The Countryman's Daughter

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the Vikings changing the name of York from the Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic to Jorvik, supposedly because it was easier for the invaders to pronounce.

I was contacted by the Reverend Canon Bill Ankers who recounted a discussion he’d had with his friend, Lord Nicholas Cunliffe-Lister, 3^rd Earl of Swinton, who very sadly passed away last month.

Lord Swinton had an alternative theory about the name ‘Jorvik’. The Swinton estate has fishing rights for a large stretch of the River Ure around Masham and further upstream. In Wensleydale it used to be called the Yore and in fact, Wensleydale was once known as Yoredale, a name still seen in the area. Lord Swinton wondered if at one time, the river was called the ‘Yore’ all the way down to York, and thus gave the city its name.

It is a plausible theory because an unusual feature of the Ure is that after it passes a place called Cuddy Reach just west of the village of Linton-on-Ouse, it is thenceforth known as the River Ouse. Usually, when one river flows into another, it takes on the name of the main waterway. So when the rivers Swale and Nidd enter the Ure, that is where they end, and the water continues its south-eastern voyage under the name ‘Ure’. 

However, when the water reaches Cuddy Reach, a seemingly insignificant stream called Ouse Gill Beck enters the Ure and in an audacious takeover, snatches the grander river’s name and from then on the waterway is known as the Ouse all the way down to the Humber.

So why the name change?

This set my brother and I on a quest to work it out, delving in to our dad’s study stuffed full of files and reference books in an attempt to work out why the Ouse takes over the Ure. And we have come up with a theory.

Many of our ancient waterways have names that derive from the old Britonnic language spoken during the Iron and Roman ages. Names were influenced by a river’s characteristics and how the locals would refer to it. It is why we often get repetitions, such as five River Avons, four River Derwents, and five Ouses, all over the country.

The names ‘Yore’ and ‘Ure’ are likely to have derived from the Britonnic name ‘Isura’, with the Indo-European root ‘IS-‘ meaning ‘strong’ or ‘swift-flowing’. The influential Roman settlement Isurium was built in the first century A.D. just west of the Isura on the current site of the village of Aldborough near Boroughbridge. As the ancient language evolved, the intervocalic letter ‘s’ (i.e. a consonant that occurs between vowels) disappeared and hence we ultimately end up with ‘Yore’/‘Ure’ (in those days likely to have been pronounced ‘Yora’).

As for ‘Ouse’, the name derives from the ancient word ‘Udsos’ which is believed to mean simply ‘water’ or ‘slow-flowing’.

If you are familiar with the Ure, then you’ll know that as it tumbles through the hilly dales, it is indeed strong and swift-flowing. You may also be familiar with the River Ouse which, because it winds its way through mainly flat land, is a different kettle of river altogether, and therefore its ancient ‘slow-flowing’ name is far more appropriate.

In the first millennium A.D., traders would have used the river as one of their main forms of transport, sailing up and down between the main settlements. Those coming up river from the south would have referred to it as the Udsos/Ouse (slow-flowing), and those coming from the north would have called it the Yore/Ure (swift-flowing). So it is possible that the names would have overlapped at the stretch of river between York and Isurium where the land begins to flatten out and the river settles down. It is only in later centuries when we started to write things down and draw maps that we also began to hate such ambiguities as a river with two names. And so a definitive point was identified where the river switched names from Ure to Ouse.  

The Vikings were enthusiastic traders and it is entirely plausible that they would have followed what they called the Jore/Yore all the way to the southern capital of the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, which they renamed ‘settlement (vik) on the Jore’ or ‘Jorvik’. 

So, could the late Lord Swinton be right?

Contact me, and read more, at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 23rd April and the Gazette & Herald on 21st April 2021

Following last week’s feline theme, in his column from 11^th April 1981, my dad mentions that a reader had sent him a letter asking if putting butter on a cat’s paws to make it stay in a new home worked.

Later that year we tried it for ourselves when we moved house. We didn’t go far, just to the other end of the village, but our cat, Marmalade, was most definitely not amused.

We relocated from an old cottage into a newly-built house, and all the carpets were brand-spanking, apart from a fetching brown, green and yellow swirly-patterned one that we rescued from our old front room and placed on the floor of my dad’s new study.

When we finally introduced Marmalade to the house, she crept slowly around the rooms commando-style, keeping as low to the ground as possible, her tummy almost touching the floor as she moved. She was quite bewildered, bless her, and found her way into my dad’s study and refused to come out for a quite some time. Obviously, it was because in there was the old carpet with its familiar scents which made her feel less disorientated.

She did eventually start to venture out of that room, but was still quite anxious, and so we resorted to the old butter on her paws trick. I think the idea is that they love butter, and by the time they have finished licking it off, they have grown so used to their new environment that they won’t try to run away.

Today, there is a lot more information available on the internet about how to settle your pet when you move house and, strangely, none seem to mention putting butter on paws!

To reduce the animal’s stress, what you should do is dedicate a whole room to it once you have moved, so that they do not feel overwhelmed by the size of the new home. Leave a litter tray, food and water in there with the door open so that it can venture out if it wants to. Make sure it has its own bed and perhaps a few items of your clothing so it has familiar scents around it.

One of the ways cats mark their territory is by rubbing themselves on walls, doors and furniture so that their scent is transferred, making them feel secure. Once they start doing this in your new home, that means they are beginning to feel more confident about where they are. If they are taking time to settle, you could try gently rubbing a soft cloth around their face and ears, then dabbing it around walls and furniture at cat height so that they are surrounded with a familiar smell .

Opinions vary as to how long you should keep a cat inside before daring to let it go outside. Some felines are quite content to stay indoors, while others resort to hovering by the door in the hope to make a dash for it when someone opens it.

We did keep Marmalade indoors for some time, although she soon began to want to go outside. I don’t think it was longer than a week before we let her out though, and it was a huge relief when she willingly returned. We had feared that she might try to find her way back to our old house, but I don’t think she ever did, and it wasn’t long before she began to feel at home in the new surroundings. She lived a long and happy life, and finally died at the ripe old of 18 in the late 1980s.

Advice for keeping them indoors ranges from a fortnight to four weeks, but I don’t know many adult cats that would be happy stuck inside for a month. One suggestion when it comes to letting them out for the first time is to sprinkle their used cat litter around the garden so that when they do go out, they know that it is their territory. It also acts as a signal to other cats in the area that there is a new kit in town.

Incidentally, that old carpet is still in my dad’s study, and I always think of dear old Marmalade when I look at it. It’s a bit tatty and worn now, but I’m not sure we will ever replace it.

Contact me, and read more, at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 16th April and the Gazette & Herald on 14th April 2021

Continue reading “A pussycat went to sea”

As I’ve mentioned before, to kill time during the most recent lockdown I’ve been watching some dramas based on historical novels such as Poldark which is set in 18^th century Cornwall, and another called Outlander, which is set in 18^th century Scotland. Poldark has taught me about coastal living in a tin and copper mining area, and Outlander about the Jacobite rising and the Battle of Culloden. I’ve recently stepped back another thousand years and am now slightly obsessed with the series ‘Vikings’ and ‘The Last Kingdom’, the latter based on Bernard Cornwell’s ‘The Saxon Stories’ novels. 

Artistic licence has been used extensively in these fictional adaptations. For example, my children and I laughed when we saw on screen a distant ‘view’ of Eoforwic, which is the Anglo-Saxon word for York. The 10^th century city was nestling among rolling green hills. Those who live on York’s glacial plain know that the nearest significant hill to the city is about 15 miles away! The Vikings had trouble pronouncing Eoforwic, which is believed to mean ‘wild boar settlement’, so they changed it to the much easier-to-pronounce Jorvik, meaning ‘wild boar creek.’

Apart from some welcome escapism, the benefit of watching these shows is that it inspires me to read up on the real history behind them. I now know far more about the historical context that led up to the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and more about how the country of my birth was divided when the Vikings landed on our shores. 

This week, when I looked in the folder that contains my dad’s columns from 1981, I came across a clipping from the Letters Page from 28^th March. A couple of readers had responded to a column he had written the week earlier in which he mentioned Viking ‘hogback coffins’ found at St Thomas’ Church, Brompton, near Northallerton. Similar examples had also been found in other places, such as Sockburn and Osmotherley, both not far from Brompton, while most of the rest were found elsewhere in the North and Scotland.

They were writing to tell him more about these fascinating things, but also to correct him. These stones, they said, were not coffins, but likely to have been grave markers. Ten of them were discovered at Brompton in 1867-8 when the church was being restored and are incredibly well preserved. Five remain there, but the rest have been moved to Durham Cathedral.

These sandstone blocks are around two feet high and three and a half feet long, have a curved top, and bow out slightly to the sides. They are carved with very distinctive patterns often seen in pagan art and were probably placed along the top of the grave. Many of these hogback stones have a lattice-type decoration running along the sides, believed to represent the tiles on the roof of a longhouse, a hall which lay at the centre of every Viking community and was home to the most important resident, the Earl.

Some theories suggest that the ‘hogback’ name derived from the carved pigs’ heads that often sit at either end of the stones. However, I’m not convinced, as those at Brompton are definitely not hogs, but muzzled bears complete with claws and fur.

One of the readers who contacted the paper said that the first ones to be discovered were found in the Lake District in the 1830s, and were so weathered that they thought the whole design was meant to represent a hog, which is how they got their name. However, if you stand back and look at the stones, their shape is very reminiscent of a curvature of the spine and the rounded belly of a pig or its wild cousin, the boar. So that’s my theory on the origin of the name, and I’m sticking to it.

The second reader mentions excavations at Coppergate in York where plans for Viking houses had been uncovered, showing the same overlapping roof tile design that was carved on the stones, confirming that they represented ‘houses of the dead’. Vikings believed that if you died a noble death, you would be rewarded with a glorious afterlife in the great hall of the gods, Valhalla.

If you want to see what they look like, then when you can, do visit the Jorvik Viking Centre which has stood on the exact spot of that discovery since 1984. 

Contact me, and read more, at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 2nd April and the Gazette & Herald on 31st March 2021