In the west the linguistic situation was much more complex, for the historical
background was made up of a mixture of P-Celtic speakers persisting from the old
kingdom of Cumbria, Old English speakers who had first settled west of the
Pennines as early as the seventh century, and a double dose of Scandinavian
speakers - Danes pushing north-westward from Yorkshire and Norwegians
penetrating eastward up the Solway Firth (itself a purely Norse place-name), many
of whom must have spent a considerable time or even have been bom and brought
up in a strongly Gaelic (i.e. Q-Celtic) speaking region, most probably the Western
Isles of Scotland28. It would therefore be rash to assert that there was any linguistic
uniformity on the West March in the earlier middle ages, yet it is certain that the
Border itself, the political line running from the upper Solway into the River Esk
and following that stream to the confluence of the Kershope Bum (whence it ran
up the Kershope to reach and then follow the Cheviot watershed), marked no
linguistic division. The melting pot of languages was as much a feature of Scottish
Dumfries-shire as of English Cumberland29. Moreover, the evidence seems
convincing that an almost common form of Middle English speech, doubtless
possessing a strong Scandinavian element, was coming into general use in the
thirteenth century in northern Cumberland and eastern Dumfries-shire.
From the standpoint of social and political organisation it must be doubted whether
the Anglo-Scottish Border marked any significant divide for the first three and a
half centuries of its existence. North and south the underlying structure consisted
of multiple estates, usually called 'shires' (especially on the east side of the
country), which were derived from the manner in which royal or princely lordship
had been exercised in Dark Age times and indeed probably since an even earlier
period. Upon this structure a military feudal organisation had been superimposed
by the monarchy, from c, 1090 in northern England and from c. 1110 in southern
Scotland. The lordships or baronies which were created by this imposed feudal
order do not seem to have been significantly different in England and Scotland, at
least before the fourteenth century30. In both kingdoms there were 'anomalies', e.g.
in England the remarkable lordship or liberty of Tynedale, the valleys of North and
South Tyne, which was scarcely tamed into normality by being called the 'manor of
Wark' by English royal clerks in the later thirteenth century31; or the archbishop of
York's powerful liberty of Hexhamshire, centred upon the ancient church of Saint
Wilfred (674)32. Comparably in Scotland the prior of Durham's liberty of
28 Fellows-Jensen, G., Scandinavian Settlement Names in the North West (Copenhagen, 1985);
Armstrong, A.M., The Place-Names of Cumberland (English Place-Name Society, 1950-52).
Fellows-Jensen, G., Scandinavian Settlement Names in the North West, 307-321.
30 Barrow, G.W.S., "Northern English Society in the early middle ages", in; Northern History 4 (1969),
especially pp. 10-12, 18-20; Barrow, Kingdom of the Scots, chap. 1; Bartlett and Mackay, Medieval
Frontier Societies, 9-12, 14-16.
31 A History of Northumberland (15 vols., Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland County History
Committee), XV (ed. Dodds, M.H., 1940), 155-298; Stevenson, J., Documents Illustrative of the
History of Scotland (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1870), I, 28-9, 37, 59 etc.
32 A History of Northumberland, III (ed. Hinds, A.B., 1896).
203