Memorials of old Durham

by Unknown

These northern ghosts or goblins have been very well described in the following verse attributed to Ben Jonson:

"Sometimes I meete them like a man,
Sometimes an ox, sometimes a hound,
And to a horse I turn me can,
To trip and trot about them round.
But if to ride
My backe they stride,
More swift than wind away I go;
O’er hedge and lands,
Through pools and ponds,
I whirrey laughing, ho, ho, ho!"

NAME-PLACES IN THE DURHAM DALES
By William Morley Egglestone

WHEN Julius Cæsar conquered Britain, he found the island peopled by Celts—a branch of the great family of nations called the Aryan, or Indo-European, which spread over the world from Central Asia. The Western branches, which rolled in successive waves over Europe, included the Celts, who, according to the Greek traveller Pytheas, were in the fourth century before the Christian era quite at home in Britain, for he there saw growing in the fields corn which the farmers took in sheaves to the barns, in which were threshing-floors.

In Weardale, situated in the western and mountainous part of the county of Durham, and surrounded by brown and heath-clad fells, the ancient Briton lived in the limestone caves, and hunted in the oaken forests. In the Wear Valley, near Hamsterley, and about seven miles east of Stanhope, there is a remarkable relic of the ancient Britons. This ancient fortification—like many other works constructed by the Britons of old, such as the Dene Holes of Essex and the Cliff Castles—has its name, and is called The Castles. The treasure of Heatheryburn Cave, at Stanhope, consisted of bone knives and pins, boar tusks, bronze and jet ornaments, spearheads and bronze celts, with prehistoric human skulls, showing considerable activity of the natives who manufactured and formed the various rude implements. Apart from these landmarks, there have come down to us in names of places the Celtic roots the ray and the tay, which we find in Lang Tay, the name of a small but long tributary stream of water in Burnhope; and in Reahope, a tributary hope to Stanhope, and which empties its waters into Stanhope Burn, a tributary of the River Wear.

The Roman power seems to have been extended to Weardale, for the two Roman altars found at Bolihope and Eastgate, and the denarii found at Westgate, prove that this lead-mining dale was well known to those ruling and wall-building people.

Soon after the Romans left, the Anglo-Saxons—including the Jutes, the Saxons, and the English—established themselves along the eastern coast of Britain, and these tribes of the Teutonic family took a firm grasp of the land, and planted the roots of the English nation.

Though little more in the early Saxon period than a dense forest, in which wild animals and ancient Britons found shelter, Weardale ultimately became an Anglo-Saxon district, influenced by the blending of the Scandinavian element in dialect and names of places, owing to its proximity to the Danelagh on the south, and the Norwegian settlement in Cumberland on the west. The whole of the Palatinate appears to have remained Saxon through the Danish rule except the northern banks of the Tees. We know little of Weardale at this period. Situated amidst mountains, and lying next the Strathclyde, it was probably as much Celtic as Saxon; but the division of counties, however, was made in 953 by the Saxon Edred, or Eadred, and the Weardale people would know their county, for, on the bleak and heather-clad fell of Burnhope, the limits of the Palatinate is marked by a pile of stones, called "eade stones"—evidently King Eadred’s stones—the boundary established by that Saxon monarch. Weardale and Teesdale, however, under the power of the Normans, were destined to be turned into desolate wastes; yet, as we shall see, the Saxon names of places survived the desolation of fire and sword.

If we examine the names of places in the Bishopric of Durham a century or so after the Danish rule had ceased and the Norman rule had been established, we shall find a large percentage of Saxon suffixes. In the Boldon Buke, A.D. 1183, there are some 151 names of manors, wards, vills, etc., in which, with a few other names in charters of about the same period, we have 45 endings, or suffixes, in 175 names of places. The Anglo-Saxon test-word, ton, figures in no less than 34 of these principal names of places: as Darlington, a settlement of the Deorlings; Stockton, the stockaded town; Haughton, the haugh town; Morton, the moor town; Norton, the north town; Essington, the home or settlement of the Essings, as the Herrings gave a name to Herrington. Of the other Saxon suffices we have: ley 25, burn 14, don 8, worth 6, ford and ham 5 each; and the Celtic hope, common in the Anglo-Saxon North, occurs 8 times. Thus, 8 endings take up 105 of the names of places in Boldon Buke, the remaining 70 names having 37 endings. The Danish test-words, by and thorpe, only occur once each—Killerby and Thorp. These names do not show that the Vikings made permanent settlements north of the Tees. In Teesdale we find in Domesday Book, A.D. 1086, Lontune, Mickleton, Lertinton, and Codrestune, having the Saxon ending tun or ton; but though the names of these places were English, the places themselves were, or had been, belonging to a Dane, for they were then in the hands of Bodin, and had formerly been Torfin’s—a person named from the Scandinavian god Thunder, or Thor. Hundredestoft and Rochebi have the Danish toft and by, and, like many other names, such as Thorsgill and Balders Dale, point to the influence and power of the Scandinavians and their heathen worship in the neighbouring dale of the Tees.

In the five northern counties, Worsaae returns Danish-Norwegian place-names in the following order: Westmorland 158, Cumberland 142, Durham 23, Northumberland 22, and Yorkshire in its three Ridings 405. The ending by occurs 167 times in Yorkshire, and thorpe 95 times; whilst 7 of each are ascribed to Durham, and but 1 of the latter only to Northumberland. Yorkshire, however, on a closer inquiry, shows over 250 names of places containing the element by, and over 160 of that of thorpe, the former predominating in the North and West, and the latter in the East and West Ridings. Of the 83 names ending in the Norwegian test-word thwaite, as mentioned by Worsaae, 80 occur in the northern district, Yorkshire 9, Lancashire 14, Westmorland 14, and in Norwegian Cumberland 43, whilst there are no thwaites in Durham or Northumberland. The evidence adduced from names of places thus goes to prove that the Angles of Durham and Northumberland, though under the yoke of the Danes during the ascendancy of the Scandinavian power, have, from their first settlement, continued on their adopted soil through all the vicissitudes incident to the descents of the Britons from the western mountains, the inroads of the Picts and Scots, the ravages of the Vikings, and the subduing marches of the powerful William of Normandy.