The work of fortification begun in Alfred’s reign had been continued by the restoration of the Roman walls of Chester in 908, by Ethelred and his wife; and Ethelfleda herself (possibly during the lingering illness which later chroniclers give to her husband) had built a burh at Bremesbyrig. During the twelve years which elapsed between Ethelred’s death and that of Edward in 924, the brother and sister built no less than twenty-seven burhs, giving a total of thirty, if we add Chester and Bremesbyrig, and Worcester, which was built in Alfred’s reign. Now what was the nature of these fortifications, which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uniformly calls burhs?
There is really not the slightest difficulty in answering this question. The word is with us still; it is our word borough. It is true we have altered the meaning somewhat, because a borough means now an enfranchised town; but we must remember that it got that meaning because the fortified towns, the only ones which were called burhs or burgi, were the first to be enfranchised, and while the fortifications have become less and less important, the franchise has become of supreme importance.
Bede, in the earliest times of our history, equated burh with urbs, a city; Alfred in his Orosius translates civitas by burh;[36] the Anglo-Saxon gospels of the 11th century do the same;[36] and the confederacy of five Danish towns which existed in Mercia in the 10th century is called in contemporary records fif burga, the five boroughs.[37]
Burh is a noun derived from the word beorgan, to protect. Undoubtedly its primitive meaning was that of a protective enclosure. As in the case of the words tun, yard, or garth, and worth or ward, the sense of the word became extended from the protecting bulwark to the place protected. In this sense of a fortified enclosure, the word was naturally applied by the Anglo-Saxons to the prehistoric and British “camps” which they found in Britain, such as Cissbury. Moreover, it is clear that some kind of enclosure must have existed round every farmstead in Saxon times, if only as a protection against wolves. The illustrated Saxon manuscripts show that the hall in which the thane dwelt, the ladies’ bower, the chapel and other buildings dependent on the hall, were enclosed in a stockade, and had gates which without doubt were closed at night.[38] This enclosure may have been called a burh, and the innumerable place-names in England ending in borough or bury[39] seem to suggest that the burh was often nothing more than a stockade, as in so many of these sites not a vestige of defensive works remains.[40] We may concede that the original meaning of an enclosure was never entirely lost, and that it appears to be preserved in a few passages in the Anglo-Saxon laws. Thus Edmund speaks of mine burh as an asylum, the violation of which brings its special punishment; and Ethelred II. ordains that every compurgation shall take place in thaes kyninges byrig; and the Rectitudines Singularum Personum tells us that one of the duties of the geneat was to build for his lord, and to hedge his burh.[41] But it is absolutely clear that even in these cases a burh was an enclosure and not a tump; and it is equally clear from the general use of the word that its main meaning was a fortified town. Athelstan ordains that there shall be a mint in every burh; and his laws show that already the burh has its gemot or meeting, and its reeve or mayor.[42] He ordains that all burhs are to be repaired fourteen days after Rogations, and that no market shall be held outside the town.[43] In the laws of Edgar’s time not only the borough-moot and the borough-reeve are spoken of, but the burh-waru or burgesses.[44] Burh is contrasted with wapentake as town with country.[45]
Fig. 2.—Anglo-Saxon MS. of Prudentius.
If we wish to multiply proofs that a burh was the same thing as a borough, we can turn to the Anglo-Saxon illustrated manuscripts, and we shall find that they give us many pictures of burhs, and that in all cases they are fortified towns.[46] Finally, Florence of Worcester, one of the most careful of our early chroniclers, who lived when Anglo-Saxon was still a living language, and who must have known what a burh meant, translates it by urbs in nineteen cases out of twenty-six.[47] His authority alone is sufficient to settle this question, and we need no longer have any doubt that a burh was the same thing which in mediæval Latin is called a burgus, that is a fortified town, and that our word borough is lawfully descended from it.
It would not have been necessary to spend so much time on the history of the word burh if this unfortunate word had not been made the subject of one of the strangest delusions which ever was imposed on the archæological world. We refer of course to the theory of the late Mr G. T. Clark, who contended in his Mediæval Military Architecture[48] that the moated mound of class (e), which we have described in our first chapter, was what the Anglo-Saxons called a burh. In other words, he maintained that the burhs were Saxon castles. It is one of the most extraordinary and inexplicable things in the history of English archæology that a man who was not in any sense an Anglo-Saxon scholar was allowed to affix an entirely new meaning to a very common Anglo-Saxon word, and that this meaning was at once accepted without question by historians who had made Anglo-Saxon history their special study! The present writer makes no pretensions to be an Anglo-Saxon scholar, but it is easy to pick out the word burh in the Chronicle and the Anglo-Saxon Laws, and to find out how the word is translated in the Latin chronicles; and this little exercise is sufficient in itself to prove the futility of Mr Clark’s contention.
Sentiment perhaps had something to do with Mr Clark’s remarkable success. There is an almost utter lack of tangible monuments of our national heroes; and therefore people who justly esteemed the labours of Alfred and his house were pleased when they were told that the mounds at Tamworth, Warwick, and elsewhere were the work of Ethelfleda, and that other mounds were the work of Edward the Elder. It did not occur to them that they were doing a great wrong to the memory of the children of Alfred in supposing them capable of building these little earthen and timber castles for their personal defence and that of their nobles, and leaving the mass of their people at the mercy of the Danes. Far other was the thought of Ethelfleda, when she and her husband built the borough of Worcester. As they expressed it in their memorable charter, it was not only for the defence of the bishop and the churches of Worcester, but “To Shelter all the Folk.”[49] And we may be sure that the same idea lay at the founding of all the boroughs which were built by Alfred and by Edward and Ethelfleda. They were to be places where the whole countryside could take refuge during a Danish raid. The Chronicle tells us in 894 how Alfred divided his forces into three parts, the duty of one part being to defend the boroughs; and from this time forth we constantly find the men of the boroughs doing good service against the Danes.[50] It was by defending and thus developing the boroughs of England that Alfred and his descendants saved England from the Danes.