POLITICAL HISTORY 



Part I — To the End of the Reign of Henry VIII 



LANCASHIRE is one of the youngest of the English counties. The 

 district formed part of a remote march or borderland which was 

 J not definitively divided into shires until the twelfth century. 

 Between the departure of the Romans and its conquest by the 

 Northumbrians the history of this district is almost a blank. Attempts have 

 been made to identify within its limits the sites of a number of the twelve 

 victories attributed to the legendary King Arthur in the Historia Brittonum of 

 Nennius, but ' they are altogether too suspicious to merit a place in sober 

 history.' ^ 



Certain it is, however, that down to the beginning of the seventh 

 century this region, with the rest of the western side of the island from the 

 Severn Sea to the Firth of Clyde, and part of the later West Riding (Loidis 

 and Elmet) was still held by unconquered Britons, whose heightened sense of 

 common blood and interest in the fierce conflict with the advancing English 

 is seen in their assumption of the new name of Cymry, i.e. compatriots. 

 How far they attained to common organization or action, and to what extent 

 the primacy of the rulers of Gwynedd (North Wales) was recognized are 

 questions we cannot answer, but there is ample evidence that the northern 

 Cymry were divided among a number of tribal kingdoms, the largest of 

 which, called by the English down to the tenth century the kingdom of the 

 Strathclyde Welsh and afterwards Cumbria, extended from the Clyde to the 

 (Cumberland) Derwent and Stainmoor. The existence of the small kingdom 

 of Elmet renders it probable that west of it there were one or more such 

 principalities between the Derwent and the Dee, including the present 

 Lancashire, but their names have not been preserved.' 



Ethelfrith, the first king of united Northumbria, may have begun to 

 conquer them before his great victory at Chester in 613 which severed the 

 northern from the southern Cymry, But as even Elmet was first reduced by 

 his successor Edwin (617—33)' it is probable that the subjugation of the 

 districts west of it was in the main a consequence of the battle of Chester. 

 The victories of Penda of Mercia and his Cymric allies over Edwin and 



' Engl. Hist. Rev. xix, 138. The River Duglas, on which four battles are said to have been fought, was 

 identified as early as the fourteenth century with the Wigan Douglas ; Higden, Polychronicon (Rolls Ser.), v, 

 328—9. Mr. A. Anscombe finds the ' flumen quod vocatur Bassas' in the same neighbourhood, and locates 

 the first battle, fought 'juxta hostium fluminis quod dicitur Glein' at the mouth of the Lune ; Zeiischr. fur 

 CeMsche PUhkgie, v (1904), 103. 



' Teyrnllwg is given as the traditional Welsh name of this region in the lolo MSS. p. 86 (quoted by 

 Rhys, Celtic Brit. 136), but better authority could be desired. 



* Nennius, Hist. Brittonum (ed. Mommsen), 206. 



