TCWAAS online

The Giant’s Grave (© B Keeling)

The Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society has recently made the full text of its Transactions available online. All volumes of this highly respected journal from 1874 onwards have been digitised, with all except the past 10 years being freely accessible and downloadable to non-members.

The Transactions (often abbreviated as TCWAAS) is published annually. Each volume contains a number of articles on the history and archaeology of the present-day county of Cumbria. The online archive can be searched by keyword, not only in the title but in the body of the article (a very useful facility). Words can also be excluded from the search, thus eliminating unwanted articles and making the process quicker and more specific.

TCWAAS is a valuable resource for research on the kingdom of Strathclyde because it deals with a region that formed the kingdom’s southern province in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. The county name ‘Cumbria’ preserves a Latinised form of the name of the kingdom itself, i.e. the land of the Cumbri or North Britons.

Cumbria, realm of the Strathclyde Britons, c.900 AD.

A search of the TCWAAS archive turns up a treasure trove of information on the period when substantial territories south of the Solway Firth were ruled by ‘Cumbrian’ kings whose headquarters lay on the Clyde. The following list of articles is just a selection. It includes items that I consulted while writing my book Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age. Topics range from the origin and meaning of the name ‘Cumbria’ to the cultural affinities of sculptured crosses and other monuments. The list gives the title, author, volume, year and pages.

‘Strathclyde and Cumbria: a survey of historical development to 1092’ by D.P. Kirkby TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 62 (1962). pp. 77 – 94

‘On the use of the terms Strathclyde and Cumbria’ by P.A. Wilson
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 66 (1966). pp. 57 – 92

‘The Lowther Hogbacks’ by W.G. Collingwood
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 7 (1907). pp. 152 – 164
[discusses the “Viking” hogback gravestones at Lowther Church]

Late Victorian image of one of the Lowther hogback fragments.

‘The Giant’s Grave, Penrith’ by W.G. Collingwood
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 23 (1923). pp. 115 – 128
[a detailed study of this enigmatic group of hogbacks and crosses at St Andrew’s Church]

One of the Giant’s Grave cross-shafts (from Collingwood’s 1923 article)

‘The Giant’s Thumb’ by W.G. Collingwood
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 20 (1920). pp. 52 – 65
[as well as discussing the Thumb (a tenth-century cross at Penrith) this article reconstructs the genealogy of the kings of Strathclyde and suggests that one of them might be the legendary “Owain Caesar” of Cumbrian folklore]

The Giant’s Thumb (from Collingwood’s 1920 article)

‘A reconsideration of Gosforth Cross’ by C.A. Parker and W.G. Collingwood
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 17 (1917). pp. 99 – 113
[an art-historical study of this famous Viking Age monument near the shore of the Irish Sea]

The Gosforth Cross (© T Clarkson)

‘Rey-Cross’ by W.G. Collingwood
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 27 (1927). pp. 1 – 10
[the place where Eric Bloodaxe, king of York, is said to have been slain during a battle on Stainmore]

‘Five Strathclyde and Galloway charters – four concerning Cardew and one the Westmorland Newbigging’ by Frederick W. Ragg
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 17 (1917). pp. 198 – 234
[one of the charters is the eleventh-century Gospatric’s Writ which deals with an area described as “lands that were Cumbrian” (i.e. former Strathclyde territory) between Carlisle and Wigton]

‘Cumberland’ by T.H.B. Graham
TCWAAS 2nd series, vol 26 (1926). pp. 274 – 284
[a discussion of this Old English county name which simply means “land of the Cumbri”]

Members of CWAAS can also access the online version of an interesting article from 2011: ‘From peoples to regional societies: the problem of early medieval Cumbrian Identities’ by Charles Phythian-Adams (TCWAAS 3rd series, vol 11, pp. 51 – 64)

To access the TCWAAS archive, click on the link below and then select ‘Transactions’ from the homepage.

Cumbria Past: the CWAAS website

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Essential studies: 1 – Fiona Edmonds on the term ‘Cumbria’

One unavoidable delay for any author of a non-fiction book comes between the end of the writing/editing process and publication. During this period of limbo, there is always a chance that something significant relating to the subject of the book will be published elsewhere – an item of key relevance that appears too late to cite in the bibliography. It can be particularly frustrating when the item in question is nothing less than a major contribution to scholarship. In my own case, this very situation arose last month when an article called ‘The Emergence and Transformation of Medieval Cumbria’ appeared in The Scottish Historical Review.

The article was written by Fiona Edmonds of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. I haven’t met Dr Edmonds in person but I’ve been reading her publications for several years and, earlier this year, we both appeared in separate sequences of Rory Stewart’s Border Country series on BBC2. Two of Dr Edmonds’ publications are cited in Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age and the one in the latest issue of SHR would certainly have joined them if timescales and publishing schedules had allowed.

On the plus side, after reading the article, I was much encouraged to note that Dr Edmonds’ main point about the meaning of the term ‘Cumbria’ in tenth- and eleventh-century contexts supports the position I adopt in my book. The gist of her argument is summarised in the abstract pasted below. Needless to say, her 22-page discussion goes into far more detail than I was able to do in my introductory chapter (which deals with chronology, terminology and sources). Indeed, I highly recommend her article as essential reading for anyone who has an interest in the origins of Cumbria (the present-day county) or in the creation of the Anglo-Scottish Border. With this contribution she effectively removes any lingering doubt that tenth-century ‘Cumbria’ and the newly expanded realm of the kings of Strathclyde were one and the same. The process by which these kings added large swathes of erstwhile English territory to their Clydesdale heartlands will be examined in another article, also by Dr Edmonds, in a forthcoming issue of Early Medieval Europe.

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Fiona Edmonds, ‘The Emergence and Transformation of Medieval Cumbria’ Scottish Historical Review vol.93 (2), October 2014, 195-216.

[The following abstract can also be found at the journal’s webpage]

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Lowther hogbacks

On one of my research trips for the book I visited Lowther Church in Cumbria to see the Viking Age sculpture, which includes hogback gravestones similar to the ones at the Giant’s Grave in Penrith.

Lowther hogback (with shaft of Anglo-Saxon cross)

 

Lowther hogback (with fragment of another)

Parts of the present church were built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It sits on high ground above the River Lowther and probably occupies the site of an Anglo-Saxon monastery.

In Chapter Six of Strathclyde and the Anglo-Saxons in the Viking Age, I consider a possible tenth-century reference to this monastery as a frontier settlement between the ‘Cumbrians’ (Britons) and the Scandinavian rulers of Northumbria.