THE MIDDLELAND
The Middleland – a term invented by my father: The geographical centre of the island of Britain. An upland landscape, whose core is the Lake District hills, the Pennines, the Cheviots and the Scottish Borders, but whose fringes extend to the Humber in the south and the Firth of Forth and Clyde in the north. A land naturally unified by geography and culture for two thousand years, but repeatedly divided by political frontiers.
ORIGINS (before AD100)
The tribes of the Middleland in the centuries before the Roman invasion form a single cultural zone, stretching across what is now southern Scotland and northern England. Their scattered buildings and largely non-ceramic-using culture distinguish them from the ceramic/stone tower culture of Highland Scotland or the large hill forts and coinage of southern England.
MILITARY FRONTIER (AD100–400) see map p. 58
The Roman wall is laid straight through the tribal territories of the Middleland, dividing them – leaving the shrine of the Carvetii tribe god, Cocidius, north of the wall, while their population centre is south of it, and leaving most of the Votadini tribe, north, while their settlement at Corbridge is marooned south of the wall. The entire area, both sides of the wall, becomes a Roman military zone: there are none of the villas found in the civilian south of Roman Britain, instead the area is dominated for three hundred years by permanent garrisons of 15,000 soldiers, from regiments originally raised elsewhere in the Roman Empire.
CUMBRIA AND NORTHUMBRIA
THE OLD NORTH (AD400–600) see map p. 123
When the Romans leave, the frontier-line of the wall fades, and Cumbric-speaking groups reassert themselves in kingdoms, which stretch across the wall. The Roman military zone becomes a Welsh-speaking culture known as ‘The Old North’, known for its poetry, such as the Gododdin.
GOLDEN AGE OF NORTHUMBRIA (AD600–800)
By 600 almost all of the Middleland from the Humber to Edinburgh has come under the control of the kingdom of Northumbria – a Germanic-speaking culture, which becomes one of the leading civilisations in Christendom, known for its theology, sculpture, astronomy, manuscript illumination – and in particular for its historian, Bede, and its saint, Cuthbert.
NORSE INVASIONS (AD800–900) see map p. 139
The invasions of non-Christian groups by sea from Scandinavia – the ‘Vikings’ – inflict terrible damage on the Kingdom of Northumbria – and in particular on the monasteries which are the heart of its civilisation.
MIDDLELAND (900–1066) see map p. 155
By the middle of the tenth century, areas such as the Lake District are an ethnic patchwork of Cumbric-Welsh, Northumbrian-Germanic, and Norse-Viking communities. The core of the Middleland is dominated by the Cumbric kingdom of Strathclyde/Cumbria in the west and Northumbria in the east; these territories still stretch deep into modern Scotland and northern England, in defiance of the Roman wall. But the West Saxon kings of England are beginning to move north, and the Gaelic kings of Scotland are beginning to move south, squeezing the Middleland kingdoms between them.
THE MARCHES
NORMAN BORDERS (1066–1150)
In 1070, the final autonomy of the Middleland is crushed by William the Conqueror, and by the slave-raids of the Scottish king. A new border emerges out of the Roman Wall, and eventually runs diagonally from the wall in the west to Berwick in the east, right through the centre of the old Northumbrian/Cumbrian nations. Much of the land is now designated as ‘Royal Forest’ on which it is illegal to settle or farm. Vast areas are reduced to depopulated wilderness.
MONASTIC REVIVAL (1150–1300)
Recovery begins with monks, initially attracted to the wilderness as a retreat, but whose energy begins to rebuild the economy. There is now a formal border between England and Scotland. But the monastic orders and the aristocratic families still own vast estates on both sides of the border, and do not clearly define themselves as either English or Scottish – their culture is Latin and Norman-French – and they are closely tied to European Christendom.
THE MARCHES (1300–1600)
The Scottish Wars of Independence led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce bring a final break between England and Scotland. And the border takes on a brutal reality: cross-border landholdings disappear, it becomes illegal to marry across the border, or travel across it without permission. The core of the Middleland is redesignated as the Marches – a zone of fighting and cross-border raids, financed by the English and Scottish Crowns. Driven by this proxy war, the region becomes lawless, wild and dangerous.
UNION
THE MIDDLE SHIRES (1600–1750)
The Scottish Stuart King James VI also becomes King of England, and the Union of the Crowns means the disappearance of the border, and with it the rationale for the proxy war and the border raids. Within forty years, this ‘cockpit of violence’ has become one of the most peaceful areas in the country. But the legal differences between England and Scotland begin to create stark differences in landholding, leading to a pattern of small traditional farms on the English side, and larger ‘modern’ estates on the Scottish. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart claimant to the throne, marches through the Borders with little fighting.
ROMANTICS AND VICTORIANS (1750–1900)
For Walter Scott, the Borders landscape is now defined by its distant past, preserved in ballads and oral history. For William Wordsworth the more southerly hills represent the restorative power of nature and the pastoral world. Together these two writers make the Middleland the central landscape of the European Romantic movement.
MILITARY MARGINS (1900–2000) see map p. 188
The arrival of the First World War brings the War Office’s attention to the Middleland. Suddenly its position as a sparsely-populated area, far from the capitals, makes it again an ideal location for military projects. Over the following decades, tens of thousands of acres are turned over to munitions depots, airfields, forestry for trench-props, submarine aerials, nuclear material manufacture, and rocket testing.
DARK SKIES (2000–)
By the twenty-first century, many of these industries have vanished or are shrinking. The low population and the marginal land attracts the attention of environmentalists, who see the potential of the uplands and wetlands to promote carbon-capture, and protect vulnerable species.