POLITICAL HISTORY 



IN the making of the counties of England, as part of the making of 

 England itself, the effect of geographical and physical conditions 

 can hardly be overestimated. On these depended the lines of the 

 Roman roads marking the way for Saxon settlements, the grouping of 

 the Saxon kingdoms, and the grouping of the counties within the kingdoms. 

 The district which was to become Nottinghamshire, being traversed by the 

 Trent, invited Roman and Saxon along its waterway as a passage north and 

 south. As a further development this passage had to be guarded, and 

 round a fortified centre the county originated. The reasons which thus 

 brought the county into existence gave it in later days its strategical impor- 

 tance, brought it actively into every insurrectionary movement of Scotland 

 and the north of England, and made it of so much moment in the history of 

 the Civil War. 



There is little or no definite evidence to mark the progress of the Angle 

 tribes who by the end of the sixth century had settled in the country round 

 the Trent. At their coming the Trent valley, in spite of Roman roads and 

 settlements, 1 was undoubtedly a wild tract of unreclaimed country hedged 

 round by hills and stretches of forest. It was only along the Fosse road that 

 they could slowly push on to the Trent and gradually people the territory 

 which was to become Nottinghamshire, on their way to further conquests 

 under the name of Middle English in Leicestershire and further west. Hence 

 when, by a gradual series of annexations, the kingdom of Mercia had come 

 into being by the end of the sixth century 2 Nottinghamshire evidently 

 existed as a territorial district until the break-up of Mercia into shires under 

 Edward the Elder in the ninth century. 3 However, the earliest mention of 

 the county is not until 1016, when, during the final struggle between Cnut 

 and Edmund Ironside, Cnut marched north and harried Nottinghamshire. 4 



No further mention of the county comes until 1064 or 1065, when 

 Earl Morkere, whom the thanes of Yorkshire and Northumberland had chosen 

 to be their earl after they had renounced and outlawed Earl Tostig, went 

 south to meet his brother Edwin with all the shire (i.e. Yorkshire), and with 

 Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire, and Lincolnshire until he came to North- 

 amptonshire. 6 The first definite outline of the bounds of the county and of 

 the wapentakes composing it, comes, of course, in the Domesday Survey, and 



1 See section on ' Roman Remains,' for full account of the Roman occupation of the district. 



1 Hen. of Hunt. Hist. Angl. (Rolls Ser.), 53. The original kingdom of Mercia evidently comprised 

 quite a small part of the later kingdom. Probably it included only the greater part of Staffordshire, 

 Derbyshire, and Nottinghamshire, with parts of Warwickshire and Leicestershire. See Chadwick, Studies 

 in Angl.-Sax. Institutions, 215. 



3 Stubbs, Const. Hi;t. \, 104-11. 



4 The spurious charter purporting to be made by King Wulfhere of Mercia in 664 granting Colingham 

 ' in Notinghamscira ' to the monastery of Peterborough is of necessity no proof that the shire existed so early. 

 Rather the mention of the shire at that date is further evidence of the spuriousness of the charter. Kemble, 

 Cod. Dipl. v, 4-8. 



4 Angl.-Sax. Chrm. (Rolls Ser.), i, 331. 



317 



