The Auldest Tung

Talking Hills

And it is this idea of physical landscape that I want to explore further. It exists far longer than people but if particular people or peoples are there long enough they leave a mark not just when they are there but sometimes long after they are gone. It is probably between a thousand and fifteen hundred years since a Celtic language or Celtic languages were spoken in Spanish Galicia and Northern Portugal but still in both there are rivers called Avon or similar. And something parallel might be true of Britain with regard to Germanic settlement not through rivers, which too are often British in derivation, but its hills and far beyond Sussex.

A hill large or small, has obvious topographical prominence. Its presence is noticed by those who settle below them simply by glancing up. They are features and named in a way their lack, a flat, featureless plain, may not be. A case in point is Thanet, where there are several woods, oak and other, but no trees, no hills and where only one “hill” word, interestingly the seemingly Saxon “down”, is deemed necessary as even rising ground is rare, although in Lydden what there is is also named. It is in contrast to across the River Stour in south-east Kent, where two words are used almost immediately and in more or less equal measure yet neither is hill itself, despite its use today in English being ubiquitous, if in density inconsistently so, throughout Britain more or less below the Highland line and outwith Wales. Those two words are firstly again “down” and then also “wold”. The former’s derivation’s is said to be the same as “dune” and thus some affinity with sand and sea-shore of the people who did the naming is at least suggested. The latter, however, comes from a different source, “wood”, i.e. wood in forest form, in turn suggesting for its users a more inland origin. It is in essence the same word as modern German’s “Wald”. It appears in Danish as “vold”, a rounded hill, although it is not clear if it is word of purely Danish origin, in the Netherlands and north Germany becomes “volde” and “wohlde”, whilst in Britain it has come to signify a hill cleared or partially cleared of the trees that once covered it and has also morphed, separately or not, mainly in contemporary western Kent and its surrounds into the more generic “weald” and occasionally elsewhere into “wealde”, “walden” and variations thereof.

Moreover, these “downs” and “wolds” just as they later would in Wessex and Sussex come, if not necessarily in conquest- then and in settlement-waves. Thus in south-east Kent in the posited first after 468 AD there is a rough circle of settlement from New Downs on the marsh edge east of Sandwich via Upton to Updown and then back to the Stour via Flemings, Weddington and Goldstone. And in a possible second, smaller wave, almost on the shoreline overlooking Deal, the “valley”, the dale, is Sholden Downs. It suggests on the face of it that those involved immediately post first Ebbsfleet had, albeit perhaps as leaders only, included not only included Old Frisians, coastal dwellers par excellence in their Germanic homelands, but also equally Saxons, “dune” Saxons, at that, potentially also coastal. However, in what looks like a third wave, whilst there are again “downs”, from Kings-, again on the coast, via Free- and Sutton-, Lang-, Snow- and others to Neavy Downs, there are also the first “wolds”. On the coast above Kingsdown is Ringwould, with as its earliest sources, it is said, not only “wealda” but precisely Roedligawealda and Ridlingwalde. It suggests the people who founded it might have been again not Angles, nor even Old Frisians or Saxons but Pliny’s Reudingi, “Reading” people with already a Reading Street on Thanet, plenty of others elsewhere and said in the homeland to have lived further east and therefore on higher ground. Then inland there are Sibertswold, called for someone called Swipbeort, and Womenswold, named not after women but a group of people called “wimlingas”.

However, that is it. Whilst “downs” with the occasional “barrow” becomes the name used for hills or chains of hills in inland Sussex, in Hampshire, Wilshire and into the Chilterns, i.e. in West Saxon- and what in part would become West Saxon client-held lands, and also in parts of Essex, parts of Surrey, west and north-west Kent, it seems in the Kentish heartland with one notable exception, the area immediately between Canterbury and Ashford that effectively separates the east of the county from the rest, they disappear. Instead there are “hills”, I am tempted to say simple hills but therein may lie another story, and also the first examples of new terms, “loe” or “low”. Indeed that first, Farthingloe, is to be found only just beyond the third wave of settlement, a tad west of Dover and notably at its most southern, coastal point, the second is the solitary Baldslow above Hastings, whilst the third, a group, with Trolliloes at its south, Coxlow and Burlow in its middle and Hadlow, actually the conflated Hadlow Down, at its north, is firmly wedged above the Pevensey Levels and therefore in what might have been at one time a no man’s land between soon-to-come Hastinga cum Jutish, Frutish/Kentish and originally native British and later Anglic territory.

However, it is a fourth “loe/low” area of settlement, the last before the Winterslows of western Hampshire, themselves deserving attention, since they are said to mean Winter’s burial mound and in the Doomsday Book were written as Wintreslev, of which more later, that is of greatest interest three times over. It is that centred on Lewes, perhaps the local regional capital in the era in question but written in its earliest known form as Laewe and Laewes, the plural of “low”, “loe” and/or notably “law”. It is also perhaps an area, or part thereof, from which there might later, during the Saxon takeover up to 590 AD, have been an exodus of its people perhaps west but mainly east and north. And finally it suggests, as does the Hadlow to Trolliloes group, that the use of “loe”, “low” etc might have been by a third, distinctive group of people, Germanic still but non-Saxon, indeed with potentially an antipathy towards Saxons, a different topographical understanding of “hill” and therefore a different descriptor..

All of which leaves one more, if small, firework to throw into this “hill” fire. It is the word “berg” or “bergh”, also in the form of “berrow” or similar. It is already there in the third wave after Ebbsfleet in the form of Three Barrows, and, if not exactly common, occurs frequently enough, sometimes as am alternative for “low” or “law”. It is, of course, basically the word in modern German in the south of the country, in Switzerland, Austria and German-speaking Italy for mountain, whilst further north again in modern German it is a synonym for “Huegel”, “hill”. Indeed right in the north of Germany where it meets the Netherlands and Denmark it is even a replacement. And it is there too in Dutch and Flemish, whilst in Danish it is bjerg and in old English was beorg, derivatives of which in Britain are both individually widespread and in local clusters. As an example of the former there is Bearsted by Maidstone in mid-Kent. Another is Bersted in West Sussex just north of Bognor. Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk provide the latter with the suggestion that “berg” people might have formed a fourth linguistic and therefore possibly tribal group that in places populated areas specifically not settled by “down”, “wold” and “low” people. The questions is, as with the other three, why and from where?

However, that is a question, which I intend in part to duck because in the context of this book it is irrelevant. As it turns out, although “bergh” is widespread, perhaps as far north as Kincardineshire, it is never in great density and can, I think, be discounted beyond re-noting there is an area to this day called Berge in the Jutland Traps. I will turn instead to an attempt to pin-point the ranges of each of the remaining four people groupings through their use of their particular word for hill and, moreover, to start by looking more closely not just at England but for the first time at Britain as a whole.

Now its clear, as already indicated, that one of the three, “down”, has a distribution, the reasons for which are mainly largely identifiable. Its use in concentration is in two fairly defined areas, north and south of the Thames. North it extends from the south Essex coast to in the west the full stretch of the Chilterns and in an arc around modern London. South it is the area that would have been originally West Saxon, essentially East-Central Hampshire, or became West Saxon-dominated, South Hampshire, the South Downs, Sussex, North Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and East Cornwall being cases in point.

However, there are anomalies. The core distributions do not explain the cluster of “downs” between Helston and Camborne in supposedly British west Cornwall, nor the smaller one at Cornwall’s western tip. Neither do they give any indication why there are clusters of “barrows” in the same areas, the occasional “staple”, not least around Taunton, or why there are no “wolds”. And finally it does not solve the riddle of why not inconsiderable clusters of “down”, suggesting Saxon enclaves independent of Wessex and Essex, are to found not in Middle- but in North-East England, often as “-don” with even, if on occasion, a solitary one or two in Scotland.

And it has to be said that “wolds” too have a fairly precisely defined distribution that also fall into two main groupings, in East Lincolnshire and directly across the Humber in East Yorkshire, stretching to just south of the North York Moors. But yet again there are exceptions; a small outlier in the Howardian Hills, with others throughout middle-England, not least south-east of Nottingham, but noticeably not in the South or the West Country or to the north of Yorkshire.

Yet “loes”, “lowes” and “lows” are if not more complicated then contrasting. In Britannia clusters are to be found scattered throughout, from Norfolk to Cornwall and Kent to Shropshire with in the far north-west the large concentration centred on the border of Britannia and Brittia in the Derbyshire Peak District. Small but wide-spread settlement is suggested, although by whom is not readily apparent, and it continues and intensifies further into Brittia with the northern iteration, “law”. It dominates not in all but large parts of north-east England once more, in Scotland to the Forth, and becomes ubiquitous north of there into Caledonia, albeit the periphery outwith obviously Pictish and Gaelic areas, as far as Moray.

In fact there is almost a trail of “down”, “wold”, “lows” and “laws” that for our purposes seems worth following up the east coast of Britain at least above a line from the Thames to Severn. In Essex there are the already explored “downs” but also “staples” and “lows” amongst “hills”, whilst in Suffolk there is the occasional “lowe” and Southwold but also settlements that are clearly marked out as Saxon and Old Frisian, prompting the assumption that they all took place as exceptions amongst mainly “hills” rather than the rule. And in Norfolk, although the Suffolk pattern is largely repeated in the south of the county, the north is “hill”-dominated with one exception, the area around Methwold but with a proviso. It is in the west of the county and therefore accessed not from the North Sea but The Wash, thus it could have had its origins elsewhere as could the cluster of “wolds” in north-west Northamptonshire and the “loes” of Bedfordshire, with, in the case of the former at least, the suspicion falling on Lincolnshire.

As to Lincolnshire itself, there it looks at first as if “hill” is once more king and that is true in general south of Louth, where all changes but with one specific place of distinction and note. In fact it could be described as the key to this whole work. In 500 AD Boston in Lincolnshire was on an island. It had in a slightly peculiarly Lincolnshire way Holland fen to its west, West Fen to its north, East Fen to its north-west, Quadring Fen to its south-west, the River Witham to its immediate south, the Wyberton and Frampton Marshes to is south-east and the North Sea to its east. And between it and the sea was Freiston, perhaps Frisian Town, with Freiston Shore, to either side of which are Freiston Low and Butterwick Low, both of which are in fact “highs”, albeit not very high, in comparison with what is around them.

But back to the journey northwards. North of Louth, specifically north of Market Rasen and through the rest of the county to the Humber, interspersed with the occasional “low”, “top”, “barrow” some “hills” but no “downs” the “wold” holds almost complete sway. And this pattern continues up the valley of the Trent southward to the large “wold” cluster by Nottingham on the Leicester/Nottinghamshire border and northward across into South Yorkshire. Whilst east of Beverley and south-east of the River Hull “hills” again predominate, there is Britain’s largest cluster of “wolds”, with again the occasional “low”, up the dip slope to the west of Beverley from Brough, said to be the Yorkshire Wold Country’s first capital before its harbour silted up, to Malton, its second, and the Derwent and south of the River Hertford in a sweep eastwards to Filey and the sea. And throughout, although there is the occasional possibly Frisian name, Saxon “downs” are few and far between.

Yet north of Filey again it all changes. In the North York Moors there are a few “hills” and no “downs”, “barrows” or “lows”. “Riggs”, ridges in modern English, are everywhere in an area probably later overwritten by Danes to the Cleveland Hills overlooking the River Tees, where briefly the “hill” reappears south of Middlesbrough, the “down” to its north. This is before both are subsumed firstly by a “low”, a “loe”, the perhaps ecclesiastical “hills” of Durham, then “downs” once more and “lows” from Wear to Tyne and the first appearance of the new boy from the west, the Norse “fjell” or “fjellet”, known in Northwest England and Southwest Scotland as the “fell” and within the Gaelic limits of mainland West and North Scotland and the Western Isles as the “val”.

However, the “fell” does not overwhelm. It never, as if encroaching from west, quite reaches the North Sea. Immediately north of Tynemouth it is held back by “downs”, mid-Tyne by “laws” and north of Blyth to Alnmouth by “hills” once more. Then it is “laws” until “downs” as Berwick is overlooked, “hills” to the Scottish border, “laws” and “hills” to Dunbar, “laws” to North Berwick, by Edinburgh once more “hills” and “laws” overlooking the estuary of Forth. This is whilst on the other side of the Forth, in Fife, west and east, “laws” predominate and finally there is a slew of “laws” interspersed with the occasional “down” and only slightly more frequently “hills” north through Angus and Aberdeenshire to the Moray coast with in each and every ripple a tale to tell.