peeblesshire-1967-vol-1/03_040

Transcription

INTRODUCTION: GENERAL

the same word as Welsh pebyll "tent", or "tents", and Traquair and Trahenna contain trev
"hamlet". A striking example is Penteiacob and its variant Peniacob, the oldest name of what is
now Eddleston. These are perfect Cumbric forms and apparently late ones; the former means
"Jacob's Outhouses" and the latter "Jacob's Hill". These people had already acquired some
knowledge of Latin letters and of Christianity, ultimately as an aspect of their Romanisation
and perhaps proximately through the medium of the shadowy post-Roman "Ninianic" church
in southern Scotland. The 5th-6th century orans figure from Over Kirkhope and the early 6th
century Yarrowkirk inscription, both across the boundary in Selkirkshire,¹ bear witness to this;
and so, within Peeblesshire itself, does the more or less contemporary Manor Water stone (No.
376) with its Cumbric names, its Latin letters, and its cross.
From the middle of the 6th century a new factor profoundly disturbed the balance of the
population in south-east Scotland, when the settlements of the Angles of Bernicia began to
penetrate the lower Tweed valley. By 638 they had probably completed the overthrow of
Gododdin with the capture of Edinburgh ² and already before 650 a Hiberno-Anglian monastery
was founded at Old Melrose as a consequence of the conversion of Northumbria from Iona in
635. The Anglian occupation can be clearly plotted by the distribution of numerous early
place-names in Mid - and East Lothian, Berwickshire, and Roxburghshire, such as Haddington,
Whittingehame, Coldingham, Mersington and Oxnam, but it is very striking that there is nothing
of the sort to be found in Peeblesshire. The probable inference is that the Angles cannot have
settled in the county in any strength before the 9th century, if then. ³ In spite of the geographi-
cal fact that the upper Tweed valley is merely an extension of the lower, and that one of its
back doors opened on Midlothian via West Linton, it looks very much as if the Angles had
occupied physically at this time only the open country of the lower Tweed and Teviot below
Melrose and Hawick, and that few had really penetrated the agriculturally unattractive upper
Tweed region or the West Linton area, supported as these may have been by the powerful
Cumbric state of Strathclyde just west of the Biggar-Drumelzier gap. A close parallel may be
seen in the Welsh border country, where the Mercians settled the plain right up to the foot of
the Welsh mountains but did not penetrate the, to them unattractive, mountainous upper
valleys of the Dee, Severn, Wye, etc., in spite of the fact that they are geographically westward
extensions from the plain. These too were supported from behind by British states to the
west.
The subsequent history of the region down to the Norman period may be thought to have
consisted of three phases. Down to the end of the 9th century Northumbria evidently consoli-
dated its power south of the Forth, so that only Strathclyde retained its independence, and
Peeblesshire must have been within the Northumbrian sphere of control if not of settlement.
The second phase begins with the Northumbrian collapse brought about by the Scandinavian
occupations of parts of Yorkshire, Cumberland, and Westmorland, in the latter half of the 9th
century. As a result of this collapse it appears that Strathclyde was subsequently able to extend

1 Inventory of Selkirkshire, Nos. 65 and 174.
2 See "Edinburgh and the Anglian Occupation of Lothian", in
The Anglo-Saxons (ed. P. Clemoes), 35 ff.
3 The Commission is much indebted to Dr. W. Nicolaisen of
the Scottish Place-Name Survey of the School of Scottish
Studies (Edinburgh University) for some valuable information
on the early English place-names of south-east Scotland. See
also his article "Celts and Anglo-Saxons in the Scottish Border
Counties" in Scottish Studies, viii (1964), pp. 141 ff.

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