Cumbria

“ While many Celtic names of places remain to attest the prolonged sovereignty of the Britons in Cumbria, by far the greater number refer to a period when the enterprising Northmen, coming from various shores, but all included under the comprehensive title of Danes, had pushed their conquests into the mountain country of Cumberland and Westmorland and those portions of the north of Lancashire, which are comprised within the district of the English Lakes. This territory had become the exclusive possession of the Norwegian settlers. ”

“ The territories of Dunmail, as king of Cumbria, included the entire tract of country from the western limits of the Lothians in Scotland to the borders of Lancashire, and from Northumberland to the Irish Sea. ”

“ On the whole we are less in want of a mass of information respecting the Welsh, than of accuracy and precision in that which we possess. ... An obscurity still more dense than that over Wales involves the district lying to the north of that country, comprised under the name of Cumbria." J. M. Lappenberg, History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, volume 1, page 119-122. See CUMBRIA AND STRATH-CLYDE. BRITAIN: A. D. 635. Defeat Of The Welsh By The English Of Bernicia. ”

“ In the reign of Edmund the Magnificent, an event occurred which has given fresh occasion for dispute. A famous passage in the "Chronicle" (945 a.d.) tells how Edmund and Malcolm I of Scotland conquered Cumbria, which the English king gave to Malcolm on condition that Malcolm should be his "midwyrtha" or fellow-worker by sea and land. Mr. Freeman interpreted this as a feudal grant, reading the sense of "fealty" into "midwyrtha", and regarded the district described as "Cumbria" as including the whole of Strathclyde. ”

“ The most important of these kingdoms were Cumbria in the north, between the Clyde and Ribble, Gwynedd in North Wales, and Damnonia in Devon and Cornwall. Now and again prominent chiefs from one or other of these three realms succeeded in forcing their neighbours to combine against the Saxon enemy, and styled themselves lords of all the Britons, but the title was precarious and illusory. The Celts could never learn union or wisdom. ”

“ And very many country folk, with wives and with cattle, he sent thither to dwell and to till the land,’ Dolphin was probably the son of Earl Gospatric, and held this part of Cumbria under Malcolm, and this was a direct invasion of his rights, as the kings of Scotland unquestionably were in legitimate possession of the whole of the ancient British kingdom of Cumbria, which extended from the Clyde to the Derwent and to Stanmore ”

“ Out of the north, from Cumbria and Strathclyde, came the great prince and warrior Cunedda, whose family seem to have taken possession, with or without resistance, of large tracts of Wales, Merioneth, Cardigan, and many other districts deriving their names in fact from his sons. ”

“ Thus, with the exception of the right bank of the Brathay, the parish embraced the whole area of the two valleys of the Rothay and Brathay and their confluents. Its boundary marched with that of parishes in Westmorland, Cumberland and Lancashire. Its northern line was for centuries the boundary between the Anglian rule, and the Celtic kingdom of Cumbria. Its circuit counted some thirty-five miles by flat measurement; but much of it lay on summits that reach to a great height. ”

“ His armies chased the Britons from the kingdom of Cumbria, and made the district of Carlisle English ground. A large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon the see of Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by one whom we have seen before labouring as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new mission-station in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of Northumberland as he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. ”

“ Thanks to thee.”
“Nay, without thy quickness and thy courage I could have done nothing.”
“And now, Torfrida, I see not which way there is left for us to turn; for if the North Angles knew me so also will the men of Elmet [7] and Northumbria. But an we do not enter Northumbria there remains nothing but the [148] wilds that lie to the north-west in South Strathclyde and Cumbria, where no man is, nor food, nor bield nor bush to shelter us from the wind, nor anything but moss and moor. ”

“ Strathclyde or Northern Cumbria, an ancient kingdom of the Britons, which originated in the 8th century, and comprised the W. side of Scotland between the Solway and the Clyde; Alclyde or Dumbarton was the capital; was permanently annexed to Scotland in 1124 under David I.
Strathfieldsaye, an estate in Hampshire with a fine Queen Anne mansion, 7 m. ”

“ Siward, earl of Northumbria, invades Scotland, and puts Malcolm, son of King Duncan, in possession of Cumbria. The Saxon Chronicle tells us that in the year 1054 ‘Earl Siward went with a large army into Scotland, both with a naval force and a land force, and fought against the Scots, of whom he made great slaughter, and put them to flight, and the king escaped. ”

“ Mr. Gilpin conjectures that the pile was probably intended to mark a division not between the two Counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, but rather between the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, in elder times, when the Scottish border extended beyond its present bounds. The generally received tradition, however, concerning this cairn is, that it was raised to commemorate the name and defeat of Dunmail, the last king of Cumbria, in the year 945, in his conflict with the Saxon Edmund, on the occasion above related. ”

“ By the population of Lothian and Cumbria, who had probably had enough of Donald and his Gaelic followers, Duncan would no doubt be received at once; for though the people of Lothian might have preferred a son of the Saxon queen, and might not dislike to see him set aside for one of that family, they would have no hesitation in supporting his cause against that of his uncle. The Gaelic inhabitants of Scotland proper seem to have been divided. ”

“ Southern Cumbria or Cumberland does not appear to have been included amongst the conquered districts recovered by the Britons after the defeat and death of Egfrid at the battle of Nectan’s Mere. When Eardulf the bishop carried off the relics of St. Cuthbert and St. Oswald from the profane violence of a pagan as fierce as Penda, the most trusted companion of his hurried flight was Edred, the Saxon Abbot of Carlisle; and there is little reason to doubt that at this time the descendants of the men who won the land in the days of Egfred still peopled the broad acres granted to the monastery of St. ”

“ Three centuries of antagonism appear to have engendered a feeling of bitter hostility between the Galwegians and their neighbours of Scottish Cumbria and the Lothians; whilst their continual encroachments upon the ancient kingdom of Strath Clyde must, from a very early period, have tended to throw the people of that province upon the protection of the Scottish kings, and materially to advance the policy which eventually placed a branch of the Mac Alpin family upon the Scoto-Cumbrian throne. ”

“ One very important theory must not, however, remain unmentioned. According to this view Arthur was not a king in South Britain, or rather South Wales, as later writers, from Geoffrey downwards, have always supposed, but a king of the North Britons of southern Scotland and of Cumbria. ”

“ Aleppo, one of the most beautiful citics of the Turkish cmpire, containing 40,000 houses and 200,000 inhabitants, has been visited by an earthquake resembling those which laid waste Lisbon and Cumbria, in the last century.
The first and most severe shock occurred on the 13th of August, 1822, about ten in the evening, and instantly buried thousands of the inhabitants under the ruins of their clegant mansions of stone, some which deserve the name of palaces. Several other shocks succeeded, and even on the 16th, shocks were still experienced, some of which were sevcre. ”

“ Looking at cities and villages so purely Umbrian, some spread among cornfields close to a swift clear river, others set upon heights which nearly touch the sky on stormy days, we forget that beyond these hills and mountains encircling the big valley of Umbria stretch other lands as fair. We forget, because it is a little world which during long centuries has been set apart from all else, and where man has but completed the work of nature herself. ”

“ But we were back in Umbria, mystical Umbria, where ancient gods walk hand in hand with saints along the banks of gently flowing streams; where life goes slowly to the tune of bells slung round the dewlaps of snow-white oxen, bred by the waters of Clitumnus and praised by Virgil, Pliny and Propertius ”

“ The autumn sun is declining over the fields and oak-woods and vineyards of Umbria, where—in the wide undulating valley, inclosed by high rounded hills, bleak or dark with ilex, each with its strange terraced white city, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, Todi—the Tiber winds lazily along, pale green, limpid, scarce rippled over its yellow pebbles, screened by long rows of reeds, and thinned, yellowing poplars, reflecting dimly the sky and trees, the pointed mediæval bridges and the crenelated towers on its banks ”

“ The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters—et tacitos sine labe laous sine murmure rivos—and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino. ”

“ All is ascetic, yet tender, save where, far off on the plain, the low red wall of a city lies like a sword across the land. In the distance Umbria, with its clean, pale landscapes, so significant and lucent under the quivering dome of white, seems less of earth than Heaven, almost breathlessly impersonal, a country more for angels than for men; but nearer at hand she smiles at you, like some saint turning from the ravishments of contemplation to encourage a fellow-being whose vision is not clarified to behold what she has seen. ”

“ Memory had clothed her with antique grace, had peopled her with Emperors and Popes, had filled her winding streets with mediaeval palaces, her piazzas with the gay Renaissance. But coming from Umbria, where the Middle Ages still linger, and that older, simpler life of the Beginning of the World is pictured in her vineyards and olive gardens, we found Rome little more than a modern city, full of unrest and noise. Everywhere there was scaffolding and masonry, and we feared to look for our familiar landmarks lest the great god of change should have swallowed them up. ”

“ In no country perhaps are these facts more strongly marked than in Umbria, where even the smallest hamlet is perched upon a high hill-side as though to provoke attention, and where the larger cities glare at each other from commanding eminences, seeming, even in this peaceful nineteenth century, to challenge one another by the mere aspect of their mighty walls. ”

“ Thus, by the advance of the Gauls from the north and the Picentes from the south, the Umbrians were shut off from the seaboard, and confined to the district known as Umbria in historical times. When Rome began the consolidating of Italy, Umbria consisted of the region bounded by the Ager Gallicus on the N., by Etruria (the Tiber) on the W., by Picenum on the E., and by the Sabines on the S. The Umbrians kept a desperate hold of this district, which lies between the two arms of the Apennines. This position indicates of itself that they had been driven before stronger foes. ”

“ Siena or Florence, Pisa or Lucca, any of the flowery cities of Tuscany would have been its proper setting. It is too gay for Umbria, whose hills are bathed in the serene, ineffable calm of a mystic holiness, who, remembering her many saints, still keeps the low estate of a handmaiden of the Lord. It is like a golden iris plucked from some Tuscan garden, and transplanted upon the bosom of this sombre precipice of tufa upheaved by Nature in primeval struggles. For chance and the Papacy have grafted the most exotic bloom of Italian Gothic architecture upon the rock of Orvieto. ”

“ But it is a joyful thing to walk south to Italy, south and west. It is so. And there is a certain exaltation in the thought of going west, even to Cornwall, to Ireland. It is as if the magnetic poles were south-west and north-east, for our spirits, with the south-west, under the sunset, as the positive pole. So whilst I walk through Switzerland, though it is a valley of gloom and depression, a light seems to flash out under every footstep, with the joy of progression.
It was Sunday morning when I left the valley where the Italians lived. I went quickly over the stream, heading for Lucerne. ”

“ Greek and Roman writers never wearied of celebrating the excellence of its harbors, the beauty of its landscape, the exuberant richness of its soil, and the enchanting softness of its air. The coast is varied by the isolated cone of Vesu ́vius and a range of volcanic hills, including the now extinct crater of Solfata ́ra. Umbria was a mountainous country east of Etruria. Before the coming of the Gauls, it extended northward to the Ru ́bicon and eastward to the Adriatic; but its coast was wholly conquered by that people, who drove the Umbrians beyond the mountains. ”

“ We made our discoveries, saw much, learned not a little philosophy. And, most of all, we caught a glimpse of the heart of Umbria—Umbria of the saints. We watched the gathering of the golden maize in the plain below Assisi while [viii] we walked with St. Francis among the vines and olives; we saw the vintage being brought home with song and thanksgiving at Orvieto and Viterbo. We dwelt among beautiful simple-hearted men and women, living in little farms far from the toil of the modern world, who still worship God in the gladness of their hearts and the spirit of the ardent thirteenth century ”