Joseph Hunter

“ What passes current in the world as a tradition is often nothing more that an hypothesis: and it is difficult to distinguish between genuine tradition delivered down through a long series of generations, and a supposition or conjecture founded on presumptions and probabilities first propounded to the world and introduced to the general currency at a period very little remote. So that the credit which is due to a rumour purporting to be a tradition will be greater when the apparent probabilities are the weakest. ”

“ To regard the first Norman castle of Sheffield as having been the Saxon aula of the manor of Hallam is an hypothesis not liable to the objection which presses strongly against any other, that we want such evident tokens of its existence as we find at Laughton of the similar edifice of Earl Edwin. This hypothesis also accounts most satisfactorily for the superiority which we shall find the vill of Sheffield enjoying through the whole of Hallamshire in the first century after the Conquest. ”

“ Many beds of scoria, of the kind just mentioned, are found in the various parts of the parish of Sheffield, where there is now no tradition nor any record of any works of iron ever having existed. They are found even in the park which for many centuries past has been peculiarly appropriated to the pleasure of the lord. Over most of them the soil has so accumulated as to form a very thick crust, in which trees of ancient growth are at this moment flourishing. ”

“ The probabilities are therefore strong, that before the Norman invasion, and that even while the Romans had possession of the island, the iron-mines of Sheffield afforded employment to a considerable number of persons; some to draw the ore from its bed, others to extract from it the meta, and a third class employed in fabricating weapons, implements of husbandry, or domestic utensils.
The silence of Domesday affords no presumption against the validity of this conclusion. Miners or artificers of any class rarely came under the notice of the compilers of that survey. ”

“ All the neighbouring manors show in the depreciation of their value that they suffered more or less. But on these places the weight of the storm seems to have rested; for though rich and flourishing in the days of the Confessor, they were returned by the Domesday surveyors as being utterly wasted and therefore of no annual value. It was but the skirts of the storm which at this time, eleven years before the composition of Domesday-book, rested upon Hallam, but that manor which in the time of the Confessor had been valued at eight marks of silver, was then worth only forty shillings. ”

“ There has been so much cultivation in the country between Rotherham or Templeborough and Chesterfield, that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect to find any remains of the ancient high-way. The road between those places no lies through the town and parish of Sheffield; but the line of the Roman iter is rather to be sought on the south side of the Don, than on the present road which twice crosses the river, though it is evident from the name of the bridge at Attercliffe that there was formerly a ford at that place, and the Lady's-bridge at Sheffield is one of very high antiquity. ”

“ England boasts to have more and better native historians than any other country of what may be called modern Europe: and yet we are seldom able to fix, with certainty, the æra of the foundation of our cities and towns; much obscurity rests upon the ancient topographical divisions of our country, and even upon many important points of its general polity and history. ”

“ In the manor of Hallam three thousand acres had been redeemed and brought into cultivation: in Attercliffe three hundred, in Sheffield three hundred, and in Grimesthorpe, three hundred and fifty; making a total of little less that four thousand arable acres. In the rude state in which the art of agriculture was at the period before us, these would probably furnish employment to not fewer than three hundred persons, of whom thirty-six are particularly noticed as being of that class of tenantry called villani, a respectable class, the predecessors of our modern copy-holders and free-holders. ”

“ Local traditions must always be received with great caution when they remove a difficulty. But the tradition that the vill of Hallam was destroyed in an act of fury in the incensed conqueror is not by any means destitute of the support of written evidence. ”

“ While I write this, a gentleman is pursuing most successfully investigations of a Roman station on the Foss-road a few miles from Bath, which has been noticed by neither ancient nor modern topographers. And on the other hand, how many names of Romand stations in Britain are preserved by Ptolemy and the Ravenna geographer, which the most acute investigators of the Roman antiquities of Britain have failed to appropriate!—With respect to the second point, the objection presses with equal force against every other part of the Domesday manor of Hallam. ”

“ Tradition speaks loudly of the defeat and death of an invading king who came from the south, bearing a raven in his standard, amongst the hilld on the north of Bradfield. History, however, affords us here no certain light; since neither in the Saxon annals nor in our own Northumbrian Bede are any events recorded that can on decisive evidence be referred, as th their scene, to the territory which now composes either the manor or parish of Sheffield. ”

“ Danum, moreover, the modern Doncaster, the Campodonum of Dede, was decidedly a Northumbrian town, and yet it stood on the south bank of the Don. On the whole, the question seems to resolve itself into a balance of probabilities—where in one scale we have the convenience of having the line of demarcation so fixed and notorious as would be the course of such a river as the Don, and in the other what may be called the prescriptive claim of the present Yorkshire boundary. ”

“ Direct historical evidence is wholly wanting: and if from a few existing remains of the ante-Norman period of our history, and by deduction from the view of this district by the Domesday surveyors, we are able to trace out a few circumstances of its early state and history, this is all we must expect. ”

“ In the general calamity the inhabitants of these regions lying in the very centre of the island must have participated: and afterwards in the contentions of Northumbria and Mercia they must, from their frontier situation, have been peculiarly exposed to the calamities of war. Those two noble military earth-works called Castle-hill and Bailey-hill, both very near to the village of Bradfield, are evidently in their whole construction Saxon, and were doubtless thrown up for the defence of the kingdom of Northumbria. ”

“ Where they fixed their abode would be the metropolis of the neighbourhood, which in later times would become the vill giving name to the great manor of Hallam, and there we might expect to see arise the aula of its Saxon lord.
The two great objections to this opinion are, that we have no notice of any Roman station in this position; and that as far as appears there are no vestigia at the point in question of human habitation, and especially of a building so prominent as must have been the aula of the Saxon thane. ”

“ To the other inhabitants of the territory now forming the parish of Sheffield we may therefore with some confidence add a mixed multitude, a rude and intractable people, whose occupations were in working the iron-mines, or preparing for useful purposes the metal which was extracted from them. ”

“ This may seem a bold conclusion from the fact of a solitary remain of this people, though of so prominent a character, having been discovered in this place. But I venture to predict that it will not always be a solitary remain of that enlightened and all-conquering people ”

“ These tablets then were the charter of a number of discharged Roman legionaries. It was granted to them at the conclusion of their term of military service, ant when they were about to exchange a wandering for a settled, a military for an agricultural life. It was also evidently granted to them in pursuance of the policy introduced by Agricola, and adopted by his successors, of drawing away the native Britons to serve in distant parts of the world, and encouraging strangers brought hither in the Roman armies to settle themselves in marriage with the daughters of Britain. ”

“ In addition to what is there advanced to prove that the Walesho of Wulfric's charter was not, as Dugdale conjectured, Walsal in Staffordshire, but rather Wales in Yorkshire, may be mentioned that Morcar is named as the former Saxon lord of Wales in the Domesday-book. I suspect the Morligtune of the charter to be a place in the wapentake of Strafford, surveyed in Domesday under the name of Merelton. The manor had four berewitæ at the time of the Norman survey, but I am unable to fix its precise situation. ”

“ This lady was the daughter of Lambert earl of Lens in Artois, by Maud his wife, countess of Albemarle, who was half-sister to the Conqueror, being daughter of his mother Arlotta by her husband Helewyne de Comitis Villâ. Historians have made free with her memory. She is left by them under strong circumstances of suspicion that she was treacherous to her lord. ”

“ VI. Lastly, the notices which the Domesday survey contains of this district bring us acquainted with some of its ante-Norman proprietors, or chief lords. Immediately before the change of property occasioned by the successful invasion of the Normans, the land which now forms the parish of Sheffield acknowledged three Saxon lords. ”

“ To some he grants the much coveted privilege of Roman citizenship, and as an encouragement to them t ally themselves in marriage with the daughters of the country they had conquered, he extends the same privileges to their wives and offspring. ”

“ Watson's that the plate fell into the possession of Dr. Pegge of Whittington. in another letter to Mr. Wilson, dates Barnsley, May 13, 1762, Mr. Watson says, 'I have spent my time during the winter chiefly in transcribing MSS. for my intended History of Halifax parish, and for a History of Lancashire, which may possibly see the light in Providence grants me life and health. Your inscription I have not considered of late, as I think you told me by letter that a gentleman somewhere in your neighbourhood had made it out ”

“ In ATECLIVE J ESCAFELD hb Suuen .V. car tre ad gld. ubi poss. ee .III. car. H tra dr fuisse inland in HALLVN [7] .
In what appears to be a recapitulation of the Yorkshire survey, we have this further notice of them:
In Hallun .XXIX. car. In Atecliue .III. c. In Scafeld .III. car [8] .
The sense of the whole may be expressed in more modern language thus:
In Grimeshov, Grimshaw, Grimesthorpe, the modern Brightside-Byerlow [9] , one manor, Ulfac had three carucates and a half of land that were rated to the taxes, about three hundred and fifty acres, and there might be about two ploughs. ”