by Grant Allen
For many years the English continued to own the Avon dale, while the Welsh still held out for their Damnonian princes in the downs and marshes between the Axe and the Devonshire border. As Mr. Freeman puts it, Wells was then in Welshland, while Wookey, a mile or two off, was in England. The Wansdyke, or Woden’s dyke, marks the boundary between the two powers. Moreover, as Dr. Guest has shown, a long spur or wedge of Welsh territory also ran north-eastward along Frome and Avon into the English dominions, back of Bath, as far as Malmesbury — Braden and Selwood Forests forming the mark or border of waste between the two races. Gradually, however, the intrusive Teuton pushed his way westward, subduing or cutting off the conquered Welsh. Three-quarters of a century after the capture of Bath the West Saxons advanced to Bradford-on-Avon, thus no doubt completing the conquest of the backward Welsh spur. A few years later a battle was fought at Pen Selwood, in which the Welsh were driven westward as far as the Parrett, so that all Selwood and the marshland fell into the hands of the English. The valley of the Tone was more slowly overrun; and at last, about the beginning of the eighth century, a hundred and twenty years after the capture of Bath and more than two hundred after the landing of the West Saxons in Britain, the English had pushed their frontier as far as the Exe — in other words, had taken all Somerset. But these later conquests were doubtless, as Mr. Freeman suggests, far less cruel than the earlier ones. In the interval between the capture of Bath and the battle at Bradford-on-Avon the West Saxons had been converted to Christianity, and the struggle was no longer one of creed and race, but simply of race alone. In the earlier wars the Christian Briton seems to have been enslaved and Teutonised by his heathen master; in the later wars he was allowed to retain possession of his land as a rent-paying churl, and for some generations he apparently kept up the use of the Welsh, or Cornish language, much as is the case with the people of Wales, Ireland, and the Scotch Highlands at the present day. In the laws of Ini the West Saxon, the conqueror of Taunton, the Welsh churl has a recognised place, and his life has its fixed price, though not so high as that of the English churl. Even the religious houses seem to have kept up a continuous existence from Welsh into English times. The Damnonian Kings (whose names and reigns Dr. Guest has traced, perhaps with more ingenuity than conclusiveness) had their Westminster Abbey at Glastonbury, a solitary tor which then rose like an island in the midst of the marshes of the Brue. Its Welsh name, preserved for us by William of Malmesbury, was Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Magic[?]; and it was the reputed burial-place of Arthur, the Island of Avilion made familiar to us by Mr. Tennyson. Ini re-endowed this old Welsh sanctuary; and even after the Norman Conquest William of Malmesbury still saw there the monuments of the early British abbots. Such continuity with the British and Roman times meets us nowhere else in English history. The Somerset people, half English, half Teutonised Celts, had their own ealdorman to a late period; and they still have their own Bishop at Bath and Wells. It is more important to note, however, that the traditions of Roman days survived strongly in the county for ages after the English conquest. Edgar, first King of all England, was crowned at Bath; the Anglo-Saxon princes were buried beside their British predecessors at Glastonbury; and when Swegen the Dane failed to get himself crowned at London he went to Bath, where he received the submission of the ealdorman of Devon and thanes of the West, “and then all folk held him for full King.”
III. SOUTH-WEST
DEVON
From the earliest times of which we have any historical record, a Celtic people, known as the Damnonii or Dumnonii, occupied the long hilly peninsula which stretches from the Avon to the Land’s End. Rising around three centres into three great barren bosses of igneous or primary rock — Exmoor, Dartmoor, and the Cornish heights — the peninsula subsides between them into fertile dales of red triassic soil, threaded by the rapid rivers which take their rise on the intervening ranges. Of these valleys, the widest and richest is that of the Exe; and in its centre, at the head of navigation for the tidal stream (afterwards fixed at Topsham), the Romans placed their station of Isca Damnoniorum — Englished into Exanceaster and Exeter — the one town in Britain which we know with certainty to have been continuously inhabited from the old provincial period to the present day. Their second chief post was Tamara on the Tamar, near the existing town of Plymouth. From Bath to Isca, the Foss Way ran through the outskirts of the county, and thence penetrated to Penzance, at once to protect the Cornish tin trade and to guard against insurrections of the Peninsular Britons. As usual, the main Roman station was planted in the midst of the chief corn-growing vale: just as York, the provincial capital, stood in the middle of the Plain of Ouse, the largest agricultural level in our island; while the scarcely less important cities of London, Verulam, Lincoln, and Camalodunum lay in the other great corn-bearing tracts of the Thames valley, the Lincolnshire lowlands, and the flat tertiary levels of the Eastern Counties. Roman agriculture in Britain was wholly confined to alluvial bottoms, and never ventured to climb the high plateau of the Midlands or the upland slopes of Lothian and Lammermoor, which modern scientific tillage has turned into the richest soil of the entire island. Thus the Devonshire of the Romans was probably confined for the most part to the apple-orchards and cornfields of the immediate Exeter valley.
After the Romans left Britain, the tribe of the Damnonii appears as one of the most powerful among the petty principalities which rose at once out of the disorganised provincial people. Gildas, the Romano-British monk who alone preserves for us some dim [notices] of the first English settlements in Britain, mentions among the chief rulers of his time Constantine, “the accursed whelp of the Damnonian lioness.” Even after the West Saxons had conquered Dorset and the Bath valley, the Damnonian Welsh princes must have been scarcely, if at all, inferior in power to the lords of Winchester. [Long after Constantine] their King, Geraint, was master of Cornwall, Devon, and half Somerset; while the West Saxons still spread only from Southampton Water to the Bath Avon. Moreover, the Damnonian Welsh had only one enemy to oppose — the West Saxon — on their eastern frontier; while these West Saxons themselves were hemmed in between two Welsh States — the Damnonians on the west and the Welsh of the Midlands on their northern frontier. It might have seemed as though the Welsh were more likely to drive the English intruders into the sea, as the mythical Merlin prophesied, than to be themselves incorporated by them. But the Britons abandoned by the Romans were in much the same condition as the modern industrial Hindoos would be if deserted by the British and left to defend themselves by their own devices against such untamed enemies as the Afghans and the Ghoorkhas. They had lost the power of organisation and of fighting [effectually], and allowed themselves to be quietly conquered piecemeal. For a while the West Saxons let their Damnonian neighbours alone, and contented themselves with securing their main northern frontier from the attacks of the Midland Welsh. At the close of the sixth century they had pushed their northern boundary to Wanborough, near Swindon; early in the seventh they were at Bampton, on the Upper Thames; and a few years later they joined hands at Cirencester with the other great aggressive English horde, the Mercians, who had been advancing to meet them from the north-east, across the face of the great central plateau. From that time forward the West Saxons were free to direct all their energies to the subjugation of the Damnonians or West Welsh (as they now began to call them) without fear of interference from their brethren on the north.
Thus for nearly a century the Damnonians appear to have been unmolested in their peninsular home, while the boundary between them and the West Saxons seems to have curved round (as Dr. Guest has shown) from Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, to Malmesbury, and from Malmesbury again to the mouth of the Somersetshire Axe. But after the West Saxons were left at liberty to push on their conquests towards the west, a new era of aggression set in. Moreover, they had now been converted to Christianity; and the community of religion doubtless made the resistance of the West Welsh far less severe than it had been during the heathen English times. No new Arthur
could any longer represent himself as the champion of Christendom against the pagan: on the contrary, the English Bishops of Winchester and Sherborne were now the representatives of Roman orthodoxy, while the Damnonians of St. Petrocs were adherents of the isolated and schismatical Celtic church. They cut their tonsure in a crescent instead of a circle, and they celebrated Easter at the wrong date. Against these dangerous heresies Aldhelm, first Bishop of Sherborne, wrote a controversial work, and succeeded in converting many of the West Welsh serfs and churls in the English territories from the error of their way; but the independent Damnonians of unconquered Devon and Cornwall remained incorrigible. The secular arm was more successful. In the seventh century the West Saxons overran the whole of Somerset, and by the first year of the eighth they had reached the Exe. Devonshire, or Dyfnaint, however, which they now began to annex piecemeal, was evidently far more slowly Anglicised than the more easterly districts. The name of the people continues in its English dress as Defnas, a slight variation of the native word, and they are almost always so described in the early English chronicles; though occasionally we get the more Teutonic form, Defnsæte. The fact remains that the Damnonii were Damnonii still: they were not expelled from their native land or “driven into Cornwall,” as the ordinary histories tell us; but they survived, with their nationality and their language intact, during many generations under English rule, exactly as the Welsh of Wales do to the present day.
Up to the beginning of the ninth century the English do not appear to have advanced farther than the Exe. The South Hams and the great wild of Dartmoor remained in the hands of the Welsh. In Egbert’s reign, however, the West Saxons “harried among the West Welsh from east to west.” Ten years later, it is clear that all Devonshire must have become English, or at least have been thoroughly subdued by the English overlords; for we learn that there was then a fight at Camelford, in Cornwall, “between the Defnas and the West Welsh”; so that the Defnas must now have ceased to be considered as Welshmen, and must have been acting in the English interest. This fight at Camelford accordingly marks the final subjugation of Devonshire up to its present boundary of the Tamar. Still, however, the Welsh blood remained, as it even now remains, in the ascendant; and during the Danish wars, when it became important to conciliate the conquered people, Alfred appointed a Welsh-speaking Welshman, Asser of St. David’s, as Bishop of Exeter, his diocese to consist of a newly-conquered country, together with the charge of two small districts in Cornwall already annexed. At the same time, the distinction of Welshman and Englishman before the law, insisted upon in the code of Ini, has quite dropped out in Alfred’s Dooms. Under Athelstan Cornish-Welsh was still spoken in Exeter; and in remote country places it even lingered on till the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The physique of the ordinary Devonshire folk is now quite as markedly Celtic as that of the Cornish or the undoubted Welsh of Wales proper.
In one respect, however, the position of Devonshire differs widely from that of every other shire of Wessex. The Wilsæte, the Dorsæte, and the Sumorsæte were all once independent or semi-dependent tribes of English settlers, which only slowly sank into the condition of mere shires or divisions of the West Saxon kingdom. Probably each of them had once possessed a king of its own, who became in name or fact a simple ealdorman at the same time when his territory was merged as a simple shire into the West Saxon land. Indeed, on one occasion, long after the general consolidation of Wessex, these several principalities fell asunder again for a while, and reverted to their original independence under their separate under-kings. But the Defnas, though they had once formed a distinct Celtic kingdom, were treated from the first moment of their incorporation with the West Saxon realm as a shire alone. The name of Defnascir, or Devonshire, appears in the very earliest years after the English conquest. Yet the Defnas had always their own ealdorman, who is usually spoken of as a person of some importance; and we know that Edgar, King of all England, considered the daughter of an ealdorman of the Defnas a fitting queen for himself. As late as the year 1000, the Defnas assembled in their own army like a semi-independent people to oppose the Danes; and to this day there is probably no shire in all England where county feeling is still so much of a reality, and where the tie of county kinship is so strongly felt. In a certain dim instinctive way, indeed, West-countrymen everywhere recognise themselves as differing in blood from other Englishmen: only 500 years since the difference was still known to be one of Celtic and Teutonic descent.
CORNWALL
By strict analogy, the name of the extreme south-western county of England ought to be Cornwales rather than Cornwall; and, indeed, that regular form made a hard fight for life, though it has long since been finally beaten in the struggle for existence by the modern received name of Cornwall. From the very first period when the English landed in Britain, they knew the Celtic aborigines of the land as Wealas, or Welshmen. The word, indeed, originally means no more than foreigners, and was the universal term applied by all branches of the Teutonic race to the alien peoples with whom they met in the course of their wanderings. Wälschland, the German name for Italy, comes from the same root: the walnut is the Welsh or foreign nut, and the turkey and French bean are known in Germany as the Wälsche Hahn and the Wälsche Bohne. But all early ethnical names tend in time to become territorial; and just as Suth Seaxe and East Seaxe, which originally meant the South Saxons and the East Saxons, have now come to mean the land itself of Sussex and Essex, so the plural name Wealas, or the Welshmen, has come to be used in its modern shortened form of Wales not for the people, but for the land which they inhabit. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that early history knows nothing of countries and districts, but only of tribes and kindreds. As in the older annals of Rome or Greece we meet merely with Samnites and Tyrrheni, with Achaians and Locrians, so in the most ancient annals of England we meet, not with Mercia and Kent, but with the Myrce and the Kentings; not with Wiltshire and Derbyshire, but with the Wilsæte and the Pecsæte, the men of the Wyly and the men of the Peak. Place-names as such hardly exist at all in the first period of English history. Even such forms as Hastings and Worthing were originally true plurals — Hastingas and Weorthingas — applied to clans or families; and down to quite a late date we find the Hastingas spoken of as a tribe side by side with the Kentingas and the Suth Seaxe.
The modern change of such plural and tribal names into singulars of local meaning is very clearly seen in the case of Cornwall. The Wealas of the West Country, after their isolation from those of the Midlands by the English conquest of Bath, were known as the West Wealas, which we usually modernise as West Wales, but which really means rather the West Welshmen. For we are now in this curious philological predicament, that having come to use the ethnical plural Wealas, or Wales, as the name of a country, we have been obliged to adopt the adjective Wylisc or Welsh as the name of the people. Various kinds of Wealas were, however, recognised by our English ancestors. There were the Bret-Wealas or Britons, and the Gal-Wealas or Gaels, the two main divisions of the Celtic stock. And there were minor local subdivisions of both races. So long as Devonshire remained unconquered the term West Wealas was applied to all the Britons of the western peninsula; while the Britons of the Cymric mountain-land were known as North Wealas, a word used to embrace the people of both North and South Wales in the modern sense. But after the Damnonii, or Defnas, had been finally subdued, and the independent Britons restricted to the west of the Tamar, this last remnant of the West Welsh came gradually to be known as the Corn-Wealas, or Welsh of the Horn — that is to say, the peninsula. Cernyw is the true Celtic form of the word. Throughout the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period, the name Corn-Wealas was always used as an ethnical plural— “this year the Danes harried the Corn-Wealas, and the North-Wealas, and the Defnas”; or “Lyfing held three bishoprics, one on Devonshire, and one on the Cornwealas, and one on Worcestershire.” But in later English times, the word got shortened into Cornwales; and then, losing its plural meaning, became finally singular in form as Cornwall. An exac
tly analogous case occurs in the peninsula of Wirral, in Cheshire, between Dee and Mersey. The original form here is Wirhealas, which is [possibly] a tribal name; but in later days it was shortened into Wirheale, and finally into Wirral.