The central question posed here is: how might local historians seek to account for variations on the theme of Englishness over a milennium and a quarter? One solution could lie through the isolation and characterisation of evolving regional societies. These may be discovered where concentrations of population are simultaneously structured on the ground in recognisably interrelated patterns of settlement, and defined by particular cultural identities. On this basis, three stages of societal development may be proposed: (1) a period, through to c.900, in which the foundations were essentially ethnic; (2) a succeeding phase of transformation down to c.1225; and (3), the consequent emergence of a newly defined, intra-dependent form of regional society which lasted until the eighteenth century and, in some areas, even beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How then, first, did people define their social space during the closing 300 years of the Celtic and Germanic tribal tradition? It is suggested that the answer lies in the broad complementarity between ‘kindreds’ and the territories they inhabited. The identities of named tribal peoples, based on imagined claims to kinship, may be seen to have been further crystallised, at both district and regional levels, through the spatial coincidence of political, religious, judicial, administrative and economic functions. Here the integration of royal and religious authority at the regional kingdom\/diocesan level was especially significant, and was directly reflected in the skeleton nature of the interconnections between the few permanent, key centres of administration and trade by land and water. Arterial rivers seem to have been the foci for central places, monastic settlements and lading points in emergent regional economies, water transport evidently reaching far further upstream than later, when mills and fish-weirs proliferated. The common association of regional ethnic kingdoms with major river basins, or their parts, may therefore be accepted, while the expansion of such peoples into similar polities, based on neighbouring drainage basins, helps to stress the contrasted ways in which different ethnicities were mixed in adjacent regions. The Scandinavians too can be shown to have been variously fitted into these already defined politico-geographical matrices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transformation of these patterns during the second phase, between c.875 and c.1225, began with the superseding of regional kingdoms and their wider hegemonies through the processes of national ‘unification’, and the reduction to irrelevance of the former functions of their component districts. Smaller tribal groups either shrank then or earlier, or their identities vanished altogether. At the same time there was an increasing tendency for new administrative districts, now defined by their central places, to be created. These developments marked significant adjustments to regional territorial patterns in certain respects. Chief amongst these was the extraordinary development, at the hearts of most existing territories, of major urban centres especially during the tenth century. Usualy these were long-established central places in their regions, and around them, recognizable urban networks began to develop across their historically dependent territories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A new slant on tenth\/early eleventh-century administrative reform can therefore be suggested. Despite the disappearance of regional kingdoms, their ghostly outlines were nonetheless perpetuated informally by the new urban networks and their hinterlands, which broadly coincided geographically with preceding ethnic arenas. Because of administrative considerations, defence needs by water, and continuing church interests, shiring was evidently conducted chrono-logically by county groups in relation to the more significant existing points in these new urban networks which now became the shire towns. This then involved the internal partitioning, rather than the overall distortion, of existing political and social contexts. Despite the theme of centralization that dominates most national historical interpretations, it is thus still possible to trace the survival of regional ethnic allegiances down to the thirteenth century and beyond: through associations remembered by name; the persistence of many ancient dioceses as entities The third stage (covering the period c.1225-1750) needs to be traced back to its beginnings to re-emphasize how the new administrative arrangements were super-imposed on the pre-existing shapes of societies on the ground. Simultaneously, however, these increasingly populous societies were becoming self-defining just as their residential patterns – rural as well as urban – stabilized into recognizable, generally enduring, settlement hierarchies around both old centres and newly emergent – and usually similarly sited – central places during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These arrangements directly reflected the contemporaneous evolution of structured regional economies in which interdependence between participating settlements was consolidated as farming sub-regions, industries and complex urban and marketing systems were developed. Here it is possible to point to the integration of road and water transport within the existing settings through an estimated national total of 400 coastal and riverine lading points, and their close relationship regionally to the known trading hinterlands of major, medieval and early modern ports. Such patterns were greatly reinforced by the impact of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century river navigation schemes which extended the reach of water transport once again. In all these contexts the relevance of alternative arrangements along and across less densely settled, inland frontier zones between provinces, nevertheless needs to be stressed, not least in the land-locked region around Coventry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Internally, in the minds of some, the identity of the single shire may have been often diluted by the persisting cultural influences exerted in a superstitious age through the long reach of many ancient dioceses. Within historically linked county groupings, moreover, contrasted examples of cooperation or solidarity further emphasised the ways in which informal<\/em> perceptions of regional intra-dependence – whether economic, cultural, political or sociological – finally came to replace the more formal structures and identities of a previous ethnic age, but in much the same spatial contexts as before. In such ways earlier regional differences may be seen to have persisted, albeit in new guises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
embracing counties in the guise of arch-deaconries; the continued cooperation of particular county groups for political purposes especially at the national margins; and the spatial patterning of ethnic myths of origin. The eventual carriers of new informal modes of association at district level seem to have been the nativi<\/em> and their successors who were identified as “aborigenes” or “indigens” in connection with the specialized pays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n