A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 
an English county, its peculiar land tenures, its division into wards, the 
ubiquity of its military defences, the motes and mounds, the earthen 
dykes and deep ditches, the peel towers and castellated churches, the 
complexity of its ethnology, the philological confusion of its folk-speech, 
and the sturdy self-reliance of its inhabitants, differentiate the county 
from the rest of England, and compel us to look at the evidences upon 
which its history is based, without reference to the forces which were 
working out the destiny of the nation of which it formed a part. 
The early history of the county presents innumerable difficulties 
owing to the dearth of documentary materials. The northern chroniclers 
have little of value to relate. A mantle of silence, like the veil of Isis, 
hangs over it till the close of the eleventh century. Domesday Book has 
nothing to tell us of the holders of land in the time of Edward the 
Confessor, or of the settlement after the Norman Conquest. The religious 
houses were founded too late to throw any light upon the dark period. 
In fact we have no authentic history worthy of the name till Henry I. 
took in hand the district which his brother had added to his kingdom. 
In the following century a new era opened with the series of the Pipe 
Rolls. In order to elucidate the history of the twelfth century, as far as 
it can be done with the materials at our disposal, and to compensate in 
some measure for the absence of the Domesday Survey, it has been 
determined to print in full all the documentary evidences which touch 
on the feudal institutions of the district and their establishment under 
English rule. 
The omission of the northern counties from Domesday can scarcely 
be explained by the reasons which seem to have satisfied the first editors 
of the great national record. Kelham thought it probable that the king’s 
commissioners had found it impossible to make an exact survey of 
Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, as the whole of the 
northern district had been laid waste by the Conqueror ; and Sir Henry 
Ellis supported this view by quotations from the chronicles to show the 
completeness of the devastation." In that case our north-western county 
was not included in its entirety in the Survey, either because it was of 
no value in the eyes of the commissioners, or because the inhabitants 
were so exasperated by the Conqueror’s vengeance that no juries could 
be found to make the requisite returns. Alongside of this view we must 
place a tradition common to the religious houses in Cumberland, that it 
was William the Conqueror, and not his son Rufus, who first subdued 
the district, and made it definitively a portion of his newly-acquired 
dominions. ‘There is in the Register of the Priory of Wetheral a frag- 
mentary document called the ‘ Distributio Cumbirlandie ad Conquestum 
Angliz,’? which Dugdale ® printed with the title of the ‘Chronicon 
Cumbrie,’ to which the early local historians had access and upon which 
they relied for much of their information on the Norman settlement of 
1 Introduction to Domesday Book, i. 38, 39. 
® The Register of the Priory of Wetherbal, p. 384, ed. J. E. Prescott. 
3 Monasticon, iii. 584, new edition. 
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