Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/620

Rh 568 NORTHUMBERLAND tan-gloves at Hexnam, some potteries, and numbers of small brick and tile works. Fisheries. The Tyne is tlie most productive salmon-netting river from a commercial point of view in England and Wales. The richness of its fisheries is mentioned in the time of Henry I. Ac cording to Professor Huxley s report, the estimated catch in 1882 was 41,110 salmon and 10,336 salmon-trout. The salmon catch has doubled within the last four years, and is not known to have been exceeded except in three abnormal years, 1871-73. The fish taken by the Berwick Salmon Fishery Company in 1882 were 8808 salmon, 3104 grilse, and 12,390 trout. Bull-trout abound in the Coquet. The sea -fisheries include herrings, whitcfish, and some crabs and lobsters. In 1872 the number of boats employed was 1163, chiefly cobles. Beyond Holy Island the boats and fishing are essentially Scotch. Antiquities, &c. The pre-Roman antiquities of Northumberland are camps, cairns, standing-stones (both monoliths and fragment ary circles), sculptures on rock, hand -made pottery, and weapons, ornaments, &c., of stone, bronze, iron, jet, glass, and gold. The camps are entrenched enclosures rudely rounded or quadrate, with their main entrances and those of the hut-circles, or foundations of lints, always facing sunrise. They differ from the camps of the Romans in their want of symmetry, and in an absence of plan in distribution, due to the desultory clan-warfare of their inhabitants. The primitive village of Greaves Ash near the Breamish, the strong defensive earthwork at Elsdon, and the camps at Old Bewick, Lordenshaw near Rothbury, and Warden Hill near Hexham are a few instances from among the great numbers that are preserved on the eminences girdling the northern Cheviots and on the lower untilled grounds. Traces of occupation by Romans, Saxons, and marauders of later times sometimes mingle with the remains of the original occupants. The sculptured cups and circles, now familiar to antiquaries, were first brought into observation at Rowtin Linn near Ford in 1852. Numerous instances and varied designs have since been found, both on &quot;fast&quot; rock and on slabs associated with burials. The uplands are dotted with round barrows and cairns containing cists and interments, sometimes cremated, some times inhumed, and in some instances both together. The county scarcely affords material as yet for a separation into periods of stone, bronze, and iron. The older interments are associated only with stone, but not necessarily precedent to bronze ; in the &quot;late Celtic &quot; or &quot; early iron &quot; ages all three were in use together. In Roman military antiquities this is the premier county of Britain. For the great wall between the Tyne and the Sol way, see HADRIAN S WALL. The Roman road from London nearly bi sects the county, and still goes familiarly under the name of &quot;the Watling Street,&quot; It passes numbers of quadrangular camps, three of which were permanent stations. Its eastern branch, the Devil s Causeway, leaves it near the Tyne for Berwick. In the south-west of the county lay the Maiden Way, making for Liddisdale. Coal, iron, and lead appear to have been worked by the Romans. Numer ous heaps of heavy iron slag, mingled with charcoal, are the sites of little &quot;bloomeries&quot; on the uplands. They may be of different ages, from that of the Britons downwards. Of Anglo-Saxon buildings the Danes left almost nothing. The crypt of Wilfrid s abbey of St Andrew at Hexham is one undoubted remnant ; portions of several other churches are very doubtfully pre -Norman. Some thousand Saxon stycas found buried at Hex- ham, the &quot; fridstool &quot; there, and an ornate cross now shared be tween Rothbury and Newcastle are the other principal vestiges of Saxon times. The Black Dyke, a bank and ditch crossing the line of the Roman wall about three miles east of the Irthing, is supposed by some antiquaries to be the continuation of the Catrail at Peel Fell ; the latter was the probable boundary-fence between the Saxon Ber- nicia and the British Strathclyde. The ecclesiastical architecture of the county suffered greatly at the hands of the Scots. Not a few of the churches were massive structures, tower-like in strength, and fit to defend on occasion. Lindisfarne Priory, the oldest monastic rain in the county, dates from 1093. Hexham Abbey Church (early 12th century), raised over the crypt of Wilfrid s cathedral, has been termed a &quot;text-book of Early English architecture ;&quot; it lacks the nave, destroyed by the Scots under Wallace. Of Brinkburn Priory the church remains, and has been well restored. Hulne Abbey, now surrounded by the sylvan loveliness of the Alnwick demesnes, was the first Carmelite monastery in Britain. Besides these there are fragments of New- minster Abbey (1139), Alnwick Abbey (1147), and others. An exquisitely graceful fragment of Tynemouth church is associated with some remains of the older priory. Among churches ought first to be named St Nicholas s, Newcastle (1350), the prototype of St Giles s, Edinburgh, and now the cathedral-church of the new diocese. There is a massive Norman church at Norham, and other Norman and Karly English churches at Mitford, Bamburgh, Wark- worth, Almvirk (St Michael s), &c. , most of them with square towers. The stone roof of the little church at Bellingham, with its ln avy semicircular girders, is said to be now unique. &quot;It may be said of the houses of the gentry herein,&quot; writes old Fuller, &quot; quot mansiones, tot munitiones, as being all castles or castle-like.&quot; Except a few dwellings of the 16th century in New castle, and some mansions built after the Union, the older houses are all castles. A survey of 1460 mentions thirty-seven castles and seventy-eight towers in Northumberland, not probably including all the bastle-houses or small peels of the yeomen. At the Conquest Bamburgh, the seat of the Saxon kings, was the only fortress north of York. Norham Castle was built in 1121. None of the baronial castles are older than the time of Henry I. A grass mound repre sents Wark Castle. Alnwick Castle is an array of walls and towers covering about five acres. The interior was restored in Italian palace style by the late Duke Algernon. Warkworth, Prudhoe, and Dunstanburgh castles are fine groups of ruins. Dilston Castle has still its romantic memories of the earl of Derwentwater. Bel- say, Haughton, Featherstone, and Chipchase castles are joined with modern mansions. The peel -towers of Elsdon, AVhitton (Rothbury), and Embleton were used as fortified rectory-houses. Seaton Delaval was the work of Vanbrugh. The place-names of the county may be viewed as its etymological antiquities. The Danish test-word by we find to be absent. Saxon tons, hams, cleughs (clefts or ravines), and various patronymics are met with in great numbers ; and the Gaelic knock (hill) and Cymric caer, dwr (water), cefn (ridge), bryn (brow), &c., mingle with the Saxon. Many curiosities of nomenclature exist, some strange, some expressive, e.g., Blink-bonny, Blaw-wearie, Skirl-naked. A few gleanings of folk-lore still remain for the discriminating collector. The virtues of certain holy wells in ailments or barren ness and of a south -running stream in sickness, the powers of Irish men and cattle over snakes and snake-bites, and the growing of boulders in the earth like bulbs are still latently believed in by many ; and there is a general aversion to burying on the sunless side of the churchyard, which is left to suicides and unchristened infants. The literary antiquities are the Border ballads. &quot; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart more moved than with a trumpet &quot; (Sir Philip Sidney). Bibliography. See Hodgson s unfinished county History, 1820-40, a marvel of minute local fidelity ; Hodgson Hinde s General History, added thereto, 185S ; also Skene s Celtic Scotland, Green s Making of England, and Freeman s Norman Antiq. of Northumberland, 1769 ; Greenwell, British Barrows, 1877 ; and tin. Archxologia JEliana, being proceedings of the Antiquarian Society of New- able matter on antiquities, natural history, &c., both in these and in the J)er- v-icJcshire Naturalists Transactions ; and Storer, Wild White Cattle of Britain, man s Report to the Royal Commission, 1882; John Gray of Dilston, &quot;Report, library of the Lit. and Phil. Society at Newcastle is one of the best provincial libraries in the kingdom. (H. M.) NORTHUMBERLAND, KINGDOM OF. The history of Anglo-Saxon England is the history, not of a heptarchy of independent and equal or nearly equal kingdoms united by any kind of federal bond, but of the rise and progress of the kingdom of Northumberland from the end of the 6th to the middle of the 8th century under Ethelfrith and the descendants of Edwin of Deira, the predominance of Mercia during the latter half of the 8th century under Offa, and the gradual union of England under the descend ants of Egbert of Wessex between the close of the 8th century and the Norman Conquest. The present article is chiefly concerned with the first of these periods chrono logically, and geographically with the portion of Britain which under the Northumbrian kings at the time of their greatest power extended from the Humber to the Forth, and was bounded on the east by the German Ocean and on the west by an irregular and gradually receding line, at times overstepped, of the country more or less mount ainous retained by the Celts of Strathclyde and Cumbria between the Clyde and the Mersey (see Plate II., vol. viii.). The first settlements of the Angles in these regions and the foundation of the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira have been spoken of in vol. viii. p. 270. Bernicia and Deira were Celtic names, Bryneich and Deifr, somewhat modified ; the former kingdom corresponded generally with the modern counties of Durham and