At Osmotherley, Ingleby, Arncliffe, Welbury, Kirklevington, Thornaby, Ormesby, Skelton, Great Ayton, Kirkdale, and Kirkby-in-Cleveland are tombstones of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is thus evident that the Angles were only beginning to penetrate these northern parts of Yorkshire when the Vikings invaded and carried on the work of land settlement much further. Further extension was made by the Norse from the West Coast, as the place-names show. Monuments of pre-Viking art work exist at places with Scandinavian names, such as Kirkby-Moorside, Kirkby-Misperton, and Kirkdale; while in other cases only Viking age Crosses are found at places with names of Anglian origin, such as Ellerburn, Levisham, Sinnington, Nunnington.
This would indicate that some Anglian sites were depopulated and refounded with Danish names, while others had no importance in Anglian times but soon became flourishing sites under the Danes.
In the west of Yorkshire the great dales were already tenanted by the Angles, but the moors between them, and the sites higher up the valleys, were not the sites of Churches until the Danish period. (See "Anglian and Anglo-Danish Sculpture in the North Riding," by W. G. Collingwood. Yorks. Arch. Journal, 1907.)
Yorkshire at the time of the Domesday survey was carucated and divided into Ridings and Wapentakes. Thingwall, near Whitby. (Canon Atkinson, site lost.) Thinghow, near Ginsborough (now lost), and Thinghow, now Finney Hill, near Northallerton. (Mr. William Brown, F.S.A.) Tingley, near Wakefield; Thingwall, near Liverpool; Thingwall in Wirral, may have been Thingsteads. (W. G. Collingwood.)
Names of places ending in -ergh, and -ark are dairy-farms from setr and saetr. Names with ulls- as prefix, such as Ulpha, Ullscarth, Ullswater, record the fact that wolves inhabited the hills.
Beacons were kept up in olden days on hills which bear the names of Warton, Warcop, Warwick and Warthole. Tanshelf, near Pontefract, is derived from Taddenesscylfe, Blawith and Blowick from Blakogr—blackwood. Axle, Acle, arcle from öxl, the shoulder.
The Battle of Brunanburh.
Was it Fought in Lancashire?
"There is one entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which must be mentioned here as it throws light upon an archæological discovery of considerable importance. In 911 the Chronicle records that the Danish army among the Northumbrians broke the peace and overran the land of Mercia. When the King learned that they were gone out to plunder, he sent his forces after them, both of the West Saxons and the Mercians; and they fought against them and put them to flight, and slew many thousands of them...."
"There is good reason to believe," as Mr. Andrew shows (Brit. Numis. Jour. i, 9), "that the famous Cuerdale hoard of Silver coins, which was found in 1840 in a leaden chest buried near a difficult ford of the Ribble on the river bank about two miles above Preston, represents the treasure chest of this Danish army, overtaken in its retreat to Northumbria at this ford and destroyed."
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