Almost as naturally isolated from the rest of Britain as East Anglia, Sussex, or Cornwall, the practical peninsula of Lincolnshire has nearly always formed a separate and easily recognised division of the land, throughout all historical or prehistoric time. It is true, in its present form, now that drainage and reclamation have so largely obliterated the native marches of fen or forest, it seems an unjustifiable stretch of language to speak of Lincolnshire as a peninsula. But while the soil of England still retained its primitive natural features, the case was far otherwise. The great outward bulge of the Wolds was then everywhere cut off from the remainder of the central secondary plateau by a continuous border of swampy lowland. To the north, the long estuary of Humber separated it from Holderness and the rest of Yorkshire; while westward the whole lower basin of the Trent and the Don was occupied by the wide fens from which the Isle of Axholme rose as a solitary habitable oasis in the midst of a vast and desolate mere. Near where Newark now stands, the Trent valley almost interosculates with that of the Witham, whose tributaries again take their rise in the same boggy morass as those of the Welland. Finally, on the south, the great Fen District and the Wash completed the isolation of Lincolnshire from the outer world. In the few spots where the mark of swamps was partially interrupted (if such there were) the wooded region, afterwards known as Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, must have acted practically just as well, so as to afford the primitive inhabitants of Lincolnshire perfect immunity from the attacks of enemies on the land side. Accordingly, it is not strange that the district of the Wolds should in early times have been regarded as a separate island; and its old Celtic name of Lindis (which appears once more in Lindisfarna-ee or Lindisfarne [the Isle of the Lindis-dwellers], now Holy Island, the chief of the Farne archipelago off the coast of Northumberland) probably contains the Welsh root Ynys, an island, in its terminal syllable [?]. The first half of the word, reappearing [as it seems] in the Roman Lindum, is of uncertain signification.
Under the Romans the peninsula or island naturally became a great corn-growing region; and its capital, Lindum, grew into an important commercial and strategical centre. From the modern name, Lincoln, which is apparently a corruption of Lindum Colonia (mentioned by the Ravenna geographer), it has been supposed that the town even attained the dignity of a colony. But the only colony in Britain distinctly alluded to by Roman writers was Camulodunum; and Bede’s intermediate form Lindocolina, seems to point to some confusion of sound or sense. At any rate, in accordance with the ordinary Roman policy of breaking down local isolation in the provinces, Lincoln was linked to the outer world by four great roads, which must have crossed the intervening fens on laboriously constructed causeways. Even the main north road, from London and Verulam to York, passed through Lincoln, avoiding as it did both the fen regions and the wooded midland plateau, and so sweeping round, in two bold curves through the most settled tracts, from London to Lincoln and from Lincoln to York. The station of Ad Pontem marks the point where it crossed the boundary-line of swamp and river. The Roman remains in Lincoln city — [among] the most extensive and best preserved in all England — though very interesting in themselves, have little connection with the question how Lincolnshire ultimately grew into a separate English shire.
When the Teutonic pirates descended upon the deserted province in the middle of the fifth century, it would seem natural that the isle of Lindiss should be one of their earliest conquests. Isolated peninsular districts like Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia were most easily overrun and defended from recapture; and Lincolnshire in particular lay right in the route of a pirate fleet sailing down with a favouring north-easter from the wicks of Sleswick. Hence we may conclude that it was very early occupied; the more so as we hear no details of the English colonisation either from Bede or from the West Saxon Chronicle. Here, as in many other places, however, it does not seem likely that the English absolutely “exterminated” the British inhabitants. Doubtless they spared the lives of many as slaves. Professor Phillipps long ago pointed out the common occurrence of the Celtic type, with all its marked anatomical peculiarities, among the supposed pure Anglians of the modern county; and later anthropologists have fully confirmed both his facts and his inferences. Lincoln city was undoubtedly spared, like York and London; and to this day it still preserves in part its Roman walls. Where the cities were left standing, as Canon Stubbs observes, a portion at least of the city population would likewise be allowed to remain; and this was probably the case at Lincoln. Both town and district retained their old Celtic Romanised titles, the one being known as Lindocolina and later Lindcylene, and the other as Lindisse, or Lindesse, in the “Anglo-Saxon” period.
But Lincolnshire was not at first occupied as a whole by a single English tribe. Though here, as elsewhere, the Danish inundation swept away all the old English landmarks, we can still partially recover the names and boundaries of the different tribes which colonised the conquered country. The northern half of the modern shire, including probably the whole basin of the Trent, was held by the Gegnas or Gainas, who had their capital at Gegnesburh, now Gainsborough. The middle district, including Lincoln itself and the basin of the Witham, was settled by a folk who called themselves after the region Lindis-ware, or men of Lindisse. The flat southern district of Holland, the hollow land, was scantily peopled by the Gyrwas, or fenmen, among whom the Celtic blood was probably strong; for we know that “Welsh robbers” held out in the Fens to a very late period. Their chief clan, the Spaldingas, have given their own name to the town of Spalding. Holland still survives as a recognised popular division of the modern county; Lindisse has taken the old English termination, ig, an island, and so has declined from the pure form into Lindesig, which occurs in the Chronicle, to its existing shape of Lindsey (analogous to Sheppey, Anglesey, and the other coast islands), under which it too lives on as a substantive sub-shire; while as to the third recognised division, Kesteven — whose name has a [curious antique look] — it is difficult to give any satisfactory account of its origin and meaning. Slowly, however, all the little principalities seem to have partially coalesced with that of the Lindisware; though even as late as the days of Alfred the Gegnas were still so powerful that a daughter of their ealdorman was considered no unworthy match for the great West Saxon king himself. The people remained heathen till after the conversion of Northumbria, when Paullinus preached in Lindsey, where the first convert was “a certain great man hight Blecca, with all his clan” — no doubt some of the same Bleccingas who gave their name to Bletchington. The earliest Lincoln minster was built of stone by this Blecca, and was dedicated to Paullinus himself; but its modern representative — a small church on the cathedral platform — is now corruptly known as St. Paul’s. Mr. Venables suggests that the number of churches in Lincolnshire dedicated to St. Michael, that favourite Celtic saint, may not improbably betoken some survival of British Christianity through the stormy period of English heathendom.
It is to the Scandinavian conquest that we owe our modern Lincolnshire in its present form, apparently. The Danes who overran Northumbria in the middle of the ninth century speedily proceeded to annex Mercia; and with it they also annexed Lindsey, which had acknowledged the Mercian supremacy ever since the days of the great heathen king Penda, two hundred years before. Lincoln became one of the Five Burghs of the Danes, and the bishops of the Lindisware fled before the renewed heathen outburst to Dorchester-on-Thames, near Oxford. Lincoln grew strongly Danish, and ranked next to York as a Scandinavian stronghold. Even as late as the time of Edward the Confessor it retained its twelve Danish lawmen. On it, apparently, all Lincolnshire depended, except the south of Holland, which formed part of the territory belonging to Stamford, another one of the Five Burghs. For forty years the heathen held undisputed possession of Lincoln, till Edward the Elder undertook his great campaigns for the recovery of the midlands and the north. After his conquest of Huntingdon, Northampton, and Cambridge, the vigorous West Saxon king pushed on to Stamford and to Nottingham, where he built forts and manned them with English and submissive Danes. “Then all the folk that sat in Mercia-land turned to him,” says the Chronicle; and though Lincoln is not mentioned by name, we may take it for granted that it was included in the general submission of the Five Burghs. Probably the shire was at once reorganised on the ordinary West Saxon model; but the earliest distinct mention of “Lindcolne-scir” seems to be during the wars of Edmund and Cnut, three-quarters of a century later. It is difficult to see why the whole modern county should have been made to depend on Lincoln alone; especially when Stamford, the old capital of the Gyrwas, had been one of the Five Burghs, each of which, in every other instance, was accepted as the nucleus of a new shire. We might naturally have expected the whole Fen country to have been erected into a county as Stamfordshire. Still more difficult is it to discover why Lindsey, Kesteven, and Holland were all rolled together into a single shire, when the smaller and less important district of Rutland obtained rank as a distinct county. Probably the geographical unity of Lincolnshire overbore its territorial separation. The Isle of Axholme, however, now a singularly outlying part of the county beyond the natural boundary of the Trent, was not incorporated with the rest of the shire till the reign of Henry II., when the Lincolnshire men attacked it in boats, and forcibly added it to their own territory. By position it belongs rather to Yorkshire; and all its commercial relations have always been with Doncaster and York.