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The Tribal Hidage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Cyril Hart
Cyril Hart
Affiliation:
Stilton, Peterborough
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Extract

THE term ‘heptarchy’, coined by John Selden in the seventeenth century to describe the political sub–divisions of England at the time of the conversion, has been handed down by successive generations of historians and still colours our thinking today. Fascinating though the word may be to the historiographer, from a strictly historical point of view it is high time it was given a decent burial, for its inadequacy has been apparent ever since Sir Henry Spelman, Selden's illustrious contemporary, edited the document known as the Tribal Hidage.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 21 , December 1971 , pp. 133 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1971

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References

1 Journal of the British Archaeological Association, xl (1884), pp. 29–31.Google Scholar Spelman printed from a late Latin version, but Birch edited the best surviving text, written in Old English in a hand of the first quarter of the eleventh century. The MS (British Museum Harley 3271, fo. 6v) is described by Ker, N., Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo–Saxon (Oxford, 1957), pp. 309–12.Google Scholar Facsimiles appear in the English Historical Review (hereafter EHR), clx (1925), facing p. 497,Google Scholar and in Hodgkin's, R. H.History of the Anglo–Saxons (2nd edn, Oxford, 1935), pl. 53.Google Scholar The best edition is in Birch's, W. de GrayCartularium Saxonicum (London, 1885–1899; hereafter CS, documents quoted by number), no. 297, which contains no demonstrable inaccuracies. CS, 297A, 297B, are later Latin versions, of no independent value.Google Scholar

2 The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 6–11.Google Scholar

3 EHR xxvii (1912), p. 625; clx (1925), pp. 497–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Stenton, F. M., Anglo–Saxon England (2nd edn, Oxford, 1947), pp. 292–94.Google Scholar

5 English Historical Documents, vol. I, ed. Whitelock, D. (London, 1955), pp. 10–11 (hereafter EHD).Google Scholar

6 It may be that some form of counting frame was employed for addition of large numbers. The operations on the abacus were restricted to multiplication and division, and it is doubtful if it was widely used in the West in this period.

7 For a list of early boundary rivers, see Kirby, D. P., The Making of Early England (London, 1967), pp. 240–42.Google Scholar

8 Ekwall, E., ‘Some Notes on Place–Names containing Tribal Names’, Namnoch Bygd, xxiv (1936), pp. 178–83Google Scholar; ‘Tribal Names in English Place–Names’, Ibid., xli (1954), pp. 129–54. I have to thank Professor Cameron for these references, and for kindly supplying photo–copies. (Continued on p. 138.)

Ekwall applies his dictum to suggest that Saxham in Suffolk, Saxton in Cambridgeshire, and Sackbridge in Bottisham, Cambridgeshire, ‘might have been pockets of Saxon settlement surviving in otherwise Anglian territory,’ which implies that they were to the Anglian side of the early boundary between the East Saxons and the East Angles. Similarly, he suggests that Engleton in Staffordshire was a settlement of Middle or East Angles within the ancient borders of Mercia, and that conversely the village name of Markfield in Leicestershire preserves evidence of an early migration of a group of Mercians into Middle Anglian territory. He applies similar reasoning to suggest that Wichnor in Staffordshire and Whiston in Northamptonshire arose likewise from migrations of groups of Hwicceans from their tribal home, and that Phepson in Worcestershire lay outside the original territory of the Fserpingas. To Ekwall's examples concerning the Hwicce can be added the double hundred of Hwicceslea which formed the northern–most tip of Northamptonshire at the time of Domesday, cf.Hart, C., The Hidation of Northamptonshire (Leicester, 1970), map in flyleaf.Google Scholar The name is preserved in Witchley Heath, now in Rutland. F. M. Stenton has suggested that migrations of this kind may explain some of the worst complexities of Anglo–Saxon archaeology; cf ‘The English Occupation of Southern Britain’, in Preparatory to Anglo–Saxon England, ed. Stenton, D. M. (Oxford, 1970), p. 270, n. 4.Google Scholar

9 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica (hereafter HE), bk III, c. 24.

10 The name is spelt (in) Wreocensœtan in CS, 487, an authentic charter of the year 855, preserved in Hemming's Cartulary.

11 Wrockwardine near Wellington also perpetuates the name. Jackson, K., in Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh, 1953), pp. 601–2, regards the borrowing into OE as of the mid–seventh century, which suggests that the material underlying the Tribal Hidage is unlikely to have been compiled before this period.Google Scholar

12 CS, 1119.

13 Ibid.

14 This accounts for the ‘pagan’ incursion into the province of the Wreocensætan in 855, recorded in CS, 487. The raid was doubtless a Norse venture from Ireland, gaining access via the estuaries of the Mersey or the Dee. There seems to be no evidence to support ProfessorFinberg's, H. P. R. assertion that ‘Mercia never reached the western sea’ (Lucerna, London, 1964, p. 66), unless he meant Mercia proper, excluding its subject provinces.Google Scholar

15 For all this, see ProfessorFinberg's, valuable chapter on ‘The Princes of the Magonsæte’, in The Early Charters of the West Midlands (Leicester, 1961), pp. 217–24 (hereafter ECWM).Google Scholar

16 Stenton, F. M., ‘Pre–Conquest Herefordshire’, in Preparatory to Anglo–Saxon England, ed. Stenton, D. M. (Oxford, 1970), p. 194.Google Scholar

17 HE, bk v, c.23.

18 British Museum, Cotton MS. Vespasian B vi, fos 108–109.

19 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 183, fos 61–64. Both this and the Cottonian list were edited by Page, R. I. in Nottingham Medieval Studies, x (1966), pp. 6–10Google Scholar; their dating and relationship are discussed Ibid., ix (1965), pp. 73–76. I have to thank Professor Bullough for bringing this evidence to my notice.

20 CS, 332, a genuine and contemporary text.

21 CS, 332; ECWM, p. 140.

22 CS, 1040; ECWM, p. 141. Attention is drawn to Birch's footnote to his edition of this charter, an interesting example of an early study of Anglo–Saxon topography.

23 See the chapter ‘Mercians and Welsh’, in Finberg's Lucerna, pp. 66–82.

24 ECWM, pp. 225–27.

25 ECWM, pp. 197–216.

26 CS, 1119.

27 Medieval Archaeology, vi–vii (1962–63), pp. 15–52.

28 Nennius, Historia Brittonum, ed. Mommsen, T. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi, xiii, Part I, 1894), p. 206.Google Scholar

29 HE, bk II, c.14.

30 Essays in History presented to Reginald Lane Poole, ed. Davis, H. W. C. (Oxford, 1927), pp. 136 ff.Google Scholar, reprinted in Preparatory to Anglo–Saxon England, ed. Stenton, D. M. (Oxford, 1970), pp. 127–35. That Holland and Kesteven were initially quite separate from Lindsey is further illustrated by their ecclesiastical history, discussed by Stenton in Anglo–Saxon England, p. 49.Google Scholar

31 HE, bk IV, c.6. Bede's statement was accepted and copied by the local chronicler of Peterborough in the early twelfth century. See The Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, ed. Mellows, W. T. (Oxford, 1949), pp. 4, 5, 14, 160.Google Scholar

32 Liber vitœ: register and martyrology of New minster and Hyde abbey, Winchester, ed. Birch, W. de Gray (Hants Record Soc, 1892), p. 88.Google Scholar

33 HE, bk IV, c.19. Bede tells us that the South Gyrwe were ruled by their own princeps at this time, and we cannot doubt that the other small tribal units named in the Hidage also had each their own ruling house, which was probably dynastic like those of the larger groupings whose royal genealogies have been preserved.

34 CS, 1003; Hart, C., The Early Charters of Eastern England (Leicester, 1966, hereafter ECEE), pp. 23–24.Google Scholar

35 Chadwick, op. cit., elaborated by Miller, E., The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 8–12.Google Scholar

36 For the old course of the Western Ouse, see the map by Darby, H. C., The Medieval Fenland (Cambridge, 1940), p. 97.Google Scholar

37 EHD, i, p. 713, n.2.

38 ECEE, p. 153.

39 The identity is accepted by Blair, P. Hunter, in An Introduction to Anglo–Saxon England (Cambridge, 1956), p. 254.Google Scholar

40 HE, bk IV, c.19.

41 See also the discussion in my forthcoming Hidation of Cambridgeshire. In the second edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Britain in the Dark Ages, 1966, the Tribal Hidage names Wixna, Wigesta, Færpinga, Bilmiga, and Willa are located in a group round Leicester. I have been unable to discover the reasoning behind this.

42 See the map forming the frontispiece to Hallam's, H. E.The New lands of Elloe (Leicester, 1954).Google Scholar

43 Ekwall, , ‘Tribal Names in English Place–Names’, Namn och Bygd, xli, pp. 147–48.Google Scholar

44 It must be admitted that early records suggest that the district was sparsely populated in the Norman period; cf.Douglas, D. C., ‘The Social Structure of Medieval East Anglia’, in Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. Vinogradoff, P., ix (Oxford, 1927), p. 120. But there is no reason to suppose that it was any less attractive to settlers in the sixth to eighth centuries than the rest of the fenland.Google Scholar

45 Cf. Bede, HE, bk III, c.25, ‘Strenaeshalc, quod interpretatur Sinus Fari’.

46 The Place–Names of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, ed. Mawcr, A. and Stenton, F. M. (Cambridge, 1926), pp. xviii, xix.Google Scholar

47 Ibid. Sword Point is best shown on the eighteenth–century map of Whittlesey Mere by John Bodger.

48 Ibid.

49 The Place–Names of Hertfordshire, ed. Gover, J. E. B., Mawer, A., and Stenton, F. M. (Cambridge, 1938), pp. xvi, xvii, and CS, 812.Google Scholar

50 Seebohm, F., The English Village Community (London, 1883), map facing p. 426. This book summarizes what is known of the early history of Hitchin.Google Scholar

51 HE, bk V, C.16, where Bede mentions that it was formerly a kingdom of its own.

52 HE, bk I, c.15.

53 Anglo–Saxon Chronicle (hereafter ASC), sub anno 530, 544.

54 HE bk V, c.23.

55 Symeon of Durham, Historia Regum, ed. T. Arnold, ii (Rolls Series, 1885), p. 393. The omission of Rutland from this list of shires, and the hidage allocated to Wiltshire, suggest that the exemplar was of the tenth century, although the surviving text is mid–twelfth century.

56 HE, bk IV, c.13.

57 Adomnan, abbot of Iona, was the first writer to apply the term imperator to a Northumbrian bretwalda; John, E., Orbis Britannie (Leicester, 1966), pp. 9 ff. The whole of this chapter of John's book is relevant to my present argument concerning the nature of the bretwaldaship.Google Scholar

58 Anglo–Saxon England, p. 293.

59 Stenton, F. M., ‘Medeshamstede and its Colonies’, Historical Essays in honour of James Tait, ed. Edwards, J. G., Galbraith, V. H., and Jacob, E. F. (Manchester, 1933), pp. 313–26.Google Scholar

60 CS, 275.

61 Sisam, Kenneth, ‘Anglo–Saxon Royal Genealogies’, in Proc. Brit. Acad., vol. 39 (1953). pp. 324–25.Google Scholar

62 Jolliffe, J. E. A., Pre–Feudal England: The Jutes (Oxford, 1933), pp. 77, 81, 91. 97.Google Scholar

63 West Saxon annal preserved in ASC ‘A’, s.a. 648.

64 Ibid., s.a. 661.

65 ECWM, pp. 167–80.

66 The Place–Names of Gloucestershire (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 31–33.Google Scholar

67 CS, 134.

68 CS, 139.

69 CS, 127.

70 CS, 183.

71 CS, 205.

72 ASCs.a. 566; on the location, see Stenton, Anglo–Saxon England, p. 28, n. 1.

73 ASC s.a. 577.

74 Alton Priors (Wilts.), beside the Wansdyke; ASC s.a. 592.

75 ASC s.a. 628. Cirencester remained permanently under Mercian control, and over two centuries later Asser described it as being in the territory of the Hwicce: Asser's Life of King Alfred, ed. Stevenson, W. H. (Oxford, 1904), p. 47.Google Scholar

76 See also Myres, J. N. L., ‘Wansdyke and the Origin of Wessex’, in Essays in British History, ed. Trevor–Roper, H. R. (London, 1964), pp. 1–28,Google Scholar and his Anglo–Saxon Pottery and the Settlement of England (Oxford, 1969), pp. 117–18. These articles illustrate how very difficult it is to relate present day archaeological knowledge of the period to the known historical framework.Google Scholar

77 HE, bk V, C.18; CS, 37.

78 CS, 54, 58, 59, 65; ECWM, p. 31; Finberg, H. P. R., The Early Charters of Wessex (Leicester, 1964), p. 249 (hereafter ECW).Google Scholar

79 CS, 63, 70–71; ECW, pp. 69–70.

80 The second battle of Wodnesbeorg; ASC s.a. 715.

81 CS, 170, 181, 185.

82 ASC s.a. 802.

83 The battle of Ellendune; ASC s.a. 825. C. S. Taylor's location of the site, based on Domesday evidence, is confirmed by CS, 447, dated 844, and CS, 948, dated 956.

84 ECWM, pp. 172–75.

85 CS, 509; Taylor, C. S. was the first to point out the significance of this charter, see Gloucestershire Studies, ed. Finberg, H. P. R. (Leicester, 1957), p. 33.Google Scholar

86 CS, 274.

87 CS, 75, 272–73.

88 I agree with Sonia Chadwick Hawkes that the nobleman buried at Taplow beside the River Thames, with the richest grave goods yet discovered in England apart from Sutton Hoo, could well have been a princeps of the Cilternsætan. Medieval Archaeology, xi (1967), p. 66.Google Scholar

89 HE, bk III, C.21.

90 Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, i, p. 378;EHD, i, p. 635. This, of course, rests on the assumption that Diuma's bones were interred near the place where he died, and were not translated subsequently.

91 ECEE, p. 245.

92 Ekwall would place them about 15 miles further north, at Horbling and Billingborough in Kesteven. Namn och Bygd, xli (1954), p. 148. If it be postulated that the Bilmiga derive from a name such as Billing, then the Billing Brook in Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire is worth considering, cf. ECEE, pp. 156, 158.Google Scholar

93 Gover, J. E. B., Mawer, A., and Stenton, F. M., The Place–Names of Northamptonshire (Cambridge, 1933).Google Scholar

94 HE, bk V, c.19; Eddius Stephanus, Vita Wilfridi, c.66.

95 Hart, C., Hidation of Northamptonshire (Leicester, 1970), p. 39 n. 3.Google Scholar

96 C. Hart, Hidation of Cambridgeshire, forthcoming, and cf. Hunter Blair, op. cit., p. 254: ‘it is probable that in the fifth century the Well stream was the main channel of entry from the North Sea giving access to the fenland rivers and ultimately to the gravel terraces along the river banks beyond the Fens themselves’.

97 Sarrazin, G., in Englische Studien, xxiii (1899), pp. 228–30;Google ScholarO'Loughlin, J. L. N., in Medieval Archaeology, viii (1964), pp. 5, 10.Google Scholar

98 On Surrey, see ECEE, pp. 117–18, 137.

99 CS, 111: in provincia qua nuncupatur Middelseaxan (704); CS, 201: in Middil Sæxum (767); Public Record Office E132/3/57 (an unpublished charter of King Offa of Mercia, relating to Harmondsworth in Middlesex, and apparently authentic): in provincia Mediterraneorum saxonum (781).

100 It seems likely that Hertfordshire was created by Edward the Elder. It is not mentioned by name until 1011 (ASC).

101 Gibbs, M., Early Charters of the Cathedral Church of St Paul (Royal Historical Society, Camden Third Series, vol. lviii, 1939), no. J.9.Google Scholar

102 Ibid., no. J.16.

103 HE, bk I, c.7. The early charters of St Albans are all suspect in their surviving forms, but there is no reason to doubt late traditions that King Offa of Mercia endowed the monastery there in the late eighth century. See further, Levison, W., ‘St Alban and St Albans’, Antiquity, xv (1941), pp. 337–59. I would question Stenton's assertion (Anglo–Saxon England, p. 54) that ‘for most of its course the northern boundary of Middlesex represents nothing more than the southern limit of the franchises of St Albans Abbey’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

104 See the map of the Kentish coastline in Anglo–Saxon times in P. Hunter Blair's Anglo–Saxon England, p. 247. This however is based mainly on geological considerations, and does not take sufficient account of other evidence. According to the map, Lydd was then under water, whereas we know that it was assessed at three sulungs in an authentic charter of 774, preserved in a mid–tenth century copy (CS, 214). The Merscware of this charter were ravaged by King Cenwulf of Mercia in 798 (ASC). Again, some of the cemeteries shown in the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map of Dark Age Britain appear to have been submerged in the Wantsum Channel, according to Hunter Blair's map. For larger scale and more accurate maps of the coast of North–East Kent in the pagan period, see Medieval Archaeology, ii (1958), p. 6, and xi (1967), p. 7; and for Romney Marsh, Ibid., viii (1964), p. 83. There is need for an authoritative investigation of the English coastline in Anglo–Saxon times, taking place–name and archaeological material into account as fully as the geology.

165 CS, 341.

106 For a very able survey of the evidence relating to the boundary in Romney Marsh, see Brooks, Nicholas in Medieval Archaeology, viii (1964), pp. 82–83.Google Scholar

107 CS, 442.

108 CS, 247.

109 CS, 260. See further, Jolliffe, op. cit., pp. 55–59.

110 CS, 260.

111 CS, 506; Jolliffe, op. cit., p. 57.

112 CS, 328, an agreement between King Cenwulf of Mercia and the Archbishop of Canterbury in 809, was enacted at a witan at Croydon and subsequently witnessed by the Satrapes Cantuariorum at Canterbury.

113 HE, bk iv, c.13.

114 HE, bk iv, C.16.

115 Professor Bullough has pointed out to me that the diocesan boundary of Chichester (the successor to Selsey) may possibly preserve the early boundary of the South Saxon kingdom.

116 EHR, clx (1925), p. 498. Brownbill appears to have been following Kemble here, cf. The Saxons in England (2nd edn, London, 1876), p. 82.Google Scholar

117 Stenton, Anglo–Saxon England, p. 293.

118 Loyn, H. R., Anglo–Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (Oxford,. 1962), pp. 45, 306.Google Scholar

119 It need hardly be added that there is no sign of such interpolation in the oldest surviving text of the hidage. Since writing this, I have found that the point did not escape notice by Corbett, and Maitland, , cf. Domesday Book and Beyond (Fontana edn, London, 1960), p. 582, n. 2.Google Scholar

120 This view is arrived at after careful scrutiny of ProfessorFinberg's, valuable handlists in The Early Charters of Devon and Cornwall (Leicester, 2nd edn, 1963),Google Scholar and The Early Charters of Wessex (Leicester, 1964). The appendix to the Burghal Hidage allocates 30,000 hides to the West Saxons in the early tenth century, but there may have been a substantial reduction of assessment by this date, Medieval Archaeology viii (1964), p. 87, n. 51.Google Scholar

121 Stenton, Anglo–Saxon England, p. 294.

122 I am greatly indebted to Professor D. Bullough, who read this paper in draft and subjected it to searching criticism, resulting in some radical amendments; to Professor K. Cameron, who went through the place–name material; and to Professor H. C. Darby and his staff of the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, for preparing the fair copy of the map which illustrates the paper. The contents of the map and of the paper are, of course, wholly my own responsibility.