Between the hills and dales of Derbyshire and the low-lying belt of land whose undrained morasses once made Lindsey practically an island, stretches a broad tract of triassic country which corresponds almost completely in outline with the modern county of Nottingham. One could almost believe at first sight that the rough English or Danish pirates of the fifth and tenth centuries were good geologists, who marked out the limits of their principalities on advanced scientific principles. It is only when we come to reconstruct the primitive characteristics of the landscape as they once were that we can see the real and natural reason for this coincidence. The lower valleys of the Trent, the Idle, the Don, and the other southern tributaries of the Humber, consist of a level alluvial stretch, from which the Isle of Axholm, now administratively united to Lincolnshire, stands up as a solitary outlier of the triassic system. At the time when the English colonised Britain, and for ages after, this wide alluvial plain formed a vast fen-land, through whose stagnant flats the rivers wandered in zigzag courses to the sea. Navigable streams formed always the highways along which the Teutonic pirates made their way into the heart of the Roman provinces in Western Europe; and the Trent must thus have served as the main channel by which the English settlers penetrated into the midland plateau of Britain. Though modern historians are not aided in the north, as they are in the south and west, by the dubious assistance of mythical legends from which to reconstruct the lost annals of the conquest, it is not difficult to guess what must have been the general drift of affairs in this particular district at least. The first English who settled in the north of Britain about the Humber were clearly the two hordes who turned severally northwards to York and southwards to Nottingham; and for this reason they were always known by the significant names of Northumbrians and Southumbrians, constantly employed by Bede, our earliest English historical authority. The pirates of the fleet which entered the Trent must have rowed on in their long-ships through the fen district of Axholm, and past the wooded region known later on as Sherwood Forest and the Dukeries, to the point where the valley widens out to a cultivable alluvial vale, according to the ideas of those times, at Nottingham. There these Southumbrian adventurers settled down, no doubt after massacring the adult male Welsh population, in the narrow strip of rich soil which borders the Trent from Burton to Newark. At a later time, other offshoot colonies spread farther along the course of the chief surrounding rivers; those who went up the Soar to Leicester being known as Middle English, and those youngest settlers of all who followed the Tame and the Trent itself to their head-waters at Tamworth, Lichfield, and Stafford, being known as the Mercians or March-men, since they formed the advanced English outpost against the Welsh. But the colonists of Nottinghamshire itself, as being the original horde, retained the distinctive name of Southumbrians, and spread on every side up to the fens on the north, the Isle of Lindsey on the east, and the unpeopled primary hills of Derbyshire on the western border.
There was an old British town on the spot where Nottingham now stands even before the English arrived; and its native name of Caer Tigguocobauc was remembered by Welshmen as late as the days of Asser, King Alfred’s Welsh secretary and Bishop of Sherborne in the West Welsh country beyond Selwood, who explains it as meaning “the House of Caves.” But, as in some few other cases, the English here entirely changed the original name. The chief clan of the Southumbrians was that of the Snotingas, and from them the town took its new title of Snotinga-ham: just as Ynys Witrin became Glæstinga-byrig or Glastonbury, and as Pengwern became Scrobbesburh or Shrewsbury. Traces of Roman occupation have also been unearthed at Nottingham itself by local antiquaries. For nearly two hundred years after the first English settlement of Britain the Southumbrians retained their independence; but at the end of that time Penda of Tamworth, the successful leader of the Mercians, united them to his own people, as he also united the Middle English of Leicester and the Lindis-waras of Lincolnshire. Penda was a heathen; but even before his time Paullinus of York had preached Christianity among the Southumbrians, and had baptized many people in the Trent at a clan village called Tiwulfinga-ceaster — an old Roman station then occupied by the Tiwulfing clan, and identified by Canon Bright with Southwell, where St. Mary’s Minster, for ages connected with the see of York, has always claimed St. Paullinus for its founder. Penda’s own son Peada, whom the Mercian king had made ealdorman of the Southumbrians and Middle English, became a Christian: and when his brother Wulfhere succeeded him as king of all the Mercians, the distinction between the three tribes seems almost to have died away. The see was originally fixed at Leicester, but was afterwards removed to Lichfield: and at a later date Archbishop Theodore divided the diocese into five, one of which had its bishop-stool again placed at Leicester, the four others being at Lichfield, Worcester, Sidnacester, and Dorchester-on-Thames.
With the Scandinavian invasions the town of Nottingham itself first comes prominently into notice. When the Danes under Ingwar and Ubba had settled down in Northumbria and divided its lands among themselves, they began to turn towards the Mercian territories beyond the Humber; and Nottingham lay naturally right in their path as they pushed south-westward along the Trent water-way. “That ilk host,” says the English Chronicle, “fared into Mercia to Snotinga-ham, and there took its winter seat. And Burhred, King of Mercians, and his witan begged Athelred, King of West Saxons, and Alfred his brother, that they should succour them to fight against the host. And there they fared with a West Saxon levy into Mercia to Snotinga-ham, and met the host at the work.” For a time the Danes made peace with the Mercians; but some years later they returned once more from Tureces-ey (Torksey) in Lindsey to Repton, a Mercian royal ham, and “drove King Burhred over sea, and won all that land.” In the division of spoils which followed, Nottingham and the Southumbrian country fell to the lot of a separate “host” under some nameless Danish earl, and became thenceforward one of the most powerful States in the Danish confederacy of the Five Burghs. For nearly fifty years the Danes held undisputed possession of the town and district; till Edward the Elder, in his victorious northern advance, had won back the whole of Danish Mercia as far as Stamford, Leicester, Derby, and Tamworth. At that point the Scandinavian host in Nottingham thought it wiser to give in, completely isolated as they were in England south of Humber. Thereupon the West Saxon king “fared thence to Snotinga-ham, and entered the burg, and bade better it, and set it both with English men and eke with Danish.” Two years later he returned again and “bade work the burgh on the south half the river, over against the other, and the bridge over Trent betwixt the two burghs.” This move put all the north at his feet; and immediately after we read accordingly that the Danes in Northumbria, the Welsh of Strathclyde, and even the kings of Scots, at once chose Edward “for father and for lord.” The occupation of Nottingham really settled the position of the princes of Winchester as central kings of all Britain.
Of course, in the fluctuations which followed, “Snotingaham” fell over and over again into the hands of the Danes; and we read of it as a Danish burgh in the fragmentary later ballad of Edmund’s northern victories. But it is probable from the analogy of the other Mercian counties that the shire was at this time first definitely organised as such on the ordinary West Saxon model. The earliest distinct mention of the county occurs ninety years after its recovery by the English, at the time when Cnut was overrunning all the midlands. “He wended out through Buccinga-ham-scir,” says the Chronicle, “into Bedan-ford-scir, and thence to Huntandun-scir, so into Hamtun-scir, along the fen to Stanford” — then apparently a county in itself, the old territory of the Gyrwas,— “and then into Lindcolne-scir, thence on to Snotingaham-scir, and so to Northumbria to Eoforwic-ward,” or York-ward. At the time of Domesday the boundaries of the shire stood approximately as at the present day. On the whole, we may believe that Nottinghamshire (the initial letter dropped out soon after the Norman Conquest) is somewhat less artificial than the other Mercian shires, and fairly represents the original dominions of the Southumbrians, as well as the territories of the later Danish host. Its boundaries are certainly quite natural, with an old mark of forest, fen, or river. In shape, it lies centrally round the town of Nottingham, as regards the cultivable land during early English times; but it also includes a great northward extension along the crest of the triassic region, and this district was long covered by Sherwood Forest, and is even now very largely wooded from place to place. In fact, the common forestine termination field, in old English feld, meaning a place where the trees have been felled — or, as we now say, a “clearing” — runs through most of the names of old towns in all this district, from Wakefield, Huddersfield, and Sheffield, by Chesterfield and Mansfield, to Duffield in Derbyshire, and recalls the time when only a few Roman roads penetrated the timbered uplands, and only a few outlying hamlets interrupted the deer-frith around. The valley of the Trent was the one really settled part of the whole county, with Nottingham itself, the Old Wark, or fort, in its centre, and New-Wark defending its key a little farther down. Throughout the north and the Dukeries, almost all the local names are of mediæval types: only around Nottingham itself do Danish and Anglo-Saxon villages cluster in any numbers.