XPost: soc.genealogy.britain, soc.history
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UK’s north-south divide dates back to Vikings, says archaeologist
Watford Gap discovered to be key geographical divide between invaders
and Anglo-Saxons
Dalya Alberge
Monday 16 October 2017 00.04 BST
Last modified on Monday 16 October 2017 00.33 BST
The north-south divide has been the butt of jokes in Britain for
years, but research has shown the Watford Gap, which separates the
country, was in fact established centuries ago when the Vikings
invaded Britain.
According to the archaeologist Max Adams, who made the discovery while researching his new book, the Northamptonshire-Warwickshire boundary
known as the Watford Gap is a geographic and cultural reality that can
be traced back to the Viking age.
Adams was struck by the absence of Scandinavian placenames south-west
of Watling Street, the Roman road that became the A5. “There might be
one or two names, but I don’t think there are any, and there are
certainly hundreds and hundreds north-east. Clearly the Scandinavian
settlers stopped at Watling Street,” Adams said.
“I began to notice that all the rivers’ sources stop pretty much on
the line of Watling Street. North-east of that line, all the rivers
flow into the Irish Sea or the North Sea. South and west of it, they
all flow into the Severn or the Thames.”
Map of Viking Britain
He added: “Roman engineers constructing the route between London
[Londinium] and the important town of Wroxeter [Viroconium], in what
is now Shropshire, chose this ancient line, and it became Watling
Street. In the Viking period it became the boundary for a treaty
between King Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum. Connecting the West
Midlands with the south-east, it runs through a narrow pass between
hills, the Watford Gap.
“I’m not sure whether people on the north side of Watling Street immediately feel themselves different or whether that’s more of a
southern joke. But clearly it’s a joke with a very old reality
attached to it.
“These days, we’re unaware of which way rivers face and where they
flow out to. It doesn’t make any odds to us. We just put bridges over
them. But, for most of history, such things have mattered. Your
natural trading routes are along rivers and all the medieval monastic
estates used the rivers as their arteries of power. So clearly the
geography of power has always mattered … Geographically, it slaps you
in the face as soon as you figure it out.”
He explained that the Anglo-Saxon kings eventually fortified that line
and made it a frontier in the early 10th-century reigns of Eadweard
the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd: “So, in a sense, they reinforced
the reality of that piece of geography and it seems to have been with
us ever since.”
“In 1959, when the M1 was first built, the Watford Gap was its end
point – the butt of north-south divide jokes ever since,” said Adams.
The M1 service station’s unofficial status as the country’s dividing
point was celebrated in 2009 with the unveiling of a new road sign,
with one arrow pointing north and another pointing south. Previously
called the Blue Boar, the service station became famous as an
early-morning hangout for The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, among
millions of travellers who were fed and watered there. Linguists have
since identified it as the boundary between northern and southern
English.
But boundaries are certainly blurred, Adams said: “We find it bizarre
that, on the news last night, people were talking about Cheshire as
the north … Routinely, politicians describe Hadrian’s Wall as if it
was the border between England and Scotland. Well, there’s another 60
miles of England beyond Hadrian’s Wall.”
Adams has excavated widely in Britain and abroad, and he will include
his research in a forthcoming book, titled Aelfred’s Britain: War and
Peace in the Viking Age, to be published by Head of Zeus on 2
November. It is a companion volume to his previous early medieval
histories, The King in the North and In the Land of Giants.
In the new book, he notes that, before the second decade of the 10th
century was out, new fortresses or burhs were constructed at 19 sites
strung out on a broad line between the Thames and the Mersey,
unmistakable in their offensive purpose. That line roughly follows
Watling Street.
“It has an ancient and continuing geographic distinction, barely
noticed by today’s midlanders. Broadly speaking, to the north-east
all the rivers flow into the Wash or North Sea on the east side, or
the Irish Sea on the west. To the south and west every river drains
into either Severn or Thames. This is England’s natural fault line,
its continental divide: the watershed that divided and divides north
from south (epitomised by the famous Watford Gap, on the A5/M1
north-east of Daventry); and I have no doubt that Scandinavian armies
and settlers knew its imperatives.”
https://t.co/3vjGNfZr7H
--
Steve Hayes
Web:
http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/
http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/
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