominion to be put on a level 
 with her three earlier chances. The land often stands 
 apart from the rest of England ; it seems often to aim at 
 local independence ; but there is no distinct sign of its 
 aiming at dominion. Northumberland rose in the days of 
 the Confessor ; but the insurgents were won over by the 
 acknowledgement of the earl of their own choice. North- 
 humberland refused to acknowledge Harold the son of 
 Godwine ; but the malecontents — they did not reach the 
 stage of insurgents^ were won over by the presence of 
 the new king and by his marriage with the sister of their 
 new earl. What changes migh-c have happened had 
 Harold of Norway been victor at Stamfordbridge we 
 can only guess. He might have reigned at York ; but he 
 assuredly would not have been satisfied with a mere 
 Northumbrian kingdom, and London and Winchester
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 291 
 
 might have had the same charms for him which they had 
 for Cnut. The conduct of Eadwine and Morkere at the 
 moment of the Norman invasion seems to point to a hope 
 of holding Northern England as a separate earldom or 
 kingdom, and of leaving Harold or William, as the case 
 might be, to rule in Wessex as he thought good. So 
 again, v^e can only guess at the schemes of those who so 
 often defended the Northern land against the Norman, and 
 who so often called in the kindred Dane to their help. Most 
 likely those who sought, now for West- Saxon Eadgar, 
 now for Danish Swegen, to rule over them, dreamed of 
 driving the Norman out of all England, if it could be done, 
 and, if that hope failed, of holding York and Northumber- 
 land as a realm independent of him. But vague schemes 
 of this kind hardly amount to a fourth chance, to a fourth 
 glimpse, of Northumbrian dominion. 
 
 One thing at least is certain, that the Norman Conquest 
 crushed all hopes of Northumbrian dominion, as dominion, 
 for ever. In this sense the Norman Conquest was in very 
 truth a Saxon Conquest. It ruled that England should 
 be for ever an united kingdom ; and it further ruled that 
 the seat of dominion of that united kingdom should be 
 placed in its Southern, and not in its Northern part. Yet 
 Northern England may at least boast thus much, that in 
 no part of the land did the Conqueror meet with stouter 
 resistance, that on no part of the land did his avenging 
 hand fall more heavily. We read in the writers of the 
 time of the harrying of the northern shires, of the fields 
 laid waste, of the towns left without inhabitants, of the 
 churches crowded by the sick and hungry as the one place 
 of shelter. We read in the formal language of documents 
 how men bowed themselves for need in the evil day, and 
 sold themselves into bondage for a morsel of bread. We 
 read how the weary and homeless met with such shelter, 
 such alms, as one monastery and one town could give at 
 the hands of good Abbot ^bhelwig of Evesham. And, 
 perhaps more striking than all, we read in the c:ilin piges 
 
 TJ 2
 
 202 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 of Domesday the entries of ' waste,' * waste,' down whole 
 pages, the records Avhich show how lands which had sup- 
 plied the halls of two or three English thegns could now 
 vield hardly a penny of income to their foreign masters. 
 To most of us all this is mere book-learning ; it was mere 
 book-learning to me a few months back. But tales like 
 these put on a new and fearful truth, they are clothed 
 with a life which is terrible indeed, to one who has seen 
 the like with his own eyes. Let me go back once more 
 to the lands from whence I set forth at the beginning of 
 this lecture. The harrying of Northumberland has ceased 
 to be a mere name to one who has seen somewhat of the 
 harrying of Herzegovina. The churchyard of Evesham, 
 crowded with the refugees who had fled from their wasted 
 homes, becomes a reality in the eyes of one who has looked 
 on the same sad sight in the lazzaretto of Ragusa. 
 
 With the Norman Conquest then all chance of North- 
 humberland maintaining itself, either as the dominant 
 part of England or as a state distinct from Southern Eng- 
 land, came to an end. But the history of the land, as 
 still a great and important part of England, went on un- 
 broken. The men of the North overthrew the invading 
 Scot at Northallerton and at Alnwick 5 the barons of the 
 North were foremost in wresting the Great Charter from 
 the rebel king. And in one special aspect of the eccle- 
 siastical and artistic life of England, the shire that was 
 Deira stands foremost among all the shires of England. 
 The same Walter of Esj^ec who led the men of Yorkshire 
 to victory under the bamiers of the older saints of York 
 and Beverley and Eipon was also among the first to enrich 
 the dales of Yorkshire, their woods and their rushing 
 streams, with the holy places of the new-born order of 
 Citeaux. It was from a foreign house that the Cistercian 
 took his name ; but it was English Harding who received 
 at his hands the homage of a founder. On later times I 
 will not enter ; I need not read in your ears the long bede- 
 roll of the worthies of your shire, or the bede-roll — not a
 
 POINTS IN EARLY NORTHUMBRIAN HISTORY. 293 
 
 short one — of the worthies of your own borough. Among 
 the worthies of Northern England I will speak of but one, 
 the latest but not the least. It is by no unfitting cycle 
 that. the list of the great historians of England, which 
 began with a man of Bernicia, ends as yet with a man of 
 Deira. The line which began with Bseda goes on through 
 Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden and other 
 worthy names, till in our own day, the same Northern 
 land has sent forth the most life-like portrait-painter of 
 English kings, the most profound expounder of the English 
 constitution. From one who lived at Jarrow and who 
 sleeps at Durham the torch has been handed on to one 
 who has come forth from Knaresborough and Ripon, to 
 make the form of the second Henry stand before us as a 
 living man, to make the legislation of the first Edward 
 stand before us as a living thing.
 
 294 
 
 KIRKSTALL. 
 
 1872. 
 
 The great Cistercian movement of the twelfth century has 
 left its mark in a singular way on the taste and speech of 
 the nineteenth. The companions of Saint Bernard are 
 the men who, if they have not, like Sultan Mahmoud, 
 supplied us with ruined villages, have at least supplied us 
 with ruined abbeys. We believe that there is a class by no 
 means small among articulate -speaking men with whom 
 the word ' abbey ' simply means ' ruin,' except perhaps 
 when the name is transferred to houses built ' in the abbey 
 style,' which commonly means that they have pointed 
 windows without any tracery. What is thought of 
 ' abbeys ' in such an exceptional state as those of West- 
 minster and Bath it is not for us to guess. It is so dis- 
 tinctly understood that an abbey, to be an abbey, must be 
 unroofed and have its walls broken down, that it is not 
 unnaturally inferred that ever}- building in such a state 
 must be an abbey. A castle is perhaps an exception. 
 We do not remember to have heard of Caernarvon or 
 Chepstow abbey. Otherwise abbeys are ruins and ruins 
 are abbeys. What people think the abbeys were before 
 they were ruined, or whether they think that they were, 
 like some freaks of modern caprice, built as ruins from 
 the beginning, is a mystery too deep to be pried into. 
 
 All this mainly comes of the Cistercians. A ruined 
 abbey is commonly a Cistercian abbey. The rule is not 
 universal, but it is general enough to make it a presumption 
 that a monastic ruin of the regulation kind is Cistercian.
 
 KIRKSTALL. 295 
 
 The older houses, the Benedictine houses, for the most part 
 either arose in towns, or else towns rose around them. Now 
 in a large town a genuine picturesque ruined abbey can 
 hardly be. The practical necessities of town life cannot 
 afford to devote any large space of ground to the pious 
 contemplation of ruins. And the picturesque associations 
 of the genuine ' abbey ' are hardly possible in the midst of 
 a busy centre of men. The great mass of the Benedictine 
 churches have therefore either utterly perished or else exist, 
 wholly or partially, as cathedral or parochial churches. 
 The large class of churches which were divided between the 
 monks and the parishioners, those which supply that class 
 of mutilated buildings where the nave is standing and the 
 choir has perished, were sometimes Benedictine, but more 
 commonly belonged to Austin canons. But a Benedictine 
 church, neither destroyed nor preserved nor cut in half, but 
 surviving in the form of a picturesque ruined abbey, though 
 not altogether unknown, is certainly far from common. 
 It was the Cistercian movement of the twelfth century 
 which covered the vales and river-sides of England with 
 those religious houses which still exist in the form of the 
 ' ruined abbeys ' of popular speech. That movement in 
 England was the counterpart of the Benedictine movement 
 in Normandy a hundred years earlier. Then we read that 
 no Norman noble thought his estate perfect unless he 
 had planted a colony of monks in some corner of it. So 
 it was in England, especially in Northern England, in the 
 days of the Cistercian reform. The causes which gave 
 the movement a special vogue in Northern England are 
 obvious. Northumberland was left almost without monks 
 through the whole time between the coming of the Danes 
 and the coming of the Normans. A few Benedictine 
 foundations arose in the period of the Conquest itself. 
 The hut of a wanderer from Auxerre grew by William's 
 own help into the great minster of Selby. Ealdwine and 
 his companions from Winchcombe revived the monastic life 
 at J arrow and Monkwearmouth, and from them the Bene-
 
 2U^ NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 dictine rule spread to the great church of Durham itself. 
 The metropolitan church at York always remained secular ; 
 but, just beyond the walls of old Eboracum, Earl Siward's 
 church of Saint Olaf of Galmanho grew into the abbey of 
 Saint Mary. This was about all that could then be found 
 between Trent and Tyne. The land indeed lay open as the 
 chosen field for the new monastic movement. Yorkshire, 
 with its hills and dales and rivers, its natural wastes and 
 the artificial wastes created by the stern policy of the 
 Conqueror, was ready made to be occupied by Cistercian 
 settlements. The monks of the new rule deliberately 
 shunned the haunts of men. Whether they deliberately 
 sought for scenes of natural beauty may be doubted ; but 
 at all events they stumbled upon them. When men set 
 out to seek uninhabited places where the two great neces- 
 saries of wood and water are to be found in plenty, the 
 chances are that, whether they design it or not, the sites 
 which they light upon will turn out to be highly pictur- 
 esque. The Cistercians occupied wildernesses, and they 
 carried with them agriculture and the arts. But it rarely 
 happened that a Cistercian abbey became the nucleus of a 
 town, like the more ancient houses of Peterborough and 
 Crowland. The growth of modern towns has sometimes 
 invaded the Cistercian retreats, but while the monasteries 
 lasted, the Cistercians probably discouraged the growth 
 of younger towns, just as they avoided choosing the older 
 towns as dwelling-places. Hence it follows that the 
 Cistercian monasteries have seldom been, like the Bene- 
 dictine, either wholly swept away or preserved, wholly 
 or partially, as existing churches. Sometimes they have 
 become private dwelling-houses, as at Woburn and New- 
 stead. But more commonly their, skeletons or ghosts 
 survive in the form of ruined abbeys. They have been 
 unroofed and dismantled, but it has seldom been the 
 interest of any one wholly to pull them down. For the 
 same reasons, the ruined Cistercian abbey commonly pre- 
 serves its monastic buildings in a more perfect state than 
 
 I
 
 KIRKSTALL. 297 
 
 any other. When a Benedictine monastery survives as a 
 parish church, its domestic buildings have for the most part 
 utterly vanished ; now and then some fragment is turned 
 to lay uses. When it survives as a cathedral church, the 
 monastic buildings have been cut up into canons' houses. 
 The Cistercian houses commonly still keep their refec- 
 tories, dormitories, and the rest, neglected, ruined, muti- 
 lated, it may be, but at least not tm-ned into prebendal 
 drawing-rooms and nurseries. 
 
 The result of this peculiar destiny of the Cistercian 
 houses has been that they have won a higher place in 
 popular estimation than in strictness they deserve. Few 
 Cistercian churches were absolutely of the first rank. 
 Fountains stands almost alone in having any claim to stand 
 alongside of Benedictine churches like Gloucester, Peter- 
 borough, and Glastonbury. But, while they attract the 
 common observer by their picturesque sites and by the 
 vague charm which seems to attach to their ruined state, 
 they supply the scientific inquirer with better opportuni- 
 ties than can be had anywhere else of studying the do- 
 mestic arrangements of a monastery. And the churches 
 themselves, though not rivalling the vast scale of the 
 episcopal and greater abbatial churches, constantly present 
 forms of the highest architectural beauty. A large pro- 
 portion of them are built in the purest form of the grace- 
 ful style of the thirteenth century. Others belong to a 
 somewhat earlier time, iu cases where churches have been 
 preserved which date from the first foundation of the 
 monasteries in the twelfth century. As belonging to the 
 later days of Romanesque, they supply excellent studies 
 of the stages by which that style gradually gave way to 
 the fully developed forms of Gothic art. 
 
 Among this earlier class a high place must be given to 
 the well-known abbey of Kirkstall. Its picturesque site 
 on a hill-side gently sloping to the Aire is now hardly 
 clear of the smoke of Leeds and its suburbs ; at the time 
 of its foundation the place must have been a wilderness.
 
 298 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 It was chosen, like so many other monastic sites, as being 
 rich in the two great monastic necessaries. It is de- 
 scribed in the local history as ' locus nemorosus et frugibus 
 iufecundus, locus bonis fere destitutes, prseter ligna et 
 lapides et vallem amoenam cum aqua fluminis quse vallis 
 medium prseterfluebat.' But, as at Bee and in so many 
 other cases, the site on which the monastery was finally 
 fixed was not that which had been first chosen. The 
 history, which will be found in the fifth volume of the 
 Monasticoii, is well Avorth reading, as an example of the 
 difliculties and vicissitudes which seem always to have 
 beset the early years of a newly founded monastery. 
 For our purpose it is enough to say that the existing 
 buildings of Kirkstall abbey, of the foundation of Henry 
 of Lacy, a grandson of the famous Ilbert of Domesday, 
 were begun in 1152 by the first Abbot, Alexander, who 
 had been Prior of Fountains, and who led his spiritual 
 colony from that monastery, itself then a foundation of only 
 about twenty years' standing, to their new home at Kirk- 
 stall. Abbot Alexander sat for thirty years, and we read 
 that within that time he carried on architectural works 
 with remarkable zeal and success. He was able during 
 his lifetime to build all the chief buildings of the monas- 
 tery in a permanent form. He built the church, cloister, 
 chapter-house, two dormitories, two refectories, and the 
 other buildings that were needed. In the words of the 
 history : — 
 
 In diebus illis erecta sunt sedificia de Kirkestall ex lapide et 
 Hgnis delatis. Ecclesia videlicet et utrumque dormitorium, mona- 
 chorum scilicet et conversorum, utrumque etiam refectorium, 
 claustrum, et capitulum et alise officinse infra abbatiam necessarise, 
 et hsec oinnia tegulis optime cooperta. 
 
 The Abbot was unusually lucky in being able to carry 
 out such great works during a first incumbency. Few 
 first abbots of any order lived, like Alexander and the 
 more famous Herlwin of Bee, to see their societies so
 
 KIRKSTALL. 299 
 
 thoroughly organized and possessed of such a perfect and 
 elaborate set of buildings. And we may count him lucky 
 also in that so large a portion of his work still exists for 
 our own study. The church of Kirkstall, as it arose be- 
 tween 1152 and 1182, has never been rebuilt, nor has it 
 been either greatly altered or greatly mutilated. The 
 ground-plan remains as its founder designed it. The chief 
 later changes were the insertion of some Perpendicular 
 windows, especially a great one at the east end, some of 
 the usual tampering with the gables, and the raising of the 
 single central tower. This last addition was most likely 
 the cause of the only important mutilation. About 1792 
 a large part of the tower fell, leaving the tower itself in a 
 strangely shattered state, and of course crushing a great 
 deal of the central part of the church. Otherwise it would 
 seem that the church had hardly suffered at all beyond the 
 process of unroofing, which, we suppose, is of itself enough 
 to raise any building to the rank of a ruin. The church is 
 therefore nearly perfect, and it bears in all its fulness the 
 impress of the date and circumstances under which it 
 arose. It is just such a church as we should expect to be 
 built by a brotherhood of a young order whose zeal was 
 still warm. It is plain and stern, but in no way rude 
 or unfinished. The simplicity of the ground-plan is 
 thoroughly Cistercian. The eastern limb is short, the 
 choir having occupied the space under the tower and the 
 two eastern bays of the western limb. There are no choir- 
 aisles, no surrounding chapels, no projecting Lady chapel 
 or procession path in any shape, nothing but three chapels 
 projecting from the east side of each transept, divided 
 from one another and from the eastern limb by solid walls, 
 and giving a dark, stern, and cavernous look to the whole 
 eastern part of the church. Allowing for the few later in- 
 sertions, the style of architecture throughout the church, 
 and through a large part of the domestic buildings, is 
 altogether uniform, and is plainly the unaltered work of 
 Abbot Alexander. It shows that stage of the transition
 
 800 NOB THUMBEULA NT). 
 
 when the pointed arch had come into general use for con- 
 structive purposes, but when it had not yet been applied 
 to the arches of smaller and decorative openings. Through- 
 out the church of Kirkstall all the constructive arches, 
 the pier arches and the arches of the vaulting, are, without 
 a single exception, pointed. The arches of the doors and 
 windows and the other smaller arches, equally without 
 exception, remain round. This rule, so strictly followed 
 in the church itself, is not quite so strictly followed in the 
 contempoiury conventual buildings, but it may fairly be 
 looked upon as prevailing throughout. The same plain- 
 ness and severity which we see in the ground-plan we 
 also see in the side elevations. Each bay consists simply 
 of the pier arch and of a single clerestory window pierced 
 in the wall above. There is no triforium- stage between 
 the arcade and the clerestory, nor are the clerestory 
 windows provided with any subordinate arches, nor is any 
 passage made among them. But, on the other hand, 
 though the triforium is wanting, we do not find that bare 
 space between the arcade and the clerestory which we find 
 in many churches of the German Eomanesque, and at 
 home in the later Cistercian church of Tintern. Such an 
 arrangement, unless it is filled up with the mosaics of 
 Ravenna, always looks bare, unfinished, and inharmonious. 
 It always shows a lack of design, while at Kirkstall there 
 is no lack of design, though there is throughout a seem- 
 ingly intentional lack of ornament. The aisles, the small 
 chapels, and the eastern limb, were vaulted ; the nave 
 was not ; the fact that the eastern limb is vaulted shows 
 that the lack of vaulting in the nave is intentional, and 
 not owing to want of skill or daring to vault so wide 
 a space. While the first fervour of Cistercian zeal was 
 still warm, it was probably deemed a duty to do well 
 whatever needed to be done at all, but a vault and a trif o- 
 lium were most likely looked on as needless luxuries. 
 
 The domestic remains at Kirkstall are very large, and 
 in some points puzzling. As far as we can make out.
 
 KIRKSTALL. 301 
 
 tliey have never been thoroughly examined and mapped 
 out as they deserve to he. If they have ever so been 
 done, we shall be glad to learn the fact and to see the 
 book in which it is done. The two dormitories of Abbot 
 Alexander are plainly to be seen, that of the monks 
 attached to the south transept, and that of the conversi 
 parallel to it on the west side of the cloister. The double 
 refectory may also be seen on the south of the cloister, 
 parallel to the nave. Biit there seem to have been a good 
 many changes in this part of the buildings, changes not 
 only due to alterations of later date, but to changes of 
 design while the work was going on. The minute exami- 
 nation of these changes would be a worthy work for local 
 inquirers or for inquirers from any quarter. It would 
 have been not unworthy even of the hand which walled 
 up again the domestic buildings of Christ Church, 
 Canterbury. 
 
 [I leave the passage about the refectories and dormitories as I 
 wrote it eleven years back. I have not been at Kirkstall since. 
 The usual Cistercian arrangement was to make the refectory, not 
 parallel to the nave, but at right angles to it. Such was the original 
 arrangement at Old Cleeve in Somerset; but it was afterwards 
 changed to a refectory parallel to the nave, as in a Benedictine 
 house. Something of the same kind may have happened at Kirk- 
 stall.]
 
 302 
 
 SELBY. 
 
 1875. 
 
 To those of whom we heard at Kivkstall, those who hold 
 that every abbey must be a ruiu and that every ruin 
 must be an abbey, it may seem strange to claim the first 
 place among the abbeys of Yorkshire for Selby. That 
 great church has had the luck, good or bad, to be pre- 
 served in an almost perfect state, and for that cause it 
 is not unlikely that there are many to whom its name 
 would not occur at all in running over a list of York- 
 shire abbeys. That Selby ought actually to hold the very 
 first place among the monastic remains of the land richest 
 in monastic remains we will not dogmatically affirm. Such 
 a classification depends on many questions, questions 
 to be looked at from many points of view, and it allows 
 wide room for fair differences of taste. It is hard, for 
 instance, to compare Selby and Fountains. At Selby the 
 church is nearly perfect, but the adjoining buildings have 
 utterly perished ; at Fountains the series of monastic 
 buildings, church and everything else, are, as a whole, 
 more perfect than anywhere else, but they are all ruined, 
 or at least roofless. If b}^ an ' abbey ' we understand, not 
 the church only, but the whole monastery. Fountains may 
 surely claim the first place in Yorkshire and in England. 
 But if the church of Fountains stood, like the church of 
 Selby, roofed and in use, with only a comparatively small 
 mutilation, we may doubt whether, of the two churches 
 taken alone, Selby would not commonly be allowed to 
 claim the higher place. The difference is between a Bene-
 
 SELBY. 303 
 
 dictine abbey, which has become the parish church of a 
 considerable town, and a Cistercian abbey, which, like 
 other Cistercian abbeys, was planted in a wilderness and 
 remains only as a ruin. 
 
 The monastery of Selby was a foundation of the Con- 
 queror, and Selby itself was, according to a tradition 
 which its very unlikelihood makes likely, the birthplace 
 of his one English-born child. Selby and Yorkshire may 
 indeed count it something if the Lion of Justice, the 
 mighty Henry, was born among them. But the tale rests 
 on no more certain authority than tradition. The king 
 who made peace for man and deer was undoubtedly by 
 birth an Englishman ; we cannot say for certain that he 
 was a Yorkshireman. The chief difficulty in the story is 
 to reconcile the statement of Henry's birth at Selby with 
 the other traditions of the place. The name Selby, with 
 its Danish ending, whether we hold that the place is really 
 called from the phoca or sea-calf or not, would seem to 
 imply that there was there a town or village or human 
 settlement of some kind, before the days of the Conqueror 
 and his son. But, if we accept the received legend of the 
 foundation of the a^bbe}^, it is hard to understand where- 
 abouts at Selby any one, not to say an ^theling, could 
 just then have been born at all. For, according to the 
 story of the abbey, the first building at Selby was the 
 monastery, and the monastery was then at most only just 
 rising. Selby, in short, was one of the latest of those cases 
 where the cell of an anchorite grew into a monastery, and 
 round the monastery there gradually sprang up a town. 
 Benedict of Auxerre, charged with a finger of his patron 
 Saint German, fixed his cell by the Ouse as a lonely hermit, 
 and lived to be abbot of a rising monastery. Such an 
 origin mnst be carefully distinguished from the usual 
 origin of a Cistercian house. The Cistercian houses were 
 strictly founded from the beginning ; Benedictine houses 
 of the class of Selby began of themselves and were founded 
 afterwards. And, though the Benedictine house might
 
 304 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 begin on a spot as solitary as tlie site of the Cistercian 
 houses, it scarcely ever remained solitary ; if a Benedic- 
 tine house was not founded in a town, a town presently 
 grew up around it. A town therefore grew up at Selby ; 
 no town ever grew up at Fountains. Such at least is the 
 story ; but we are met by the difficulties both of the name 
 of the place and of tlie tradition, whatever it may be 
 worth, about the birth of Henry. That tradition must be 
 taken for whatever a mere tradition is worth; the fact 
 that at Selby, as at a crowd of other places, a building of 
 impossible date used to be shown as the birthplace of the 
 local hero, as it proves nothing for the tale, really proves 
 nothing against it. But, if Henry was born at Selby, 
 unless his birth there was the result of the merest chance, 
 there must have been some place for him to be born in 
 other than the cell of an anchorite. And, as we have hinted, 
 the fact that the place bears a name which was much 
 more likely to be given to it before 1068 than after that 
 year does look as if there might have already been some 
 human d.-elling-place at Selby besides the hermitage of 
 Benedict of Auxerre, even if we can conceive him to have 
 got to Selby so soon as the time of Henry's birth. There 
 is something therefore to be said both ways ; but, if Henry 
 was not born at Selby, we can see an intelligible reason 
 why he should be born at least in that neighbourhood. 
 His birth, if not specially at Selby, yet at all events in 
 Eno-land and in Yorkshire, would exactly answer to the 
 birth of Edward the Second at Caernarvon ; for we need 
 hardly repeat that Edward the Second was born at Caer- 
 narvon, though not in the tower of his own building. If 
 the Conqueror took care that the one son who was born 
 to him as a king should be born, not only in his kingdom, 
 but in that part of his kingdom which it had cost him 
 most trouble to win — and this would be true of York 
 even in 1068, though it became truer still in 1069 — his 
 policy would be exactly the same as the policy by which 
 Edward the First took care that the son whom he
 
 8ELBY. 305 
 
 designed to be Prince of Wales should be born upon 
 Welsh soil. 
 
 The early history of Selby is therefore hard to put 
 together ; we have to make out what we can between two 
 legendary tales, neither of which rests on any direct or 
 trustworthy evidence. But it is in any case certain that 
 we have at Selby a foundation of the Conqueror, which 
 grew up into a high position among the monastic houses 
 of England, to a specially high position among the mo- 
 nastic houses of its own district, where it could have had 
 no rival of its own order except the house of Saint Mary 
 at York. The earlier monasteries of the North had been 
 swept away in the Danish invasion. The four great 
 churches of the diocese, the metropolitan church and its 
 three satellites, the three churches which sent forth their 
 banners to the battle of the Standard, Saint Peter of 
 York, Saint John of Beverley, Saint Wilfrith of Ripon, 
 together with the more distant church of our Lady at 
 Southwell, were all of them, in their later estate at least, 
 secular foundations. The other houses which have made 
 Yorkshire famous as a specially monastic district are of 
 the Cistercian or other later orders. Selby and Saint 
 Marys at York stand alone in their own region as Bene- 
 dictine houses of the first rank, and of these two Selby 
 stands alone as having its church preserved in an all bu t 
 perfect state. This rarity of great Benedictine house s 
 of any date, this absolute lack of monasteries which went 
 on uninterruptedly, or nearly so, from the earliest times , 
 distinguishes the monastic history of Yorkshire from the 
 group of great monastic houses in the fenland and from 
 the other great group in the diocese of Worcester, th e 
 diocese from which Ealdwine set forth to revive the mo - 
 nastic life in Yorkshire, and which so long kept up a close 
 connexion with the see of York. In that land we have 
 Worcester, Gloucester, Tewkesbury, fallen Wincheombe, 
 and the lesser houses of Malvern and Deerliursfc, all ne;ir 
 together ; so in the other land there was that great gather- 
 
 X
 
 a06 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 iiig of mig-lity abbeys of wbich Ely and Peterborough, 
 still remain as two of our noblest episcopal cliurclies, wliile 
 Crowland and Tliorney, if sadly mutilated, have not wholly 
 vanished like Ramsey. Bat these districts, so rich in 
 their own way, have nothing to set against the Cistercian 
 remains of Yorkshire. We can hardly conceive Cistercians 
 within the range of the Bedford Level. There would be 
 rivers indeed for them in plenty, but where are the hills 
 and valleys ? A Rievaux by the Ouse or the Nen is a 
 thing whicli no imagination can conjure up, and even the 
 other more favoured laud could hardly supply exactly the 
 same kind of sites as those supplied so abundantly in the 
 land of Northern monasticism. The Cotswolds and the 
 range of Malvern would supply plenty of heights and hill- 
 sides, but they would supply but few distinctly Cistercian 
 valleys. In the eastern and the western districts then 
 we find great and ancient Benedictine houses, either 
 founded in already existing cities, or else surrounded by 
 a town, greater or smaller, which has grown up under 
 their shadow. Therefore, as a rule, they still survive in a 
 more or less perfect state. In the North — the compara- 
 tive North ; for the furthest North presents other features 
 — we find the churches of the later orders standing soli- 
 tary and in ruins. Selby and Saint Marys, exceptional 
 in their own district, form a link between the two ; they 
 are, together with several other houses in other j)arts of 
 the kingdom, the fruit of the zeal of the days immediately 
 following the Norman Conquest, before the specially Cis- 
 tercian reform had reached England. 
 
 We have thus, by a kind of process of exhaustion, 
 marked out the abbey of Selby as holding an unique posi- 
 tion as the one great Benedictine monastery of Northern 
 England surviving as a parochial choirch. But we must 
 remember that Selby became a parocliial church only after 
 monks had passed away, indeed as late as the days of 
 James the First. The church of Selby never was divided. 
 As at Malvern, the minster became the parish church, and
 
 S^LBY. 30? 
 
 the elder parish church was forsaken. And the minster 
 of Selby is in truth a building worthy to have lived on 
 through all changes. In outline it is certainly lacking j 
 the western towers were never carried up ; the south 
 transej^t is gone — the only mutilation of the church itself, 
 as distinguished from the utter sweeping away of the con- 
 ventual buildings which joined it on the south side. And 
 even this mutilation was negative rather than j)ositive. 
 The ancient central tower fell in the year 1690, and 
 crushed the south transept. The tower was rebuilt in the 
 mean style of the time ; the transept was not rebuilt at all ; 
 down to that time the whole of the building must have 
 been perfect. As we see it now, the general aspect of 
 bulk and stateliness, which is the impression which the 
 church gives at the first glimpse from the railway, is not 
 belied upon a nearer examination. In the lantern and the 
 surviving transept we have the remains of the original 
 Norman building. The nave, in its full length, is one of 
 the richest and most varied examples of the Transition ; 
 its distinguishing feature is one which is shared by some 
 other churches of the same region ; in no single bay do 
 the south side and the north agree. Some difference or 
 other seems to have been studiously made between each 
 arch and the arch opposite to it. It is this part of the 
 building which supplies the greatest study of remarkable 
 architectural forms. It is one which it would be instruc- 
 tive to compare with the contemporary nave of Worksop, 
 in the same diocese, though not in the same shire. But 
 in most eyes the glory of Selby will be its choir, ending in 
 a window, which may claim at least the second place of its 
 own class in England, and therefore in the world. Like 
 York, Lincoln, Ely, and Carlisle, Selby has neither apse 
 nor low chapels spreading beyond the main building. The 
 ends of the choir and its aisles form the grand and simple 
 east end of a type exclusively English. Within, tlie choir 
 may be thought to suffer somewhat from th(3 common 
 English fault of lowness. A somewhat larger triforium- 
 
 X 2
 
 808 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 rang-e nyouIJ have made the dilierence. The vaulting of 
 wood is clearly the rig-ht thing, if the walls and pillars 
 were found unable to support a vault of stone, A wooden 
 vault is of course a mere makeshift, but it is an allowable 
 and necessary makeshift. The wooden vault of Selby is 
 thoroughly good of its own kind, and it is a special relief 
 to one who comes to it from the paltry roofs of its 
 metropolitan neighbour at York. 
 
 Altogether, while we must leave it uncertain whether 
 the one English-born son of the Conqueror really was 
 born at Selby, we must allow that Selby has at least 
 grown into a birthplace worthy of him. And one would 
 the more gladly believe the tale because though, as we 
 have seen, the architectural history of Selby is spread 
 over several centuries, its history, as distinguished from 
 its architecture, belongs, save one not very important fight 
 in the seventeenth century, wholly to the age of Henry's 
 birth.
 
 309 
 
 NOTES IN THE NORTH RIDING. 
 
 1875. 
 
 The North Riding of Yorkshire contains two remarkable 
 spots which may be easily visited in a day's journey, 
 namely Kirkdale, precious alike to antiquaries and to 
 palaeontologists, and Lastingham, which, except so far 
 as the geologist is at home everywhere, the antiquaries 
 have, we believe, wholly to themselves. Certain it is that 
 the idea which is first suggested by the name of Kirk- 
 dale is that of a cave full of hysenas, while the idea which 
 is first suggested by the name of Lastingham is, what 
 may pass in some sort for an artificial cave, the crypt of 
 the church. But the two stand as members — Lastingham 
 perhaps as the furthest outpost — of a group of spots of 
 singular and varied interest. A good day's ramble will 
 take the traveller through many varieties of scenery, and 
 through places whose antiquarian associations pretty well 
 cover the whole field of British history. We may start 
 from the Roman camp at Malton ; we may go on among 
 the hills through which the Conqueror struggled back 
 with so much pain from his Northern conquests, by the 
 great foundation of Walter of Espec, by the two places 
 which the verse of the satirist has inseparably joined to the 
 name of the second duke of the house of Villiers. Last- 
 ingham meanwhile carries us back to the saints of Bseda, 
 and Kirkdale in its church commemorates the days of the 
 Confessor, and in its cave carries us back to days before 
 the Briton himself. We are in a land of hills and streams, 
 Htreams which make up that Derwent which flows by
 
 mo NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 Stamfordbridge, nills whicli give us every variety of hill 
 scenery, from the bleak moor of Lastiiigbam to the 
 wooded vale where the votaries of the religion of Citeanx 
 fixed themselves by that Eye which gives its name to 
 Eievaux. Some spots are richer in earlier, some in later, 
 associations, bnt all have something to offer. Helmsley, 
 which, and not the geographically impossible Hexham, 
 was doubtless William's resting-place after his hard march 
 through the Hambledon hills, forms a good centre for 
 many places. The name of Helmsley must be familiar to 
 many who never were there through the two famous lines 
 of Pope, which tells how 
 
 Helmsley, once proud Biackingham's delight, 
 Slides to a scrivener or a city knight. 
 
 Lord Macaulay's readers know how ' the once humble 
 name of Duncombe' got transferred to the lands which 
 had once been the reward of Fairfax ; and students of 
 local genealogy may know how the name passed, not only 
 to the lands — the lands which the House of Commons 
 proposed to confiscate as a punishment of their owner's 
 fraud — but also to their later possessors. Now, if Brown 
 chooses to call himself Duncombe, or if Duncombe insists 
 that Brown shall call himself Duncombe, no great harm 
 is done to any one, and Brown most likely is pleased. 
 But when the lands of Helmsley were made to take the 
 name of Duncombe, a real wrong was done to geography. 
 The student of local nomenclature, careless of pedigrees 
 of yesterday, is indifferent alike to Browns and Dun- 
 combes. ' Brown Park ' would cause him no perplexity ; 
 but when he hears of * Duncombe Park ' as the name of a 
 place, he naturally asks. How came a combe in Yorkshire? 
 The thing is a fraud on nomenclature as great as any 
 of the frauds which the first Duncombe, ' born to carry 
 parcels and to sweep down a counting-house,' contrived 
 to commit on the treasury of the nation. It is as though 
 a Kirby or a Thoresby should come down into the south
 
 NOTES IN THE NORTH RIDINO. 311 
 
 and bring his name with him, and should thereby set 
 
 inquirers wondering how a Danish ' by ' got into Sussex or 
 
 Dorset. But, whether Duncombe or Helmsley, the castle 
 
 is still there, and we may thank the fraudulent scrivener 
 
 that he had at least the grace to build his palace away 
 
 from the ancient castle and to leave it as castles may 
 
 best be studied. Helmsley has at least escaped the fate of 
 
 Alnwick. We may still trace the vast ditches, the keep — 
 
 the work it well may be of Walter of Espec, the hero of 
 
 the Standard, the Norman patron of English learning — 
 
 and side by side with it the work of later times, the delight 
 
 of the proud Buckingham. The castle is at Helmsley the 
 
 main attraction ; the church contains some original work 
 
 of the twelfth century ; but the greater part is in the 
 
 modern Norman style, a style which always awakens a 
 
 certain desire to laugh, and which awakens it the more 
 
 strongly as the new work more closely imitates the old. 
 
 But Helmsley, besides its merits in itself, is the centre 
 for many other places. From the castle of Walter of 
 Espec we naturally turn to his abbey, to Rievaux in its 
 lovely valley, where in the transepts the work of the 
 founder himself remains ingeniously preserved and adapted 
 in the enlargement of the building in the next century. 
 As we look down on the famous ruin from the terrace 
 above, the strange departure from the common law of 
 orientation, combined with the great size of the choir, 
 may well lead the spectator astray at the first glimpse. 
 He may easily take the main surviving part of the building 
 for the western limb, instead of what it is, at least con- 
 ventionally, the eastern limb. But it is less needful to 
 dwell on a building so well known as Eievaux than it is 
 to point out the importance of two places which lie on the 
 other side of Helmsley. First we reach Kirkdale, in the 
 solitary Kirk-dale itself, watered by its heck, the good old 
 English name which carries us far away to Normandy, to 
 Herlwin, to Lanfranc, and to Anselm. The Hodgebeck 
 joins its waters with those of a Dove less famous than it
 
 312 NOBTHUMBEItLANI). 
 
 more southern namesake, the Dove which itself joins the 
 Rye, and the Rye the Derwent, so that the waters which 
 flow by perhaps the only stone which bears the graven 
 name of Tostig find their path into the Ocean by way of 
 Starafordbridge. There, in the little church standing 
 apart from the dwelling-places of man, we find portions as 
 precious in the eyes of the architectui'al antiquary as the 
 neighbouring cave is in the eyes of the palaeontologist. 
 We have here a dated example of work of the moment 
 when the newly introduced Norman style was displacing 
 the earlier Romanesque forms common to England with 
 all Western Europe. It is part of the same chain as 
 Coleswegen's towers at Lincoln, but it is an earlier link. 
 The inscription on each side of the sundial at Kirkdale tells 
 us how Orm, the son of Ganiel, bought Saint Gregorys 
 minster when it was ' all tobroken and tofallen,' and made 
 it new from the ground in the days of Eadward the King 
 and Tostig the Earl. The rebuilding of Saint Gregorys 
 minster — mark the use of the word ' minster ' here, as at 
 Assandun, for a church of the smallest scale, and which 
 we can hardly conceive as maintaining more than a single 
 priest — came between the years 1055 and 1065. Within 
 those years Eadward was busy in building his church at 
 Westminster in the new style, and the influence of the 
 new models made their way even to Kirkdale. Both in 
 the west doorway and in the chancel arch, the work, 
 though very rude, is quite unlike the forms of Primitive 
 Romanesque, and shows a distinct, though not very suc- 
 cessful, attempt to imitate the foreign forms which were 
 creeping into use. This small, plain, and solitary church, 
 in a feature which it takes some trouble to find when we 
 have got there, is in fact a most important link in the 
 progress of architecture in England. At Deerhurst — a 
 church of far greater pretensions, but built earlier in the 
 days of the Confessor — there is no approach to Norman 
 work whatever. At Kirkdale the approach may be seen 
 distinctly, though seen only in the very rudest form,
 
 NOTES IN THE NORTH SIDING. 313 
 
 We pass from Kirkdale to Kirkby Moorside. Both 
 places have names taken from the church, and both there- 
 fore of comparatively late origin. They stand therefore 
 in contrast with the venerable gentile name of Lastingham. 
 In that name some have seen the 'lasting home' of its 
 inhabitants, while one ingenious man, hearing that Last- 
 ingham was the home of Lastingas or Lastinga, wrote to 
 say that he had looked in the parish register and could 
 find no such family as the Lastings there. Yery modern 
 ideas, it seems, may dwell in very ancient spots. But we 
 have not yet reached Lastingham, and on the way we 
 must give a moment to that Kirkby Moorside where the 
 best-known lord of Helmsley has been said, with a good 
 deal of exaggeration, to have died ' in the worst inn's 
 worst room.' Thence either of two roads, both of them 
 leading over hill and dale, but one of them specially 
 leading over many hills and dales, will lead to what is in 
 some sort the most remarkable building of the neighbour- 
 hood — the strange, incongruous, unfinished, mutilated, 
 disfigured, and yet in some sort stately, church of Lasting- 
 ham. The place, deep in a hollow on the moorside, was 
 a savage wilderness in the days of Bseda. But for the 
 church and the village which is gathered round it, it 
 would be a wilderness, solitary, if not savage, still. With 
 valleys bearing the attractive names of Ferndale and 
 Rosedale on either side of it, Lastingham itself, though 
 approached on every side from ground higher than itself, 
 can hardly be called a dale. The air of the whole place 
 is strange and un-English, and the un-English efiect is 
 increased by a tall cross on a height above the church 
 and village, though the cross actually commemorates 
 nothing more ancient than the beginning of the present 
 reign. Yet the monument is not inappropriate, looking 
 down as it does on one of the first spots where the cross 
 was planted in this part of England. Within less than a 
 generation from the day when Coifi led the way to the 
 overthrow of the heathen temple at Godmundingaham,
 
 314 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 LastiEgham became the site of one of the earliest of 
 Northnnibrian monasteries, the seat of the holy Cedd, 
 the brother of the more famous Ceadda of Lichfield. 
 There he ^Yas buried, and there his memory is still pre- 
 served in local reverence. His well by the neighbouring 
 stream has been repaired and adorned in quite modern 
 times. But though the history of Lastingham thus 
 carries us back four centuries earlier than the days when 
 Orm rebuilt Saint Gregorys minster, the building itself 
 does not carry us quite back to the days of Eadward and 
 Tostig. In Domesday Lastingham appears as having 
 been held by Gamel, who can hardly be the father of the 
 founder of Kirkdale, nor yet his son who was slain by the 
 practice of Tostig ; he must rather be that other Gamel 
 who avenged his blood by being one of the foremost in the 
 revolt of Northumberland. From him it had passed to 
 Berenger of Toesny, and of him it was held by the then 
 newly- founded monastery of Saint Mary at York. Ac- 
 cording to one story, Lastingham was actually for a while 
 the dwelling-place of the brotherhood, on their road from 
 Whitby to York. Then it was doubtless, in the days of 
 the Conqueror, that there arose that tall apse, stately in 
 its very" plainness and sternness, whose outside displays 
 its plainness and sternness untouched, but which within 
 has been disfigured above all apses, above almost all 
 buildings of any shape. How far human perversity, not 
 without a certain kind of ingenuity, can go iu the way of 
 disfiguring a venerable building, no man fully knows till 
 he has been to Lastingham. As a study of human nature, 
 it is worth any one's while to see how the apse of Last- 
 ingham has suffered within. From any other point of 
 view it is better to shut one's eyes within the choir, and 
 to study only the simple grandeui- of the outside and of 
 the crypt beneath, with its short and sturdy columns sup- 
 plying a perfect study of capitals of the earlier Norman 
 type. To make out the exact history^ of the rest of the 
 building would almost need the gifts of a Willis. At first
 
 To face />. -in.
 
 NOTES IN THE NORTH SIDING. 315 
 
 sight the stately apse of the eleventh century seems to 
 have come into strange union -with a commonplace parish 
 church of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But, 
 both within and without, it is easy to see signs that a 
 large church, much longer and higher than the present 
 one, was at least begun, but possibly never finished, about 
 the end of the twelfth century. The piers and their 
 arches are there, but the upper part is gone or never was 
 built, while there are piers and the beginnings of arches 
 to the west of the present tower. To the exact nature of 
 the process we will not commit ourselves, but it is certain 
 that a church on a great scale was begun, but was either 
 never finished, or else was strangely and recklessly muti- 
 lated at a time long before the dissolution of monasteries 
 gave the general signal for such mutilations. 
 
 Not exactly in the same district, but still within easy 
 reach of Helmsley, is another strange case of destruction, 
 though wrought in this case at the usual time. The 
 priory church of Old Malton, approached by a pleasant 
 walk from the Koman camp of New Malton, besides the 
 usual loss of its monastic eastern portion, has had its 
 nave in the like sort cut short both in height and length. 
 But at Lastingham the west end, whatever it was, has 
 utterly perished ; while at Malton, though one of the twin 
 towers is gone, there is enough to bear witness to the 
 former being a thirteenth-century front of a high order. 
 Malton, in short, has a good deal to show both in the 
 Roman and in the mediseval way ; only it must not, any 
 more than Brihtnoths Maldon far away, set itself up to 
 be Camelodunum.
 
 316 
 
 THE PERCY CASTLES. 
 
 1875. 
 
 When the student of early English history crosses the 
 Tees, a frightful thought at once presses itself upon him. 
 He is in the land which is not set down in Domesday. 
 He feels himself at the mercy of pedigree-makers. If a 
 man chooses to say that his forefathers lived at such a 
 place before the Norman Conquest, the historian looks 
 incredulous, but the pretender cannot always be at once 
 sent to the right-about, as he can at any point between 
 Carisbrooke and Northallerton. There is not always the 
 means of at once turning to the law and to the testimony 
 to see whether these things are so. To be sure sometimes 
 the Survey itself will help us, even in the lands which it 
 does not directly describe. When the Chronicle of Aln- 
 wick tells us of a certain William Tison who died fighting 
 by the side of Harold at Senlac, we hardly need to turn 
 to any further authority to set aside a story which is 
 fully set aside by the evidence of its hero's Norman name. 
 Yet it is something to be able to point in Domesday to 
 the name of Gilbert Tison, and to his estates, the spoil of 
 several patriotic Yorkshiremen. We see how calmly the 
 local romancer has borrowed a name from the other side, 
 and we see also that, whenever he wrote, people were 
 already beginning to think that to have been settled in a 
 place ' before the Conquest ' was even grander than to 
 have ' come over with William the, Conqueror.' But if in 
 the Bernician shii-es we are in a land where we have lost
 
 THE PERCY CASTLES. 317 
 
 our greatest safeguard of all, its place is supplied, as well 
 as may be, by lesser safeguards of no small abundance and 
 value. For the genealogical antiquities, as for the anti- 
 quities of all kinds, of the shires beyond the Tees, of the 
 palatine bishopric and the border earldom, the materials 
 are rich, and no materials have ever been more diligently 
 and more acutely handled by local inquirers. Indeed the 
 great monuments of Northumbrian research, the Surtees 
 Society and its publications, have more than a local cha- 
 racter. They rank among the most valuable contributions 
 to early English history. Northumberland too has been 
 made the subject of the model county history, one of the 
 few whose authors have remembered that the main object 
 of writing the history of a county is to throw light on the 
 history of the whole kingdom. Foremost in interest among 
 the monuments of Northumberland in the narrower sense, 
 of the earldom beyond the Tyne, stand the castles, the 
 castles of every size and shape, from Bamburgh where the 
 castle occupies the whole site of a royal city, to the smallest 
 pele-tower where the pettiest squire or parson sought 
 shelter for himself in the upper stage and for his cows in 
 the lower. For the pele-towers of the Border-land, like 
 the endless small square towers of Ireland, are essentially 
 castles. They show the type of the Norman keep con- 
 tinued on a small scale to a. very late time. Perhaps many 
 of the ' adulterine ' castles which arose in every time of 
 anarchy and which were overthrown at every return of 
 order, many of the eleven hundred and odd castles which 
 overspread the land during the anarchy of Stephen, may 
 have been of much greater pretensions. At any rate, 
 from the great keep of Newcastle — were we not in North- 
 humberland, we should speak of the far greater keep 
 of Colchester — to the least pele-tower which survives 
 as a small part of a modern house, the idea which 
 runs through aU is exactly the same. The castles and 
 towers then, great and small, are the most marked feature 
 of the country. They distinguish it from tliose shires
 
 318 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 where castles of any kind are rave ; and the use of 
 the t^'pe of the great keeps on a very small scale dis- 
 tinguishes it from the other laud of castles. In Wales 
 the Norman keep is not usual ; the castles are, for the 
 most part, later in date and more complex in plan ; and 
 the small square private tower, the distinctive feature of 
 the North, is there hardly to be found. Northumberland 
 has much to show the traveller in many ways, from the 
 Roman wall onward, but the feature which is specially 
 characteristic is that it is the land of castles. 
 
 In speaking of Northumbrian castles it is curious to 
 see how in most minds their mention at once suggests the 
 name of one particular family. Romancing about Tison 
 has gone out of fashion ; but the fashion of romancing has 
 gone on with another name. In any matter which has 
 to do with castles, and with what have happily been called 
 * castle times,' the name of Northumberland at once calls 
 up the name of Percy. Yet, when we come to look a 
 little more narrowly into matters, we shall see how little 
 Northumberland and Percy really had to do with one 
 another. If one chose to be very precise, it would not be 
 wrong to say that no real Percy ever had anything to do 
 with Northumberland at all, except in that elder sense of 
 words in which Yorkshire is a part of Northumberland. 
 As there never was a Duke, so there never was even an 
 Earl, of Northumberland sprung from the male line of 
 the Percy of Domesday. The Northumbrian castles which 
 we instinctively think of as Percy castles were never held 
 by the first, the only true, line of Percies. The Percy of 
 Domesday belongs not to the later Northumberland, but 
 to Yorkshire. The Percies of Northumberland, the de- 
 scendants of Jocelyn of Louvain, had in truth more claim 
 to rank as Karlings than as Percies. But while surnames 
 were still territorial, while they still marked possession of 
 this or that place, rather than descent from this or that 
 man, for the husband of the heiress of Percy to call him- 
 self Jocelyn of Percy was not quite the same thing as
 
 THE PERCY CASTLES. 319 
 
 when Sir Hugh Srnithsoii took the name of his wife's 
 grandmother simply because it was thought to sound finer 
 than the good old Teutonic name of his own forefathers. 
 But the fact is that the great Northumbrian castles which 
 have become specially suggestive of Percies are no more the 
 work of the Karling Percies than they are of the Smithson 
 Percies. At Alnwick almost the only feature of beauty or 
 interest which the hand of the destroyer has spared is the 
 one fragment which belongs to the days that give Alnwick 
 its place in English history. The noble gateway of the 
 ancient keep belongs to days long before the coming of 
 Percies ; it is the work of the older lords of Alnwick of the 
 house of Vescy. So it is at Warkworth ; so it is at Prud- 
 hoe. The Percy of the true line never was there at all ; 
 the Percy of the second line came in as one who dwelled in 
 goodly houses which other men had builded. It was per- 
 haps in some desperate effort to carry back the possession 
 of its later lords to an earlier time, that some daring 
 genealogist, forgetful that Percy was the name of a real 
 spot of Norman ground, devised the tale of the soldier 
 who pierced King Malcolm's eye at Alnwick and so took 
 the name of Pierce-eye. The tale is much of a piece with 
 other genealogical tales ; only unluckily it cut two ways. 
 It exalted the Percy of Northumberland by taking him to 
 Alnwick before his time ; but it lessened the antiquity 
 of the Percy of Normandy and Yorkshire. For once 
 therefore truth got the better of error ; people who be- 
 lieve that Bulstrode came riding on a bull to meet the 
 Conqueror do not believe that the first Percy pierced the 
 eye of Malcolm of Scotland. 
 
 Yet the place of the house of Percy in English history, 
 the place to be sure rather of the second line than of the 
 true Percies, is one which nothing but flattery can ever lead 
 us to forget. Its last age is perhaps the most honourable. 
 The last Percy but one took his place alongside of Man- 
 chester and Essex. One version of the contemporary 
 career of the first recorded Smithson may be read in Tait's
 
 820 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 History of Alnwick, one of the few books of the kind 
 which are not written in a spirit of cringing. Another 
 version, can-ying Smithson, or haply Smithton, up into 
 Domesday, may be seen in the peerages. Which is true, 
 or whether either is true, is a matter of perfect indiffer- 
 ence to English history. The earlier history both of the 
 Percies and of their castles may be studied in the volume 
 which was published by the Archseological Institute after 
 its meeting at Newcastle, the work of the late Mr. Harts- 
 horne, the best inquirer into such matters till the appear- 
 ance of Mr. Clark. Only one cannot help being amused 
 at the fervour of zeal into which Mr. Hartshorne lashes 
 himself at every mention of the name of Percy. He works 
 very hard to make out a case even for the double traitor 
 who first betrayed Richard to Henry, and then rebelled 
 against Henry in tarn. Rather than own a Percy to have 
 been in the wrong, the vulgar names of usurper and the 
 like are showered on the deliverer to whom the Lords and 
 Commons of England gave the crown which was theirs to 
 give. With Mr. Hartshorne reverence for the Percies ex- 
 tends to the modern occupiers of their name, and he has his 
 bursts of admiration even for the modern works to which 
 the glories of Alnwick have given way. Yet, after all the 
 daubing of flatterers, Percy remains a great historic name, 
 and the castles in which the second line of Percies dwelled 
 have an interest in themselves, an interest deep and last- 
 ing, independent either of genealogical fables or of genea- 
 logical truths. And Mr. Hartshorne's book, in sj^ite of its 
 Percy-worship, is a good and useful book, and guides us 
 to several spots which never had anything to do with 
 Percies at all. 
 
 Of the chief Percy castles, the historical importance of 
 Alnwick belongs to its prse-Percy times. The popular 
 belief seems to be that Dukes of Northumberland of the 
 name of Percy have reigned uninterruptedly at Alnwick 
 from the days of the Conqueror or earlier down to our own 
 time. We have seen the travels of an American professor.
 
 THE PERCY CASTLES. 321 
 
 who sets down with charming simplicity the story which 
 he was told at Alnwick about the Duke of Northumber- 
 land's dealings with King Malcolm, in which the appear- 
 ance of the Duke's daughter, Lady Something Percy no 
 doubt, added to the charm of the legend. Yet at Alnwick 
 in the eleventh century, even in the latest years of the 
 century, there was neither Duke nor Earl, neither Smith- 
 son nor Percy ; it is not clear that there was any castle at 
 all. Still it was undoubtedly at Alnwick that Malcolm and 
 his son Edward lost their lives in the days of Rufus ; at 
 Alnwick it was that, eighty years later, William the Lion 
 was taken captive, to yield to the English overlord a more 
 full submission than any King of Scots had yielded before 
 him. The place of the ambush by which the earlier king 
 died is still shown, marked by the traditional name of 
 Malcolm's Cross, and by a ruined chapel of Romanesque 
 date hard by. The place is a height looking out on another 
 range to the south, while between them flows the Alne, 
 with the lower height crowned by Alnwick castle and 
 town rising above it. When William came, Alnwick had a 
 castle, the work of Eustace Fitz-John, son-in-law of the first 
 Ivoof Vescy, who seems to have set the fashion to the place of 
 handing on the names of mothers and grandmothers rather 
 than those of fathers. The capture of the Lion king chiefly 
 suggests the remembrance of the special engagements by 
 which he regained his freedom. Hitherto, though the 
 Scottish king had been the man of the English overlord, 
 no Scottish subject had been bound by the like allegiance, 
 no Scottish castle had been held as a pledge of the faith 
 of its prince. The treaty of Falaise imposed these new 
 burthens, and it was from these new burthens, not from 
 the obligations of the old commendation, that the Lion of 
 Poitou released his brother Lion of Scotland. Another 
 Scottish king, early in the next century, did his homage 
 at the same place. Then, in 1309, the first Percy of 
 Alnwick crept in unawares, through a grant or sale from 
 Bishop Anthony Bek, who seems to have played the last
 
 322 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 Ye^Qj -a rather shabby trick. Since then Ahiwick appears 
 now and then in history ; it has stood a siege or two and 
 seen a king- or two, bnt it has not been the scene of great 
 national events, like the slaying of Malcolm and the 
 homage of William. 
 
 At Alnwick then the main interest of the place is in 
 its memories, memories of days before the name of Percy 
 had been heard there. Warkworth, of less historic fame 
 than Alnwick, is in itself a more pleasing object of study. 
 Bating two or three rooms in the later keep, it stands, as a 
 castle should stand, free from the disfigurement of modern 
 habitation. This keep, a work of the Percies of the second 
 line, is a good study of the process by which the purely 
 military castle gradually passed into the house fortified for 
 any occasional emergency. Placed on its peninsular hill 
 rising above the Coquet, few military or domestic buildings 
 surpass its picturesque outline. The later chapel, as well 
 as the later hall, is in this keep ; but the older chapel and 
 the older pillared hall are still to be traced in their foun- 
 dations. But the chapel was to have been more than a 
 chapel. According to a practice found in several royal 
 and in a few baronial dwellings, it was to have been a 
 small minster, a cross church with an attached college, 
 within the castle walls. In a hill-side on the other bank 
 of the river, approached by a wooded dale, is the famous 
 hermitage, so well known in legend, but whose history Mr. 
 Hartshorne is driven to guess at. The chapel hewn in 
 the rock carries us to the rock-hewn churches of Brantome 
 and Saint Emilion. Here in England the sight of archi- 
 tectural details cut in the rock, an apparent vault with 
 apparent groining and bosses, is strange and unusual. 
 Mr. Hartshorne looks on the hermitage as the work of 
 the third Percy of Alnwick, the second of Warkworth, 
 Henry by name, in the time of Edward the Third. That it 
 is a Percy work can hardly be doubted ; but it must not 
 be forgotten that Warkworth contains, both in its castle 
 and elsewhere, important remains - of prse-Percy times.
 
 X
 
 ^VM^{L, 
 
 
 'J P face p. 32^.
 
 THE PERCY CASTLES. 323 
 
 The oldest parts of the castle may have seen the coming of 
 the Lion of Scotland, and the parish church is a large and, 
 allowing for modern restoration, a well preserved building 
 of Romanesque date. At Prudhoe, the castle where Percy 
 succeeded TJmfraville, the ugly house within the walls is 
 perhaps less offensive than the turning of the ancient 
 building itself into a modern dwelling-place. But we 
 admire the pile as it stands above the Tyne ; we admire 
 the entrance-tower, with its chapel containing the earliest 
 known oriel window, one of the simplest and most grace- 
 ful pieces of work of its kind. There is the shattered 
 keep, which withstood the Scottish assaults when Wark- 
 worth fell before them, where its founder, Odenell of 
 Umfraville, kept at bay the host of the Northern king till 
 Randolf of Glanville, the warlike Justiciar, the author of 
 our first legal treatise, came to his help. At Prudhoe 
 there are no Percy memories, no Percy buildings ; all 
 belongs to an elder day. The keep of the twelfth century 
 leads us back by easy steps to a yet more venerable monu- 
 ment on the other side of the river. There the church 
 tower of Ovingham,of the purest prse-Norman Romanesque, 
 recalling Monkwearmouth itself on a scale of greater bulk 
 and stateliness, carries us back to days wlien Percies were 
 not, and when, if we may trust one of the most venerable 
 of Northern sagas, the son of Smith would have been as 
 little likely as the son of Karl to be ashamed of his own 
 name. 
 
 T 2
 
 824 
 
 BAMBURGH AND DUNSTANBURGH. 
 
 1875. 
 
 We lately spoke of some of those castles of the great 
 Border earldom which derive their chief reputation in 
 popular, though not in historical, belief, from their com- 
 paratively modern connexion with the second house of 
 Percy. But there are other castles in the same land which 
 play but little part in the hands of the genealoger or the 
 romancer, but which really have, in one way or another, a 
 higher interest than any of those castles whose names are 
 to most ears more familiar. Two castles of the North- 
 humbrian earldom stand out, each, in its own way, pre- 
 eminent among all their fellows. One is, in its memories, 
 if not in its fabric, the most historic of all, and if its fabric 
 is sadly disfigured by adaptation to modern uses, it yet 
 stands, with its main outline at least hardly marred, on a 
 site which is all but the noblest by nature, and which 
 surpasses the sites of all other northern fortresses in 
 ancient and abiding historic interest. The other plays but 
 little part in history, but it surpasses all in the natural 
 grandeur of its site, and it alone abides, as a castle should 
 abide, in all the majesty of a shattered ruin. These are 
 the two fortresses of Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh, each 
 standing far away alike from the busy dwelling-places of 
 man and from the softer scenery of inland hills and dales. 
 Utterly unlike the keep of Newcastle in the midst of its 
 thronging streets, utterly unlike Alnwick and Wark worth 
 and Prudhoe, looking down from their gentler heights on 
 their rivers, are these two stern rock-fortresses overhanging
 
 BAMBURGH AND DUNSTANBURGH. 325 
 
 the German Ocean. Among buildings of their own class, 
 they are the very glory of the old Bernician realm. Of 
 the two shires into which the still English portions of that 
 realm are divided, each, by a kind of equitable arrangement, 
 contains the spot of deepest importance in its own line. 
 Northumberland contains the immemorial dwelling-place 
 of its kings and earls. Durham contains the no less proud 
 dwelling-place of the princely bishops from whose church 
 the palatine shire has taken its name. With Bamburgh 
 in the land beyond the Tyne, with Durham in the land on 
 this side of it, it is an insult to those two great and his- 
 toric shires to speak of them, as is done in Murray's 
 Handbook, as if mere ballads and popular traditions were 
 the chief things to be thought of in them. Ballads and 
 popular traditions are well enough in their place, and, in 
 their place, they will never be despised by any rational 
 inquirer. But it is not of ballads and popular traditions 
 that we chiefly think when we see the whole volume of 
 English history unfolded before us around the mighty keep 
 of Bamburgh, or when we trace the fates of the great 
 Bernician bishopric, in its wanderings from the cell of 
 Aidan on his hermit island to the lordly home of William 
 of Saint Calais and Hugh of Puiset. 
 
 We have said that, among the objects of historical in- 
 terest in Northumberland, the castles claim the first place 
 as the distinctive historic feature of the country. When 
 we look on such a fortress as Bamburgh, and think of all 
 the events whose memories dwell around it from the 
 earliest days of English history, we may be tempted to say 
 that, in purely historical interest, as a monument of re- 
 corded men and recorded acts, it surpasses even the great 
 wonder of the northern land, the Roman wall itself. In 
 truth the interest of the wall and that of the castles are 
 of two wholly different kinds. The wall is there, less 
 mysterious indeed now than it was to Procopius in days 
 when, comparatively new as it still was, it had passed 
 away into the shadowy wonders of an unknown cloudland.
 
 320 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 But, diligently as it has been studied, rich as has been the 
 return which it has yielded to those who have studied it, 
 the Koman wall, whether we call it the wall of Hadrian, of 
 Severus, or of Theodosius, still remains a work shrouded 
 in a certain degree of mystery. It is a monument of ages 
 which have utterly passed away, a monument which 
 might be almost said to have been already an antiquity 
 when the first Englishman gazed on it in wonder. What- 
 ever part the great wall played in history in days when 
 strife within this island was still a strife between Celt and 
 Roman, it has played no part since English history began ; 
 it has not even, like many meaner works, served as a 
 political frontier. It might be hazardous to say that it 
 has never at any time formed the boundary of shire or 
 kingdom ; but it has certainly not served as such for any 
 great time or through any great part of its length. The 
 wall is a monument of the past which has utterly vanished, 
 a monument of the fortunes of those who came before us 
 in the possession of the land which is now ours. The 
 castles are also the monuments of a past which is gone 
 for ever ; but it is a past which is our own past, a past 
 which is connected by a tie of unbroken continuity with 
 the present. 
 
 But at Bamburgh above all we feel that we are pilgrims 
 come to do our service at one of the great cradles of our 
 national life. It is the one spot in northern England 
 around which the same interest gathers which belongs to 
 the landing places of Hengest, of ^EUe, and of Cerdic, in 
 the southern lands. It is to the Angle what those spots 
 are to the Jute and the Saxon. The beginnings of the 
 Anglian kingdoms are less rich in romantic and personal 
 lore than are the beginnings of their Jutish and Saxon 
 neighbours. Unless we accept the tale about Octa and 
 Ebussa, we have no record of the actual leaders of the first 
 Teutonic settlements in the Anglian parts of Britain. 
 The earliest kingdoms seem not to have been founded 
 by new-comers from beyond the sea, but to have been
 
 BAMBURGH AND BUNSTANBUROH. 327 
 
 formed by tlie fusing- together of smaller independent 
 settlements. Yet round Baraburgli and its founder Ida 
 all Northumbrian history gathers. Though its keep is 
 more than five hundred years later than Ida's time — though 
 it is only here and there that we see fragments of masonry 
 which we can even guess may be older than the keep — it is 
 still a perfectly allowable figure when the poet of northern 
 Britain speaks of Bamburgh as *King Ida's fortress.' 
 The founder of the Northumbrian kingdom, the first who 
 bore the kingly name in Bamburgh, the warrior whom the 
 trembling Briton spoke of as the * flame-bearer,' appears 
 in the one slight authentic notice of him, not as the leader 
 of a new colony from the older England, but rather as 
 the man who gathered together a number of scattered in- 
 dependent settlements into a nation and a kingdom. And, 
 when we find ourselves in a land, no longer of casters but 
 of chesters, we begin to ask whether Octa and Ebussa do 
 not mean something, whether some of these settlements 
 were not Jutish or Saxon rather than Anglian. The 
 Chronicler records of Ida that in 547 he ' took to the 
 kingdom ' (' f eng to rice ') ; but nothing is said of his 
 coming, like Hengest or Cerdic, from beyond sea. And 
 all the other accounts fall in with the same notion. 
 Henry of Huntingdon, though he has no story to tell, no 
 ballad to translate, was doubtless following some old tradi- 
 tion when he described the Anglian chiefs, after a series 
 of victories over the Welsh, joining together to set a king 
 over them. And all agree in speaking of Bamburgh, 
 called, so the story ran, from his queen Bebbe, as a special 
 work of Ida. Whatever may be the origin of the name, 
 it suggests the kindred name of the East-Frankish Baben- 
 berg, which has been cut short into Bamberg by the same 
 process which has cut short Bebbanburh into Bambu.rgh. 
 But Bamburgh was a fortress by nature, even before Ida 
 had fenced it in, first with a hedge and then with a wall. 
 That mass of isolated basaltic rock frowning over the sea 
 on one side, over the land on the other, was indeed a spot
 
 828 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 marked out by nature for dominion. Here then was the 
 city of Bebbe, strong but small, the royal city, reached only 
 by steps, with a sing-le entrance cut in the rock, and whose 
 whole circuit did not exceed that of two or three fields. 
 That is, the whole length and breadth of the royal city of 
 Bernicia was no greater than that of the present castle. 
 Its highest point was crowned, not as yet by the keep of 
 the Norman, but by a church which, according to the 
 standard of the eighth century, was a goodly one. This 
 church contained a precious chest, which sheltered a yet 
 more precious relic, the wonder-working right hand of the 
 martyred king Oswald. We read too how the city, 
 perched on its Ocean rock, was yet, unlike the inland hill 
 of the elder Salisbury, well furnished with water, clear to 
 the eye and sweet to the taste. Here was the dwelling- 
 place of successive Bernician kings, ealdormen, and earls ; 
 here they took shelter as in an impregnable refuge from 
 the inroads of Scot and Dane. Here the elder Waltheof 
 shut himself up in terror while his valiant son Uhtred sent 
 forth and rescued the newly founded church and city of 
 Durham from the invader. But by the time that we reach 
 the event in the history of Bamburgh which is told to us 
 in the most striking detail, the keep had already risen ; 
 the English city had become the Norman castle. In the 
 days of Eufus, when the fierce Robert of Mowbray had 
 risen a second time in rebellion, the keep of Bamburgh, 
 safe on its rock and guarded by surrounding waves and 
 marshes, was deemed beyond the power even of the Eed 
 King to subdue b}^ force of arms. The building of the 
 Malvoisin, the Evil Neighbour, the s7riTscxi'0-/^os, as a Greek 
 would have called it, was all that could be done while 
 the rebel Earl kept himself within the impregnable walls. 
 It was only when he risked himself without those walls, 
 when he was led up to them as a captive, with his eyes 
 to be seared out if his valiant wife refused to surrender, 
 that Bamburgh came into the royal hands. 
 
 Yet, simply as a spot to gaze at, the castle of Dunstan-
 
 BAMBURGH AND DUN8TANBURQH. 329 
 
 burgh, wliich lias hardly any history, may claim a rank 
 higher even than royal Bamburgh. Neither history nor 
 tradition tells us how the fortress came by its name ; yet 
 Dunstan was a Northumbrian as well as a West-Saxon 
 name, and Dunstan the son of ^Ethelnoth appears among 
 the Northumbrian chiefs who rose up against the tyranny 
 of Tostig. But be its founder who he may, though the 
 castle itself plays no part in history, it has been the posses- 
 sion of two memorable lords. It was for a while the 
 property of Earl Simon ; and it had passed to him from a 
 lord who, whatever may have been his pedigree, bore the 
 glorious name of Hereward. After the fall of the great 
 Earl, it passed to Edmund of Lancaster, him who had 
 once borne the name and garb of a Sicilian king, and 
 from him it passed to his son, that Thomas of Lancaster 
 whose name was by the voice of the English people placed 
 on the roll of saints alongside of Simon himself. To Earl 
 Thomas there is every reason to attribute the present 
 building. In Mr. Hartsborne's collection we find him 
 receiving a licence to crenellate, combined with a full 
 ofiicial account of the works. There those works stand as 
 they should stand. At Alnwick, at Warkworth, at Prud- 
 hoe, at Bamburgh itself, the historic sense is grated on 
 by modern habitation in various forms. At Dunstan- 
 burgh happily all is ruin. Its isolated hill stands yet 
 more nobly than the isolated hill of Bamburgh ; the waves 
 dash more immediately at its feet, boiling up in a narrow 
 channel close under its walls, as if art and nature had 
 joined together to make the fortress of Earl Thomas 
 grim and awful above all other fortresses. Nothing can 
 well be conceived more striking than the Lilburn tower, 
 a Norman keep in spirit, though far later in date, 
 rising on the slope of the wild hill with the tall basaltic 
 columns standing in order in front of it ' like sentinels of 
 stone.' Yet, simply as a building, one is almost more 
 struck if one approaches from the opposite side, and if the 
 vast gateway, with its two huge circular towers, is the
 
 330 NORTHUMBERLAND. 
 
 first feature to burst upon us. It doubtless bas its rivals in 
 otber places wbere we more naturally look for some of 
 tbe great works of human skill. In that desolate wilder- 
 ness the gateway and tbe wbole castle bave an effect wbicb 
 is sublime beyond words.
 
 SUSSEX
 
 383 
 
 THE CASE OF THE COLLEGIATE 
 CHURCH OF ARUNDEL. 
 
 1879-1880. 
 
 [This paper was first written in 1879, at the time of the first trial. I had 
 not then seen the documents in full. I afterwards recast it by the light 
 of the two trials and of a study of the documents. It was satisfactory 
 to find that such a study thoroughly confirmed the conclusion which I 
 had come to by the mere use of tlie comparative method. 
 
 I have added, as an appendix to tlie paper, part of an article from the 
 Saturday Review, September 11, 1875, describing two of the best ex- 
 amples of the class of churches referred to, one of which is mentioned 
 in the paper itself.] 
 
 The question which, after two trials, has lately been 
 decided in favour of the Duke of Norfolk against the 
 Vicar of Arundel is one which involves many points of 
 historical and antiquarian interest. The j^oint in dispute 
 was whether the building forming the eastern limb of 
 Arundel church was simply the chancel of the parish 
 church, or whether it was in strictness a separate church, 
 formerly belonging to the suppressed college, and now 
 forming, with the other property of that college, an 
 absolute possession belonging to the duke. In the former 
 case the duke would have simply the rights and liabilities 
 held by an impropriate rector over the chancel of a parish 
 church. In the other case the building would be abso- 
 lutely at the duke's disposal, as much as a house or a 
 barn that belonged to him. Much that was said at the 
 two trials by counsel, and even by judges, much that has 
 been said in the way of newspaper comment, sounds very 
 wonderful to those to whom the case of Arundel church
 
 334 SUSSEX. 
 
 seemed only a very simple instance of a class to which 
 they were well accustomed. It may therefore be useful 
 to compare the case of Arundel at some length with a 
 number of other cases which have more or less of analogy 
 with it. 
 
 It was even doubted at the trial whether there could 
 be in strictness two churches under one roof, that is, 
 whether a building which forms one architectural whole 
 and which in artistic and in ordinary language would be 
 spoken of as a single church, could really contain what, in 
 point of property and use, are two distinct churches. I 
 confess that I was surprised that there could be any doubt 
 upon the subject. The arrangement is a very common one, 
 and it is one which I have always carefully noticed when- 
 ever I have come across it. I have myself spoken of it 
 in several monographs in various periodicals and local 
 proceedings, and it must surely be familiar to any one 
 who has studied the different classes of monastic and 
 collegiate churches. The case of Amndel seems singular, 
 simply because both churches are standing, though one is 
 disused, while in most cases one of the two has been pulled 
 down. That is to say, the successive Earls of Arundel 
 have forborne to exercise the right of destruction which 
 the law gave them. In most cases that right has been 
 unsparingly exercised ; Arundel is one of the small class 
 of cases in which it has not. 
 
 In some collegiate churches, in perhaps the majority 
 of monastic churches, there was no connexion with any 
 parish. The inhabitants of the place where the college or 
 monastery stood had no proprietary rights in the monastic 
 or collegiate church; they had their own distinct parish 
 church, standing quite apart. In other cases the parish 
 church and the monastic or collegiate church stood close 
 together and formed one architectural whole. That is to 
 say, a building which formed architecturally a single 
 church was, as far as use and property were concerned, 
 divided into two churches, one belonging to the painsh.
 
 THE ARUNDEL- CASE. 836 
 
 the otlier to the monks or canons. I must here add an 
 interpretation clause for my own article. To avoid end- 
 less repetitions and explanations, I shall use the word 
 monies to denote all members of religious foundations, and 
 the word canons to denote all members of secular founda- 
 tions, whatever was their title in .each particular case. 
 The members of the secular foundations bore various titles 
 — canons, prebendaries, fellows, chaplains, and others ; 
 at Arundel the original name was chaplains, for which the 
 name of fellows seems to have been a later alteration. 
 But the nature of the foundation was the same, whatever 
 was the title of its members. In these cases of divided 
 churches, the eastern part of the building commonly 
 belonged to the monks or canons, the western part to the 
 parishioners. Most commonly, in the usual case of a cross 
 church, the parishioners had the nave, while the monks or 
 canons had the choir and transepts. Thus the building, 
 while it formed architecturally a single church, formed in 
 point of possession two churches, which, wherever legal 
 precision was needed, were spoken of severally as the 
 ' parish church ' and the ' abbey church,' * priory church,' 
 or, as at Arundel, 'collegiate church,' according to the 
 nature of the foundation. But neither now nor then was 
 such legal precision likely to be always attended to in 
 ordinary speech. A building which, for all architectural 
 and artistic purposes, was one building, was constantly 
 spoken of as one building. The two churches under one 
 roof, forming one architectural whole, were constantly 
 spoken of as one church. Men spoke then, as we should 
 speak now, of ' Arundel church ' as a whole. And as one 
 part was collegiate, another part parochial, it is not 
 wonderful if the whole was often spoken of, sometimes as 
 ' collegiate church,' sometimes as * parochial church.' But 
 whenever legal precision was of importance, the two parts 
 of the building were carefully distinguished by their proper 
 names. And never was the distinction more needed than 
 when one part of the building changed owners. Such a
 
 336 SUSSEX. 
 
 time came amid the changes of the sixteenth century. 
 Wlion the monasteries were suppressed under Henry the 
 Eighth, and the colleges, partly under Henry the Eighth, 
 partly under Edward the Sixth, that part of the building 
 which formed the monastic or collegiate church came into 
 the hands of the king with the rest of the monastic or 
 collegiate property, and was dealt with by him or his 
 grantee according to their pleasure in each particular case. 
 It was dealt with precisely as those suppressed churches 
 were dealt with which stood apart from any parish church. 
 Its architectural connexion with the parish church made 
 no difiPerence. But, whatever hajDpened to it, the right of 
 the parish in its part of the building was not touched. 
 That was no more interfered with by the suppression of 
 the monastery or college than it was when the two 
 churches stood altogether apart. The monastic or col- 
 legiate church was in most cases altogether pulled down. 
 In others it was dismantled and left as a ruin. In others 
 it was allowed to stand whole, but was disused ; in a few 
 cases it was bought by the parishioners or given them by 
 some benefactor, and was added to the parish church. 
 
 I shall speak throughout of monastic and collegiate 
 churches together, because I cannot see that it makes 
 any difference whether the corporate body which divided 
 the church with the parish was regular or secular. The 
 rights and relations of the corporation towards the parish 
 would be the same in either case. The abbot and monks 
 in one case, the dean and canons or other collegiate body 
 in the other case, might be simply the corporate rector 
 with the rights and liabilities of any other rector, or they 
 might be something more, namely the absolute owners of 
 the monastic or collegiate part of the building. It makes 
 no difference that in the majority of collegiate churches 
 the canons seem to have been simply a corporate rector, 
 while in the vast majority of monastic churches the 
 monks were absolute owners, either of the whole church, 
 if there was no parish attached, or, as has been already
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 337 
 
 said, of part of it wlien there was a parish attached. The 
 reason is plain ; the monks had much more reason to seek 
 for a complete separation from the parishioners than the 
 secular clergy had. In fact, in mauy collegiate churches 
 the evident object was simply to provide for the better 
 performance of divine service in the parish church. The 
 canons or other clergy were simply a multiplied rector ; 
 when the college was suppressed, the rectory passed with 
 the other college projDerty to the king's grantee ; but this 
 gave him no rights over the chancel beyond the ordinary 
 rights of a rector. It was his duty to keep up ; he had 
 no power to pull down. But where the absolute property 
 of any part of the building was vested in the corporate 
 body, whether monks or canons, the power of destruction 
 passed into the hands of the grantee, and he most com- 
 monly put it in force. 
 
 On the other hand, it is equally clear that there were, 
 or had been, monastic churches which were also parochial, 
 and in which the monks had simply the rights of rectors. 
 This I conceive was the case with a number of small 
 monastic churches, chiefly in Wales — I mention that of 
 Penmon in Anglesey, as the last which I have seen — where 
 the whole church is standing, and where there is no sign 
 of any division having been made. Here, I conceive the 
 monks were simply a corporate rector, so that the disso- 
 lution did not affect the rights of the parishioners in 
 the chancel. In other cases the church was in the same 
 way originally held in common by the monks and the 
 parishioners ; but disputes arose, as Avas but natural ; 
 and it was agreed to divide the building, the monks 
 taking the eastern part and the parishioners the western. 
 The cases of this kind where the history is recorded give 
 us the key to a number of other cases where the history is 
 not recorded — where at least it is not accessible to me — 
 but which present the same appearances as those whose 
 history is known. When we see a church, known to have 
 been monastic or collegiate, whose western part is standing 
 
 z
 
 838 SUSSEX. 
 
 and is used as a parish church, but whose eastern part is 
 pulled down, ruined, or disused, we may, in absence of 
 proof to the contrary, presume a division of the building 
 between the parish and the monks or canons. It does 
 not follow that the division was in all cases the conse- 
 quence of a dispute. The church may have been in some 
 cases so divided from the beginning- ; but it is naturally 
 in those cases where there was a dispute that we get the 
 history in the fullest detail. 
 
 It must further be remembered that, if any distinction 
 could be established in this matter between monastic and 
 collegiate churches, a distinction for which I do not see 
 the slightest ground, still that distinction would not apply 
 to Arundel. For there, as the grantee took the place of 
 the college, so the college had before taken the place of 
 the supxn-essed alien priory. The rights with which the 
 new foundation Avas clothed would not be smaller than 
 those which had been held by the earlier body ; they 
 might conceivably be greater. 
 
 I now come to the examples' which show that it was a 
 common practice for a church to be divided between a 
 parish and a monastic or collegiate body, and that in such 
 cases the two parts were formally spoken of as the ' parish 
 church ' and the ' priory church,' or whatever else might 
 be the proper description in that particular case. But 
 we must not look for strict consistency of usage on this 
 point. The church, though divided for purposes of pos- 
 session and use, still, as a building, formed one whole. 
 When there was no particular necessity to insist on the 
 fact of division, people would naturally speak of the two 
 
 1 I keep to English examples, as I have not given much attention to the 
 matter out of England. But I stumbled on a case of the kind in 1879 at 
 Chateau du Loir in Maine, where the cure kindly volunteered a bit of local 
 history proving the division, not knowing that it would be specially accept- 
 able. 
 
 The double choirs, capitular and parochial, of the great German min- 
 sters are the same in principle as the arrangement of which we are now 
 speaking ; but the artistic effect is quite different.
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 339 
 
 parts togetlier as a single church. It was only when it 
 was specially needful to insist on the division that the 
 parts would be spoken of severally as the ' parish church ' 
 and the ' priory church ' or ' collegiate church.' 
 
 I will begin with a case in which the history of the 
 division is minutely recorded, having been brought about 
 by a dispute as to the right of visitation. This is the 
 church of Wymondham in Norfolk, first a dependent 
 priory of Saint Albans, afterwards an independent abbey. 
 It was also a parish church, and in 1249 a dispute arose 
 as to the right of the archdeacon to visit in it. The 
 question was settled by papal authority in favour of the 
 archdeacon, so far that his right of visitation was esta- 
 blished within the parochial part of the church, whicli is 
 distinctly distinguished as the ' parish church.' The docu- 
 ment is printed in the Gesta Abbatum Sancti Albani, i. 
 355 — 360. The description of the church, as given in the 
 archdeacon's pleading, is explicit. 
 
 Cum enim ecclesia de Wydmundham, de qua agitur, sit paro- 
 chialis ecclesia, et non cella, ad quam per priorem et conventum 
 vicarius Norwicensi episcopo prfesentatur, et curam animarum 
 recipit ab eodem, et ad ipsam parochiani confluunt pro divinis, et 
 a vicavio ecclesiastica I'ecipiunt sacramenta, monachis ij^sius celljB 
 facientibus intra chorum ; ad quam etiam parochianis per publica 
 stiata patet ingressus, ipsia vero monachis ad chorum datur aditus 
 aliunde; licet parietes parochialis ecclesise, et choii iu quo per 
 monachos deservitur, continui sint, ipsosque sit protegens idem 
 tectum, hujusmodi tamen ecclesia infra cellar ambit um non consis- 
 tit, nee ad ipsam indulgentia se extendit. 
 
 The decision of the papal court runs as follows : — 
 
 Ut memoratum archidiaconum permittant uti juribus supra- 
 dictis in dictis ecclesiis pacifice et quiete : nomine autem ecclesise 
 de Wymundham parochialem intelligimus ecclesiam, cum vicario, 
 et plebe quae pertinet ad eandem. 
 
 Here we have described, as distinctly as words can 
 describe anything, two churches forming one building 
 under one roof and with continuous walls, which were 
 
 z 2
 
 840 SUSSEX. 
 
 yet so distinct in point of possession and nse that the 
 archdeacon had jurisdiction in one part of the bviilding 
 and not in the other. But the ' prrcdictaj ecclesio} ' in the 
 hist extract do not mean the monastic and parochial 
 church, but the two churches of Wymondham and Binham, 
 both of which Avere concerned in the dispute. 
 
 For the later very important history of Wymondham 
 I have not any original document to refer to. I must be 
 satisfied with the account in the Monasticon (iii. 328), 
 and in Mr. Petit's paper on Wymondham, in the volume 
 of the Archaeological Institute at Norwich for 1847, p. 117. 
 Both refer to Blomefield's History of Norfolk, which I 
 have not at hand. It appears that the second dispute 
 arose about 1410, this time between the parishioners and 
 the monks, and it was settled by Archbishop Arundel. 
 The way in which the constructive division was made was 
 singular. The monks took the choir and transepts, with 
 the tower which stood immediately west of the crossing, 
 together with the south aisle of the nave. The parishioners 
 had the nave and the north aisle ; they also built a tower 
 at the west end. The abbey tower in the middle formed 
 a complete barrier, with a dead wall, between the eastern 
 and western parts of the church. At the dissolution, the 
 parishioners bought the south aisle and the abbey tower. 
 They did not buy the choir and transepts ; these therefore 
 were destroyed, and only some ruins are left. 
 
 The church of Binham, another cell of Saint Albans, 
 was, as I have said, concerned in the same dispute as 
 Wymondham. The western limb is now standing, and 
 forms a complete parish church, with a chancel marked 
 off in its eastern part. It was evidently cut off from the 
 monastic church by a solid wall, forming a reredos to the 
 parish high altar, and pierced Avith the two doors usual in 
 a reredos. 
 
 Another cell of Saint Albans was Tynemouth, where 
 also in 1247 a dispute arose between the church of Saint 
 Albans and the Bishop and church of Durham, about the
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 341 
 
 right of visitation. This is recorded by Matthew Paris 
 (Chronica Majora., iv. 609, ed. Lnard). The words are — 
 ' super visitatione facienda in ecclesia parochiali, qusG est 
 in monasterio monachorum de Thinemue.' In the decision 
 of the question (iv. 615), the dispute ' super visitatione 
 ecclesise parochialis de Thinemue ' is settled by ruling that 
 the bishop and his officials shall have jurisdiction 
 in ilia parte ecclesise de Thinemue in qua parochianis divina cele- 
 brantur, sine onere procurationis, ita quod de monachis seu alia 
 parte ecclesise sive etiam de ipsa cella se nullatenus intromittant. 
 
 Here the ' ecclesia parochialis ' is defined to be a part 
 of the general 'ecclesia' or ' monasterium ' {minster) of 
 Tynemouth.' And, though the whole is now in ruins, 
 the distinction is still clearly marked. The reredos of the 
 parish high altar, plainly set up at the time spoken of by 
 Matthew Paris, is still to be seen across the western arch 
 of the crossing. 
 
 The further history of Tynemouth, as given in the 
 Monasticon (iii. 309-310),^ shows that in the time of 
 Elizabeth, the ' parish kirk,' which was then still in use, 
 was distinguished from the ' abbey kirk,' to the east of it, 
 which was in ruins. A new parish church, apart from 
 the priory, was begun in 1659, and by the end of the 
 seventeenth century the old parish church was unroofed. 
 
 In these cases we have part of the building distin- 
 guished in legal language as ' ecclesia parochialis,' while, 
 in one case at least, the two parts were popularly distin- 
 guished as ' parish kirk ' and * abbey kirk.' We find the 
 same language in use at Leominster, a church which I 
 
 ' It must be remembered that, besides the use of monasterium to mean 
 monastery, it also often means minuter, that is, the church as distinguished 
 from the other buildings, and that whether the church was monastic or 
 secular. The Waltham charter says, with perfect accuracy, that Harold 
 ' construxit monasterium ; ' it would have been inaccurate to say that he 
 ^fundarit monasterium.' 
 
 2 Many more details will be found in the late Mr, W. S. Gibson's His- 
 tory of Tynemouth ; but, amidst much declamation, he fails to grasp the 
 history of the divided church.
 
 ;U-2 SUSSEX. 
 
 have studied very minutely, and of which I wrote an 
 account in tlie Arehrcolog'ia Cambrensis, and also in the 
 local History of Leominster by the Rev. G. F. Townsend, 
 p. 209. Here we have the witness of Leland (see Monas- 
 ticon, iv. 55). He says : — 
 
 Ther is but one paroch chirch in Leominster, but it is large, 
 somewhat darke, and of antient building, insomuch that it is a 
 gi-ete lykelyhood that it is the church that was somwhat afore the 
 Conquest. The chirch of the priorie was hard joyned to the est 
 end of the paroch chirch, and was but a small thing. 
 
 The parish church, though certainly not ' somewhat 
 afore the Conquest,' contains the greater part of the 
 twelfth century minster, namely, the nave and north aisle. 
 The south aisle was widened into a large building, with 
 the parish high altar at the east end. The choir and 
 transepts which formed the priory church had plainly 
 been pulled down before Leland's visit. Their founda- 
 tions were dug up some years back. But the evidence for 
 the distinction at Leominster does not merely rest on the 
 English of Leland. It occurs also in the formal Latin of 
 the will of Philip Bradford in 1458, printed in Mr. Town- 
 send's book, p. 41 : — 
 
 Lego . . . corpus meum ad sepeliendum in capella sanctse 
 Annfe infra ecclesiam parochialem Leomynstrise. Item, lego altari 
 S. Petri in ecclesia monachorum ijs. Item, lego altari Sanctse 
 Trinitatis in ecclesia parochiali ibidem xijd. 
 
 This last document gives us another clear case of dis- 
 tinction between the ' ecclesia parochialis ' and the ' eccle- 
 sia monachorum,' existing as separate churches within 
 what, sjjeaking architecturally of the building, we should 
 call a single church. This leads us to an entry in Matthew 
 Paris (Chronica Majora, iv. 227, ed. Luard), where, under 
 the year 1242, he records the consecration of 'ecclesia 
 conventualis canonicorum de Waltham.' No one who 
 knows the earlier and later history of Waltham abbey can 
 doubt as to his meaning. The present church consists of 
 the nave only ; the choir, transepts, and central tower are
 
 ^;^»»23TO3Nvj^T^ 

 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 343 
 
 gone. The solid wall which ends the church to the east 
 is clearly a carrying up of the reredos of the parish high 
 altar ; the doors may be traced. Within this parish 
 church or constructive nave it is alleged that two or three 
 of the eastern bays still form the parish chancel, and that 
 the impropriate rector, and not the parish, is bound to 
 repair those bays. I do not profess to know whether this 
 claim is good in law ; but the mere belief is enough to 
 show historically that the present church of Waltham 
 was a complete parish church with its chancel, distinct 
 from the monastic church to the east of it. That eastern 
 church was the ' ecclesia conventualis ' of Matthew Paris. 
 It was no doubt rebuilt on a larger scale in the thirteenth 
 century, and consecrated afresh, while the parish church to 
 the west of it remained untouched. It is hardly needful 
 to say that the ' canonici de Waltham ' in Matthew Paris' 
 entry are the Austin canons put in by Henry the Second, 
 not the secular canons of the elder foundation of Harold. 
 In all these cases the monastic church is gone. The 
 grantee exercised his right of property by pulling it down 
 or leaving it in ruins. With these before us we can better 
 understand a crowd of other cases, where we see the same 
 appearances, but where I at least do not know the docu- 
 mentary history. Such are the monastic churches of 
 Worksop, Blyth, Bridlington, Usk, Chepstow, Margam, 
 Deerhurst," Lanercost, Monkton in Pembrokeshire, the 
 collegiate church of Euthin in Denbighshire, and many 
 others. I speak only of monastic and collegiate churches ; 
 they must not be confounded with another class, chiefly 
 found in Norfolk, where the chancels of purely parochial 
 churches have been — illegally, as I conceive — pulled down 
 or allowed to fall into ruin by their lay rectors. The 
 monastic or collegiate church commonly lay to the east of 
 the parochial church ; but there is a very singular and 
 puzzling bailding, the priory of Way bourne in Norfolk, 
 where the two lie in an irregular way side by side. To 
 this point I shall have to come back.
 
 344 SUSSEX. 
 
 But the grantees did not in all cases exercise their 
 right of pnlling down the monastic or collegiate church. 
 In some eases it Avas added to the adjoining parish church. 
 These cases must he distinguished from those in which 
 the parish at the dissolution hecanie possessed of a monas- 
 tic church ■which had never been parochial at all. At 
 Great Malvern, for instance, and at Selhy, the parishioners 
 bought the monastic church, and forsook and pulled down 
 the old parish church which stood quite distinct. I am 
 speaking only of cases in which, in a divided church, the 
 monastic part was added to the parochial part. There 
 are good instances of this at Dorchester, Tewkesbury, 
 and Sherborne. At Dorchester Richard Beauforest, in 
 his will, dated 1554 (printed in Addington's Dorchester, 
 p. 98), says — 
 
 I beqiieth the Abbey Churche of Dorchester, which I have 
 bought, and the implements thereof, to the Paiyshe of Dorchester 
 aforesaid, so that the said Parishioners shall not sell alter or 
 alienate the said Chiu-che Implements or any part or parcell thereof 
 withoute the consente of my heires and executors. 
 
 Now that this does not mean the whole of the present 
 church of Dorchester, but only a part, is plain from other 
 items in the same will, where the testator bequeaths 
 twenty shillings ' to the reparations of my parishe church.' 
 He is described as ' of the towne of Dorchester ; ' so * my 
 parish church ' can only mean the parochial part of Dor- 
 chester church. Iceland, too (see Addiugton, p. 105), 
 says distinctly — 
 
 The Body of the Abbay Chhch servid a late for the Paroche 
 Chu'ch. Syns the Suppression one (Beauforest) a great riche Man, 
 dwelling in the Toun of Dorchestre, bought the Est part of the 
 Chu'ch for 140. Poundes, and gave it to augment the Paroch 
 Chhch. 
 
 Here we clearly see the distinction between the abbey 
 church which Beauforest bought and gave to the parish, 
 and the parish church to the repaii-s of which he made a
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 845 
 
 bequest. And we may mark the various forms of lan- 
 guage which naturally grew up in speaking of buildings 
 of this kind. Leland, describing what he saw without 
 any legal precision, calls the whole building the ' abbey 
 church ; ' the parochial part he calls indiscriminately, 
 * the body of the abbey church,' ' the west part of the 
 church,' and 'the parish church.' But in Beauforest's 
 will, as a legal document, more careful language is used. 
 Here the two parts are distinguished as ' the abbey 
 church,' and 'the parish church;' and it strikes me, 
 though I do not feel positively certain, that he uses the 
 words, 'church of Dorchester' to take in both. For he 
 leaves his body ' to be buried in our Lady He within the 
 church of Dorchester.' Every one at Dorchester would 
 know whether ' our Lady He ' was part of the abbey or of 
 the parish church. At Tewkesbury again, in the inven- 
 tory of the property of the monastery drawn up by Henry 
 the Eighth's commissioners (Monasticon, ii. 57), among 
 ' buildings deemed to be superfluous ' comes * the church.' 
 That this again means only part of the building appears 
 from what follows. I quote the Monasticon. 
 
 Euclder says, ' It appears by an ancient deed transcribed into 
 an old council book, that before and at the time of the dissolution, 
 the body of the abbey church was vised as the parish church, and 
 that the parish purchased of the king the chancel, steeple, and 
 bells, with the clock and chimes for 483Z.' 
 
 Here again the local historian does not speak with 
 strict legal precision ; but the commissioners do. ' The 
 church,' in a list of the possessions of the monastery, 
 would be understood only of that part of the building 
 which belonged to the monastery. This the parishioners 
 bought of the king, and added it to what was their own 
 already, ' the body of the abbey church,' that is, the western 
 limb of the minster, which formed the parish church. 
 
 The history of Sherborne is given in the Monasticon, 
 i. 335. It appears from Leland's account that there also 
 the parishioners had their parish church in the western
 
 846 SUSSEX. 
 
 limb of the cruciform minster. 'The body of tlie abbay 
 eliireh dedicate to our Lady, servid ontille a liunderitlie 
 yeres syns for the chife paroche chirch of the town.' 
 The parishioners had also a building to the west of this, 
 known as All Hallows. A violent quarrel, or rather fight, 
 between the monks and the parishioners in the fifteenth 
 century, led to a settlement, by what authority Leland does 
 not say, by which the parishioners had to withdraw wholly 
 from the minster (Saint Mary) and kept only All Hallows. 
 'Postea vero, omnium sanctorum ecclesia, non autem 
 Dominse Marise, tanquam parochialis ecclesia usurpabatur.' 
 At the dissolution ' the church, steeple (campanile), and 
 churchyard of the monastery' passed to a lay grantee, 
 from whom they were bought by the pa,rish. All Hallows 
 must then have been forsaken, as it now remains a ruin, 
 while the minster forms the parish church. I said some- 
 thing about this matter in the Somerset Archseological 
 Proceedings for 1874, where I refer to Professor Willis' 
 paper on Sherborne, in the Archaeological Journal, vol. 
 xxii. p. 179. The plans are in the same volume, p. 196, 
 and in the Bristol volume of the Institute, p. 200. 
 
 These cases of Dorchester, Tewkesbury, and Sherborne 
 further help us to understand another class of cases in 
 which the usual arrangement seems to be reversed, where 
 the eastern part is used as the parish church, and where 
 the western part is destroyed. This is the case at Per- 
 shore and Boxgrove. I can find no documents in the 
 Monasticon to explain the reason, but I imagine it to be 
 this. The parishioners became possessed of the monastic 
 part of the church, and as that was often the larger and 
 finer of the two, they did not care to keep up their former 
 parish church to the west of it. At Boxgrove there are 
 distinct signs that there once was a separate church in 
 the ruined nave, as there is the usual reredos, with its 
 doors, earned up so as to make a partition wall. I take 
 this also to be the explanation of the very extraordinary 
 appearances at Llantwit Major in Glamorganshire, where
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 347 
 
 to the west of the present church is a building, roofed but 
 disused, which is known as ' the old church,' though it is 
 certainly later in date than the part now in use. I can 
 only take this to mean that it is the former parish church, 
 which was disused when the parishioners obtained posses- 
 sion of the larger monastic church to the east of it.^ 
 
 We may now come to another exceptional case where 
 the parish church was not at the west end of the monastic 
 church, but at one side of it. I have remarked one very 
 anomalous case at Way bourne ; there is one easier to 
 understand at Romsey. There the abbey church is now 
 the parish church. I cannot find anything in the Monas- 
 ticon about the way in which it became so ; but I dis- 
 tinctly remember reading, probably in some local book, 
 a deed of Bishop William of Wykeham, by which it 
 appeared that the parish church of Eomsey was then in 
 the north aisle of the nave of the abbey church. The 
 parishioners obtained leave to enlarge their church ; the 
 building bears witness to the way in which this was done. 
 They built a double aisle to the north, which has since 
 been pulled down. One can hardly doubt that, when the 
 parishioners became possessed of the whole of the abbey 
 church, they no longer cared to keep up this small addi- 
 tion, and so pulled it down. 
 
 But in cases when a church was divided between the 
 parish and a monastic or collegiate body, it sometimes 
 happened that the corporate body dispossessed the parish- 
 ioners. We have seen one case something to this effect 
 at Sherborne. In the preface to the seventh volume of 
 the edition of Giraldus Cambrensis in the Chronicles and 
 Memorials (pp. Ixxx — xcix), I have collected the evidence 
 for the fact that no less a church than Lincoln minster 
 was, from its foundation in the time of William the 
 Conqueror to the fourteenth century, a divided possession 
 between the bishop and his chapter and a body of parish- 
 ioners. Remigius founded his cathedral church in an 
 ' See Archseologia Cambrensis for 1858, p. 37.
 
 348 SUSSEX. 
 
 existing parish diurcli, exactly as the cathedral churches 
 of Ti'uro and Liverpool have been founded in our own 
 time. He of course rebuilt the church on a great scale, 
 but the parishioners kept their right, and occupied the 
 nave of the minster, or part of it. In the fourteenth cen- 
 tury a dispute arose between the chapter and the parish, 
 -which was ended by common consent by the parishioners 
 leaving the minster, and withdrawing to a separate parish 
 church which was built for the purpose. This case of 
 real divided possession in a cathedral church must be 
 distinguished from cases like those of Ely and Norwich, 
 where a parish has been allowed to occupy part of a 
 cathedral church by some later arrangement. But I be- 
 lieve, though I cannot bring my evidence at this moment, 
 that the occupation of the nave at Carlisle as a parish 
 church was not a case of this last kind, but was a real 
 case of divided possession. At Rochester again, I believe 
 the parish held the nave, and that the parish church hard 
 by was built instead, as at Lincoln. At LlandaflP, Saint 
 Davids, and Bangor, the cathedral church is also paro- 
 chial. I do not know how the case stands legally ; the 
 architectural arrangements have differed at different 
 times. 
 
 In other cases again the monastic or collegiate church 
 was neither destroyed nor ruined nor added to the parish 
 church. It was simply disused. Here comes the typical 
 case of Dunster, the account of which is given in CoUin- 
 son's History of Somerset, ii. 18, and of which I have 
 said something in the Transactions of the Somerset 
 Archaeological Society (1855, pj). 2-12). The church is 
 a cross church with a central tower. Westward of the 
 tower was a perfect church, with chancel and rood-screen, 
 the latter reaching, according to local custom, right across 
 the church, and approached by a turret in the outer wall 
 of the south aisle. East of the tower was a second choir, 
 fenced off by a second screen. To this the transepts and 
 crossing formed a kind of ante-chapel. Nowhere in short
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 349 
 
 were the arrangements of the class of churches so easily- 
 studied as at Dunster, up to the time of a very recent 
 ' restoration.' The two churches, parochial and monastic, 
 west and east of the tower, were absolutely perfect. The 
 parish church, a perfect parish church, with its screened 
 chancel, remained untouched, with its high altar under 
 the western arch of the tower. The tower with the 
 transepts on each side of it, formed a neutral space 
 between the two choirs. ' Restoration ' has had its usual 
 effect of wiping out history. The two churches have 
 happily not been thrown into one, but the ancient arrange- 
 ment has been altogether confused by taking the neutral 
 space under the tower into the parish choir, and removing 
 the parish high altar to the eastern arch of the tower 
 instead of the western. There is thus no space left 
 between the two choirs. The former arrangement, so 
 lately destroyed, was the result of a dispute between the 
 parishioners of Dunster and the monks of the priory 
 there, a cell to the cathedral monastery of Bath. This 
 dispute was settled in 1498 by a composition decreed by 
 three arbitrators, Richard Bere, Abbot of Glastonbury. 
 Thomas Tremayle, a judge, and Thomas Gilbert, a doctor 
 of canon law. The parishioners were to make themselves 
 a separate choir, taking, it would seem, the existing altar 
 of Saint James just outside the roodloft as their high 
 altar. This implies that, up to that time, the monks' 
 choir had been the chancel of the parish church. But 
 now the monks and the people made themselves separate 
 choirs, east and west of the tower, leaving the tower itself 
 free between the two. The words which concern us are : 
 
 Quod vicarius modernus et successores sui vicarii habeant 
 chorvim separatum a dictis priore et monachis sumptibus et expensis 
 parochianorum faciendum et erigendum, factum et erectum separ- 
 andum, et quotiens opus fuerit de novo construendum, in nave 
 ecclesise ad altare sancti Jacobi apostoli qviod est situatum ex 
 australi parti hostii quod ducit a choro monachorum in navem 
 ecclesise.
 
 350 SUSSEX. 
 
 Some regulations follow about processions, in which 
 ilio two choirs are distinguished in a marked way ; 
 
 C'uiu ilifti prior ot confrati-es per medium chori sui euntes 
 egredi incipiaut hostium ex parte boreali chori vicerii et parochia- 
 
 There is much that is curious in the history of Dunster 
 church which I leave to Mr. Maxwell Lyte. The above 
 is enough for my purpose, to establish it as one of the 
 best, till late changes the very best, example of a divided 
 church. 
 
 Dunster, of which we have the history, gives the key 
 to the church of Ewenny in Glamorganshire. Here, 
 unlike Dunster, part both of the monastic and of the 
 parochial church has been destroyed ; but enough is left 
 to show the distinction in the most marked way. The 
 western limb of a cross church forms the parish church, 
 fenced ofP by a solid reredos across the western arch of 
 the tower. The monks' choir is fenced off by another 
 open screen across the eastern arch, just as at Dunster. 
 The transepts and the crossing are, as they once were at 
 Dunster, neutral. Since the ' restoration ' of Dunster, 
 Ewenny, unless that too has been ' restored ' out of its 
 historical value since I was last there, remains the most 
 perfect example of churches of the class. 
 
 In arguing this matter, I have been met at every stage 
 with the objection that my instances are drawn from 
 monastic churches, and that we cannot argue from them 
 to churches of seculars. I must repeat that, for the pur- 
 poses of the present argument, I cannot see any difference 
 between the two. The relations between the parish and 
 the corporate body differed in different places, whether 
 that corporate body was regular or secular. As I before 
 said, disputes and divisions were far more likely to arise 
 in the case of regulars than in the case of seculars. We 
 must therefore be prepared to find our monastic examples 
 many, and our collegiate examples few. But I can see no
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 861 
 
 difference of principle between them. Nor are we wholly 
 without collegiate examples. I have already quoted the 
 case of Ruthin, where the choir has been destroyed, Avhile 
 the nave remains as the parish church, exactly as in 
 divided monastic churches. Here is at least a presumption 
 of divided possession between the college and the parish. 
 The history of the collegiate church of Howden would, 
 I suspect, throw some important light on the present 
 matter. The choir is in ruins ; I can find nothing about 
 it in the Monasticon ; but I distinctly remember having 
 read — again most likely in some local book — that a case 
 which must have been very like the case of Arundel was 
 argued in a court of law in the reign of Elizabeth. The 
 parish called on the grantee of the college property to 
 repair the choir ; this claim could have been made only 
 on the ground that the college choir was the chancel of 
 the parish church. The grantee refused ; I can conceive 
 no ground for his refusal, except that the choir was not 
 the chancel of the parish church, but that it was an 
 absolute possession of the college which had passed to him 
 as the grantee of its property. Here was a question of 
 fact, on which it would be dangerous to say anything 
 without knowing the evidence on both sides. Either 
 relation would be perfectly possible ; the question was 
 which was the actual relation in this particular case. 
 My story adds that, while the suit was pending, it was 
 practically settled by the choir falling in, after which 
 neither side thought it worth while to continue the liti- 
 gation. I tell this only from memory ; but it is a point 
 on which I am likely to remember accurately, and the 
 records can doubtless be found somewhere. 
 
 Another case which helps us is that of the collegiate 
 church of Fotheringhay. Here in 1412 Edward Duke of 
 York founded a college, endowed, as at Arundel, with the 
 estates of alien priories. The choir seems to have been 
 built by his father, Duke Edmund, who had designed the 
 foundation of the college, but had not actually carried it
 
 352 SUSSEX. 
 
 out. In 1485 Dnke Eicliard rebuilt tlie nave. The con- 
 tract for the buiWing is preserved, and tlie language used 
 in it seems distinctly to show that the nave formed a 
 parish church distinct from the collegiate choir. William 
 Horwood, freemason, ' graunts and undertakes to mak up 
 a new body of a kirk joyning to the quire of the College 
 of Fodringey, of the same hight and brede that the said 
 quire is of.' And throughout the contract the old building 
 is spoken of as ' the quire ' and the new building as ' the 
 church." The college property was granted in 1553 to 
 John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland ; the choir must 
 have passed with it, for it was in ruins when Fotheringhay 
 was visited by Queen Elizabeth. She, finding the tombs 
 of the Dukes of York neglected among the ruins, caused 
 their bodies to be removed into the church and new tombs 
 to be made.- 
 
 These cases bring us to the immediate case of Arundel. 
 I should myself, on seeing the choir stand perfect but 
 disused, and knowing that the church had been collegiate, 
 have inferred the historj^ from the appearances. I should 
 have inferred, without documentary proof, that the colle- 
 giate choir had been the absolute property of the college, 
 and that it had, as such, passed to the grantee. I should 
 have argued that the case spoke for itself, that the colle- 
 giate part of the church, which would most likely have 
 been destroyed if it had been granted to a stranger, had 
 been preserved because the grantee was himself the Earl 
 of Arundel, the representative of the founder, who natu- 
 rally cared for the tombs of his forefathers and for the 
 buildings which they had raised. That is to say, I should, 
 simply from the analogy of other cases, have assumed the 
 claim which was actually made by the present Earl of 
 
 ' This argument would not be enough by itself, as in parish churches 
 the ' church ' often means the nave, as opposed to the chancel. But the 
 phrase, ' quire of the college,' seems to mark distinct possession, and the 
 destruction of the choir proves the case. 
 
 ^ See the account of Fotheringhay, published by the Oxford Architec- 
 tural Society, p. 9.
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 353 
 
 Arundel and Duke of Norfolk. Without looking at a 
 single document, the circumstances of the case, as com- 
 pared with other cases of the like kind, were consistent 
 with that view, and were not consistent with any other. 
 I cannot understand how a parish chancel could come to 
 be disused, unless it were liable to be destroyed. If the 
 Earls of Arundel had been no more than ordinary impro- 
 priate rectors, they could have had no right to cause the 
 disuse of the chancel. Their business would have been to 
 keep it in repair for use. On this theory a monsti'ous 
 wrong had been done for three hundred and thirty years, 
 seemingly without any protest. The ' onus probandi ' 
 undoubtedly lay on those who denied the duke's right. 
 
 But the documents which were produced at the trials 
 placed the matter beyond a shadow of a doubt. They 
 start from the foundation of the college of Arundel by 
 Richard Earl of Arundel in 1387. This I may call the 
 second college. It appears from Domesday' that at the 
 time of the survey tliere were secular clerks in the church 
 of Saint Nicolas at Arundel, who had certain dues in the 
 port of Arundel and property elsewhere. These clerks 
 must have given way to Benedictine monks at some time 
 between 1086 and 1094. For the priory was a foundation 
 of the famous Eoger of Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, 
 lord of Arundel and Chichester, who made the new founda- 
 tion a cell to the abbey of Seez of his own foundation. 
 After the French conquest of Normandy, Arundel, as a 
 dependency of Seez, became an alien priory, and underwent 
 the usual ups and downs of such foundations. It was sup- 
 pressed earlier than the most of its fellows, falling under 
 Richard the Second and not living on to Henry the Fifth. 
 Then the seculars came back in the form of the master and 
 chaplains of Earl Richard's college. His deed of founda- 
 tion sets forth that the late Earl Richard, his father, had 
 
 ' P. 22. In the first column we read of the tolls of the haven, ' de hiia 
 habet S. Nicolaus xxiiii solidos,' and in the second column is the name of 
 Hertinges, ' de hoc manerio tenent clerici de S. Nicolao vi hidas.' 
 
 A A
 
 854 SUSSEX. 
 
 designed to found three chaplains in Arundel clnu'ch — * in 
 occlesia paroehiali Arundoll prioratu nionachornm ordinis 
 S. Benodicti, cella subjoeta abbatliiai de Sagio alienigenEe 
 in partibus FrancitB.' The deed also speaks several times 
 of the ' eeclesia parochialis,' ' parochialis eeclesia per 
 quinque nionachos monasterii de Sagio solita guberuari,' 
 &c. The elder Earl Richard then changed his mind, and 
 designed to found a college of priests and clerks in his 
 own chapel in the castle. Neither purpose was ever car- 
 ried out when he died. His son, the younger Earl Richard, 
 was hindered by some difficulty not described from making 
 the foundation in the castle chapel (' quum idem colle- 
 gium perpetuo dicta capella infra castrum nequoat stabi- 
 liri"). Considering then the desolate state (' desolatio,' 
 ' viduitas ') of the parish church, now that the monks 
 from Seez had, on account of the wars, gone back to their 
 own country, he determined to make his foundation in 
 the parish church. Then arose the college of Arundel, 
 ' Collegium S. Trinitatis Arundell,' instead of the priory. 
 It consisted of thirteen chaplains, of whom one was 
 Warden or Master ('Gustos sive Magister perpetuus'), 
 one Vice-Master (' Sub-magister'), a third Sacrist and 
 Subchanter (' Sacrista et Succentor'). A Subchanter 
 without a Prsecentor seems a little anomalous. There 
 were also some inferior members. 
 
 There is nothing in the deed of foundation to imply a 
 division of the fabric, or to settle anything as to rights 
 of ownership on the -part of either college or parish in 
 different parts of the church. The church is spoken of as 
 one, ' prsedicta eeclesia ; ' we hear of ' cancellus,' ' mag- 
 num altare,' and the like, just as we should in an un- 
 divided church, but also just as we might in a divided 
 church, if there was no special reason for insisting on the 
 fact of division. There is nothing about the repair of the 
 fabric at all. And, with a collegiate body, the question 
 
 ' Was this any question as to the position of the chsipel, which may 
 •well have hindered consecration ' de solo ad c^lum ' 1
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 365 
 
 of divided or joint ownership might very likely not be 
 stirred at all till some question arose about the liabilities 
 to rex^air. In course of time such disputes did arise, and 
 the next document distinctly shows that, at all events 
 by the year 1511, Arundel had passed into the class of 
 divided churches. 
 
 The* document of that year is in some respects the 
 fellow of the Dunster document of 1498, with this differ- 
 ence, that the Dunster document orders the division to 
 be made, while the Arundel document rather implies that 
 it is made already. This is an arbitration by which the 
 two arbiters, Thomas Earl of Arundel and Robert Sher- 
 born Bishop of Chichester, decide a dispute between the 
 college and the parish (' major et burgenses ceterique 
 parochiani villse de Arundel ') as to the rejjair of part of 
 the church described as ' pe crosse partes.' These ' cross 
 parts ' are the transepts and central tower. The dispute 
 was 
 
 de et super reparatione et svistentione illarum partium ecclesise 
 ibidem quse vulgariter diciintur ' ])e cross partes,' ducentes ab 
 austro per mediam inter chorum et navem ecclesias usque ad 
 boream una cum eodem medio et campanili supi'a ilkid mediam 
 erecto campanisque ac ceteris omnibus et singulis rebus in eisdem 
 existentibus et ad eadem pertinentibus. 
 
 Here the eastern limb is ' chorus,' the western is 
 ' navis.' But the architectural 'chorus' is not in 1511 
 the chancel of the parish church, whether it was so or not 
 in 1387. Just as at Dunster, just as at Binham, there is 
 a distinct parish chancel, only occupying a somewhat 
 singular place, one different from that which it occupied 
 at Dunster and Binham, but not very different from that 
 which it occupied at Leominster and Blyth. When I was 
 at first at Arundel in 1853, the parish church with the 
 parish altar was in the south transept. That this was no 
 modern arrangement springing out of the dissolution of 
 the college, appears from the document which we have 
 now in hand. The arbiters decree — 
 
 A A 2
 
 sm SUSSEX. 
 
 Quoil onus sustontniionis ac ropavationis insula'' australis dictai 
 occlcsia', gi((f cnmrllus pdrin'/iidli'i viil<jiirlfi'.r uunciipadir, portineat 
 solum et insoliihim ad prajfatos magistruin et socios '^ et eorum 
 svu'ccssorcs in perpotuuni, Et quod onus sustentationis ac repara- 
 (ionis altoiius insula' boroalitov situa(a> siniul cum navi ccclesia^ et 
 insulis ejus ad piwfatos niajoreni, burij^onsos, et parocliianos qui 
 pro temjHn-e fuerint, in perpetuum pertineab. Et insuper (piod 
 onus sustentationis ac reparation is illius mediae partis quae campa- 
 nile vocatur, in pavimentis, muris, columnis, singulisque dicti 
 canipanilLs appenditiis tani intus quam extra, sul)tus quam supra, 
 perpetuis i'uturis temporibus per dictes partes iequaliter supporte- 
 tur et sustineatur. 
 
 Nothing can be plainer. There is a perfect parish 
 church with its chancel, wholly apart from the choir of 
 the college. The parishioners, according to universal 
 custom, repair the nave and its aisles. The college, as 
 rectors, repair the parish chancel ; its unusual architec- 
 tural position makes no difference ; wherever placed, it is 
 equally the parish chancel, the repair of which is borne 
 by the holders of the rectorial tithe, that is, in this case, 
 by the college. The north transept the arbitrators ad- 
 judge to the parish ; the tower they make a common pos- 
 session. One would like to know what the exact nature 
 of the dispute was, and on what grounds the earl and the 
 bishop came to their decision. In most cases, where the 
 eastern limb has perished, the transepts have perished 
 with it, showing that they formed part of the suj^pressed 
 church. Here at Arundel the case was clearly otherwise. 
 But this peculiarity does not touch the main point. 
 Westward of the ' chorus ' or eastern limb there was in 
 1511 a complete parish church, following the ordinary 
 law of parish churches, its nave repaired by the parish, its 
 chancel by the rectors. Of the ' chorus ' itself nothing is 
 said ; it was out of the reckoning ; whatever it was in 
 
 ' The Latin ala became isle, or He the older spelling; aisle is modern. 
 Isle or He is here translated back into instila. 
 
 * The capellani of 1387 seems by 1511 to >have grown into the higher 
 rank of socii. In the later documents both names are used.
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 357 
 
 1387, in 1511 it had become a separate church belonging 
 to the college, with regard to which the parishioners had 
 neither rights nor burthens. 
 
 The force of the document of 1511 is rather to assume 
 the division as something existing than to ordain it as 
 something new. We may either take it as explaining the 
 vaguer language of 1387, or else we may infer that the 
 division took place at some time between the two dates. 
 The main point is that in 1511 Arundel was a divided 
 church, containing two choirs, in one of which, placed in 
 the south transept, the college had the ordinary rights 
 and duties of rectors, while the other, forming the eastern 
 limb, the architectural choir, was the choir, the collegiate 
 church, of the college, apart from the parish. 
 
 Each of the documents explains the one which comes 
 after it. We now come to the document of 1545, bearing 
 date December 12 of that year. This followed very closely 
 on the Act of Parliament of that year, the first act for the 
 suppression of colleges, that which simply gave the king 
 power to suppress, while the act of Edward the Sixth 
 two years later absolutely suppressed those colleges 
 which escaped under Henry. The college by this deed 
 gives up to the king all its possessions of every kind. 
 They are thus described, as far as concerns us now : — 
 
 Reddimus .... totam cantariam sive collegium nostrum 
 prsedictum. Ac etiam totum scitum, fundum, circuitum, ambitum 
 vel prsecinctum, ac ecclesiam, campanile, et cimiterium ejusdem 
 cantarise sive collegii, cum omnibus et omnimodis domibus, edificiis, 
 ortis, pomariis, gardinis, terra et solo, infra dictum circuitum et 
 prsecinctum cantarise sive collegii prsedicti. 
 
 Fourteen days later, December 26, the king grants all 
 this to Henry, Earl of Arundel, in consideration of good 
 services and of the sum of 1000 marks. The words which 
 concern us are : — 
 
 Damiis et concedimus eidem comiti totum scitum, fundum, 
 ambitum, circuitum, et precinctum, nuper ecclesiae collcgiata3 sive 
 collegii Sanctse Trinitatis de Arvindell in comitatu nostro Sussexiae,
 
 358 SZrSSEX. 
 
 alias dic't;v iiupov collogii sive i'nut;vri;v Sancta3 Tnnitivtis de vol in 
 Anuidoll in coniitatu nostro Sussoxiio, modo dissoluta', a,c ctiam 
 campanile ot cimitcrinm rjusdrni nn[)er collegii sive cantarife. Ac 
 etiam omnia et singula mesnagia, domos, edificia, structuras, 
 horrea, grangeas, columbaria, ortos, pomavia, gardina, stagna, 
 vivaria, terram, fundum, et solum, nostra quajcunque infra scitum 
 ambitum circuitum et procinctum dict:e nuper ecclesia; collegiatae 
 collegii sive cantariie pra^dicta existentes, aut dicta? nuper ecclesia? 
 collegiata? collegio sive cantarise aliquo modo dudum spectantes 
 sive pertinentes, ac parcellam possessionum et rcventionum ejus- 
 dem ecclesiaj collegiatas collegii sive cantariaj dudum existentes. 
 
 Notliing can be plainer than that the college here 
 surrenders to the king-, and that the king grants to the 
 earl, something which is described as a church, ' ecclesia,' 
 and which is further defined in the second grant as the 
 ' collegiate church,' — ' ecclesia collegiata.' What was the 
 building which was thus granted '? Clearly not the whole 
 building which was doubtless, then as now, commonly 
 spoken of as * Arundel church,' and which might be even 
 spoken of either as ' the parish church ' or as ' the colle- 
 giate church,' one of those names in strictness belonging 
 to part of the building, and the other to another part. 
 The college could have no right to surrender to the king 
 those parts of the building which belonged to the parish, 
 the nave, nave aisles, and north transept, nor yet the 
 south transept or parish chancel, withiu which they had 
 simply the rights and duties of rectors. The ' collegiate 
 church ' which they surrendered could have been only 
 those parts of the building which are left untouched in 
 the award of Earl Thomas and Bishop Sherborn, those 
 parts in which they had an absolute property, that is the 
 eastern limb, the ' chorus ' of that document, the con- 
 structive choir namely, and the Lady chapel to the north 
 of it. As a matter of fact, that is what they did surrender. 
 These parts have ever since been the possession of the 
 successive Earls of Arundel, who have dealt with them as 
 they thought good. As a matter of fact, those parts of 
 the building did become their possession, a possession
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 359 
 
 which was dealt with in quite another way from the 
 parish chancel in the south transept. There the earl 
 succeeded to the college in the ordinary position of a 
 rector, a position involving a duty to keep up, but giving 
 no right to pull down. But the ' chorus,' the ' ecclesia 
 collegiata,' the grantee had a full right to pull down, 
 a right which most grantees exercised freely. We may 
 be sure that, if Earl Henry had done like most other 
 grantees, if he had done as John Duke of Northumberland 
 did at Fotheringhay, and had pulled down everything east 
 of the tower, there would have been no dispute. It is simply 
 because Earl Henry was less destructive than most of his 
 class that any dispute has arisen. The course which he 
 chose to take was the rarest of all. The commonest 
 course was to pull down the monastic or collegiate part 
 of the church altogether, but to sell or give it to the parish 
 was, as we have seen, not very uncommon. Earl Henry 
 did neither. He did not pull the collegiate church down, 
 neither did he give it to the parish. He kept it standing, 
 but disused. So unusual a course has been misunder- 
 stood, and people have fancied, though the existence of 
 the parish chancel in the south transept should have 
 taught them better, that the disused eastern limb was, 
 what architecturally it seemed to be, the chancel of the 
 parish church, and that the successive Earls of Arundel, 
 in keeping that part of the building in their own hands, 
 had been, for three hundred years and more, abusing 
 their rights as lay rectors. But the award, the surrender, 
 the grant, the transfer which actually took place, all hang- 
 together. Taken together, they show that, within the 
 building which in common language would be called 
 ' Arundel church,' the college possessed in absolute pro- 
 perty the ' chorus,' the eastern limb, that they surrendered 
 it to the king, and that the king granted it to the earl. 
 And to those who have studied this class of buildings 
 there is nothing wonderful in the whole story. Or rather 
 the only wonderful thing is that Earl Henry did not pull
 
 mo SUSSEX. 
 
 down the church which was granted to him. Had it 
 been a church at the other end of England, which con- 
 tained the tombs, not of his own forefathers, but of the 
 forefathers of somebody else, he would most likely have 
 dealt by it as John Dudley dealt by Fotheringhay. 
 
 The only point of doubt is whether Earl Henry took 
 quite all that the grant gave him. Along with the church 
 and churchyard, the college surrendered to the king, and 
 the king granted to the earl, the tower or camiianile. 
 Now in the first trial one of the counsel for the vicar 
 treated this as a reductio ad ahsurdum, as if it was im- 
 possible that the tower of the church could be the duke's 
 proi^erty. It seems to me by no means impossible that it 
 may be so ; the words of the grant seem to imply it. In 
 the various cases which I have gone through, the central 
 tower has sometimes been destroyed with the choir, 
 sometimes left standing. When it was destroyed, it must 
 have been the property of the corporate body, which 
 therefore j)assed to the grantee, and a grant of the tower 
 is not uncommon in such grants. At Waltham the cen- 
 tral tower was destroyed, and the parishioners built them- 
 selves a new tower at the west end. At Wymondham 
 and Tewkesbury the parishioners bought the tower of the 
 king. Here at Arundel, the college and the parish clearly 
 had a joint right, if not a joint property, in the tower. 
 But most likely the freehold was in the college ; the words 
 of the surrender and grant imply it. But, if so, the pro- 
 perty of the college, and afterwards of the earl, in the 
 tower was a property subject to the parishioners' right of 
 joint use. The tower therefore could not have been 
 pulled down by the earl or taken to his sole use. But I 
 suspect that the freehold of it belongs to the Duke of 
 Norfolk.! 
 
 ' This view seems borne out by a curious passage in the award. ' Pro- 
 viso quod omnes et singulae reparationes dicti campanilis nunc necessarite 
 resarciantur et fiant citra festum Michaelis proximum futui'uni, ac quod 
 dicti major, burgenses, et parochiani habeant pro interesse si veliut unam
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 861 
 
 I liave found it argued on tlie vicar's part that the 
 example of Dunster does not apply, because the ground 
 plans of Dunster and Arundel are not exactly the same, 
 and because the division between the two parts of the 
 church is not made in exactly the same way. I answer 
 that, in the long list of examples which I have put 
 together, we have many kinds of ground-plans, and many 
 ways of making the division. Several of the churches of 
 which I have spoken are not cruciform churches at all. 
 Dorchester, Llantwit, Fotheringhay, Waybourne, have 
 ground-plans which have no likeness to those of either 
 Dunster or Arundel ; but the division may be seen in all 
 of them. At Dorchester and Fotheringhay it is a matter 
 of distinct documentary evidence. The division was often 
 made by a solid reredos ; it was so at Wymondham, 
 Binham, Ewenny, Waltham ; but there is no reason to 
 think that it was always so made. In some of the cases 
 which I have gone through such a way of making the 
 division is clearly impossible. It could hardly have been 
 so at Dorchester or Fotheringhay ; and the division is 
 much less likely to be so made in a collegiate church than 
 in a monastery. Even when the part which the canons 
 occupied was their absolute property, they had not the 
 same temptation which the monks had to fence themselves 
 wholly off from the parishioners. An open screen would 
 serve their purpose just as well as a solid reredos. To my 
 mind therefore it proves nothing, that the two parts of 
 Arundel church, or the two churches, whichever we choose 
 to call them, were divided by a screen and not by a solid 
 wall. 
 
 I have looked specially to this class of churches for 
 five and twenty years and more ; perhaps they have had a 
 
 clavem per qiiam possint reparationes cTicti campanilis necessarias, si velint, 
 snpravidere, ita quod, si id non facient, imputetur eis.' This looks as if, 
 tliough the parishioners had rights in the tower and bore a share of the 
 cost of its repairs, yet the actual ownership of it was in the college. It was 
 clearl_y not the parishioners who were actually doing the repairs.
 
 862 SUSSEX. 
 
 special charm for me, because nobody seemed to under- 
 stand them. And the result of this examination was, 
 before I made any reference to documents, to make me 
 say with perfect confidence that the claim now made by the 
 Duke of Norfolk was in strict analogy with a great num- 
 ber of undoubted historical examples. The appearances of 
 the building were consistent with the duke's argument, 
 and they were not consistent with any other. But it is 
 satisfactory to find how completely the documents support 
 my view formed without them, and to find two successive 
 courts decide in accordance with the plain facts of history. 
 To me of course the question is simply one of historical 
 fact, where the only object is to find out what the facts 
 are. I certainly have no satisfaction in seeing a. church, 
 or part of a church, in private hands ; but the plain facts 
 of history cannot be got over. Two Acts of Parliament, 
 of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, caused the 
 property of the colleges and chantries, including in some 
 cases the fabrics of churches, to pass into lay hands. 
 ISTothing but a repeal of those Acts of Parliament can take 
 them away from their present owners. 
 
 T have two more remarks to make, one on each side. 
 First, I can see no authority for the name ' Fitzalan 
 chapel,' which has been given in modern times to the 
 collegiate choir. I have shown that there is a good deal 
 of laxity in the way of speaking of these buildings ; but 
 the name ' Fitzalan chapel ' does not occur in the docu- 
 ments, and I can hardly conceive that such a name can 
 ever have been in use. Secondly, I nrast protest against 
 a late so-called ' restoration ' at Arundel, which, as usual, 
 destroys the history of the building. I was there in April 
 1880, and found that the parish altar, which in 1853 still 
 stood in its ancient place in the south transept, had been 
 moved under the central tower, to the confusion of the 
 whole story. 
 
 [I might have spoken also of Crowland abbey, where the divi- 
 sion is very plain, the parLsh reredos still standing across the
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 363 
 
 westei-n arch of the lantern. But at present the vvestei'n limb is 
 riuned, save only part of the north aisle which serves as the parish 
 church. According to the Monasticon (ii. 205) this aiTangement 
 dates only from the seventeenth century ; but I have a strong 
 impression that I have seen a Crowland document of the fifteenth 
 prescribing something of the same kind.] 
 
 WORKSOP AND BLYTH. 
 
 1875-1880. 
 
 The county of Nottingham contains, at a short distance from each 
 other, two churches of the class in which the monastic and the 
 parochial church stood close together under one roof. These are 
 the Benedictine priory of Saint Mary at Blyth, and the prioiy of 
 Avistin canons of Saint Cuthberht at Worksop. In each case the 
 nave only, the pai'ish church, is standing ; of the monastic church 
 there are no remains at Blyth, and only a ruined fragment at 
 Worksop. The dates of the two foundations are not far apart. 
 Both monasteries arose in the days of the Conqueror's sons. But 
 the surviving part of Blyth still keeps the architecture of the date 
 of its foundation, while at Worksop we find the Romanesque style, 
 if Romanesque we can still call it, in its latest form. The effect 
 of the two buildings as we draw near to them is widely different. 
 Worksop, with its twin towers, proclaims at the first glimpse its 
 character as a minster. Blyth, on the other hand, shows itself in 
 the distance by a single tower, not without stateliness, but which 
 would not suggest that it belonged to anything but an ordinary 
 village church. Indeed, if a visitor could be set down immediately 
 under the south wall of the church, he would not be the least in- 
 clined to suspect either the antiquity or the stateliness of the inside. 
 Where the nave alone is left, where the cruciform shape of the 
 building has therefore vanished, a slight change may easily destroy 
 the external character of a church which within follows the full 
 type of a minster of a high order. 
 
 The priory of Blyth was founded by Roger of Bully, famous 
 in Domesday, but nowhere else, about 1090. The house was in 
 a cei'tain degree of dependence on the monastery of the Holy 
 Trinity at Rouen. Yet the priory of Saint Mary at Blyth was 
 an independent corporation. It was not counted as an alien
 
 864 SUSSEX. 
 
 priory at the dissolution of alien priories, though it was at least 
 once taken into the King's hands during tlie war with France. 
 All that now remains of the monastery and its belongings is the 
 pjxi'ochial part of the cluu-oh, the constructive nave. Within we 
 at once see that the main fabric cannot be much later than the 
 time of the original foundation. The fejxtures of the nave, tri- 
 forium, and clerestory are all of them early Norman. Some of the 
 details are strikingly like those of the chapel of the White Tower. 
 Any one would at first sight set down the nave of Blyth as being 
 fully a generation eai-lier than the choir of Durham, which must 
 have been going on at the same time. That is to say, Roger of 
 Bully did not call to the work an aichitect of the same genius as 
 Bishop William of Saint- Calais, or whoever it was that Bishop 
 William employed. His work therefore lags a little behind. It 
 is work which not only Roger of Salisbury but Randolf Flambard 
 would certainly have looked on as old-fashioned. Every iiistance 
 of this kind is instructive, as teaching the lesson to all who can 
 take it in of the wide difference between questions of style and 
 mere questions of date. The nave of Blyth can hardly have been 
 finished before the early days of Henry the First, yet it has all the 
 simplicity as well as the grandeur of the earliest Norman. Its 
 vaulted roof was not contemplated by its original builders, but no 
 one can regi-et its addition here any more than at Malmesbury. 
 That the triforium on one side has given way to a range of very 
 late windows we certainly regret, but we would not, in any repair 
 of the building, wipe out the record of a change which is part of 
 its history. 
 
 But more remarkable than these changes Avas a change in 
 the general character of the building which makes the stateliness 
 of the Romanesque interior come upon us as something of which 
 the outside gave no sign. As not uncommonly hajjpened in such 
 cases, the parishioners seem to have striven at a somewhat later 
 time to give their part of the church a distinctly parochial charac- 
 ter. They built a new and wide south aisle, after the manner of 
 Grantham, a change which was also made at Wymondham, and, 
 on the greatest scale of all, at Leominster. As at Leominster, the 
 new aisle, and not the Norman nave of the minster, became the 
 main body of the parish church, and the parish high altar still 
 stands at its east end, a position nearly but not quite the same 
 as that at Arundel. Later again, as at Wymondham also, they 
 built a western tower, in this case, as at Shrewsbury and Malmes- 
 bury, within the original nave, so that we have to add another to
 
 THE ARUNDEL CASE. 865 
 
 the long list of former examples of the now rare arrangement of a 
 central and western tower grouped as at Wimborne. The tran- 
 septs and the eastern limb, as forming part of the monastic 
 church, have perished. But the eastern bay of the western limb 
 is standing, but blocked off from the parish church. There is, 
 in itself, nothing wonderful in this, as the Norman choirs often 
 went far down into the western limb. But in Mr. John Raine's 
 History of Blyth it is said that, though this bay was cut off from 
 the chuich, the parish was held to be bound to repair its vaulted 
 roof. This looks as if the grantee had taken a bay more than his 
 share — perhaps a bay covered by the monastic roodlofb. Altogether 
 this, we fancy, very little known church of Blyth is a highly 
 instructive building, both in the character of its original archi- 
 tecture and in the changes which it has since gone through. 
 
 The greater neighbour of Blyth, the Austin priory of Work- 
 sop or Radford, supplies in some points a contrast to its fellow. 
 The beginnings of Woi'ksop were rather later than those of Blyth, 
 the foundation having been made in 1103 by Williixm of ]jovetoft. 
 His name is not to be found in Domesday, which suggests the 
 belief that he was one of the many new men who rose to impoi-t- 
 ance under Henry the Fii'st. But if the foundation of Worksop is 
 only a little later than that of Blyth, the style of the building is a 
 good deal later. It is still Romanesqvie, so far as it keeps the 
 round arch and something of Romanesque proportion, but the style 
 is the very latest to which the name of Romanesque can be given. 
 That is to say, the comparatively small church of Blyth was pro- 
 bably finished from east to west by its original founder, while the 
 much larger pile of Woi'ksop took a much longer time to build, 
 and was not finished till quite the last years of the twelfth century. 
 As at Durham, as in so many other cases, we can see that the 
 eastern limb, and just so much of the western as was needed to 
 form a sujjport for the central tower, was built first, and that the 
 western part was not carried on till after a longer or shorter inter- 
 val. In the nave of Worksop the break is easily to be seen in the 
 change of detail. All that is now left of the first work, that is, 
 the eastern bay, is, as compared with Blyth, late and rich Roman- 
 esque, but the nine bays to the west of it are again much later and 
 richer. We may be sure that their architect, had he been design- 
 ing a pei'fectly new building, would have used the pointed arch. 
 As at Peterborough and Ely, he used the round ai'ch only because 
 his own taste or the bidding of his employers told him to adapt 
 the new work to the general proportions of the old. In fact, he
 
 866 SUSSEX. 
 
 did use the pointed arch where lie could. He could not venture 
 to alter the main lines of the piei'-arch, triforium, and clerestory, 
 but in the smaller and purely ornamental arches of the triforium 
 range the pointed arch is actually used. This reverses the usual 
 rule, according to which the })ointod shape appeal's first in the 
 constructive and txfterwards in the mei'ely decorated arches. Here 
 again we see how far the ancient architects were from following 
 any inflexible law, and how readily they adapted themselves to 
 the requirements of any particular set of ciicumstances. The whole 
 nave is a study, both for the grandeur of its general effect and for 
 the richness and beauty of its detail ; but we feel that that detail 
 would have been more in place if it had been adapted to other 
 constructive forms. The internal elevation of Worksop nave is a 
 stately one, but there is a certain degree of trick in the treatment 
 of the triforium and clerestory. Greater space is found for the 
 triforium range by placing the clerestory windows over the piers, 
 which take the form of columns alternately round and octagonal. 
 Worksop had two western towers from the beginning, so that the 
 change which was made in the general outline of the church at 
 Blyth coiild not be made here. But an old drawing shows that a 
 good deal had been done in the way of lowering roofs and putting 
 in windows in the triforium range, just as at Blyth. These 
 changes, which ought never to have been made, but which, when 
 once made, form part of the history of the building, were, with 
 questionable judgement, wiped out in a restoration made some 
 years back. Of the monastic church the extent has been tiaced, an 
 unusually long eastern limb ending in an apse. A chapel of the 
 thirteenth centuiy attached to the east of the south transept still 
 remains, though ruined. Parts of the cloister and dormitoiy may 
 be traced to the north of the nave, and the noble gateway of the 
 prioiy remains at some distance to the south.
 
 367 
 
 COWDRAY. 
 
 1875. 
 
 The student of Eng-lish antiquities lias often to complain 
 of the strange neglect which, amid a marked improvement 
 with regard to our monuments of other kinds, is com- 
 monly the lot of our ancient domestic buildings. There 
 is indeed a great difficulty of making the general public 
 understand that there are any ancient domestic buildings 
 at all—it is hai'd to persuade people that a mediseval 
 building, when palpably not a castle, is not necessarily 
 a church or a monastery. There is perhaps a certain 
 class of houses to which this difficulty does not apply. 
 These are the great houses of the reigns of the first two 
 Tudor Idngs, the latest houses which can be in any sense 
 called ancient, the earliest which can in any sense be 
 called modern, as being the earliest which can be adapted 
 to modern uses without spoiling them, the earliest which 
 can suggest much practical teaching for buildings of our 
 own time. It is instructive to be carried suddenly from 
 the castles of Northumberland or South Wales to such a 
 building as the ruined house of Cowdray in Sussex. Our 
 feelings are exactly opposite in the two cases. When we 
 see a castle in ruins, we feel that the castle is as it ought 
 to be ; when it is inhabited, we feel that it is as it ought 
 not to be. At Alnwick and Bamburgh alike we grudge 
 the presence of their several kinds of inhabitants. When 
 we come to a ruined house as distinguished from a ruined 
 castle, we mourn to see it in ruins ; we regret its lack of 
 inhabitants. At Alnwick we should feel annoyed at the
 
 368 SUSSEX. 
 
 presence even of a Vesey ; at Cowdray, the dwelling-place 
 of seven or oiglit successive Viscounts Montague, we are 
 sorry that there is not a Viscount Montague dwelling there 
 still. For the castle is a thing of the j)ast, a thing of the 
 past which is wholly gone ; it is something which was called 
 into being by circumstances which have long vanished. 
 It is essentially an antiquity, a memorial of distant times, 
 and, if it is made into a modern dwelling-place, it loses its 
 character as an antiquity and a memorial. The habits 
 of modern life, carried on in an ancient keep, are simply 
 incongruous. Either the keep is utterly sacrificed, or else 
 the habits of modern life are carried on with less con- 
 venience than they might be elsewhere. In a Tudor 
 house on the contrary, great or small, the case is quite 
 different. It is not a castle, a fortress — a dwelling-place 
 certainly, but a dwelling-place of days when no dwelling 
 was safe but a fortress ; it is strictly a house, in which, 
 if any signs of a fortress are shown, they are mere sur- 
 vivals, a house in which it is perfectly possible to live 
 with comfort in our own times. The interest of a building is 
 always greater when it has been uninterruptedly used for 
 its proper purpose from its first days till now ; and, on this 
 ground, it is always sad to see an ancient house forsaken 
 or ruined. Of this Cowdray is a special case. The house, 
 one of the grandest structures of the early days of Henry 
 the Eighth, lived on as the chief dwelling-place of its 
 owners till near the end of the last century. Nearly at 
 the same time— it is probably a case of modern legend 
 when we are told that it was on the self-same day — Cow- 
 dray house was burned, and the last Lord Montague was 
 drowned far away in the Rhine, as though fire and water 
 had, as ^schylus says, conspired together against the 
 family. At that time, to judge from what still remains 
 and from old drawings, the house must have been abso- 
 lutely perfect, and it would seem to have been hardly at 
 all disfigured, at least on the outside, of which alone we 
 are able to judge.
 
 COWDRAY. 869 
 
 The house, built about 1520, belonged to that happy 
 moment of our national art when purely domestic archi- 
 tecture was at its height. The notion of the great house, 
 as something distinct from the castle, had now been brought 
 to perfection. The turreted gate-house is doubtless con- 
 tinued by direct tradition from castle times ; but it is 
 merely continued, and its few really military features, as 
 the holes for shooting out of, have become little more than 
 survivals. On the other hand, the architecture is still 
 purely English ; it does not as yet Italianize. That is to 
 say, the architecture proper does not ; as the foreign in- 
 fluence may be found in tombs and other lesser features 
 before it touches the main features of a church, so it may 
 be found in inserted medallions and the like before it 
 touches the main features of a house. There is nothing 
 of this kind now visible at Cowdray, except one or two 
 inserted coats-of-arms and the like, which must be a little 
 later than the building itself, and some Jesuit-like work 
 in the chapel, which must be later still. Otherwise, the 
 house, with the quadrangular court — of which two sides 
 have utterly vanished, and not one is absolutely perfect — 
 the gate-house, the hexagonal kitchen-tower, the grand 
 hall with its windows and buttresses and its vast oriel, 
 generally the ranges of large windows throughout the 
 house, are purely and perfectly English. Both the actual 
 style and the arrangements of the building are exactly 
 at the point which is best suited for domestic work. 
 There was still the hall in all its stateliness, with its 
 screens, its gallery, its oriel, its soaring timber roof, every 
 feature of mediaeval grandeur still untouched. But the 
 master and his family were no longer cabined, cribbed, 
 confined, as they were in the older houses. The solar 
 keeps its old place in relation to the hall, but it has swelled 
 into the great drawing-room, or rather series of drawing- 
 rooms, whose large windows form a main feature of the 
 quadrangle. But, while the modern architect makes a 
 pretty drawing of a house and then gets his rooms into 
 
 B B
 
 S70 SUSSEX. 
 
 it how lie can, here at Cowdray no one can mistake the 
 purpose of any pari of the bnikling. Each is marked by 
 its own proper character ; the hall is clearly the hall, and 
 nothing else ; the large rooms beyond it are no less clearly 
 what they are, and nothing else. The hall and the chapel 
 alone have pointed and traceried windows ; the other 
 parts have the sqnare window which best suits domestic 
 purposes. Buildings of this kind, in their grand sim- 
 plicity, their perfect adaptation of everything to its proper 
 end, do indeed contrast with that endless striving after 
 something new, something queer, something unlike any- 
 thing which has ever been done before, which seems the 
 main object of most designers of modern houses. There 
 are no breaks, no projections, no odd little bits put in, 
 not because they serve any practical end, but because the 
 architect was throughout haunted by the notion ' I must 
 make something picturesque.' At Cowdray, and in all 
 other buildings of the type of Cowdray, the whole house 
 and every part of it is meant to serve its own purpose. 
 Each part does serve its own purpose, and the reward of 
 building rationally and straightforwardly is the creation 
 of a magnificent and harmonious whole. 
 
 The history of Cowdray carries us into the thick 
 of the history of the sixteenth century. The house no 
 doubt marks the site of an earlier house or castle ; but 
 the history of the present building begins with a daughter 
 of the famous Marquess of Montague who died at Barnet, 
 Lucy by name, whose marriages remind us of the real and 
 mythical countesses of that name at an earlier time. The 
 daughter of Montague and niece of Warwick married suc- 
 cessively Sir Thomas Fitzwilliam and Sir Anthony Browne, 
 names which at once land us in the reigns of Henry the 
 Eighth and his children. Her son by her first husband 
 bought Cowdray in 1528 and built the house ; her son by 
 her second husband inherited it. He was a friend of 
 Henry the Eighth, and an early possessor of Battle abbey, 
 though it may be well to bear in "mind that the church
 
 COWBRAY. 871 
 
 there was pulled down, not by him, but by an earlier pos- 
 sessor still. His son, another Sir Anthony, was raised to 
 the peerage under Mary. Viscount Montague doubtless 
 chose his title in memory of his mother's father, but he 
 does not seem to have thought it needful to cast away a 
 surname which was famous as early as the twelfth century. 
 'He stands out in our history as almost the only emin- 
 ent layman who, having conformed to earlier changes 
 and having played a leading part in the changes under 
 Mary, refused to conform under Elizabeth. Lord Mon- 
 tague even argued stoutly in the House of Lords against 
 the second abolition of the papal authority. In his peerage 
 and his possession of Cowdray he was succeeded by seve- 
 ral viscounts of the elder faith, though the family con- 
 formed to the established religion before it came to an 
 end. This suggests a question — What, during this long 
 time, was the use of the chapel ? This is an apsidal building 
 with a room, as in so many other cases, opening into it. 
 It forms an important part of the building, and is the 
 only part which now shows distinct signs of having 
 been Italianized within. Did successive Viscounts Mon- 
 tague venture on anything so like to public celebration of 
 forbidden rites as to have mass said in this chapel ? The 
 first lord moreover, quite at the end of his days, in 1591, 
 received Queen Elizabeth at Cowdray as he had years 
 before received Edward. Long before that time all the 
 doubtings and baitings and compromises of the earlier 
 part of her reign had come to an end, and men were, as 
 they are now, either distinctly Protestant or distinctly 
 Eoman Catholic. Did Lord Montague go on with an 
 illegal worship under her Majesty's very eyes, and was 
 no worship of the kind prescribed by law provided for the 
 royal visitor? Here is a question which at once strikes 
 the stranger, and to which local research may perhaps 
 find an answer. 
 
 It is, as we have said, not without a feeling of sadness 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 SUSSEX. 
 
 that wo see a building' in ruins whicli might still, but for 
 the accident of eis^lity years back, have been kept on in all 
 its splendour as one of the greatest houses of the best 
 house- building time. Its repair, which in more than half 
 of the vast pile would amount to rebuilding, is now hardly 
 to be thought of; but one thing at least might be done. 
 Never was a building so thoroughly disfigured, and indeed 
 endangered, by that baleful plant which is sometimes so 
 strangely thought to add fresh beauties to the buildings 
 which it defaces. The whole is so utterly overgrown with 
 ivy that in many parts the proportions are utterly lost. 
 The outlines both of the great gateway and of the kitchen 
 tower can hardly be traced by reason of the presence of 
 the enemy in its full strength. The insidious weed has 
 so entwined itself into the great oriel of the hall that its 
 rear-arch seems ready to fall. Some hand should at least 
 be stretched forth to hinder this. We cannot afford to 
 lose one stone of such a house as Cowdray. It stands, like 
 others of its own class, as a memorial of what Englishmen 
 could do in the sixteenth century, of what they will not 
 do in the nineteenth. We can never look on a building 
 of this kind without once more asking the question, why, 
 while we have in our own land buildings like Cowdray 
 and Thornbury, buildings of the very stateliest architec- 
 ture, an architecture which is the growth of our own soil, 
 whose associations are those of our own history, and 
 which is surely surpassed by the architecture of no other 
 nation in splendour, in consistency, in practical con- 
 venience — why, when we have such models as these at 
 home, we should ransack Venice and Verona and all the 
 cities of the earth, to bring back a scrap from this place 
 and a scrap from the other, whose sole merit is that, 
 whatever they are, they are not English. With such 
 buildings among us, it is indeed strange that our modern 
 architects and their employers will go everywhere for 
 models, rather than to the great works of our own land. 
 We can only say, for our own part, that if any Englishman
 
 COWDRAY. 373 
 
 is thinking of building a house on any scale, from a palace 
 to a cottage, he could not fail to learn something which 
 might be useful in his work by a study, even in fts ruin, 
 of the house in which the first Viscount Montague enter- 
 tained Edward and Elizabeth.
 
 874 
 
 CHICHESTER. 
 
 1864-1875. 
 
 The city of Chichester has probably gained in general fame 
 by the loss and recovery of its best known feature. Many 
 people mnst have heard of the fall and the rebuilding of 
 the spire whose notions of Chichester and its church were 
 till then a little indistinct. The city, in short, is not one 
 of our great cities, and its minster is not one of our great 
 minsters. It lies off any great line of travel, and it is 
 rather in a corner even of its own county. The county 
 of Sussex, the county which contains the hill of Senlac 
 and the hill of Lewes, has witnessed greater events than 
 any other shire in England, but those events belong to 
 districts at a considerable distance from Chichester. The 
 city itself, though it plays a certain part in the civil wars 
 of the seventeenth century, has never been the scene of 
 anything very memorable. Its interest and history is 
 mainly ecclesiastical, and, even among ecclesiastical toAvns, 
 it can claim only a secondary place. But few memorable 
 names figure among its bishops, or rather perhaps, the 
 see being a poor one, those eminent men who have 
 held it have commonly been translated elsewhere, so 
 that we connect their names with their later bishoprics. 
 The local saint. Saint Richard, and that most paradoxical 
 of divines, Reginald Pecock, are the two most famous 
 names which connect themselves more with Chichester 
 than with any other place ; and, after all. Saint Asaph 
 may fairly dispute the possession of Pecock with Chiches- 
 ter. Altogether, the ecclesiastical capital of the South-
 
 CHICHESTER. 376 
 
 Saxons must be satisfied with quite a secondary rank among 
 the episcopal cities of England. 
 
 Secondary towns and churches of this sort have how- 
 ever a kind of interest which does not always belong to 
 places of greater importance. Local history derives a 
 sort of special charm from being more purely local, and, 
 in a place of this kind, the absence of greater memories 
 leaves the mind more leisure to attend to the details of 
 local customs, ofl&ces, and traditions. At Battle, at 
 Evesham, at Waltham, a single illustrious remembrance 
 well nigh excludes all others. At Chichester, as in many 
 other of our cathedral and monastic towns, there is no 
 memory of this kind ; there is simply an old ecclesiastical 
 foundation for the ecclesiastical antiquary to compare 
 with other foundations of the same kind. Wherever there 
 is a cathedral church, there is always something to study 
 in the way of buildings ; wherever there is an old-founda- 
 tion church, there is always something to study in the 
 way of peculiarities in its constitution and history. 
 
 The cathedral church of Chichester, like two or three 
 others, fills a kind of debateable ground between minsters 
 of the first and the second order. Chichester, Wells, and 
 Hereford hardly aspire to rank in the same class with 
 Canterbury and Ely, and yet it is hard to pull them down 
 to the level of Kipon, Saint Davids, or "Romsey. Of course 
 we are here speaking merely of the scale, not at all of the 
 architectural merit or historical interest, of the several 
 churches. In these respects, a minster of the second 
 rank may be fully equal to one of the first. There is no 
 church in Christendom more worthy of a pilgrimage than 
 the metropolitan church of Alby, yet in point of mere 
 scale it is insignificant compared with many which seem 
 commonplace beside it. Thus our present subject Chi- 
 chester can hardly compare with the general effect of 
 such a church as Southwell, which is distinctly its in- 
 ferior in point of size. In fact, the value of Chichester 
 rests rather in the deep interest of several particular por-
 
 876 SUSSEX. 
 
 tious than in any very g-reat general grandeur of outline 
 or splendour of detail. The outline is awkward. That 
 the north-west tower has perished is not the fault of its 
 original designer ; but the west front can never have been 
 satisfactory ; it should either have had higher towers, or 
 no towers at all. They seem to have been originally 
 crowned with the characteristic wooden spires of the 
 county; and this wonld doubtless have improved the general 
 appearance, though there must always have been an awk- 
 wardness of effect about spires whose towers rise so little 
 above the ridge of the roof. Even at Lichfield, this defect 
 is felt in some degree. The central spire of Chichester 
 was doubtless a noble object ; still nothing but exagge- 
 rated local patriotism could ever have compared it with 
 Salisbury, or even with Norwich. The true distinction 
 of Chichester in the way of towers is to be found in an 
 object which we suspect has been somewhat underrated. 
 Cliichester, alone among English cathedral churches, has 
 had the great good luck to keep its detached bell-tower. 
 This tower is plain and massive, very unlike the soaring 
 lanterns of Bourdeaux and Boston, which it resembles in 
 general design. As the single tower of the church, it 
 would have been despised as paltry ; as an adjunct, it 
 is in every way admirable. Standing near the church, 
 but not forming part of it, the sliif tings of its apparent 
 position produce never-ending varieties of grouping, and 
 from every jjoint of view they redeem the outline of 
 the church from that character of commonplace which 
 would otherwise have attached to it. Indeed it surpasses 
 either of the Bourdeaux campaniles in the happiness of 
 its position ; both of them lose somewhat from standing 
 so directly east and west of their respective churches. 
 But the Chichester bell-tower is a gain from every point 
 from which it can be seen. From one point it stands out 
 in its own character, as the bold, massive, detached tower 
 which relieves the north side of the minster, which other- 
 wise lies too bare and open to the street ; from another
 
 CHICHESTER. 377 
 
 more distant point it supplies, and more than supplies, the 
 loss of the missing' tower of the west front. We do not 
 know whether any barbarians ever threatened to pull down 
 the Chichester tower, as some actually did pull down its 
 fellow at Salisbury. But Salisbury could bear the loss 
 better than Chichester. It may be doubted whether it is a 
 merit in a building to be so complete in itself, so inde- 
 pendent of grouping — so much, in short, like a model — as 
 Salisbury is ; but, such being the character of the build- 
 ing, it is clear that it could better afford to lose such an 
 adjunct than a church like Chichester, which is neither such 
 a perfect whole as Salisbury, nor yet a building in itself of 
 any very varied or picturesque outline. The campanile is, 
 in fact, not only the distinguishing characteristic, but the 
 distinguishing merit, of the church of Chichester as seen 
 from the outside. 
 
 It is within that we see far more of those peculiarities 
 which make Chichester, inferior as its effect is to so 
 many other churches, one of the most interesting studies 
 of architectural history in England. The Norman of the 
 nave must have been singular from the beginning. The 
 vast rectangular piers, nearly as wide as the arches be- 
 tween them, are utterly unlike the common English form ; 
 and the singular process of casing after the fire late in the 
 twelfth century makes them more remarkable still ; there is 
 a marked contrast between the plain and massive original 
 work and the delicate coating which cleaves to it and 
 follows its form. The double aisles again, or rather the 
 chapels beyond the aisles, so common in foreign churches, 
 are almost without a parallel in England ; for the double 
 aisles of some parish churches, as Coventry and Taunton, 
 have quite another character. These chapels have the 
 effect of making the nave, on a ground-plan, about the 
 widest in England, while practically, as measured from 
 pier to pier, it is one of the narrowest. 
 
 The new tower and spire were built closely after the 
 pattern of those which they succeeded. The lower stages
 
 87« SUSSEX. 
 
 of the tower are therefore Norman. The new arches 
 are close reproductions of the old ones, while care has 
 been taken to make the foundations this time fullj 
 able to bear the weight which is to be laid upon them. 
 Still we have a strong opinion as to the unreality of re- 
 building a tower and spire in two or three styles, because 
 its predecessor had been built at two or three distinct 
 dates. We still hold that the right course would have 
 been to rebuild the spire exactly as it was, but to adapt 
 the internal sui)ports, sesthetically as well as construc- 
 tively, to the superstructure which they were to bear. 
 Instead of passing off any part of it as a building of the 
 twelfth century, we would have in this way distinctly 
 marked it as a building of the nineteenth. And we may 
 remark another point. We chanced to see the church at 
 the moment when the tower was finished but when the 
 spire was not begun. The proportion and the general 
 effect was so admirable that we pleaded hard that it might 
 stay as it was, finished only with some Ioav capping. But 
 it was ruled otherwise ; the neighbourhood won back its 
 great landmark, but the church was again, to our thinking, 
 cumbered with a crown far too high for its size, and the 
 loss of which was a real gain. 
 
 In the collegiate buildings attached to the minster 
 there are several good points here and there, but, as a 
 ■whole, they are not striking. The Bishop's chapel is by 
 far the best thing, and the extraordinary shape and posi- 
 tion of the cloister should be noted. It is even more dis- 
 tinctly unmonastic than that of Wells. It is simply a 
 passage connecting two doors, one in the nave and the 
 other in the presbytery : it thus takes in the south 
 front of the transept. All peculiarities of this sort should 
 be carefully attended to, as marking the difference between 
 the arrangements of regular and secular foundations. 
 
 Two other buildings in the city, though of course on a 
 much smaller scale, are in their way quite as well worth 
 study as the minster itself. The old Guildhall is the
 
 CHICHESTER. 379 
 
 choir of a friars' church of the usual type — the long sim- 
 ple choir, without aisles or surrounding chapels, forming 
 a marked contrast to the complicated arrangements of 
 cathedral and abbatial churches. The difference is less in 
 size than in arrangement ; the BarfusserJcirche at Basel is 
 as big or bigger than the neighbouring minster, but it 
 preserves the same simple ground-plan as its smaller 
 fellows. This of Chichester, when the nave was standing, 
 must have covered a great deal of ground from east to 
 west. But the nave has unfortunately vanished. The 
 arch between it and the choir is so wide that there can 
 hardly have been a tower inserted between them, as has 
 happened to so many churches of the type. 
 
 The other building is Saint Marys hospital, perhaps the 
 best example in England of that kind of hospital which 
 consists of a large hall divided into cells for the inmates, 
 and opening at the east end into the chapel by an arch 
 and screen. The object of course is to allow the inmates 
 to attend divine service without going out of doors. The 
 arrangement is in fact the same as that which was usual 
 in monastic infirmaries, where the infirmary church is open 
 to the domestic part of the building. It is the same as 
 that which is found in many domestic chapels in castles 
 and houses, where the chapel was often only large enough 
 for the priest to say mass while the household ' assisted ' in 
 the hall, or in some other room from which they could look 
 into the chapel. Among hospitals there are many such 
 cases, sometimes with two stages, sometimes with one only. 
 Of this latter class there is none which carries out the 
 arrangement so thoroughly as this at Chichester. People 
 who are not familiar with buildings of this kind are sure 
 to mistake the hall for the nave of a church — the chapel, 
 of course, being the chancel — and they are commonly 
 scandalized at the sight of people living in it. But both 
 wonder and scandal are thrown away : the arrangement 
 is at once common, ancient, and convenient. It is merely 
 part of the vulgar error of crying out * church ' at the
 
 880 SUSSEX. 
 
 sight of any niediivval building, just as when an outcry 
 was raised against holding the Hampshire assizes in the 
 hall of the King's palace at Winchester, because people 
 fancied that a building with pillars and arches must 
 necessarily be a cliurch. 
 
 In domestic antiquities Chichester is not rich, but the 
 city cross, of the same type as those at Cheddar and 
 Malmesbury, but infinitely grander, is perhaps tbe best of 
 its kind in England. It is a remarkable contrast to the 
 soaring form of the corresponding building at Winchester, 
 which almost rivals the outline of the Eleanor crosses. 
 In the neighbourhood of the city is the church, of 
 Bosham, famous for its connexion with the history of 
 Godwine and Harold, and from its representation in the 
 Bayeux Tapestry. There can be no doubt that tbe tower 
 and part of the cliurch are as old as Harold's time, yet 
 certainly they are not the least like the picture. Far less 
 interesting historically, but beyond all comparison superior 
 as a matter of art, is Boxgrove priory, one of the best 
 examples in England of a divided church, but rendered a 
 little perplexing, because, contrary to the usual fate of such 
 buildings, the parish churcli has been destroyed while the 
 monastic portion survives. The singular internal elevation 
 of the presbytery is known to most antiquaries, and should 
 be got up on the first opportunity by any to whom it is 
 still unknown. We need hardly say that the county of 
 Sussex in general is one of the richest for the ecclesiastical 
 inquirer. The village churches are small, but always 
 picturesque, and there are several larger parish churches of 
 much merit. But the strength of Sussex lies in its series 
 of second-class minsters, of which Boxgrove is only one 
 out of several. The architectural interest of Sussex is of 
 quite a different kind from that either of Northampton- 
 shire or of Somerset, but it is equal in its own way to either 
 of them.
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM
 
 383 
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 1868-1876. 
 
 [Read at the opening of the Historical Section of the Archjeological Institute 
 at Colchester, August 1, 1876. The case of Lucas and Lisle has been 
 fully gone into by Mr. Clements Markham in the ' Fortnightly Keview ' 
 for September 1876.J 
 
 The history of the town m which we are now met, as far 
 as it concerns the general history of Britain, belongs 
 mainly to three distinct periods; and, in two of these, 
 Colchester, placed as it is in the extreme east end of the 
 island, has a singular historical connexion with events 
 which went on at the same time in its western parts. 
 In strictly English history, the time when Colchester 
 plays its most truly important part is in the tenth 
 and eleventh centuries. But on the surface of his- 
 tory, as history is commonly writ ben, the name of Col- 
 chester stands out in greater prominence at an earlier and 
 at a later date, in the first century of our sera and in the 
 seventeenth. To most minds Colchester will be the town 
 which was overthrown by Boadicea and which was taken 
 by Fairfax. The events of the intermediate age have had 
 more direct bearings on the real destinies of the English 
 kingdom and nation ; but it is the earlier and later dates 
 which have most firmly fixed themselves in popular me- 
 mory. And, both at the earlier and at the later date, 
 there is a singular historical connexion between Colchester 
 and the land in which it stands and a widely distant 
 part of Britain. It seems a wide step indeed from the 
 land of the Silures to the land of the Trinobantes, from
 
 884 COLONIA CAMULOBUNUM. 
 
 Morganwg to Essex, from British Cardiff to Saxon Col- 
 chester. For myself the kindness of the Institute has 
 bridged over the gap by calling on me to fill the same 
 place at Colchester which five years ago I filled at Cardiff. 
 And yet there are real, if accidental, points of connexion 
 between the two lands and the two spots. Colchester has 
 in its earlier days a privilege which is shared by no other 
 city or borough of England. The first beginnings of its 
 history are not to be found in British legend or in English 
 annals ; they are recorded by the pen of the greatest his- 
 torian of Rome. It is in the pages of Tacitus himself that 
 we read of the foundation of that Veteran Colony which, 
 swept away in its first childhood by the revolted Briton, 
 rose again to life, first to be emphatically the Colony of 
 Rome, and to become in after days the fortress which the 
 men of the East-Saxon land wrested by their own swords 
 from the grasp of the invading Dane. But, in the very 
 page in which he records the beginnings of the Trinoban- 
 tine colony, he brings that colony into a strange, and at 
 first sight puzzling, connexion with movements in the far 
 Silurian land. Later on in his Annals, he has to record 
 the overthroAv of the new-born colony, the first of all the 
 sieges of Colchester. The first clause of his narrative of 
 that stage of British affairs brings in a name which, in 
 legend at least if not in history, is held to be preserved in 
 the name of the greatest fortress of Morganwg. Before 
 Tacitus can tell us how much Suetonius did in the east of 
 Britain, he has first to teU us how little Didius had done 
 in the west. Now this same Didius is, at least by a 
 legendary etymology, said to have given his name to 
 Caerdydd, the fortress of Didius, as a more likely ety- 
 mology sees, in the name of the town where we are met, 
 the name of the fortress of the Colony. If then there be 
 any truth in the popular etymology of Cardiff, the begin- 
 nings of Cardiff and of Colchester must be dated from 
 nearly the same time. And, even without trusting too 
 much to so doubtful a legend, we at least find the land of
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 886 
 
 the Silures and tlie land of the Trinobantes brought close 
 tog-ether in our earliest glimpse of both. The foundation 
 of a Roman colony in the East is directly connected in 
 the narrative of Tacitus with patriotic movements in the 
 West. Alike in the days of Boadicea and in the days of 
 Fairfax, warfare in the Silurian and in the Trinobantine 
 land has to be recorded in the same page. In the royalist 
 revolt of which the fall of Colchester was the last stage, 
 no part of the island took a greater share than the land 
 to check whose earliest revolt Colchester was first founded. 
 When the royal standard was again unfurled at Col- 
 chester, it had but lately been hauled down at Chepstow ; 
 it was still floating over Pembroke. And one of the for- 
 tresses of the land of Morganwg, one of the lowlier castles 
 which surround the proud mound and keep of Robert 
 Fitzhamon, saw the last encounter in that last stage 
 of the civil war which even local imagination can 
 venture to dignify with the name of battle. The fight of 
 Saint Fagans does not rank in English history along with 
 the fights of Marston and Naseby ; and the siege of Col- 
 chester, with all its deep interest, military, local, and 
 personal, can hardly, in its real bearing on English his- 
 tory, be placed on a level with the siege of Bristol. Yet 
 the siege of Colchester and the war in South Wales were 
 parts of one last and hopeless -struggle. The remem- 
 brance of its leaguers and skirmishes lives in local me- 
 mory there as keenly as the last siege of Colchester lives 
 in local memory here. And if the name of Fairfax may 
 be bracketed in the East with the name of Suetonius 
 Paullinus, in the West the name of Oliver Cromwell has 
 left but small room for the memory of Aulus Didius. 
 
 Throughout the earliest stage of the history of the two 
 districts their historical connexion is as clear as it is 
 strange. I am not going to give a complete history 
 of Colchester or of Essex, or to dispute at large on any 
 minute points of controversy. I presume however that I 
 may at least assume that Camulodunum is Colchester and 
 
 c c
 
 886 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 not any other pliice, in the kingdom of the East-Saxons 
 or out of it. I feel sure that, if I had any mind so to do, 
 my East-Saxon hearers would not allow me to carry the 
 Colony of the Veterans up to Malton in Yorkshire ; and I 
 certainly cannot find any safe or direct road to guide 
 them thither. I trust too that there may be no civil war 
 in the East Saxon-camp, that no one may seek to wile 
 away the veteran band from the banks of Colne to the 
 banks of Panta. Maldon has its own glories ; its name 
 lives for ever in the noblest of the battle-songs of Eng- 
 land ; but I at least can listen to no etymologies which 
 strive to give a Roman origin to its purely English name. 
 Let more minute philologers than I am explain the exact 
 force of the first syllable either in Northumbrian Malton 
 or in East-Saxon Maldon. Both cannot be contractions 
 of Camuloduuum ; Avhat one is the other must surely be ; 
 one is the town, the other the hill, of whatever the 
 syllable common to both may be taken to be. I at least 
 feel no donbt that it is the town in which we are now met 
 which has the unique privilege of having its earliest days 
 recorded by the hand of Tacitus. 
 
 But if it is Tacitus who records the foundation of the 
 colony, it is not in what is left to us of his ^ages that we 
 find our first mention of the name of Camulodunum. That 
 unlucky gap in his writings which every scholar has to 
 lament sends us for the first surviving appearance of the 
 name to the later, but far from contemptible, narrative of 
 Dio. Claudius crossed into Britain, and went as far as 
 Camulodunum, the royal dwelling-place of Cynobellinus. 
 That royal dwelling-place he took, and, on the strength of 
 tbat and of the other events of his short camjoaign in the 
 island which, men looked on as another Avorld, he enlarged 
 the ])omoerium of Eome and brought the Aventine within 
 the sacred precinct. Whether the royal dwelling-place of 
 Cynobellinus stood on the site which was so soon to 
 become the Eoman colony, I do not profess to determine. 
 The Eoman town often arose on a spot near to but not
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 887 
 
 actually on the British site. Eoman Dorchester — if any 
 trace of it be left — looked up on the forsaken hill- fort of 
 the Briton on Sinodun. Eoman Lindum came nearer to 
 the brink of its steep hill than the British settlement 
 which it supplanted. I do not pretend to rule what may 
 be the date or purpose of the earthworks at Lexden. It 
 has been thought that they are part of a system which 
 took in the site both of an older and a later Caniulodu- 
 num, a system belonging to the time of British resistance 
 to Teutonic invasions. If so, we have here at Lexden a 
 defence raised against the East-Saxons, as at Wareham 
 and Wallingford we have defences raised against the 
 West- Saxons. But on this matter I could not decide. 
 All I ask is that I may not be constrained to believe 
 in King Coel's kitchen. But wherever the British settle- 
 ment was, I cannot bring myself to believe that the site of 
 the colony was other than the site of the present town. It 
 was a site well suited for a military post, fixed on a height 
 which, in this flatter eastern land, is not to be despised ; 
 it approaches in some faint measure to the peninsular 
 position of Shrewsbury, Bern, and Besan9on. On this site 
 then the Colony of Veterans was founded while Claudius 
 still reigned. When he had taken his place among the 
 gods — Seneca to be sure had another name for the change 
 in him — the temple of the deified conqueror arose within 
 the site which the Roman occupied to hold down the con- 
 quered people. And now comes the difficulty, the strange 
 relation in which two such distant parts of Britain as 
 Camulodunum and the land of the Silures appear in the 
 narrative of Tacitus. The Iceni are subdued ; the Cangi 
 have their lands harried ; the Brigantes submit. But in 
 the East and in the West, by the banks of the eastern and 
 of the western Colne, another spirit reigns. The Silures, 
 the iDcople of Caradoc, still hold out. Neither gentleness 
 nor sternness will move them ; nothing short of regular 
 warfare, regular establishment of legionary camps, can 
 bow those stubborn necks to the yoke. With a, view to 
 
 c c 2
 
 SSi COLON [A CAMULODUNIIM. 
 
 this warfare in the West, the Colony of Veterans is planted 
 in the East. Some have therefore carried Camulodunum 
 elsewhere — though assuredly matters are not much 
 mended by carrying it into Yorkshire ; others, more 
 daring still, have sought to depreciate the authority of 
 Tacitus himself. But, as I read the passage, though the 
 connexion is perhaps a little startling, though the word- 
 ing is perhaps a little harsh, the general meaning seems 
 plain. In order that the legions and their camps might 
 be more easily established among the threatening Silures, 
 a feebler defence was provided for the conquered Trino- 
 bantes. As I understand the terse phrases of the historian, 
 the legions were removed from the east for the war with 
 Caradoc, and a colony of veterans was thought enough to 
 occupy a land where little danger was feared. How little 
 danger was feared, how thoroughly the land was held to 
 be subdued, appears from the defenceless state of the 
 colony eleven years after. The colonists lived at their 
 ease, as if in expectation of unbroken peace. The town 
 was unw-alled ; the only citadel, the ' arx feternse domina- 
 tionis,' w^as the temple of the deified conqueror. The 
 mission of the veterans was less to fight than to civilize 
 their barbarian neighbours. They were sent there indeed 
 as ' subsidiuDi adversus rebelles ; ' but they were sent 
 there also 'imbuendis sociis ad officia legum.' Sterner 
 work than this had to be done among the hills where 
 Caradoc was in arms ; but those who founded the unwalled 
 colony hardly dreamed that, before long, w^ork no less stern 
 was to be done there also. They little dreamed what feats 
 of arms were to be wrought, upon the Roman as well as 
 by him, in the land which they had deemed so thoroughly 
 their own that its capital hardly needed warlike defences 
 against an enemy. 
 
 For eleven years the colonists lived a merry life, the 
 life of conquerors settled upon the lands of their victims. 
 The dominion of law which the veterans set up at Camu- 
 lodunum did not hinder the conquering race from seizing
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 389 
 
 the lands and houses of the natives, and insulting them 
 with the scornful names of slaves and captives. Such 
 doings are not peculiar to the dominion of the Roman ; 
 but it does say something for the Eoman, as distinguished 
 from the oppressors of our own day, that it is from a 
 Roman historian that we learn the evil deeds of his coun- 
 trymen. Tacitus neither conceals nor palliates the wrongs 
 which led to the revolt of eastern Britain, as wrongs of 
 the same kind still lead to revolts before our own eyes, as 
 they always will lead to revolts as long as such deeds con- 
 tinue to be done. Crime was avenged by crime, as crime 
 ever will be avenged, till men unlearn that harsh rule 
 which excuses the wanton oppression of the tyrant and 
 bids men lift up their hands in holy horror when his deeds 
 are returned on himself in kind. Fearful indeed was the 
 vengeance of the revolted Briton ; but when he used the 
 cross, the stake, the flame, against his oppressors, he was 
 but turning their own intruments of civilization against 
 themselves. 
 
 The tale is one of the most familiar, one of the most 
 stirring, in that history of the former possessors of our 
 island which so often passes for the history of ourselves. 
 We see the British heroine, as we might now see some 
 matron of Bosnia or Bulgaria, calling on the men of her 
 race to avenge her own stripes, her outraged daughters, 
 the plundered homes of the chiefs of her people, the kins- 
 folk of their king dealt with as the bondmen of the 
 stranger. But we are concerned with Boadicea, her 
 wrongs and her vengeance, only as they concerned the 
 Colony of Veterans at Camulodnnum. The tale is told 
 with an Homeric wealth of omen and of prodigy. The 
 statue of Victory fell backwards ; strange sounds were 
 heard in the theatre and in the senate-house ; frantic 
 women sang aloud that the end was come. The men of 
 the defenceless colony, and the small handful of helpers 
 sent by Catus Decianus, guarded by no ditch or rampart, 
 defended the temple of Claudius for two days till town
 
 390 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 and temple sank before tlie assaults of the avengers. So 
 the first Camulodunnm fell, in one mighty flame of sacri- 
 fice, along with the two other great settlements of the 
 Eoman on British ground. London, not adorned like 
 Camulodunnm with colonial rank, but already the city of 
 ships, the place where, as in after days, the merchants of 
 the earth were gathered, fell along with the Veteran 
 Colony. So too fell Yerulam, doomed again to arise, again 
 to fall, and to su])ply out of its ruins the materials for the 
 vastest of surviving English minsters. All fell, as though 
 the power of Rome beyond the Ocean was for ever broken. 
 But their fall was but for a moment ; the sword of Sueto- 
 nius won back eastern Britain to the bondage and the 
 slumber of the Eoman Peace. The towns that the Briton 
 had burned and harried arose again : a new colony of 
 Camulodunnm, this time fenced in with all the skill of 
 Eoman engineers, again grew up. It grew up to live on 
 through four unrecorded centuries, carefully marked in 
 maps and Itineraries, but waiting for a second place in 
 history till the days when Eoman and Briton had passed 
 away, when the Saxon Shore had become a Saxon shore in 
 another sense from that in which it bears that name in the 
 Domesday of the tottering Empire. 
 
 The Eoman then passed away from the Colony of 
 Veterans, as he passed away from the rest of Britain. 
 But in the Colony of Veterans he left both his works and 
 his memory behind him. When I say that he left his 
 works, do not fancy that I mean that he left the temple of 
 Claudius behind him. On the grotesque delusion which 
 mistook a Norman castle for a Eoman temple I might not 
 have thought it needful to waste a word. Only, when I 
 was last at Colchester, I saw, written up in the castle 
 itself, such names as 'Adytum,' 'Podium,' and the like, 
 implying that there was still somebody in Colchester who 
 believed the story. Perhaps there was also somebody who 
 believed that the earth was flat, and that the sun was only
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 391 
 
 a few miles from it. The scientific antiquary will give 
 exactly as much attention to the one doctrine as the scien- 
 tific astronomer will give to the other. Of the two stories 
 I should be more inclined to believe in old King Coel, in 
 his fiddlers, and even in his kitchen. Yet I have come too 
 lately from the Illyrian land, my mind is too full both of its 
 past and of its present history, to let me believe that Helen 
 the mother of Constantino was the daughter of Coel of 
 Colchester. The strange likeness between the names of 
 the river and the settlement, between the Cohie and the 
 Colony, is, if not a puzzle, at least a coincidence. But 
 King Coel will be at once sent by the comparative mytho- 
 logist to the same quarters as Hellen and Romulus and 
 Francus the son of Hector. Saint Helen, says Henry of 
 Huntingdon, surrounded Colchester with walls. So she 
 did many things at Trier which the last and most scien- 
 tific historian of Trier is pulling to pieces in a way which 
 must grievously shock some of his brethren. I trust then 
 that I shall not shock anybody in Colchester by disbeliev- 
 ing in old King Coel. I do not think that I shocked any- 
 body in Exeter by declining to believe that, when Vespa- 
 sian marched oiF to besiege Jerusalem, it was because he 
 was bent upon taking some city, and had found Exeter too 
 strong for him. 
 
 But the walls are there, whoever built them, the walls 
 which, at some date between the invasion of Boadicea and 
 the invasion of the first East-Saxon settlers, were raised 
 to shelter the Colony. And even the legend of Helen 
 may be taken as pointing to the age of Constantius and 
 Constantino as the most likel}' time for their building. 
 Those walls are, as far as I have seen, unique among the 
 inhabited towns of Britain. Neither York nor Lincoln 
 nor Exeter, nor even Chester, can boast of being still 
 girded by her Roman walls in anything like the same per- 
 fection in which Colchester is. Nowhere else in Britain, 
 save in fallen Anderida and Calleva, have I ever seen 
 the line of the old defences so thoroughly complete. But
 
 802 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 unluckily it is the line only. While the circuit of the walls 
 is so much more perfect than at York and Lincoln, the 
 fragments which still remain at York and Lincoln have 
 kept much more of their ancient masonry than can be 
 found at Colchester. Still Colchester can show far more 
 than can be seen at Chester, where, though the Eoman 
 lines are all but as perfectly followed by the later defences, 
 little is left of the actual Roman wall beyond its founda- 
 tions. As the abiding wall of a still inhabited town, the 
 Eoman Wiill of Colchester is, I repeat, unique in Britain. 
 And a Roman wall I do not scruple to call it. In so calling- 
 it I am far from meaning to rule that the whole circuit of 
 the existing wall actually dates from the time of Roman 
 occupation. I have no doubt that the lines are the Roman 
 lines ; I have no doubt that part of the wall is the actual 
 Roman wall. But I have just as little doubt that it has 
 been in many places patched and rebuilt over and over 
 again ; one great time above all of patching and rebuild- 
 ing is recorded in the days of Eadward the Unconquered. 
 But the wall has a higher historic interest, it becomes a 
 more living witness of Roman influence, from the very fact 
 that much of it is not actually of Roman date. It teaches 
 us a lesson which is taught by several continental cities, 
 but which Colchester brings out more strongly than any 
 other place in England. This is the way in which certain 
 forms of construction sometimes abide through all changes 
 of architectural stjde and of everything else. In the walls 
 of Colchester we indeed learn with how strong a life the 
 arts and the memory of Rome lived on. Whatever be the 
 date of any part of the walls, they are Roman ; they are built 
 more Romano. It is at Colchester as it is at Trier, as it is 
 at Perigueux, as it is in a crowd of other places where the 
 influence of Roman models had struck deep. In places of 
 this kind the Roman construction lived on for ages. At 
 Trier masonry of thoroughly Roman character is used at 
 least up to the eleventh century ; ^at Perigueux and in 
 some other cities and districts of southern Gaul it cannot
 
 COLONIA CAMULOnUNUM. 393 
 
 Le said to have ever gone out of use at all. So here in 
 Colchester we have to distinguish between three kinds 
 and dates of construction. We have, in the walls at least, 
 actual bricks of Eoman date in the places where the 
 Eoman engineer laid them, bricks which formed part of 
 the defences which withstood the first East- Saxon at- 
 tack. We have bricks of Roman date used up again in the 
 construction of later buildings, as at Saint Albans. And 
 we have bricks, not of Eoman date, but of thoroughly 
 Eoman character, made afresh at all times at least down 
 to the fifteenth century. Here, where brick and timber 
 were of necessity the chief materials for building, the 
 Eoman left his mark upon the bricks as in some other 
 parts of Britain he left his mark upon the stones. North- 
 ern England reproduced the vast stones of the Eoman 
 wall in a crowd of buildings built more Romano, with ma- 
 sonry of massive stones. With such stones again, no less 
 more Romano, did ^thelstan rebuild the walls of Exeter. 
 Here at Colchester Eoman models were no less faithfully 
 followed ; but here the mos Romanus naturally took the 
 form of brick, and to build more Romano meant to build 
 with brick and not with stone. It meant to build with 
 bricks, either taken from some Eoman building or cast in 
 close imitation of those which the Eoman buildings sup- 
 plied. The brickwork of the best and most undoubted piece 
 of the Eoman wall is reproduced in a neighbouring church 
 tower of the fifteenth century. Still differences may be 
 seen among bricks which differ perhaps fourteen hundred 
 years in age. The true Eoman bricks can commonly be 
 known by the distinctive mortar still cleaving to them, and 
 in the later work many bricks are interspersed of a size and 
 thickness which, so far from being Neronian, cannot even 
 be Stilichonian. Still, in the sense of a fashion handed on 
 by unbroken tradition, all the brick buildings of Colchester 
 may be called Eoman. In this sense the castle itself 
 may be called a Eoman building. So may the one tower 
 of Primitive Eomanesque to be found in Colchester, the
 
 894 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 tower of Trinity cliurcli, wLicli, while otlier towers of its 
 typo arc of stone, reproduces in material as Avell as in form 
 the campaniles of Italy. Its western door has a triangular 
 head; the arch from the nave into the tower is Saint 
 Benet at Cambridge translated from stone into brick. But 
 the midwall shafts, strange to say, are lacking ; as if the 
 mind of Colchester was so wholly set upon bricks that the 
 art of turning a stone column was unknown there. An- 
 other far greater and more famous piece of brickwork 
 is the ruined nave of Saint Botolfs priory. Here we 
 have a building second only to Saint Albans as an instance 
 of the useof Roman materials, not so much taught to assume 
 new shapes, as brought back to what was their true Roman 
 use before Italy began her imitation of the arts of Greece. 
 But the walls are Roman in a yet stricter sense than any of 
 the other buildings around them. As almost everywhere 
 in Britain, the gates have perished. There is nothing to 
 set even against the New Port of Lincoln; far less is there 
 aught to set against the mighty gateways of Trier, Aosta, 
 and even Mnies. Can we deem that at Camulodunum, as 
 at Rome itself, there were ever gateways of really good 
 architectural design built of the favourite material ? As it 
 is, we must content ourselves with the walls. They are the 
 old walls of the Colony, in many places patched; in some, 
 we may believe, actually rebuilt. But they have undergone 
 no change which at all destroys their personal identity. 
 The wall is not an imitation, a reproduction, of a Roman 
 wall ; it it the Roman wall itself, with such repairs, however 
 extensive, as the effects of time and of warfare have made 
 needful. The walls of Colchester are Roman walls in the 
 sense in which the walls of Rome are the walls of Aurelian. 
 The circuit of the walls is very nearly perfect; in some 
 places they stand free ; everywhere they can be seen by 
 going down courts and alleys. As so often happens in 
 these Roman towns, the old line of defence no longer 
 answers to the actually inhabited space. As at Chester, 
 there are void spaces and gardens within the walls, while
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 395 
 
 ill other parts tlie town itself has spread far beyond them. 
 Modern Colchester spreads itself away from its river over 
 the ground to the south. This is doubtless partly owing* 
 to the foundation of the castle, the precinct of which takes 
 up a large part of the northern side of the town. For at 
 Colchester we must talk of sides ; we cannot, as we com- 
 monly can in a Roman Chester, talk of quarters. There is, 
 now at least, no strongly marked cross at Colchester, such 
 as there is at Gloucester, Chichester, and the city which 
 is specially Chester. There too the foundation of the 
 castle, and the large space taken up by its precinct, may 
 well have disturbed the ancient arrangement. The suc- 
 cessive enlargements of the ecclesiastical precinct have, in 
 the same way, caused modern York to keep but little of 
 the lines of the ancient Eboracum. 
 
 We come then to a time when the walls of the Colony 
 were still standing, but when the legions of Rome were 
 no longer marshalled to defend them. Was there ever a 
 time when those walls stood, as the walls of Bath and 
 Chester once stood, as the walls of Anderida and Calleva 
 still stand, with no dwelling-place of men within them ? 
 That question I will not undertake to answer. I think I 
 remember that, in one of his scattered papers and lectures, 
 the great master of those times, the discoverer of early 
 English history, told us that of all the towns of England 
 there was none more likely than Colchester to have been 
 continuously inhabited through British, Roman, British, 
 and English days. If I am right in thinking that Dr. 
 Guest said this, he doubtless had some weighty reason for 
 saying it. I have not myself lighted on any direct evi- 
 dence either for or against such a proposition. It is only 
 in a very few cases that we have any direct evidence 
 as to the fate of this or that particular town during the 
 progress of the English Conquest. And of the circum- 
 stances under which the kingdom of the East-Saxons 
 canre into being, we know absolutely nothing. The
 
 390 COLONIA CAMULODUXUM. 
 
 Ohrouicles are silent; no legend, no fragment of ancient 
 song is preserved to us by Henry of Huntingdon. We 
 have nothing but a dry list of princes. We hear of 
 iEscwine as the first founder of the East-Saxon settle- 
 ment; wo find his remote descendant Sleda spoken of as 
 the first East-Saxon king. In this there is no contradic- 
 tion. The story of the growth of Essex is doubtless much 
 the same as the story of the growth of East-Anglia and of 
 the tAvo Northumbrian kingdoms. Several scattered Teu- 
 tonic settlements were gradually united under a more 
 powerful chief; then, as the head of a nation and no 
 longer the head of a mere tribe, that chief deemed himself 
 great enough to take upon himself the kingly title. Such 
 was Ida in Bernicia ; such, we may believe, was Sleda in 
 Essex. But we have no trustworthy details of the East- 
 Saxons and their kings till their conversion to Christianity 
 in the beginning of the seventh century. We have no 
 trustworthy mention of the town of Colchester till the wars 
 of Eadward the Unconquered in the tenth. All that we 
 can say is that the Colony on the Colne, like the Colony 
 on the Rhine, kept its name. One was Colonia Camulo- 
 dunum; the otlier was Colonia Agrippina ; but Colonia was 
 name enough to distinguish either. Latin Colonia became 
 British Gaer Collun ; and Caer Collun appears in every list 
 as one of the great cities of Britain. British Caer Collun 
 passed into English Colneceaster, with no change beyond 
 that which the genius of the British and English languages 
 demanded. In British and in English alike it remains the 
 city of the colony. From this preservation of the name I 
 argue, as I have argued in the case of the one English 
 city whose name ends with the title with which the name 
 of Colchester begins, the sister colony of Lindum, that, if 
 Camulodunum ever was, like Deva, ' a waste Chester,' it 
 was only for a very shoi't time. I inferred from the fact 
 that Lindum Colonia kept its name in the form of English 
 Lincoln, that, if Lindum Colonia e^er lay in the state of 
 a waste chestevy it was but for a very short time. It was
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 397 
 
 settled again aud named again while tlie memory of its 
 old name and its old rank were still fresh. And I make 
 the same inference in the case of Colchester, though with 
 one degree less of certainty, because I must stand ready 
 to have it thrown in my teeth that the town is called, not 
 from the Roman colony, but from the river Colne. Here 
 is a point on which each man must judge for himself. If 
 there were no colony, one could say for certain that the 
 town was called from the river ; if there were no river, 
 one would say for certain that the town was called from 
 the colony. As it is, I cannot get over the succession of 
 Colonia, Caer Collun, Colneceaste?-. I feel that it is awk- 
 ward to say that the likeness of the name of the colony 
 and of the river is purely accidental : it would be more 
 awkward still to hint that the river may have taken its 
 name from the colony. But the colony is a fact ; the 
 keeping of its name is a fact ; and, in the face of those 
 facts, all that I can do is to leave the river to shift for itself. 
 It seems likely then that, whether Colchester was or 
 was not continuously inhabited through all the revolutions 
 of the fifth and sixth centuries, its time of desolation, if 
 it had any, was but short. If it did not become t'he 
 dwelling-place of Englishmen in the first moment of their 
 conquest, it at least became the dwelling-place of Eno-- 
 lishmen before its British and Roman memories were 
 forgotten. But, as I just now said, of Colchester itself 
 there is absolutely no mention in history between the 
 days of Boadicea and the days of Eadward the Elder. All 
 that I can find is a dark and mythical reference in the 
 story of Havelock as told by Geoffrey Gaimar. But we 
 must not forget, even within the walls of the colony, that 
 Colchester is not the whole of the East-Saxon realm. It 
 is not even its formal head. I must leave local inquirers 
 to say whether there is any reason beyond the fact of the 
 neighbourhood of Colchester to the East-Anglian inarch 
 to account for that rank falling to the lot of a town of so 
 much less fame as Chelmsford. Yet Colchester was once
 
 398 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 some^vliut of a capital. That one of the earliest seats of 
 Roiuau power in Britain shonld to modern ears be mainly 
 suggestive of oysters is really by no means inappropriate. 
 The shell-fish, as tlie unscientific call it, was so favourite an 
 article of Eoman food that its remains are often set down 
 among- the signs of Roman occupation. Not that Colchester, 
 inland as it stands, is in itself a seat of the oyster- fishery. 
 But, if not the seat, it was long the head ; the town bad 
 a jurisdiction over the neighbouring coasts, something 
 like that exercised over other waters by Bristol and by its 
 own successful rival London. Colchester is not a city in 
 tbe modern use of the word ; it does not even bear the 
 name in Domesday. It has never been the seat of an 
 independent bishopric. That was because another of the 
 Roman towns which was overthrown by Boadicea, low- 
 lier in rank in those early days, had, by the time that 
 the East-Saxons embraced Christianity, outstripped the 
 Veteran colony. London, already tbe home of commerce 
 before her first overthrow — again, under ber new name of 
 Augusta, the home of commerce in the later days of 
 Eoman power — was now, as an East-Saxon city, the head 
 of the East- Saxon realm, again the home of commerce, 
 the meeting-place of merchants and their ships. London, 
 not Colchester, became the seat of the bishopric of the 
 East-Saxons, and remained so till the strange arrange- 
 ments of modern ecclesiastical geography gave Colchester 
 a shepherd, first in the realm of Hengest and then by the 
 ruins of Yerulam. But the very greatness which made 
 London the head of the East-Saxon kingdom tended to 
 part London off from the East-Saxon kingdom. Among 
 the shiftings of the smaller English kingdoms, London 
 seems to have held her own as a distinct power, some- 
 times acknowledging the supremacy of Mercia, sometimes 
 the supremacy of Wessex, but always keeping somewhat 
 of an independent being. She parts off from the main 
 East-Saxon body ; she carries off a fragment of it along 
 with her, to become what we may call a free Imperial
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 399 
 
 city, bearing rule, like other Imperial cities, over her sub- 
 ject district of tlie Middle-Saxous. London therefore soon 
 falls out of our special survey of the East-Saxon land. 
 But the East-Saxon land can number within its borders 
 not a few historic sites besides tlie towns which Boadicea 
 overthrew. There is the battle-field of Maldon and the 
 battle-field of Assandun ; there is the wooden church of 
 Greenstead where Saint Eadmund rested ; there is Earl 
 Harold's Waltham and King Eadward's Havering ; there 
 is Barking, where the Conqueror waited while his first 
 tower was rising over London, where Eadwine and Mor- 
 kere, and perhaps Waltheof himself, became the men of 
 the stranger, and where Englishmen first bought back their 
 lands at a price as a grant from the foreign king. The East- 
 Saxon land has thus its full share among the great events 
 of our early history ; but the history of the kingdom 
 itself, as a kingdom, fills no great place in our annals. 
 Essex supplied no Bretwalda to bring the signs of Im- 
 perial dignity to London or Colchester as Eadwine 
 brought them to York. After some flittings to and fro, 
 Essex passed, like the other English kingdoms, under the 
 supremacy of Ecgberht, and by the division between 
 Alfred and Guthrum it passed under the rule of the 
 Dane. It is in the great struggle of the next reign that 
 Essex, and especially its two great historic sites of Col- 
 chester and Maldon, stand forth for a moment as the 
 centre of English history, as the scene of some of the 
 most gallant exploits in our early annals, exploits which 
 seem to have had a lasting effect on the destinies of the 
 English kingdom. 
 
 It was in the j-ear 913, the thirteenth year of Eadward's 
 reign, the year after he had taken possession of London 
 and Oxford, that we hear for the first time of a solitary 
 East-Saxon expedition. Eadward marched to Maldon ; 
 he stayed there till he had built a fortress at Witham, and 
 had received the submission of many who had been under
 
 400 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 Danish rulo. This sounds like the emancipation of all 
 Essex south of the Panta or Blackwater. Our next notice 
 is nine years later, after Eatlwartl and his sister, the Lady 
 of the Mercians, had won back most of the central part of 
 the island to English and Christian rule. We now again 
 find Eadward carrying his war of deliverance into the 
 East-Saxon land. He first fortified Maldon, the goal of 
 his former march, the borough which seventy-three years 
 later was to behold the valour and the death of Brihtnoth. 
 But Colchester was still left in the hands of the enemy. 
 The next year the Danes again broke the peace ; and, 
 dm'uio- the whole former part of the year, fighting went 
 on in central England between the Danes and the de- 
 fenders of the various towns which King Eadward had 
 already fortified. At Towcester, at Bedford, and else- 
 where, the English defenders drove off the Danish invaders 
 from King Eadward's new fortresses. Towcester was not 
 yet surrounded by the stone wall which girded it before 
 the year was out ; but the valour of its defenders, fighting, 
 we may suppose, behind a palisade or rampart of earth, 
 was enough to bear up till lielp came and the enemy was 
 driven away. During all this stage of the campaign, the 
 warfare seems to be purely local. The Danes attack ; the 
 English defend ; there is no mention of the King or of 
 any royal army. Presently the tables are turned; the 
 local force of various English districts begins to attack 
 posts which the Danes still held among them. And now 
 comes our first distinct mention of warfare on East-Saxon 
 soil. Colchester is still held by the enemy ; Maldon is 
 held by King Eadward's garrison. The tale cannot be 
 so well told as in the language of the chronicle : — ' There 
 gathered mickle-folk on harvest, either of Kent and of 
 Surrey and of East-Saxons, and of each of the nighest 
 boroughs, and fared to Colchester, and beset the borough 
 
 all I'ound ' — ymhsteton is the emphatic word — ' and there 
 fought till they had won it and the folk all slew, and took 
 all that there within was, but the men that there fled over
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 401 
 
 the wall.' Colchester was thus again an English borough, 
 won, as it would seem, by the force of a popular move- 
 ment among the men of Essex and the neighbouring 
 shires, without any help from the West-Saxon king. 
 Then, in the same harvest, the Danes of East-Anglia, 
 strengthened by wikings from beyond sea, set forth to 
 attack the English garrison in Maldon. In the words of 
 Chronicler, ' they beset the borough all round, and fought 
 there till to the borough-folk there came more force from 
 without to help them, and the host forsook the borough, 
 and fared away from it ; and then fared the men after out 
 of the borough, and eke they that had come to them for 
 out to help, and put the host to flight, and slew of them 
 many hundred either the ashmen ' — the men of the ashen 
 ships — ' and others.' Thus, of the two great points in 
 the East-Saxon land, Colchester was won, Maldon Avas 
 kept, and that without any help from the king. Local 
 energy had done so much that, when shortly the Uncon- 
 quered king came with his West-Saxon army, his march 
 was little more than a triumphal progress. He came 
 to Towcester ; he girded the town with its stone wall, 
 and received the submission of Northamptonshire. He 
 marched to Huntingdon ; he strengthened the fortress, 
 and received the submission of the surrounding country. 
 Then comes the fact which immediately concerns us here. 
 That ' ilk year afore Martinmas fared Eadward king with 
 West-Saxons' fyrd to Colneceaster, and repaired the 
 borough and made it new there where it tobroken was.' 
 Here then we have a distinct record of damage done and 
 of damage repaired in the circuit of the walls of Colches- 
 ter. Part of the wall was broken down in the siege, and 
 the breach was repaired on the King's coming. It would 
 be pleasant if we could tell, amongst the many bricks of 
 various dates which are to be seen in the walls of Col- 
 chester, those bricks which were set in their place at the 
 bidding of the founder of the English kingdom, and not 
 by any earlier or later hand. If we can find the site of the 
 
 D D
 
 402 COLOXIA CAMULODUNVM. 
 
 broach which Eng^lishmoii made in winning Colchester from 
 tlie Dane, Englishmen may look on that spot in the Roman 
 wall with the same eyes with which all Europe looks on 
 that spot in the wall of Aurelian where the newest bricks of 
 all tell ns where the army of united Italy entered her capital. 
 But the two great East- Saxon sieges of this memorable 
 year have more than a local interest. They were the last 
 warfiire of the reign of the Unconquered king. After 
 Colchester was won and Maldon saved, no sword was 
 drawn against Eadward and his dominion. The rest of 
 his reign is one record of submissions on the x^art of his 
 enemies. At Colchester itself the men of East-Anglia 
 and Essex, who had been under Danish rule, first bow to 
 him ; then comes the submission of the Danish host itself ; 
 then that of all Mercia ; then that of all North Wales. 
 The realm of the West-Saxon king now reaches to the 
 Humber. Northumberland, Strathclyde, Scotland, are 
 as yet untouched by his arms or his policy. But next 
 comes the great day of all, the crowning-point of West- 
 Saxon triumph, when the King of Scots and all the people 
 of Scots, and Rsegnold and EadAVulf's son, and all that 
 were in Northumberland, Angles, Danes, Northmen, or 
 any other, and eke the King of Strathclyde Welsh, and all 
 Strathclyde Welsh, bowed to Eadward at Bakewell, and 
 sought him to father and lord. The fights on East- Saxon 
 ground, the storm of Colchester, the defence of Maldon, had 
 taught the whole world of Britain that Eadward and his 
 people were not to be withstood. The gallant gathering of 
 the men of Essex, Kent, and Surrej^, had led to the establish- 
 ment of an English kingdom bounded only by the Humber, 
 of an English Empire bounded only by the Northern sea. 
 
 Thus two East-Saxon sites, one of them our present 
 place of meeting, have won for themselves a foremost 
 place in that struggle with the Dane which welded 
 England into a single kingdom. And one of those sites 
 joins again with a third whose name we have not yet
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 403 
 
 heard to form another pair no less memorable in the 
 struggle whicli gave the united kingdom of England into 
 the hands of a Danish king. If the days of Colcliester 
 and Maldon stand forth, among the brightest days of 
 Englisb victory, so Maldon and Assandun stand out 
 among the saddest yet noblest days of English overthrow. 
 Our last East- Saxon memory showed us the invading Dane 
 flying from before the walls of Maldon ; our next East- 
 Saxon memory shows us the Dane victorious in the hard 
 hand-play, and the Ealdorman of the land dying in defence 
 of the Saxon shore. The fight by the Panta, the fight 
 where Brihtnoth fell, lives in that glorious battle-song 
 which, were it written in any tongue but the native speech 
 of Englishmen, would have won its place alongside of the 
 battle-songs of ancient Hellas. The song is plainly local 
 and contemporary ; it comes straight from the soul of the 
 East-Saxon gleeman of the tenth century. It is some- 
 thing to stand on the spot and to call up the picture of 
 the valiant Ealdorman, lighting from his horse among his 
 faithful hearth-band, marshalling his men in the thick 
 array of the shield-wall, refusing to pay tribute to the 
 wikings, and telling them that point and edge shall judge 
 between them. Then we see the dauntless three who 
 kept the bridge, Wulfstan, .^Ifhere, and Maccus — Wulf- 
 stan the Horatius, his comrades the Lartius and Her- 
 minius, of the fight in which the legend of the Tiber was 
 repeated in sober truth by East-Saxon Panta. Yet among 
 the crowds to whom the legends of distant lands are as 
 household words, how few have ever heard the names of 
 the inborn heroes of our own soil. Then Brihtnoth, in 
 his 'overmood,' in his excess of daring and lofty spirit, 
 allows the enemy to pass the water : then comes the fight 
 itself, the Homeric exploits on either side ; the death- 
 wound of Brihtnoth and his last prayer; the dastardly 
 flight of Godric on the horse of his fallen lord, the fight 
 over the body of the slain chief; the self-devotion of the 
 true companions who in death are not divided, as thev lie
 
 404 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 ' tliegn-like ' around their lord, their earl and ring-giver. 
 No tale is told with more spirit, no tale sets better before 
 us that great feature of old Teutonic, and indeed of old 
 Aryan, life, the personal and sacred tie which bound a 
 man to the lord of his own seeking. But the men who 
 fought on that day were Englishmen ; the tongue in which 
 their deeds were sung-was English ; their deeds are there- 
 fore forgotten, and the song which tells of them sounds 
 in the ears of their children like the stammering speech 
 of an unknown tongue. 
 
 But if the banks of Panta saw the glorious death of 
 the local East- Saxon chief, the banks of another East- 
 Saxon estuary saw, not indeed the death but the last 
 struggle, of the champion, not only of Essex but of all 
 England. The fight of Maldon is handed down to us in 
 the glowing strains of native song ; the song which told 
 of the fight of Assandun has perished : we have only feeble 
 echoes preserved to us in the Latin pages of the historian 
 who has kept so many such precious fragments, from the 
 song of Anderida to the song of Stamfordbridge. As to 
 the site of Assandun I will not enter on any discussion ; 
 I think no one will doubt about it who has been there. 
 There is the hill on which Eadmund Ironside marshalled 
 his army for the last battle, the hill down whose slope he 
 rushed with his sword, as the faint echo of the ballad 
 tells us, like the lightning-flash, leaving in his charge the 
 royal post between the Standard and the West- Saxon 
 Dragon, and fighting hand to hand in the foremost rank 
 of his warriors. We hear ft'om the other side how the 
 Raven of Denmark had already fluttered its wings for 
 victory ; but it was only through Eadric's treason — treason 
 which no effort of ingenious advocacy can wipe out from 
 the pages which record it — that Eadmund, in the sixth 
 battle of that great year, found himself for the first time 
 defeated. The spot which saw Cnut's victory over all 
 England saw also a few years later his ofifering in his new 
 character of an English king. Then arose the joint work
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 405 
 
 of Cnut and Thurkill, the minster of stone and lime, 
 whose material as much needed to be noted in the timber 
 land of Essex as the material of the wooden basilica of 
 Glastonbury needed to be noted among' the rich stone- 
 quarries of Somerset. Of that minster the first priest was 
 Stigand, the man who won his first lowly promotion at the 
 hands of the Dane, and who lived to be hurled from the 
 metropolitan throne at the bidding of the Norman. 
 
 But the East-Saxon land contains a memorial of those 
 times more precious even than the memories of Maldon 
 and Assandun, a memorial too which forms a special tie 
 between Eastern and Western England. It was on East- 
 Saxon soil, just within the East-Saxon border, on the 
 spot to which the willing oxen drew the Holy Cross of 
 Leodgaresburh from the place of its first finding in the 
 West, that Tofig first cleared the wild forest, that he first 
 reared the minster of Waltham in its earlier and lowlier 
 form, and gathered round it a band of pilgrims and de- 
 votees who changed the wilderness into a dwelling-place 
 of man. It was on that spot that Earl Harold, patron of 
 the secular clergy in the most monastic period of our his- 
 tory, patron of learning in a day when the light of Eng- 
 lish literature seemed almost to have died away, enlarged 
 the church and the foundation of Tofig. It was for the 
 good of this spot that he sought in lands beyond the sea, 
 in the kindred land with which England had exchanged 
 so many worthies — the land to which she had given 
 Ealhwine and whence she had received Old- Saxon John 
 — for men to help him in the work which he had planned 
 for the weal of Waltham and of England. It was there 
 that the doomed king, marching forth to the great strife 
 for his land and people, went to make his last prayers and 
 to offer his last gifts, and it was there that, as men of his 
 own day believed, he received that awful warning which 
 led his faithful bedesmen to his last field, standing afar 
 that they might see the end. It was there, in his own 
 minster, that his bones, translated from their earlier
 
 406 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 South- Siixon resting-place, lay as the most precious among 
 his gifts to the house which he had founded. And it was 
 there, when his foundation had been changed to another 
 form, when a choir in a new style of art had risen over 
 his tomb, that the greatest of his successors, the first of a 
 new line of English kings, lay for a moment by his side. 
 The choir of Waltham has perished along with the choir 
 of Battle ; the ]>lace of Harold's tomb, like the place of 
 Harold's standard, again lies open to the day ; but if the 
 East-Saxon land had nothing to boast of beside the un- 
 marked spot where Harold and Edward met in death, that 
 alone would place the shire where Waltham stands among 
 the most historic shires of England. 
 
 Among his other possessions in all parts of England, 
 Earl Harold held four houses in Colchester. This fact, I 
 need not say, conies from the Domesday Survey, which 
 tells us how those houses had passed away to the abbey 
 of Westminster. The Domesday of Essex is very full ; 
 for Essex is one of those three eastern shires of which we 
 have only the first and fuller account, while in most of 
 the other shires we have only the shorter form which is 
 found in the first volume of the Exchequer Domesday. 
 Essex was one of those shires which came into the pos- 
 session of the Conqueror, not, indeed, like Sussex and 
 Kent, immediately after the great battle, but immediately 
 after the submission at Berkhampstead. Like Kent and 
 Sussex, its men had been in their place in the battle, and 
 it became subject to a confiscation only less sweeping than 
 that of Kent and Sussex. We do not find in Essex, as 
 we do in many other shires, either one or two English 
 landowners still keeping great estates, or a whole crowd 
 of them keeping smaller estates. A few entries of Eng- 
 lish names towards the end of the record are all. We 
 hear of no revolts in Essex after the coronation of Wil- 
 liam; the strength of the shire, like the strength of Kent 
 a.nd Sussex, must have been cut off on Senlac, and no
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 407 
 
 foreign prince offered himself as deliverer to the men of 
 Essex as Eustace of Boulogne offered himself to the men 
 of Kent. Still there must have been some confiscations 
 in Essex later than the time of the redemption of lands ; 
 for the penalty had fallen on one of the very commis- 
 sioners by whom the redemption was carried out. Engelric, 
 who must have played much the same part in Essex which 
 Thurkill played in Warwickshire and Wiggod in Berk- 
 shire, as the Englishman who, by whatever means, rose 
 high in William's favour, had fallen from his high estate 
 before the Survey was made. Another man, English by 
 birth though not by descent, Swegen the son of Eobert, 
 who took the name of the shire as a surname, he whose 
 father had stood by the death-bed of Eadward and had 
 counselled William on his landing to get him back to his 
 own duchy, still kept great estates ; but he had lost his 
 office of Sheriff. Most of the familiar names of the Con- 
 quest appear in Essex as well as elsewhere ; but the East- 
 Saxon shire enjoys a singular privilege in not having had 
 an acre of its soil handed over to the Conqueror's ra- 
 pacious brother, Count Eobert of Mortain. But Bishop 
 Odo is there, and Count Alan, and the Count of Eu, and 
 William of Warren and Hugh of Montfort, and many 
 another name of those who found their reward in almost 
 every shire of England. Among the names specially con- 
 nected with the district stand out Geoffrey of Mandeville, 
 father of a line of East-Saxon earls, Ealph Baynard 
 whose name lives in London city, and the names specially 
 belonging to Colchester, Hamo and Eudo. Of Colchester 
 itself the record in the Survey is one of the fullest among 
 the boroughs of England. It ought to be fully illustrated 
 by some one who to minute local knowledge adds the 
 power of comparing what the Survey tells us about Essex 
 and Colchester with what it tells us about other shires 
 and boroughs. A general historian from a distance can- 
 not do this ; a dull local antiquary cannot do it ; it needs 
 a man on the spot who knows the ins and outs of the
 
 408 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 land, but ^vlio also understands historical criticism, and 
 who knows something of other parts of England as well 
 as of his own. 
 
 Colchester does not appear, as one might have looked 
 for, at the beginning of the East- Saxon record, but at 
 the end. Nor can we find any such precious notices of 
 the municipal constitution of Colchester as the other 
 volume gives us of the municipal constitution of Lincoln, 
 Cambridge, and Stamford. Colchester had been held by 
 the Danes ; but they had been driven out too soon and 
 too thoroughly to allow of the formation of a patriciate of 
 Danish lawmen. But we see the burgesses of Colchester 
 already forming a recognized body, holding their folkland, 
 their common lands, and claiming other common lands as 
 having been unjustly taken from them. We specially see 
 them holding the land for a certain distance round the walls. 
 And it would seem that, not many years back, Colchester 
 kept a precious record of its early municipal being, a treasure 
 rare even in Italy and, one would think, almost unique in 
 England, a town-hall or gild-hall of Eomanesque style. Of 
 this building the drawing of a single Romanesque doorway 
 is the only monument. But while the walls are distinctly 
 recorded in the Survey, there is no mention of the castle. 
 There is therefore no entry of the destruction of houses 
 to make room for the castle, such as we find in many other 
 English towns. A long list is given of English burgesses 
 who kept their houses, followed by a list of possessions 
 within the borough which had passed into the hands of Nor- 
 man owners. Among these of course appear the Dapiferi, 
 Eudo and Hamo, and about the latter there is an entry of 
 special interest. Whatever Hamo held had been held 
 in the days of King Eadward by his English antecessor 
 Thurbearn. First Thurbearn and then Hamo, besides a 
 house, had a ' curia,' a rare word whose use I do not fully 
 understand. And this ' curia ' seems, I know not on what 
 ground, to be identified with an existing house which 
 keeps portions of Eomanesque date. The first entry of
 
 COLONIA CAMULODVNUM. 409 
 
 all is also one of a good deal of interest, as marking the 
 subdivision of property in Old-English times. The houses 
 and other property of Godric — one of the many bearers of 
 one of the commonest of English names — had been di- 
 vided among his four sons. They had died on Senlac, or 
 had otherwise brought themselves under the displeasure 
 of the Conqueror. Of the four parts of Godric's property 
 the king held two ; Count Eustace had the third, and 
 John the son of Waleran the fourth. The church of which 
 Godric was patron had passed whole to Count Eustace ; 
 but his mill — a most important possession, and one always 
 accurately noted in the Survey — was carefully divided. 
 
 Another point to be noticed in the Survey of Colchester 
 is that the borough had clearly been, before the coming 
 of William, allowed to make a money composition for 
 military service in the fyrd. In many towns Domesday 
 records the number of men which the town was to find 
 when the King made an expedition by sea or land. In- 
 stead of this, we find at Colchester a payment of sixpence 
 from each house for the keep of the King's soldarii or 
 mercenaries, that is doubtless the housecarls. In another 
 part of the kingdom Wareham and the southern Dorches- 
 ter were subject to payments for the same object, while 
 Wallingford had to find for the housecarls, not money but 
 quarters. In the nature of the service due from Col- 
 chester to the king we may perhaps see the key to the 
 fact that so many English burgesses of Colchester re- 
 mained undisturbed by the Conqueror. The borough, as 
 a community, had served King Harold, not with men but 
 with money. Possibly it had not served King Harold at 
 all, as the last yearly payment may have been made before 
 the day on which King Eadward was alive and dead. In 
 either case, it would have been hard, even for the astute- 
 ness of William's legal mind, to turn this payment of a 
 customary royal due into an act of constructive treason 
 against the Norman claimant of the crown. The com- 
 munity then, as a community, was guiltless, and fared
 
 410 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 accordingly. But volunteers from Colchester, as well as 
 from otlior places, li:ul tloubtloss flocked to the Standard 
 of the Fighting Man ; and they, whether dead or alive, 
 paid the forfeit of their patriotism. 
 
 Here is a point which touches the general history of 
 England. There are other curious entries with regard to 
 the customs of Colchester which I leave to local inquirers 
 to expound to us. I pass to the ecclesiastical history. 
 The Survey mentions several churches ; but there clearly 
 was no great ecclesiastical foundation, either secular or 
 religious, within the walls of Colchester. The two reli- 
 gious foundations which have given Colchester an eccle- 
 siastical name arose after the taking of the Survey and 
 beyond the ancient walls. They arose on the south side 
 of the town, the side away from the river, a fact which 
 accounts for the way in which the inhabited town of Col- 
 chester has spread itself. While on the northern side 
 void spaces have arisen within the walls, houses have 
 grown on the south side round the priory and the abbey, 
 covering a large space which lies outside alike of Eoman 
 Camulodunum and of old English Colchester. The great 
 abbey of Saint John, the foundation of Eudo, rose on a 
 height opposite that on which the town itself stands ; the 
 priory of Saint Julian and Saint Botolf rose between the 
 heights on the low ground just below the hill of Camulo- 
 dunum. The history of Eudo's foundation is told in a 
 document in the Monasticon which, in all points bearing 
 on general history, is highly mythical. Eudo's father, 
 Hubert of Eye, is a well-known man, he who sheltered 
 William on his perilous ride from Valognes before the 
 fight of Val-es-dunes. But the embassies on which Hubert 
 is sent between William and Eadward simply take their 
 place among the Norman legends of the Conquest. There 
 is also a very mythical air about the prominent part 
 in securing the succession to William Rufus which 
 the local story assigns to Eudo. We may however accept 
 the purely local parts of the tale. Eudo's special
 
 tOLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 411 
 
 position at Colchester, by whatever name we are to call it, 
 appears in the story as the gift, not of William the Great 
 but of William the Eed. This at once falls in with the 
 absence of all mention of the castle in Domesday. The 
 castle was not one of the castles of the Conqueror ; that 
 vast pile, so widely differing in its outline from the towers 
 of London and Rochester, was clearly a work of Eudo, a 
 work dating from the reign of the second William and 
 not of the first. It is a castle of the square Norman type, 
 but covering a greater expanse of ground than Rochester, 
 or even than London. It is therefore low in proportion to 
 its height ; no one would think of calling it a tower. Its 
 vast rectangular mass is broken only by the apsidal pro- 
 jection for the chapel in the east wall, as in the later 
 example at Kidwelly; in the Tower of London the apse 
 is made in the thickness of the wall. The style is plain 
 throughout ; all the original windows are of the narrowest 
 and simplest Norman type. The inside is divided into two 
 courts, but it is a dead wall that divides them. There is 
 nothing at Colchester like the arcades of William of Cor- 
 boil, nothing even like those plainer arcades of Gundulf 
 which so strangely reproduce in miniature the vast pile 
 of Saint Sernin at Toulouse. Far vaster in mere bulk, the 
 castle of Colchester has nothing to compare with the 
 architectural detail of that of Rochester, any more than 
 it can rival the general effect which the Kentish keep 
 owes to its grand position. The Colne is not the Med- 
 way, and the castle of Colchester does not overha.ng even 
 the Colne. It does not soar over the town, but simply 
 stands within its walls. Low and spreading, standing on 
 the same level as the rest of the town, it is simply the 
 chief among the buildings of the town, while the tower of 
 Rochester looks down, with a distinct personality of its 
 own, on church and city alike. 
 
 The great Benedictine abbey began in the later days 
 of Rufus ; the priory of Austin canons began a little later 
 in the early years of Henry the First. Both are among
 
 412 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 the ties wliieh connect the East of England and the 
 "West. John Beche, hist Abbot of Colchester, was one of 
 the three prelates who refused to betray their trust. He 
 was a sharer in the martyrdom of Richard Whiting on the 
 Tor of Glastonbury. The priory had ages before served, 
 as we have seen clearly, as a nursery for Llanthony. It 
 boasted the Lion of Justice himself among its benefactors, 
 as appears by his charter dated while Queen Matilda and 
 Bishop Eobert Bloet of Lincoln were still living. The 
 abbey, like that of Shrewsbury, arose on a spot where had 
 stood the wooden church of the English priest Sigeric. 
 Of the material of the new building the local history does 
 not sjDeak ; the foundation stones whose laying it records 
 are quite consistent with a superstructure of brick, and 
 it appears in old drawings as a brick building. Saint 
 Botolfs, as we all know, is built more Roynano, more Camu- 
 lodimensi, of bricks which are none the less Roman, even 
 if some of them may have passed through the kiln in the 
 twelfth century. So it is with the castle also, though 
 there brick is not so exclusively the material. A marked 
 difference may be seen in the bricks in the upper and the 
 lower part of its walls. The colony, like its metropolis, 
 remained in all ages and under all masters emphatically 
 a city of brick, and happily no one has been found to 
 change it into a city of marble. 
 
 I have now reached the point at which I commonly 
 find it expedient to bring discourses of this kind to an 
 end. But at Colchester I must follow another rule, as in 
 some degree I did at Exeter. The place of Exeter in 
 English history would be imperfectly dealt with, if we 
 did not bring the entry of William the Conqueror into 
 its obvious contrast with the entry of William the De- 
 liverer. So at Colchester I cannot bring myself to stop at 
 the days of William the Eed. I must leap over a few 
 centuries. To many the scene whicli the name of Col- 
 chester first calls up will be the scene which followed the
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 413 
 
 last siege, the day when Lucas and Lisle died on the green 
 between the Norman castle and the Roman wall. I have 
 already pointed out that there is, in som e sort, an analogy 
 between the beginning and the ending of Colchester his- 
 tory, between the warfare of Boadicea and the warfare of 
 Fairfax. It is hardly allowed to me here to speak as freely 
 of Fairfax as I can of Boadicea. Of Eudo the Dapifer I can 
 perhaps speak more freely than of either. The strife of the 
 seventeenth century is so closely connected with modern 
 controversies and modern party-feelings that it cannot be 
 made purely archseological ground like the strifes of the 
 first century or of the eleventh. I perhaps need hardly 
 tell you that my own personal feelings go with the side of 
 Fairfax, though I trust I am fully able to understand and 
 to honour all that was good and high-minded and self- 
 sacrificing on the side of his enemies. But in summing- 
 up the last stage in the long life of this historic town, I 
 must call attention to one or two obvious facts which are 
 apt to be forgotten in forming an estimate of that great 
 piece of local history. Remember then that the warfare of 
 which the siege of Colchester forms the last and the most 
 striking scene was a warfare wholly distinct from the 
 earlier warfare of Edgehill and Naseby. Colchester was 
 not, as seems to be the legendary belief, a fortress which 
 had held out for the royal cause ever since the royal 
 standard was first upreared at Nottingham. During the 
 whole of the first war, Colchester and Essex were hardly 
 touched. Even in Essex, a land so strong for the Parlia- 
 mentary cause, the men of Colchester were noted for their 
 special zeal, a zeal which they had shown, a little too 
 fiercely, against their royalist neighbours at the abbey. 
 The royalist movement of 1648, alike in Essex, in 
 Kent, and in South Wales, was in the strictest sense a 
 revolt, a rising against an existing state of things. 
 Whether that revolt was to be praised or to be condemned, 
 it is a simple fact that the enterprise of the Earl of Nor- 
 wich and Lord Capel was not a continuation of the
 
 414 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 w;\\' which boo-au at Notting'hani, but a wholly new war 
 of their own levying-. Before Colchester was besieged by 
 Fairfax, it hail in truth to be besieged, though only for a 
 moment, by those who presently became its defenders. 
 Those defenders, who have been so strangely changed into 
 local heroes, were in the days of their presence looked on 
 simply as oppressors of whom the oppressed town was yearn- 
 ing to be rid. The day of deliverance came ; two of the 
 oppressors underwent a fate which has come, in local leg'end, 
 to be looked on as martyrdom. Yet in the execution of Lisle 
 and Lucas, Fairfax went on j)erfectly good technical 
 ■ grounds. They had been prisoners of war, and had given 
 their word of honour never again to serve against the 
 Parliament. I am far from insisting with any undue 
 severity on the obligations of such promises as this. It is 
 a question of casuistry whether such a purely military 
 promise should or should not keep a man back from an 
 enterprise to which he deems that loyalty or patriotism 
 calls him. But, as a matter of military law, his life is 
 fairly forfeit ; the man who has been set free on certain 
 conditions cannot complain if the sternest measure is 
 meted out to him when he breaks those conditions. The 
 military justice of Fairfax touched those only whose 
 breach of military honour had fairly brought tbem within 
 its reach. The escape of Norwich, the execution of Capel 
 — Capel, a man worth Norwich, Lucas, and Lisle all put 
 together — were the work of another power in which 
 Fairfax had no share. Whatever may be thought of the 
 political or personal conduct of either of the two lords, 
 there was no stain on their military honour. The General 
 therefore did not take on himself to judge men wbo, what- 
 ever they were in the eye of the law, were, on the field of 
 battle, entitled to the treatment of honourable enemies. 
 But, 'in satisfaction of military justice,' he let the laws 
 of war take their course on men who, whatever may be 
 pleaded in their behalf on other grounds, had, by the laws 
 of war, lost all tecbnical claim to honourable treatment.
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM, 415 
 
 One point more there is wliicli brings the last siege of 
 Colchester into direct connexion with earlier times. The 
 site of Saint Johns abbey, the house of Lord Lucas within 
 or close to its precinct, play an important part in the 
 siege. The gateway, the only imj)ortant part that now 
 survives, occupied by the insurgents, was stormed by the 
 Parliamentary forces, and doubtless Avhat other remains 
 of the abbey were left at the Dissolution now perished. 
 Saint Botolfs too, standing immediately between the 
 batteries of the besiegers and the walls of the town, was 
 exposed to the fire on both sides. The eastern or monastic 
 part, as commonly happened to the divided churches of the 
 Austin canons, had already perished. The nave became 
 in the siege the ruin which we now see it. 
 
 I have now brought my tale, and that by somewhat of 
 a bound in its last stage, to its latest point. I have tried 
 to sketch out the chief grounds on which the shire of 
 Essex, and, above all, the town of Colchester, are entitled 
 to a high place among the shires and towns of England. 
 It is for others with more of local knowledge to fill up 
 that sketch in detail. I have exhausted nothing ; I stand 
 in the way of no one who has specially mastered any por- 
 tion of East- Saxon history. In the days of Boadicea and 
 in the days of Fairfax I may even be deemed an intruder. 
 But I am no less ready to invite every help, to welcome 
 every light, on the times in which I may say that I my- 
 self have lived. That I have lived in those times makes, 
 me know perhaps better than other men how much there 
 is still to be found out, how many things in them there 
 are that to me at least are grievous puzzles. The greatest 
 of English scholars, once a dweller in the East-Saxon 
 shire, has made the history of the Holy Cross of Waltham 
 plain to all men. But we still need a worthy commentator 
 on the Song of Maldon. Even in those parts of the tale 
 at which I have specially worked, I feel, better perhaps 
 than others, how much I have left uncertain, how much
 
 416 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 
 
 there still is for others to fix by the light of sound and 
 sober historic criticism. But, in any case, there is no part 
 of the isle of Britain in which one who has lived in the 
 tenth and eleventh centuries feels more at home than 
 within the Avails which felt the repairing hand of Eadward 
 the Unconc]uered, in the land which beheld the exploits 
 and the death of Brihtnoth, the land where Eadmund 
 fought the last fight of the year of battles, the land where 
 Harold knelt before the relic which was brought from the 
 green hill of Montacute, the land to which he himself was 
 borne from the craggy hill of Hastings. It is something 
 that the hero of England should be in this way a common 
 possession of the three branches of the great Saxon colony, 
 that the Saxon of the West, the South, and the East, 
 should be all bound together, as by a threefold tie, by the 
 presence among them in life or death of the last king of 
 the old stock, the king who died on Senlac and who no 
 longer sleeps at Waltham. 
 
 [I have left what I wrote attributing the castle to Eudo. But 
 last year there appeared an anonymous book, seemingly by a local 
 w-riter, called the ' History and Antiquities of Colchester Castle,' 
 which shows some research and criticism (though the form of the 
 criticism is sometimes a little captious), but ha which the author 
 takes too much trouble over the nonsense of those who call the 
 castle a Roman building. ' Solventur risu tabulje ' is the only 
 treatment for them, as for Anglo-Israelites and such hke. But 
 the writer speaks of a charter of William Bufus, gi-anting the 
 castle to Eudo, which certainly looks as if the castle was not 
 Eudo's buUding. This charter, he truly says, has escaped my 
 notice. But he does not tell us whether the charter is printed 
 anywhere, nor does he priut it in full himself. He gives (p. 29) 
 the words of the gi-ant ' Sciatis me dedisse benigne et ad amorem 
 concessisse Eudoni dapifero meo civitatem de Colecestria et turrim 
 et castellum et omnes ejus civitatis firmitates cum omnibus quae 
 ad Ulam pertinent.' But he does not quote the opening words of 
 the document, and the words which follow the grant are fatal to 
 the notion of its being a genuine charter of William Bufus. The
 
 COLONIA CAMULODUNUM. 417 
 
 king grants the town and castle, ' sicut pater meus et frater et 
 ego in ea quocumque habuimus.' A moment's thought will show 
 that these words could not be used by the Red King, nor indeed 
 by any sovereign after the Norman Conquest, except Henry the 
 First, John, Mai-y the Fii-st, and William the Fourth. A date 
 follows : ' hsec commissio facta fuit apud Westmonaster [sicj in 
 primo natali post concordiam Roberti comitis fratris mei de me et 
 de illo.' This has a suspicious ring about it ; but it would do just 
 as well for Henry in 1101 as for William Rufus in 1091. And, 
 if Eudo had anything to do with the treasons of that year, a fresh 
 grant of the castle might well be needful, whether the castle was 
 his own building or not. But it is passing strange that the writer 
 does not give us the opening words. 
 
 It is perhaps safest to leave the matter open. The anonymous 
 writer attributes the castle to the Conqueror. It is too great a 
 work for Eudo. There is pei-haps something in this. On the 
 other hand there is the absence of any mention of the castle in 
 Domesday. This again however is only a presumption, as the 
 notices of castles in the Survey is a little capricious. But one 
 would certainly have looked for some mention of it in so elaborate 
 a description as that which Domesday gives of Colchester.] 
 
 13 S
 
 i
 
 CAELISLE
 
 421 
 
 THE PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH 
 HISTORY. 
 
 In tlie course of the journeyings of onr Institute through, 
 various parts of our island, in the course of the meetings 
 which it holds year by year in ou-r chief cities and 
 boroughs, it often happens that the immediate scene of 
 our researches specially calls back, as a matter either of 
 likeness or of contrast, some other scene which we have 
 examined in earlier years. Thus it was that, in the dis- 
 charge of the office which the kindness of the Institute 
 has so often laid upon me, I was once called on to flit over 
 a large part of our island, from British Cardiff to East- 
 Saxon Colchester, Strangely enough, I found that in two 
 stirring periods of history, at some distance from one 
 another, in the first century and in the seventeenth, the 
 fates of the Silurian and the East-Saxon lands were 
 twined together in a way which beforehand we should 
 hardly have looked for. Here, on our second visit to this 
 renowned border city, on my first visit to it in the cha- 
 racter of an officer of the Archaeological Institute, my 
 thoughts have wandered to stages in our progress earlier 
 than the meeting of the Institute at Cardiff. From the 
 hill and the castle of Carlisle I would ask you to look 
 south-eastward to the flats of Holderness, to the haven of 
 Kingston-upon-Hull. I would ask you also to carry your 
 eyes more directly southward, to that one among all the 
 chesters that Rome has left us which has specially taken 
 that once vague description as its own proper name, to 
 the scene of the bloody victory of .^thelfrith and the
 
 422 CARLISLE. 
 
 peaceful trmrapli of Eadgar, to tlie City of the Legions 
 by the Dee. Between Carlisle and Chester, between Car- 
 lisle and Kingston-on-Hull, I trust to show some instruc- 
 tive historic analogies and contrasts. 
 
 There are not many of the chief cities and boroughs 
 of England which can point with undoubting certainty to 
 a personal founder in strictly historic times. On founders 
 who are purely mj^thical I need hardly dwell, and it would 
 almost seem that they are passing out of date even in 
 popular belief. I found at Colchester that, while yet 
 wilder legends were still in vogue, old King Coel was well 
 nigh forgotten in his own city, and that it needed rather 
 hard work to get a copy of the music of his own song to 
 sing on the battlements of what for the nonce we may 
 call his own castle. Among more real personages, who 
 do not claim to be looked on as grandfathers of the 
 founder of the New Rome, it has happened in not a few 
 cases that some well-ascertained man has founded a castle 
 or a monastery, and that a town has grown up around his 
 foundation. So it was, to take only two examples out of 
 many, with the abbey of Saint Eadmund in one age and 
 with the castle of Eichmond in another. So in northern 
 England Durham owes its being to the happy choice of 
 Ealdhun, when he picked out the peninsula girded by the 
 Wear as the fittest place to shelter Saint Cuthberht's 
 body after its wanderings. So in southern England the 
 younger Salisbury owes its being to the happy choice of 
 Richard Poore, when he moved his church from the 
 waterless hill of elder days to the merry field that looks 
 up to it. But I speak rather of cities directly called into 
 being as cities, as great military or commercial posts, by 
 the policy of princes who strove to strengthen or to defend 
 their kingdom. We believe that Edinburgh came into 
 being at the bidding of E ad wine the Bretwalda as the 
 outpost of Anglian Lothian against the Scot. We know 
 that Taunton came into being at the bidding of Ine the 
 King as the outpost of Saxon Somerset against the
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 423 
 
 Briton. But the foundations of Eadwine and Ine belonsf 
 to a time so early that we can hardlj look on them as 
 cities or boroughs in the later sense. In the long list of 
 English towns which first appear in history among the 
 works of Eadward the Unconquered and iEthelflsed the 
 Lady, it is hard to say on which spots they bade an unin- 
 habited site to become for the first time a dwelling-place 
 of man, and on which they simply strengthened sites which 
 had, from the beginning of English settlement in Britain, 
 been covered with English homes. But it is one of the 
 works of ^thelflsed, and one of the works, if not of the 
 elder Eadward, yet of the namesake of after- times who 
 walked in his path and renewed his glories, which I would 
 ask you to look to as fellows, in the way of likeness and 
 of contrast, to the city in which we are now met. Chester, 
 Carlisle, Kingston-upon-Hull, can all point without doubt- 
 ing to their personal founders. Let the eldest of the 
 three, the work of the Mercian Lad}'', wait a while. I 
 would first ask you, dwellers and sojourners within these 
 ancient walls, at the foot of yonder historic castle, dwellers 
 and sojourners on a spot which has played so great a part 
 in English warfare, not to look with scorn on the lowlier, 
 the more peaceful, the more recent, fame of the great 
 haven by the mouth of Humber. I can hardly believe 
 that the men of Hull would willingly exchange their 
 founder for the founder of the Carlisle that now is. On 
 the stairs of their town-house stands their founder's 
 statue, a statue which fifteen years back I had often to 
 pass, and which I could never bring myself to pass 
 without showing some mark of worship to the greatest 
 of England's later kings. Carlisle contains no such 
 memorial of her founder, and, if she did, I am not sure 
 that some years of very near acquaintance with him aiid 
 his doings would lead me to pay him the like reverence. 
 For while Hull may boast herself as the creation of Edward 
 the First, the Carlisle that now is can claim no worthier 
 founder than William the Bed. I give the fonnder of
 
 424 CARLISLE. 
 
 Hull his conventional number under protest. Lawyers 
 anil courtiers have taught us to forget the worthies of 
 our own stock ; but the men of the great Edward's own 
 da^' bettor knew his place in history ; they reckoned him, 
 by a truer and worthiei' reckoning, as fourth of his name 
 among the Kings of the English, third among the Em- 
 perors of Britain. If we are to change the number of the 
 founder of Carlisle, we must change it the other way ; for, 
 as we are standing here on soil which formed no part of the 
 realm of the Conqueror, he who was William the Second 
 for the kingdom of England might be deemed to be only 
 William the First within the earldom of Carlisle. Between 
 the founder of Hull and the founder of Carlisle, between 
 Edward the First and William the Red, the general 
 contrast is certainly as wide as any contrast that can be 
 found between any two of the princes and leading men of 
 our history. I need not now draw their portraits. The 
 portrait of the great Edward I have striven over and over 
 again to draw as occasion served. The portrait of William 
 Eufus I have so lately drawn in the fullest detail of which 
 I am capable that I am not as yet ready with a single 
 freshening touch. Between the father of his people and 
 their oppressor, between the foul blasphemer and the 
 devout crusader, between the man of the most debased life 
 and the mirror of every personal virtue, there is indeed 
 little likeness. And though the reign of Rufus does in 
 its way mark a stage in our national progress, it is hardly 
 in the same way as the reign of the king whom we may hail 
 as the founder of our later commerce and of our later law, 
 the king who made fa st for ever the great political work 
 of the uncle whom he overthrew. And yet there are points 
 in which two men so unlike each other as the founder of 
 Hull and the founder of Carlisle may truly stand side by 
 side. Each gave a king to Scotland ; each warred with the 
 Briton ; and, if the Welsh warfare of Rufus brought him 
 but little of immediate gain or immediate glory, it did in 
 truth open the way for the victorious Varfare of Edward,
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 425 
 
 But, before all things, each enlarged the borders of the 
 kingdom of England in a way that was done by no king 
 between them. That the ground on which I now stand is 
 English ground is the work of William the Red. And 
 that the city in which we are met has been for nearly 
 eight hundred years a dwelling-place of man is his work 
 also. 
 
 But it may be that some one stirred up by a praise- 
 worthy local patriotism may arise and ask how the 
 King's-Town-upon-HuU, whose plain English name be- 
 speaks a comparatively modern origin, can be in any way 
 set side by side with a city like this, whose British name 
 points to an antiquity far older than the Conqueror's son. 
 Hull, he may say, had undoubtedly no being before the 
 days of Edward the First ; do I mean to say, he may ask, 
 that Carlisle had no being before the days of William the 
 Red 9 And I must answer that, though each prince is, on 
 his own ground, alike entitled to the honours of a founder, 
 yet the work of Rufus by the Eden and the work of 
 Edward by the Humber were not wholly of the same kind. 
 They differed in this, that the one called into being a 
 haven of peaceful trade, while the other called into being 
 a border fortress for the defence of his kingdom. But 
 they differed further in this. Edward was strictly a 
 creator. If men already dwelled on the site of the King's- 
 town-on-Hull, there was, till his keen eye marked the 
 advantages of the site, nothing that could claim the name 
 of town or borough. But William Rufus, in founding 
 what has lasted from his day to ours, did but call into 
 renewed being what had been in ages long before his. 
 He called into being a city of men, and he girt it with 
 walls and towers ; but he called it into being on a site 
 where men had dwelled in past times, and which had been 
 defended by walls and towers of an older pattern than 
 those with which the Red King fenced it in a second 
 time.
 
 426 CARLISLE. 
 
 As I have already hinted, if we had no record to tell 
 ns of the tact, the very name of Carlisle would be enoug-h 
 to teach us that the history of this city is essentiall}'' 
 different from that of any other English city ; and, above 
 all, that its first being dates from a day long before the 
 day of William Ruf as. Alone among the cities of what 
 we now deem the proper England, Carlisle bears an almost 
 untouched British name, a name which was assuredly not 
 given to it by a King of the English of Norman birth. 
 This alone would show that, if Rufus was on this ground 
 truly a founder, yet he was a founder only on ground 
 where others had been founders long before him. Now 
 here comes in the analogy between Carlisle and the other 
 cit}' with which I have already asked you to compare it. 
 The part which was played at Carlisle by the son of the 
 Conqueror was essentially the same as the part which had 
 been played at Chester by the daughter of Alfred. Rufus 
 and ^thelflsed alike called into renewed being a city which 
 had once been, but which was no longer. Deva, Caerlleon, 
 the City of the Legions, had stood void of men for three 
 hundred years, since ^thelfrith smote the Briton beneath 
 its Roman walls. Under the Lady of the Mercians the 
 * waste Chester ' rose again, bearing an English version of 
 its ancient name. But so renowned was the Chester of the 
 Legions, the Chester of iEthelflsed, among the many chesters 
 of the land, that it became emphaticallj' the Chester, and 
 has for ages been known by no other name. 
 
 Whether Roman Lugubalia, British Caerlluel, ever 
 sank so low as Roman Deva, British Caerlleon, we have no 
 means of judging. We know not whether it ever stood 
 as a mere * waste Chester,' like Deva and Anderida. On 
 the whole, the evidence looks as if Rufus had not found it 
 utterly desolate. The story of its restoration looks that 
 wa}'^ ; the historj^ of the name looks that wsij. At Caer- 
 lleon-on-Dee, the British name was, according to the 
 usual rule, turned round and translated. The Briton,
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 4t27 
 
 according- to the idiom of his tongue, had put his aver 
 before the qualifying name ; the Englishman, according 
 to the idiom of his tongue, put his ceaster after it. Caer- 
 lleon became Legeceaster, as the southern Caergwent became 
 Wi7itanceaster, Winchester. But on the spot where we now 
 stand the British name has ever lived on. Lugubalia 
 became Caerlluel, as Ve7ita became Caergwent ; but, while 
 Caergwent has become Winchester, Caerlluel has not, in 
 modern speech, become Lulchester, but, with the slightest 
 change of sound, it remains Caerlluel to this day. As 
 far as modern usage goes, it has not shared the fate of 
 the Caerlleon by the Dee and the Caergwent by the 
 Itchin; it has lived on, like the other Caerlleon by the 
 Usk, the other Caergwent on the Silurian shore. And 
 this fact, the fact that we speak of Winchester and not of 
 Caergwent, while we speak of Carlisle and not of Lul- 
 chester, becomes the more remarkable when we light on 
 another fact, namely that, for a season, on some mouths 
 at least, Lulchester was the actual name of the city where 
 we are met. There is just evidence enough, but only just 
 enough, to show that the English form of the name was 
 really known. In the ninth century we hear of Lulchester ; 
 in the eleventh we hear again of Caerlluel. This seems to 
 prove almost more than if the name of Lulchester had 
 never been heard at all. It does not absolutely prove 
 continuous habitation ; but, combined with other facts, it 
 looks like it. And it does prove that, while there had once 
 been an English day on the spot, it was followed by a re- 
 newed British day. In the case of the City of the Legions, 
 some form of the name, British or Latin, must have lived 
 on for ^thelflsed to translate into English. But it was 
 she who translated it. In her father's day the spot had 
 no English name ; it was not the Chester of the Legions, 
 it was simply a ' waste Chester.' But William Eufus did 
 not think it needful to translate the name of Caerlluel 
 into either French or English. He did not think it need- 
 ful to call again into being the English translation Avhich
 
 428 CARLISLE. 
 
 had been once made, but wliich was by his time doubt- 
 less quite forgotten. Neither did he, like the founders of 
 Eichmond and Montgomery, give his creation a name in 
 his own tongue, borrowed perhaps from some well-known 
 spot in his own land. All this shows that, when Rufus 
 came, the British name of the spot must have been in 
 familiar use. It was perhaps more commonly Luel than 
 CaerUuel; yet even the fuller name must have been far 
 better known in his day than the name of Caerlleon could 
 have been in the days of ^thelflced. And this looks as if 
 Caerlluel was not so utterly a waste Chester in the days of 
 Eufus as Caerlleon-on-Dee was in the days of ^Ethelflsed. 
 But we must further remember that English ^thelflsed 
 had every temptation to give her restored creation an 
 English name. To the French-speaking Rufus — for he knew 
 not our tongue like his greater brother — a British name 
 would sound no more strange than an English one. If he 
 found the name of Caerlluel as well established as the 
 name of Eoforwic, he had no more temptation to change 
 the name of Caerlluel than he had to change the name of 
 Eoforwic. 
 
 But when we have fixed the name of the city, as far at 
 least as writing it on paper is concerned, how are we to 
 sound it ? For the name seems to be sounded in one way 
 within its own walls, in another way in other parts of 
 the kingdom. Diligent students of Sir Walter Scott may 
 have noticed that he gives the name of the city two dis- 
 tinct accents, according to the necessities of his metre. 
 ' The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,' when the sove- 
 reignty of love is to be set forth ; but, when an English 
 raid is looked for beyond the Scottish border, the places 
 whence it is most likely to come are marked as 'ISTaworth 
 or Wark worth or merry Carlisle.' This last accentuation 
 is that by which the city is best known to the rest of the 
 world. The former is that which is used by its own 
 inhabitants. But it is plain that in this case, as in some 
 others, the stranger has preserved the true sound more
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 429 
 
 accurately than the native. For it is the second syllable 
 that qualifies the caer which answers to the English Chester, 
 and it is of course on the qualifying syllable that the 
 accent should come. And it is whispered that, though 
 the citizens themselves prefer the other sound, yet the 
 neighbouring peasantry still keep the accent, according 
 to etymology, on the second syllable. Exactly the same 
 differences are to be marked in the sound of the Celtic 
 name of a much smaller city, the episcopal see on the 
 Taff. The Welsh Llanddf has, in the ordinary speech of 
 other parts, become Llanddff or Landdff. In its own 
 neighbourhood, the only known English form is Ldndaf. 
 This last sound is altogether unfamiliar out of the imme- 
 diate neighbourhood. I well remember a witness being 
 examined before a bench of magistrates in Somerset who 
 mentioned something as having happened at Ldndaf. 
 Nearly every one who heard him understood him to speak 
 of Taunton. The vowels were not quite the same; the 
 consonants were quite different; but the trochaic run 
 common to the two names did for one as well as for the 
 other. I believe I may say, without boasting, that, if I 
 had not happened to know a little of South- Welsh topo- 
 graphy, no one would have found out what place the witness 
 meant, I know not whether any such accidents have ever 
 happened through the double accentuation of Gdrlisle and 
 Carlisle. If it ever should so happen, I trust that the 
 foundation of William Rufus will not think it scorn to be 
 mistaken for the foundation of Ine. 
 
 Such then are our analogies and contrasts. Between 
 Carlisle and Kingston-on-HuU there is such fellowship as 
 as may be deemed to arise between those two of the chief 
 cities and boroughs of England which, alone or almost 
 alone, can each claim as its personal founder a king of all 
 England and a king who enlarged the bounds of England. 
 Between Carlisle and Chester there is such fellowship as 
 may be deemed to arise between cities which, after lying 
 for a long time more or less thoroughly forsaken, were
 
 480 CARLISLE. 
 
 again called into being as cities of men, as border fort- 
 resses of the English realm. Other cities have in the like 
 sort risen again : it may -well be that most of the inhabited 
 chesters throughout England did so. But in no other 
 cases can we be so certain of the fact, so certain of the 
 motive, as we can be of the work ^thelfla^d in 907 and 
 of the work of William Eufus in 1092. 
 
 But it rarely happens that any ancient and historic 
 city, however close and instructive may be its points of 
 likeness to its fellows, is left without some points in its 
 history which are absolutely its own, and which might 
 serve as its definition. I do not mean simply incidental 
 definitions, based on some great fact in the history of the 
 city. In this way we might define Chester as the city 
 which beheld the last great victory of the heathen English- 
 man over the Christian Briton and which was the last of 
 English cities to bow to the Norman conqueror. So we 
 might define the elder Salisbury as the city which looks 
 down alike on the field of battle which decreed that 
 Britain should be English and on the field of council 
 which decreed that England should be one. These are 
 indeed events whose memory is now inseparably bound up 
 with the historic spots where they took place ; but the 
 course of history might have taken such a turn as to 
 cause them to take place elsewhere. York or Exeter, 
 instead of Chester, might have been the last city to hold 
 out against the Conqueror. Gloucester or Winchester, 
 and not Salisbury, might have been the scene of his great 
 act of legislative wisdom. To take the highest range of 
 all, if York stands alone in Britain as the seat of Imperial 
 rule, the peer of Trier and Milan and Eavenna, that post 
 of supreme dignity might just as easily have fallen to the 
 lot of London or Verulam or Camulodunum. If Lincoln 
 stands out within our world as the head of aristocratic 
 commonwealths, yet it might have been that the lawmen 
 of Stamford or Cambridge should have held the place 
 which was held by the lawmen of the Colony of Lindum,
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 431 
 
 I speak rather of defiuitious which enter as it were into 
 the essential being- of- the cities themselves. It is after 
 all an accident in the history of Exeter that she should 
 have withstood William the Conqueror and welcomed 
 William the Deliverer. It is an essential part of her per- 
 sonal being that she should have been the one city of 
 Britain whose historic life is absolutely unbroken, the 
 one city which passed from the Christian Briton to the 
 Christian Englishman, it may even be without storm or 
 battle, certainly without any period of abiding- desolation. 
 And Carlisle has her personal definition of the like kind. 
 We can say of her that she is the one city which, having 
 once become part of an English kingdom, again fell back 
 under the rule of the Briton, the one city which became 
 again part of the united English realm, and that by so 
 strange a process as she beheld when the son of the 
 Norman Conqueror drove out the one man of English 
 blood who ruled as a prince in any corner of Britain. 
 
 It is a relief to one whose immediate business it is to 
 speak specially of the city of Carlisle that he is not called 
 upon to mix himself up with all the puzzles which surround 
 the history and ethnology of Cumberland. He is not called 
 upon to fix any limits to the extent of a name whose 
 extent was ever changing. When Eadmund the Doer-of- 
 great-deeds gave Cumberland, as perhaps the first of terri- 
 torial fiefs, to his Scottish fellow- worker, when ^thelred, 
 in one of his strange fits of energy, came to Cumberland 
 on an errand of havoc, the site of Carlisle may perhaps 
 have been in some way touched in either case. But the 
 city of Carlisle was certainly untouched ; for the city of 
 Carlisle was a thing which had been and which was to 
 be again, but which at that moment was not. Nor is 
 he called upon to solve that most puzzling of problems, 
 the history of Scandinavian settlement and influence in 
 the land around us. That Scandinavians of some kind, 
 Danes or Northmen, made their way into the land is plain
 
 482 CARLISLE. «, 
 
 alike from the record of history and from the traces which 
 they have left to this day. On the eastern side of Eng- 
 land, in Northumberland, in Lindesey, in East-Ang-lia, we 
 know the time of their coming ; we know the names of 
 their kings and earls who reigned at York. Here we simply 
 know that they did come, and, as a matter of actual 
 record, we know that they did come by one fact only. But 
 that is a fact which touches our immediate subject in the 
 most direct way. The one thing that we know to have 
 been done in this immediate region by Scandinavian 
 hands is the thorough destruction which Scandinavian 
 hands Avrought in the city where we are come together, 
 destruction so thorough that, for two hundred years, the 
 city ceased to be a city. This fact concerns us most in- 
 timately ; I do not know that we are at this moment called 
 on to enter on the problem, how it was that Cumberland 
 could be spoken of as specially Danish; how Henry of 
 Huntingdon came to speak of it as the chief dwelling- 
 place of the Danes, while the presence of Danes in it cer- 
 tainly did not hinder the succession of a line of Scottish 
 princes. But I am not called on to speak of Cumberland. 
 In the time that specially concerns me we have only to 
 do with the name of Carlisle, not at all with the name of 
 Cumberland. The land which the Eed King added to the 
 English kinofdom was not the land of Cumberland, but 
 the land of Carlisle. When, under King Henry, that land 
 became an English earldom, it was an earldom of Carlisle, 
 not an earldom of Cumberland. When, under the same 
 king, the land became an English diocese, I need hardly 
 say that its bishop was Bishop of Carlisle, not of Cumber- 
 land ; by that time the territorial titles of bishops had 
 altogether died out in England. The land which formed 
 its diocese had no name ; it had to be pointed at, as it is 
 pointed at by Archdeacon Henry in his list of episcopal 
 churches, as ' that land in which is the new bishopric of 
 Carlisle.' The name of Cumberland, like the name of 
 Westmoreland, as the name of a part of the immediate
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 433 
 
 English kingdom, dates only from the days of the Angevin. 
 And, as for the problems of Cumbrian ethnology, let them 
 be debated beyond the city walls. Of the city itself 
 written history tells us only, what we have already heard, 
 that the Dane overthrew the city and left it empty, and — 
 a point on which I shall have to speak again — that, when 
 the Norman came to restore and to repeople city and 
 land, it was with a colony of Saxons that he repeopled 
 them. 
 
 I have defined Carlisle as being that one among the 
 cities of England which, having once become English, 
 became British again. The unbroken English life of 
 Carlisle begins with the coming of the Eed King and the 
 settlement of his southern colony. For two hundred years 
 before he came, it had been British or nothing. For at 
 least two hundred years before that it had been part of an 
 English kingdom, that of the Angles of Northumberland. 
 For at least two hundred years before that, it had shared 
 the independence of those parts of Britain from which the 
 Roman had gone, and into which the Angle or the Saxon 
 had not yet come. Of the Eoman and British life of the 
 city we have little to tell, but that it had a long Roman 
 and British life no man can doubt. Under various shapes 
 and corruptions of its Roman and British name, we find it 
 in every list of the cities of Britain. Luguballium, Lugu- 
 balia — I may be forgiven for cleaving to the shape which 
 the name takes in the pages of English Bseda — occupies 
 a site which seems marked out by Nature for a great 
 fortress. It is a site which seems specially marked out 
 as designed to guard a border, to defend a land against 
 dangerous neighbours who may one day become wasting 
 invaders. And this duty the hill of Lugubalia has had 
 laid upon it throughout more than one long period, in the 
 hands of more than one set of masters. I was once 
 tempted to say that it is not without a certain fitness 
 that the spot which was to be the bulwark of England 
 against the Scot should of itself put on somewhat of a 
 
 F F
 
 434 Carlisle. 
 
 Scottish, cliaracter. I pointed out that the castle-hill of 
 Carlisle bore a strong likeness, thoug-h a likeness in minia- 
 ture, to the castle-hills of Edinburgh and Stirling. In all 
 three the castle crowns a hill, steep at one end only. It 
 crowns it therefore in a different sense from those hill- 
 towns where the fortified akropolis forms the centre of the 
 city. At Edinburgh, at Stirling, at Carlisle, the castle 
 alike crowns and ends the city. It is at once an akropolis 
 and an advanced bulwark. All three strongholds are em- 
 phatically watch-towers, homes of sentinels, standing and 
 looking forth to guard the land of their friends and to 
 overlook the land of their enemies. But when I spoke of 
 Carlisle, the bulwark of England against the Scot, as 
 having itself a Scottish character, I was thinking of some 
 later ages of its history. In a wider view of the history 
 of our island, I might have expressed myself otherwise. 
 From one side we might look on all three as being for 
 several ages charged with what was essentially the same 
 historic mission. In a more general view than that 
 which concerns the fluctuating political boundary of 
 the English and Scottish kingdoms, each of these 
 fortresses, looking out as they all do, so significantly 
 and so threateningly to the north, might pass, from 
 the days of EadAvine, from the days of Rufus, as a 
 bulwark of Teutonic Britain against the Celtic lands 
 beyond it. That duty was at least as well dischai'ged by 
 Stirling in the hands of an English-speaking King of 
 Scots as it was by Carlisle in the hands of a French- 
 speaking King of England. In a broad view of things, 
 the artificial boundary of the English and Scottish king- 
 doms, that is the boundary which parted off the Angle of 
 Northumberland from the Angle of Lothian, is of far less 
 moment than the boundary of Teutonic speech and civiliza- 
 tion, whatever might be the name-i^r the formal nationality 
 of its champions. But what distinguishes Carlisle from 
 its two northern fellows is that, while it has shared with 
 them the championship of Teutonic Britain against the
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 435 
 
 Celt, it, alone of the three, had already held an analogous 
 place in days before any part of Britain was Teutonic. 
 
 It will be at once seen that, while Stirling and Edin- 
 burgh guard one natural line of defence, Carlisle guards 
 another. Stirling and Edinburgh guard the northern line, 
 the line of Antoninus and Yalentinian, the line drawn 
 across the isthmus between the firths, at the point where 
 Britain becomes so narrow that some ancient writers 
 looked on the land beyond this line as forming another 
 island. It is strange how nearly Valentia, the recovered 
 conquest of the elder Theodosius, answers to the Scotland 
 of later history, the English kingdom ruled by kings 
 bearing a Scottish title. Of that kingdom Stirling and 
 Edinburgh were border fortresses against the true Scot, 
 save so far as Teutonic speech and culture crept up 
 the eastern coast to meet the kindred settlements which 
 the Northman made in the lands which lay beyond the 
 home of the Scot himself. Ages came when that was no 
 mean function ; but it was a function whose counterpart 
 was called into only rare and fitful action in the days 
 when the Csesars ruled in Britain. To hold the land 
 against the Celt was the calling alike of the Roman and 
 the Teutonic lords of Britain. But the Roman could not 
 be said to hold anything with a firm and lasting grasp 
 beyond that great bulwark of which Lugubalia kept the 
 western ending, as the ^lian bridge kept the eastern. 
 Speaking without strict topographical accuracy, but with 
 an approach to it near enough to convey the general idea, 
 we commonly say that the Roman wall stretches from 
 Carlisle to Newcastle. The Roman wall, the greater of 
 the Roman walls, the only Roman wall in the sense which 
 the word conveys in modern usage, the mighty bulwark of 
 Hadrian, of Severus, and of Stilicho, may be fairly said to 
 take Lugubalia as one of its starting-points. Not itself 
 placed immediately on the line of the wall, the fortress 
 looks out, as one of its chief points of view, on the station 
 of Stanwix, the near neighbourhood of which may have 
 
 r r 2
 
 43G CARLISLE. 
 
 caused Lngubalia itself to have been really of less military 
 iinpovtance in the days of Eoman occupation than in 
 either earlier or later times. Yet the fortress itself does 
 in some sort form part of the great bulwark, if it be true, 
 as I have heard sui<-o-ested, that the moat in advance of 
 the wall to the south may be traced along the Hne dividing 
 castle and city. On this point I venture no opinion ; I 
 leave it Avholly to those of greater local knowledge to 
 decide. Of one thing we may be sure, that the Eoman 
 was not the first to turn this natural fortress into a place 
 of strength. He was possibly the first to fence in the 
 headland with a wall of masonry — though indeed some 
 have suggested that Lugubalia was defended only by a 
 stockade ; he was surely not the first to part it off by a 
 ditch from the ground to the south of it. We may be 
 sure that such a site was marked off as a x^lace of defence 
 even in the days when the art of defence was rudest. 
 Here, as in so many other cases, the Eoman did but seize 
 on and improve on the works of the older inhabitants 
 of the land. But we may be equally sure that it was 
 at Eoman bidding that the primitive stronghold became 
 the akropolis of a city, a city where the arts and luxury of 
 southern Europe were for the first time planted on this 
 furthest border of Eoman abiding power. From his own 
 world the Eoman had gone forth to bring the other world 
 of Britain under his dominion. But, as he looked forth 
 from the akropolis of this his most northern city, he must 
 indeed have felt that there was yet another world beyond, 
 a world within which the power of the Csesars could spread 
 itself only now and then, in moments of special, and at 
 last of dying, energy. 
 
 Presently a time came when the Eoman world, within 
 and without Britain, was to be cut short, when the older 
 barbarian world against whose outbreaks Lugubalia had 
 been planted as a bulwark was again to be enlarged, again 
 to take in lands and cities where the Eoman had ruled 
 and where he was still to leave his memory behind him.
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 437 
 
 We enter tliat unrecorded age whose silence is more 
 eloquent than any record, that age of darkness whose 
 gloom gives us a clearer teaching than we can often gain 
 from the fullest light of contemporary history. The 
 Eoman has gone ; the Teuton has not yet come. The 
 second period of British independence and isolation has 
 begun, the length of which was so widely different in 
 different parts of Britain. In Kent many a man who 
 had seen the eagles of Rome pass away from Britain 
 must have lived to see the keels of Hengesfc draw near to 
 the coasts of Thanet, and to take his part in the bloody 
 fights when the Welsh fled from the English like fire. 
 Nay, the life of man is now and then so long that some 
 who were born under Roman law, subjects of the sons of 
 Theodosius, may have stayed on to die as helpless elders 
 when ^lle and Cissa left not a Bret alive within the walls 
 of Anderida. Far otherwise was it here in Lugubalia. 
 Two centuries at least of untouched Celtic independence 
 must have passed before this corner of the island which the 
 Roman had forsaken fell under the rule of any Teutonic 
 conqueror. How are we to fill up that long gap through 
 which even the most meagre records are speechless ? 
 It might indeed be easy to fill it up from the world of 
 legend. We may at pleasure people merry Carlisle with 
 the company which poets of earlier and later days have 
 called into being to gather round the shadowy form of 
 Arthur. The knights and ladies of Arthur's court, their 
 loves and their exploits, I leave poets to deal with; I 
 leave poets too to deal with the warfare of the British 
 prince in lands far beyond the shores of Britain. But the 
 question whether we are to look for a historic Arthur in 
 so northern a part of our island is a fair question for 
 critical discussion. If such an Arthur there was, we may 
 fairly look on Caerlluel as in every way likely to have been 
 his capital. But can any one here who bears in mind 
 whence I have come reasonably ask me to become the pro- 
 phet or champion of a northern Arthur? As a disciple of
 
 438 CARLISLE. 
 
 Pr. Guest I must accept a personal Arthur ; but both my 
 local and my personal allegiance constrain me to place 
 him and his exploits in a part of our island far away from 
 this. I must accept an Arthur who was a thorn in the 
 path of our fathers, a valiant enemy who did somewhat 
 to delay the work which turned Britain into England. I 
 must grant to him the glory of a victory of no small 
 moment over the English arms ; but I must place that 
 victory far away from Lugubalia and the Roman wall, on 
 the spot where he met Cerdic face to face beneath the 
 rings of West-Saxon Badbury. Dwelling within sight of 
 the Tor of Avalon, hard by a hill which bears Arthur's 
 name and which looks out on the spot where men deemed 
 that Arthur slept, I may join in honouring the memory 
 of a gallant foe, the Hector, the Hannibal, the Hereward, 
 of Britain ; but I must be allowed to honour him on my 
 own ground or on the ground of my immediate neighbours. 
 If any man asks me to believe that the tyrant Arthur 
 came with the men of Cornwall to win back his wife whom 
 the King of the Summer-land had carried off to the sure 
 shelter of the Glassy isle, I feel no special necessity laid 
 on me to refuse so harmless a request. But I cannot let 
 the hero of our antecessores in the south-western peninsula 
 go further from us than to the lands which may be seen 
 from his own southern hill. Two British names of which 
 I have often had to speak have a tendency to get con- 
 founded both ways. We of the Estiva regio where Arthur 
 found his tomb may let him go so far from us as to keep 
 his court at Caerlleon by the Usk ; we cannot part with 
 him on so long a journey as to let him go to keep it at 
 Caerlluel by the Eden. 
 
 The fifth and the sixth century pass away ; the seventh 
 brings us face to face with deeds which are more certain, 
 and with doers of those deeds of whom, if legend can tell 
 us less, history can tell us more. At some time in that 
 century, earlier or later, Lugubalia, beyond all doubt, 
 passed under English rule. But was" it earlier or later ?
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENOLLSH HISTORY. 439 
 
 When ^thelfrith had done what Ceawlin had failed to 
 do, when he had cloven asunder the solid British land 
 which still stretched from the Clyde to the Severn sea, 
 when he had smitten the monks of Bangor and left the 
 City of the Legions a howling wilderness, are we to deem 
 that the spot on which we stand was among the lands 
 which the last heathen king of Northern England added 
 to the Northumbrian realm ? Or shall we deem it that 
 Lugubalia bowed to iEthelfrith, but that what iEthelfrith 
 won Cadwalla won back, when for the last time the 
 Northern Briton went forth conquering and to conquer ? 
 Was the city and its fortress part of the immediate realm 
 of the Bretwaldas Oswald and Oswiu? One thing is 
 certain that, later in the century, Caerlluel formed part 
 of the realm of Ecgfrith. It may have been part of his 
 conquests from the Briton ; it was at least not one of 
 those among his conquests which were won only for a 
 moment. For nearly two hundred years after Ecgfrith, 
 the city remained part of the dominions of the Northum- 
 brian kings, part of the spiritual fold of the bishops of 
 Lindisfarn, and, by the grant of the conqueror to the holy 
 Cuthberht, part of their temporal possessions also. In 
 English mouths too at least, its name took an English 
 shape, and British Caerlluel became, in the pages of 
 Cuthberht's biographers, English Luelceaster. It had its 
 abbots, its abbesses, one at least among them of royal 
 birth, the sister of Ecgfrith, to whom and to others the 
 holy Cuthberht foretold their king's coming end. Indeed, 
 save his own holy island, few places stand out more con- 
 spicuously than Lugubalia in the history of the saint of 
 Lindisfarn. We see him in the picture of Bseda himself, 
 visiting the city with somewhat of the curiosity of an 
 antiquary : we see him taken, as we have been this day, 
 to look at its ancient walls, and to stand by the fountain 
 which had been wrought in a wondrous sort in the days 
 of Eoman rule. Can we deem that, of the walls on which 
 Cuthberht gazed we have this day gazed on any abiding
 
 440 CARLISLE. 
 
 fragments? Carlisle is not as dead Anderida, it is not 
 as living- Coleliester, it is not even as Chester, which was 
 dead and is alive again. Had Saint Cuthberht been taken 
 to see the walls of anj- of those ancient cities, we could 
 point with all assurance to the stones and bricks on which 
 he looked, abiding in the place in which he saw them. 
 In the walls of Carlisle I have believed myself to see 
 Roman stones ; I leave it to more minute local knowledge 
 than my own to judge whether any of them still abide in 
 the places in which Cuthberht can have looked on them. 
 One would be glad indeed if we could thus directly connect 
 the Carlisle of the present with the great Bernician saint j 
 for it is simply through its connexion with him in life and 
 death that we hear at all of the first English occupation 
 of the city. The living Cuthberht prophesied within it ; 
 well nigh two hundred years later the dead Cuthberht 
 appeared in a warning dream to its abbot Eadred, that 
 Eadred who, from dwelling in the city of Luel, was known 
 by the surname of Lulisc. Thus we learn that Lulchester 
 was then still part of the Northumbrian realm. It was to 
 be so no longer. The Dane was in the laud, and Lul- 
 chester was to perish at his hands, though not to perish 
 for ever. Its abbot had a share in placing a king on the 
 throne of York, now that York was the seat of Danish 
 kings, as it had once been the seat of Eoman Caesars. He 
 had a share in guarding Saint Cuthberht's bones till they 
 found that home at Cunegaceaster which sheltered them 
 till Ealdhun found for them a nobler resting-place. But 
 the city from which Eadred Lulisc took his surname 
 ceased to be, and its site passed away from the rule of 
 the foreign king of Deira for whom he found a kingdom, 
 from the fellowship of the native saint of Bernicia for 
 whom he found a tomb. Of the site where Lugubalia 
 once stood we hear nothing ; but it cannot fail to have 
 shared the fate of that Cumbrian under-kingdom which 
 afterwards came to form the appanage of the heirs of 
 Scottish kingship, and over which the West-Saxon and
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 441 
 
 Danish lords of all Britain claimed at most the rights of 
 an external over-lord. 
 
 Thus we learn from incidental notices, and from in- 
 cidental notices only, that towards the end of the ninth 
 century, the site, the walls, the ruined dwellings, of Lugu- 
 balia, passed away from immediate English rule. They 
 ceased to be part of any English kingdom. They had 
 been part of the realm of the Northumbrian ; they never 
 became part of the realm of the West-Saxon. They formed 
 part of a kingdom whose princes became the men — per- 
 haps sometimes rather the men of the men — of Danish 
 Cnut and of Norman William, but they were no part of 
 the realm which owned the Danish and the Norman con- 
 queror as its immediate sovereign. It is surely hardly 
 needful for me to dwell on the exploded errors which 
 were matters of more than local controversy, of contro- 
 versy in the oecumenical columns of the Times no more 
 than nine years back. There is surely no doubt now, there 
 ought never to have been any since the day of our In- 
 stitute's earlier meeting on this spot, why it is that 
 Cumberland and Westmoreland do not appear by those 
 names among the shires which are entered in the Norman 
 Survey. Why Northumberland and Durham are not 
 entered may still be a question, though to ni}^ mind it is 
 not a very hard question ; but the case of Northumberland 
 and Durham and the case of Cumberland and Westmoreland 
 have nothing in common. Northumberland and Durham 
 might have been entered ; we may therefore fairly ask the 
 reason why they were not entered ; but Cumberland and 
 Westmoreland, by those names, were no more likely to be 
 entered in Domesday than the earldom of Orkney or the 
 county of Ponthieu. Domesday is a survey of lands which 
 formed part of the dominions of the King of the English, 
 not of lands which formed no part of his dominions. In 
 the days of William the Great, nay, in the days of his 
 sons and of his grandson, there were, as I have already
 
 442 CARLISLE, 
 
 said, no English shires bearing- the names of Cumberland 
 and Westmoreland. Of the lands which now bear those 
 names, part already belonged to the English kingdom and 
 formed part of an English shire. Those lands are duly 
 entered in the Survey under the shire of which they then 
 formed a part, the great shire of York, yet greater in 
 those days than it is now. But the parts which imme- 
 diately concern us, the site of Carlisle, the special land of 
 Carlisle, are not entered in the Survey, for the simple 
 reason that in the days of William the Great they formed 
 no part of the English kingdom. 
 
 Again I repeat — -it is no discovery of mine ; it was 
 announced in this city three and twenty years ago by a 
 master of the history of Northern England, by Mr. Hodgson 
 Hinde — it was not under the Conqueror himself, but 
 under the son of the Conqueror, that the land of Carlisle 
 was restored to the English realm, that the city rose 
 again, strengthened by fresh bulwarks and colonized by 
 new inhabitants. The tale which carries back Earl Randolf 
 and his earldom into the Conqueror's day, which further 
 turns him from an Earl of Carlisle into an Earl of Cum- 
 berland, has been copied over and over again ; but no 
 statement ever was more utterly lacking in authority. 
 The reference commonly given is to a well-known passage 
 in the printed test of the writer known as Matthew of 
 Westminster. This would at most prove that a single 
 inaccurate writer of somewhat doubtful personality had 
 made a not very wonderful confusion ; but the authority 
 for the common tale is even less than this ; it comes 
 simply from a marginal note written by some unknown 
 Xoerson in a copy of Matthew Paris. Genuine contemporary 
 history knows nothing of the restored city of Carlisle 
 till the days of William Euf us ; it knows nothing of an 
 earldom even of Carlisle till the days of Henry the Clerk. 
 In the year 1092, so witnesses the Chronicle, ^ the King 
 William with 'mickle fyrcl went north to Carlisle, and the 
 borough set up again, and the castle reared, and Dolfin
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 443 
 
 out drove that ere the land wielded, and the castle with 
 his men set, and sith hither south went, and mickle many 
 of churlish folk with wives and cattle thither sent to dwell 
 in the land to till it.' There is the true tale. It is a 
 curious instance of the way in which so much of our 
 most trustworthy history has to be patched up from 
 notices which are purely incidental, that it is from another 
 record of this same event, from the entry in Floretus of 
 Worcester, that we learn the destruction of the city by 
 the Danes two hundred years earlier. That fact might 
 otherwise have been passed by ; but it was needful to put 
 it on record to explain the state of things which the Red 
 King found in Lugubalia and the coasts thereof. 
 
 No part of our fragmentary story is more thoroughly 
 fragmentary than this, the central fact of the whole tale. 
 The entry in the Chronicles stands by itself; we are left 
 to connect it as we can with anything that went before, 
 and with anything that came after. We are not told 
 what led to this action of the Red King at this particular 
 time. We find a certain Dolfin in possession of the land ; 
 but we are not told what he had done to lead to the 
 attack which the King of the English made upon him ; 
 we are not even told who he was. But, from his name 
 and from the whole circumstances of the story, we can 
 hardly be wrong in setting him down as one of the house 
 of the lords of Bamburgh and earls of Northumber- 
 land, as the son of that Gospatric who in his youth 
 risked his life to save Earl Tostig, who afterwards 
 himself ruled for a while as earl under the Conqueror, 
 who had then for a while to find shelter with the 
 Scottish king, but who appears in the end in Domesday 
 as a considerable landowner in Yorkshire. And we can 
 hardly be wrong in assuming that whatever Dolfin held 
 he held as the man of Malcolm. Here then was a corner 
 of Britain still ruled by a man of the loftiest English 
 birth, a man sprung by the female line of the stock of 
 West- Saxon kingship, but held under the supremacy of
 
 444 CARLISLE. 
 
 tlie King of Scots. The land now becomes in one sense 
 more English, in another less. Up to 1092 there was 
 still an English ruler in Britain ; there was still a man of 
 English blood holding an earldom, a lordship, or whatever 
 it is to be called, which so far formed a distinct state as 
 to be no part of the immediate dominions either of the 
 Norman or of the Scot. Here was still a ruler who, 
 sprung from Northumbrian earls on the one side, from 
 West-Saxon kings on the other, might, with the minutest 
 accuracy, be set down as an ' Anglo-Saxon.' As long as 
 such a ruler still reigned, there was still something like 
 an English power in Britain twenty-six years after the 
 Norman lauded at Pevensey. But its existence as an 
 English power implied separation from the now united 
 English kingdom ; it implied dependence on the Scottish 
 crown. After the change which the Red King wrought at 
 Carlisle, no man of purely English descent ever again 
 ruled in Britain ; but this sentimental loss might be 
 looked on as counterbalanced by the reunion of the severed 
 land with a kingdom of England which was soon again 
 to become an English kingdom. The French-speaking 
 founder of Carlisle made way for a king who was English 
 by birth and speech, if not by blood, and who handed on 
 his crown to descendants who came of the old kingly 
 stock by the same tie of female descent as Dolfin and 
 Gospatric themselves. 
 
 We are not told what it was that led the Eed King 
 to march with a great fyrd to Carlisle and to drive 
 out Dolfin. Save for this expedition, the year 1092 
 was a year of peace. The events recorded under it 
 are mainly ecclesiastical. Just before his march into 
 Carlisle, the King would seem to have been at Lincoln, 
 ready for the hallowing of Eemigius' minster, a hallowing 
 which did not come just yet. The year before had been 
 a busy one indeed. King William had made peace with 
 his brother Duke Robert, and the two had dispossessed 
 their younger brother Henry, ^theling, Count, and Clerk,
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 445 
 
 Malcolm of Scotland had meanwhile harried Northumber- 
 land as far as Chester-le- Street, and had been driven back 
 by the Normans and English of the land. The three sons 
 of the Conqueror, all now reconciled, had come to England 
 together; they had all gone northwards; they had en- 
 tered Malcolm's dominions ; but, instead of a battle, the 
 mediation of Robert and Eadgar had led to a treaty and 
 to an act of homage done by Malcolm to the King of the 
 English. Then the brothers had quarrelled again, and 
 Eobert and Eadgar had gone away to Normandy. So 
 much for 1091. In 1093 a Scottish embassy comes to 
 William Rufus during his momentary fit of reformation 
 at Gloucester. Then Malcolm is summoned to the court 
 of his over-lord ; Eadgar is sent to bring him honourably ; 
 he comes, but the capricious Rufus refuses to see him ; 
 Malcolm goes home in wrath ; he invades England for the 
 last time, and dies at Alnwick. 
 
 Here there are two years, 1091 and 1093, both full of 
 warlike dealings between England and Scotland, parted 
 by a year of peace as far as the two kingdoms are con- 
 cerned, but in which we find these remarkable doings on the 
 borders of the two, the driving out of Dolfin and the estab- 
 lishment of the English power at Carlisle. We may be 
 sure that these events had some reference either to what 
 went before or to what came after. One might suppose 
 that Malcolm, like some other kings, betrayed his ally and 
 vassal Dolfin, and that the surrender of Carlisle to Wil- 
 liam was one of the articles of the treaty agreed upon 
 between him and the King of Scots, But if this were so, 
 William would surely have taken possession of his new 
 dominion on his way southwards, and would not have 
 waited till seemingly the latter part of the next year. It 
 is far more likely that the occupation of Carlisle was a 
 piece of capricious aggression on the part of Rufus, an act 
 which, whether it was or was not a breach of the letter 
 of the treaty, was sure to kindle the wrath of Malcolm 
 to the uttermost. A King of Scots might reasonably be
 
 446 CARLISLE. 
 
 ^vratllf^l at the wrong done to a vassal of Scotland, and 
 still more at the standing menace which was now set up 
 against the Scottish kingdom itself. We cannot be cer- 
 tain, because it is not recorded ; but we may be strongly 
 tempted to believe that the occupation of Carlisle held a 
 foremost place among the complaints which Malcolm and 
 his embassy had to make to Rufus, and to which Rufus, 
 when he had risen from his bed of sickness and penitence, 
 characteristically refused to hearken. 
 
 The whole later history of Carlisle — one might say, the 
 whole later history of England — witnesses to the import- 
 ance of the step which was now taken by the Red King. 
 The whole later relations between England and Scotland, 
 from that day till the union of the crowns, were in- 
 fluenced by the presence of a great and strong English 
 city so close to the Scottish border. The step, whatever 
 may have been its moral aspect toAvards Malcolm, towards 
 Dolfin, or towards Dolfin's subjects, was, as an act done by 
 a king of England, for the strengthening of his kingdom, 
 the act of a keen-sighted general and a far-sighted states- 
 man. And William the Red, though he did not always 
 choose to be either, could be both whenever he did choose. 
 What became of Dolfin we know not ; as concerns Dolfin's 
 subjects, the story suggests that they could not have lost 
 much, and that there were not very many of them to lose 
 anything. The words of one of our best authorities, 
 literally taken, would imply that the city was a mere 
 uninhabited ruin. But it is always dangerous to press 
 descriptions of this kind too far. Some dwelling-places 
 of man may likely enough have still gathered round 
 the ancient walls, more likely within than, as at An- 
 derida, without. It is enough that Lugubalia had ceased 
 to be a city and a fortress, and that, at the bidding of 
 William the Red, it again became both. How much, in 
 wall and castle, may be his work, how much may be 
 the work of his brother, I must leave local knowledge
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 447 
 
 to settle. What William wrought, Henry, as Simeon of 
 Durham witnesses with some pomp of words, undoubtedly 
 strengthened. Of the work of one or other of them a good 
 deal is left, though it may be hard to say how much is the 
 work of the elder and how much of the younger brother. 
 The keep is there, though sadly disfigured ; and it is need- 
 less to say that other parts of the castle keep work of 
 later times, that they suggest memories of stirring scenes 
 in later history, memories of Richard of Gloucester and 
 of Mary of Scotland. But those to whom the city and 
 castle themselves have a distinct being will perhaps be 
 inclined to dwell less on those later memories ; they will 
 rather strive to trace out every scrap that carries them back 
 to the days of the sons of the Conqueror, seeing that to the 
 days of the Conqueror himself there is nothing to lead us. 
 As for the land, as distinguished from the city, at the 
 time when the Eed King came, our story certainly im- 
 plies that it was, to say the least, not very thickly inhabited. 
 No part of Britain was thickly inhabited then according 
 to modern standards ; but the land of Carlisle must have 
 seemed empty of men even according to the standard 
 of the eleventh century. To drive out those whom he 
 found in the land, and to ]Dlant in it a colony of his own 
 subjects, might be an act of wise policy on the Eed King's 
 part. It might even be a wise way of disposing of men 
 who might be dangerous in other parts of the kingdom. 
 Dissatisfied Normans, oppressed Englishmen, would be 
 turned into loyal subjects, when they were set to guard 
 the border city of England against the Scot. But this is 
 not the kind of migration of which the Chronicler speaks ; 
 at least he speaks of another kind of migration as well. 
 The land must really have lacked inhabitants of any kind, 
 when William found it a wise step to bring churlish folk 
 from southern England to dwell in the land and to till it. 
 I need not dwell on the guess, in any case a mere guess, 
 and to my mind not a likely guess, which connects this 
 settlement with the dispossession of English — sometimes
 
 448 CARLISLE. 
 
 of Norman — owners to make way for tlie New Forest. 
 The important point is that the colony planted by William 
 Rufus in the land of Carlisle was strictly a Saxon colony. 
 It was a Saxon colony in a land for which Briton, Angle, 
 Scot, and Dane, had often striven, but where the Saxon was 
 altogether a new comer. Now in all discussions on the 
 ethnology of Cumberland this Saxon colony seems to be 
 wholly forgotten. Yet its coming is an undoubted fact, and 
 perchance the fact of the eleventh century may have left 
 some signs even in the nineteenth. I merely throw this 
 out as a subject for local inquiry. Are there any distinc- 
 tively Saxon elements to be traced within the land colo- 
 nized by Rufus, that is, I would again remind every one, 
 not all modern Cumberland and Westmoreland, but the 
 special laud of Carlisle, the old earldom, the old diocese ? 
 In the neighbouring land of Bernicia I have sometimes 
 seemed to notice points in language and nomenclature 
 that were distinctively Saxon. The cliesters of that land, 
 as opposed to the casters of Deira, are, if not distinctively 
 Saxon, at least English as opposed to Danish. And I 
 began to doubt whether it might not be owing to the 
 coming of Octa and Ebussa, when I heard, along the 
 Eoman wall, such names as Bellingham and Ovingham 
 sounded with a soft g. Surely, I said in my heart, here 
 are folk who are Westsaxonihus ijpsis Westsaxoniores. 
 
 One thing we must not forget, namely, that the eccle- 
 siastical side of Carlisle is not the work of William Rufus 
 — we could hardly expect it to be so — but the work of 
 Henry the First. Early in the reign of the Lion of 
 Justice, the fallen abbey of Eadred rose again in the shape 
 of a new priory of Austin canons, of which the King him- 
 self, if not the founder, was at least a benefactor. Here, 
 as in many other places, from Wells to Manchester, from 
 the tenth century to the nineteenth, the chaj^ter or other 
 ecclesiastical body is older than the bishopric. Nearly 
 thirty years after the foundation of the priory. King Henry
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 449 
 
 planted his English confessor ^thelwulf in the new epi- 
 scopal chair of Carlisle. It was not till the next century 
 that the unbroken succession of the Carlisle bishops begins; 
 still Henry is none the less the founder of the see, although 
 for many years his foundation remained vacant, Henry 
 the First was the last king till Henry the Eighth who 
 could write himself a founder of English bisho^^rics, and 
 in the case of Carlisle the material church dates from his 
 time as well as the succession of its pastors. To the priory 
 of Austin canons the bishop became at least a nomiual 
 abbot, and, as at Bath, as at Durham, the name of abbey 
 clave to the episcopal church or its precinct. According 
 to the common use of the Austin canons, the building was 
 divided between the monks and the parishioners, one of 
 the few instances of that arrangement in strictly English 
 cathedral churches. As all on the spot know, the 
 parishioners kept till quite lately the small fragment 
 of the western limb which survived the civil wars. The 
 division would seem to have had the most important 
 effects on the building. In the western church the 
 grand simple Norman of ^thelwulf's day is left un- 
 touched. The church of the canons was rebuilt in the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and was crowned 
 with the noblest window of its class that England, and 
 therefore that the world, can supply. But surely never 
 was building built with less regard to its neighbour than 
 the builders of the eastern limb of Carlisle abbey showed 
 to the western. Did they simply cast the despised 
 parish church out of all reckoning ? Or did they dream 
 of building it afresh some day or other in the same style 
 and on the same plan as its greater neighbour? As 
 it is, between rebuilding and destroying, the church is 
 left a shapeless fragment, magnificent in parts, but with- 
 out connexion or outline as a whole. Still I at least 
 rejoice that something of the nave of Henry and ^thel- 
 wulf is left to us. 
 
 Again, in a land which is emphatically the earldom of 
 
 G G
 
 450 CARLISLE. 
 
 Carlisle, we must remember that, as Henry was the first to 
 £jive bishops to Carlisle, Henry was also the first to g-ive 
 her earls. And tliey were bishops of Carlisle, earls of 
 Carlisle. The limits of the land added to England by 
 Rufus were the limits of their diocese and their earldom. 
 If Henry founded bishops and earls, it was in a city 
 founded by Rufus that he founded them. Yes, I would 
 again say to the citizens of Carlisle, the Red King is your 
 founder, and you cannot escape him. You might better 
 have liked the Conqueror, to whom an old-standing 
 blunder assigned you. You might better have liked 
 Ecgfrith or ^thelfrith, Cadwalla or Arthur. You might 
 better have liked one Avhom the monk of Saint Evroul gives 
 you, even Divus Julius himself. The future Dictator is, 
 I suppose, carried thus far northward b}^ the same kind of 
 process which has carried Hengest, out of the narrow 
 Kentish range which history gives him, to Stonehenge 
 and Sprotburgh and I know not where else besides. But 
 the journey which Csesar never took was taken by the 
 king into whose body some thought that the soul of 
 Csesar had passed. The Roman must be satisfied with 
 having called Corinth and Carthage into a restored being ; 
 it was his Norman avatar that did the same good turn by 
 Carlisle. You must be content that the work of calling 
 your fallen city into a new being was the work of him 
 who every morning got up a worse man than he lay down, 
 and who every evening lay down a worse man than he 
 got up. 
 
 I am near the end of my discourse, but some might 
 think that I am still near the beginning of my subject. 
 Yet I have really reached its goal. I have carried the 
 history of Carlisle through those stages of its history 
 which give the city its distinctive historical character, those 
 which work out what I would call its personal definition. 
 We have seen, at Lugubalia, as in other parts of the land^ 
 the Roman city left as a city of the forsaken and inde- 
 pendent Briton, to pass under the rule of an English
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 451 
 
 kingdom. In this Lugubalia lias simply fared as other 
 cities, except so far as it would seem to have been one 
 of those more favoured places which passed from British 
 to English rule without any intermediate period of deso- 
 lation. The thing which forms the distinctive character 
 of Carlisle is that its time of desolation came later, that 
 the coming of the Danes wrought, not only the overthrow 
 of the city, but its separation from English rule. The 
 forsaken site became part of a British kingdom, which 
 presently bowed to an external English supremacy, but 
 which, instead of passing under immediate English rule, 
 became an appanage of the Scot. Then at last the land 
 returns, if not to English rule, at least under the rule of 
 England, and the Norman builds up again what the Dane 
 had overthrown. But I should hardly have said ' at last ; ' 
 Carlisle was yet again to pass under the rule of a king of 
 Scots, and to be again restored to the realm of England. 
 When all the sons of the Conqueror had passed away, 
 when the nineteen years of anarchy had come with his 
 grandson. King David, in all zeal for his Imperial niece, 
 cut short the kingdom of his other niece's husband, and 
 added Carlisle, with other lands and fortresses of North- 
 ern England, to the Scottish dominions. Just then subtle 
 questions of homage were not likely to be argued, and 
 the King of Scots doubtless held Carlisle by whatever 
 right he held, if not Dunfermline, at least Lothian. But 
 what one Henry had strengthened, the next won back, and, 
 while Dunfermline and Lothian passed under the mere out- 
 ward supremacy of the Angevin king, Carlisle again became 
 part of his immediate kingdom. In this way the dis- 
 tinctive feature of the history of Carlisle, its falling away 
 from England and its recovery by England, was really 
 acted twice over. But the second loss, the second recovery, 
 were but a feeble after-shadow of the first ; they did 
 not involve the destruction of the city and its calling 
 again to a renewed life. For the moment indeed the 
 question might have been asked, whether the rule of David
 
 452 CARLISLE, 
 
 Avas not more English than the rule of Stephen, if in 
 courtesy Ave look on Stephen as exercising any rule at all. 
 Practically, Carlisle, with the other parts of England 
 which were ceded to David, obtained a happy exemption 
 fi-om the horrors which laid waste the rest of the king- 
 dom, and, as soon as the kingdom had again a settled 
 government, they again became members of the English 
 body. 
 
 The place of Carlisle in English history is thus fully 
 ascertained. The city has run a course of its own in the 
 earlier times of our history ; it now finally takes its place 
 as an English city in order to discharge one special 
 function among English cities. Carlisle has now to be, 
 before all other spots, the bulwark of England against 
 the Scot. So I must speak in obedience to the received 
 rules of language ; but we should ever bear in mind that 
 warfare with the Scot hardly ever meant warfare with 
 the true bearers of that name, allies as they so often 
 were of the English overlord ; the truer name of the war- 
 fare of which Carlisle was for many ages the centre 
 would be warfare, as in the old days before England had 
 a single king, between the northern and the southern 
 English kingdoms. One king marched from Westminster, 
 another from Dunfermline, each at the head of armies of 
 the English speech, strengthened, it may be, or weakened, 
 by wilder allies from the Celtic background which over- 
 shadowed both English realms alike. In this warfare the 
 border city was ever the main object of attack and de- 
 fence. The time would fail to tell how many times Carlisle 
 was besieged by the Scottish invaders, how many times it 
 was the trysting-place of the hosts of England. The 
 annals of Carlisle at this stage are written in the Chronicles 
 of the kindred Austin priory of Lanercost. It has a strange 
 sound when we read how, in the year of the Great Char- 
 ter, the Scottish Alexander took the city, as David had
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 453 
 
 taken it before liim, and liow he presently did homage — 
 for Carlisle, for Scotland, or for what? — to the French 
 prince whom the Norman barons of England had chosen 
 to take the place of the rebel tyrant from Anjou. But 
 the Scottish occupation under Alexander was yet shorter 
 than the Scottish occupation under David ; two years 
 later the Scottish king, ere he could be absolved from 
 ecclesiastical censures, had to give up Carlisle, not to the 
 Lord Lewis to whom he had so lately done homage, but to 
 the Lord Henry, chosen and hallowed King of England. 
 Through the wars of the Edwards, the name of Carlisle 
 meets us at almost every page ; it stands out specially as 
 a spot bound by another tie to one of the other spots with 
 which at starting I compared and contrasted it. The 
 needs of warfare and of policy caused the city of William 
 Rufus to be many times honoured with the presence of the 
 founder of Hull. Edward, father of parliaments, held 
 three famous parliaments within your walls, and, as the late 
 Mr. Hartshorne told you three and twenty years ago, the 
 good estate of the river Thames and its traffic was discussed 
 in this distant coi-ner of the English kingdom. From 
 Carlisle the Hammer of the Scots set forth on his last enter- 
 prise, when the enfeebled frame of the mighty warrior and 
 lawgiver sank beneath the weight of cares and labours 
 beside the sands of Solway. A generation later the 
 presence at Carlisle of Edward King of Scots may be a 
 momentary puzzle; but the personage so described was 
 no Scottish conqueror like David or Alexander ; Edward 
 Balliol, faithful vassal of his Southern overlord, found it 
 convenient to make use of Carlisle as something between 
 a court and a place of shelter. In the sixteenth century 
 Carlisle again received a Scottish sovereign ; but that 
 sovereign was a deposed queen flying from her own people. 
 In the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century, the city 
 was again occupied by Scottish armies ; in the earlier case 
 it was by a Scottish army in league with the English
 
 454 CARLISLE. 
 
 Parliamont, in the latter by a Scottish army marching in 
 the cause of a pretender to the Eng-lish crown whose claims 
 were at least Scottish rather than English. And in this last 
 occupation we are after so many ages brought back to a 
 race -which has been for a long while out of our sight. 
 If most so-called Scottish armies were more truly to be 
 called armies of Englishmen of Lothian or of converted 
 Britons of Strathclyde, w^e cannot say this of the High- 
 laud host of Charles Edward. Then the true Scot — or, 
 for aught I know, the true Pict — showed himself on Eng- 
 lish ground in his true garb -his true garb, I say, for the 
 devices of the famous army-tailor to whom the present 
 so-called Highland dress is said to be owing, must have 
 come at a later date. Let some student of the antiquities 
 of dress tell us the exact distinction between the two. If 
 that distinction should prove to be very wide, it might 
 save King George the Fourth, who doubtless clad himself 
 in the more modern fashion, from Lord Macaulay's gibe 
 that he ' thought that he could not give a more striking 
 proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed 
 in Scotland before the Union, than by disguising himself 
 in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotch- 
 men out of ten as the dress of a thief.' 
 
 I have rushed with somewhat headlong speed through 
 several stirring ages. But to tell what Carlisle, after 
 the city had put on its characteristic character, did and 
 suffered, is rather the business of other members of the 
 section, and not of its president. For detailed notices of 
 such points we look to local zeal and local research ; my 
 business is rather to point out what Carlisle is, to fix its 
 place among the cities of England, to trace out what is 
 special and distinctive in the history of the one English 
 city which still keeps its almost unaltered British name, 
 the city where a foreign king, the most deeply hated of his 
 line, showed himself as the enlarger of the English king-
 
 PLACE OF CARLISLE IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 455 
 
 dora, the man who, if he drove out the last separate ruler 
 of the old English stock, drove him out only to become 
 himself the founder of a Saxon colony, and to give Eng- 
 land her abiding bulwark against her northern neighbour, 
 so often her northern enemy. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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