Elmet

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Elmet is an area in the northern English traditional West Riding of the northern English county of Yorkshire . In the early Middle Ages , between the 5th and 7th centuries, Elmet was an independent British kingdom that was part of the Hen Ogledd . It stretched from the York Valley to the Pennines watershed , with the Sheaf to the south and Wharfe to the east forming the approximate boundaries. In the north Elmet bordered the Anglish Kingdom of Deira and in the south on the Anglish Mercia . In the west of Elmet there was also the British area of Craven , preserved in the name of the current District of Craven , which appears to have been a smaller British kingdom.

Hen Ogledd (The Old North)

Elmet was conquered in 616 by the Anglish Deira under his King Edwin and incorporated into the kingdom that later - together with the Anglic Kingdom of Bernicia - became the Anglic Kingdom of Northumbria .

Aside from historical evidence, the only remains of this kingdom today are found only in defensive earthworks and in place names such as Barwick-in-Elmet and Sherburn-in-Elmet . A constituency established in 1983 in West Yorkshire was also named Elmet (now Elmet and Rothwell).

history

After Roman troops withdrew from Britain in the 5th century, a number of independent British dominions were established. This is how the kingdoms Rheged , Strathclyde , Ebrauc , Bryneich , Gododdin and Elmet came into being in the north of Great Britain . How Elmet formed is not clear. It is possible that it developed from an area within a larger kingdom ruled by the semi-legendary King Coel Hen . On the other hand, it is possible that the Elmet area had a distinctly different tribal identity in pre-Roman times, which reappeared after the Romans left.

Little is known about the actual history of Elmet before the Angling. Elmet appears to have had relationships with other British rulers. In Gwynedd , Wales, a funerary inscription was found with the inscription Aliotus Elmetiacos hic iacet ( Here lies Aliotus of the Elmetern ). Kings of Elmet are mentioned in various Welsh sources. A song by Taliesin is dedicated to Gwallog ap Llaennog , King of Elmet towards the end of the second half of the 6th century. The original capital of Elmets seems to have been in a place Campodonum , perhaps identical to today's Doncaster . The main town, however, was later moved to Loides ( Leeds ) after Campodonum was destroyed , which is reported to have been in the "Forest of Elmet" ( silva Elmete ).

Towards the end of the 6th century, Elmet came under increasing pressure from the expanding Anglic kingdoms of Deira and Mercia. In 590, various British kingdoms formed an alliance to push back the rapidly expanding northern kingdom of the Angles , Bernicia. In the course of this campaign Gwallog ap Llaennog was killed. The alliance of the northern Britons disintegrated after the assassination of King Urien of Rheged and the ensuing feud . From the developing union of the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia in Northumbria, the rulers of Elmet seem to have drawn the consequences to erect walls as an additional line of defense north and west of Barwick-in-Elmet.

In 616, Deira's Anglic troops invaded Elmet, conquered the kingdom and drove out the last British king, Ceredig ap Gwallog . The reason for this campaign of conquest seems to lie either in the fact that an Anglic gentleman from Deira, named Hereric, living in exile in Elmet, was poisoned there, or the fact that Elmet had given shelter to exiles and thus opponents of the Northumbrian king Edwin . On the other hand, it is possible that the conquest of Elmet was part of a large-scale campaign by Edwin, as he was able to subdue most of the areas in post-Roman Britain that year.

After being conquered by the Angles, Elmet was completely absorbed in the Anglic Kingdom of Northumbria, the inhabitants became the Elmetsæte . As such, they appear in a document commonly dated to the second half of the 7th century, the so-called Tribal Hidage . The Tribal Hidage is a list of named areas and territories, the size of which is given according to the number of their hooves . The Elmetsæte only appear as a relatively small unit with a total of 600 hides in this document.

The survival of the British population is the reason for the frequent number of place names that go back to British roots, the most striking being the place names with the elements Eccles and Whale . It is believed that the residents of Elmet called themselves Loides , which can be found in many place names, for example Ledston , Ledsham , Leathley and of course Leeds.

Web links

Commons : Elmet  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ D. Hey: A History of Yorkshire: "County of the Broad Acres". P.56.
  2. ↑ Philip Holdsworth: Elmet. In: Lapidge et al. (Ed.): The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England . Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford et al. 2001, ISBN 0-631-22492-0 , p. 165.
  3. ^ A. Woolfe: Romancing the Celts. P. 207.
  4. ^ NJ Higham: The Kingdom of Northumbria. P. 86.
  5. ↑ Beda: HE , II, 14.
  6. ^ JT Koch: Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. P. 670f.
  7. ↑ Nennius: HB , c. 63.
  8. ↑ Annales Cambriae , p. a. 616.
  9. ↑ ASC , s. a. 616

literature

swell

  • Janet Bately (Ed.): The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: MS A v. 3. Brewer, Rochester (NY) 1986, ISBN 0-85991-103-9 .
  • John Williams (Ed.): Annales Cambriae. London 1860.
  • B. Colgrave, RAB Mynors (Ed.): Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Clarendon, Oxford 1969, ISBN 0-19-822202-5 .
  • David Dumville (Ed.): Nennius, Historia Brittonum. Brewer, Cambridge 1985, ISBN 0-85991-203-5 .

Secondary literature

  • Leslie Alcock: Arthur's Britain. History and Archeology, AD 367-634. Harmondsworth, London 1973, ISBN 0-14-021396-1 .
  • Ken Dark: Britain and the End of the Roman Empire. Tempus, Stroud 2000, ISBN 0-7524-2532-3 .
  • David Dumville: The Tribal Hidage: an Introduction to its Texts and their History. In: Steven Basset (Ed.): The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms . Leicester University Press, Leicester 1989, ISBN 0-7185-1317-7 .
  • David Hey: A History of Yorkshire: "County of the Broad Acres" . Carnegie, Lancaster 2005, ISBN 1-85936-122-6 .
  • Nicholas J. Higham: The Kingdom of Northumbria AD 350-1000 . Sutton, Stroud 1993, ISBN 0-86299-730-5 .
  • Peter Hunter Blair: Roman Britain and Early England, 55 BC-AD 871. Thomas Nelson and Sons, Edinburgh 1963, ISBN 0-17-711044-9 .
  • Christopher A. Snyder: The Britons (Peoples of Europe). Blackwell, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-631-22260-X .
  • Frank Merry Stenton: Anglo-Saxon England. 3. Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1971, ISBN 0-19-280139-2 .
  • John T. Koch: Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia . ABC-CLIO, Oxford 2006, ISBN 1-85109-440-7 .
  • Alex Woolfe: "Romancing the Celts: Segmentary societies and the geography of Romanization in the north-west provinces", in: Ray Laurence and Joanne Berry (eds.): Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire . Routledge, Oxford 1998, ISBN 0-203-02266-1 .

See also