XPost: soc.genealogy.britain, soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   UK’s north-south divide dates back to Vikings, says archaeologist   
      
   Watford Gap discovered to be key geographical divide between invaders   
   and Anglo-Saxons   
      
   Dalya Alberge   
      
   Monday 16 October 2017 00.04 BST   
   Last modified on Monday 16 October 2017 00.33 BST   
      
   The north-south divide has been the butt of jokes in Britain for   
   years, but research has shown the Watford Gap, which separates the   
   country, was in fact established centuries ago when the Vikings   
   invaded Britain.   
      
   According to the archaeologist Max Adams, who made the discovery while   
   researching his new book, the Northamptonshire-Warwickshire boundary   
   known as the Watford Gap is a geographic and cultural reality that can   
   be traced back to the Viking age.   
      
   Adams was struck by the absence of Scandinavian placenames south-west   
   of Watling Street, the Roman road that became the A5. “There might be   
   one or two names, but I don’t think there are any, and there are   
   certainly hundreds and hundreds north-east. Clearly the Scandinavian   
   settlers stopped at Watling Street,” Adams said.   
      
   “I began to notice that all the rivers’ sources stop pretty much on   
   the line of Watling Street. North-east of that line, all the rivers   
   flow into the Irish Sea or the North Sea. South and west of it, they   
   all flow into the Severn or the Thames.”   
      
   Map of Viking Britain   
      
   He added: “Roman engineers constructing the route between London   
   [Londinium] and the important town of Wroxeter [Viroconium], in what   
   is now Shropshire, chose this ancient line, and it became Watling   
   Street. In the Viking period it became the boundary for a treaty   
   between King Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum. Connecting the West   
   Midlands with the south-east, it runs through a narrow pass between   
   hills, the Watford Gap.   
      
   “I’m not sure whether people on the north side of Watling Street   
   immediately feel themselves different or whether that’s more of a   
   southern joke. But clearly it’s a joke with a very old reality   
   attached to it.   
      
   “These days, we’re unaware of which way rivers face and where they   
   flow out to. It doesn’t make any odds to us. We just put bridges over   
   them. But, for most of history, such things have mattered. Your   
   natural trading routes are along rivers and all the medieval monastic   
   estates used the rivers as their arteries of power. So clearly the   
   geography of power has always mattered … Geographically, it slaps you   
   in the face as soon as you figure it out.”   
      
   He explained that the Anglo-Saxon kings eventually fortified that line   
   and made it a frontier in the early 10th-century reigns of Eadweard   
   the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd: “So, in a sense, they reinforced   
   the reality of that piece of geography and it seems to have been with   
   us ever since.”   
      
   “In 1959, when the M1 was first built, the Watford Gap was its end   
   point – the butt of north-south divide jokes ever since,” said Adams.   
   The M1 service station’s unofficial status as the country’s dividing   
   point was celebrated in 2009 with the unveiling of a new road sign,   
   with one arrow pointing north and another pointing south. Previously   
   called the Blue Boar, the service station became famous as an   
   early-morning hangout for The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, among   
   millions of travellers who were fed and watered there. Linguists have   
   since identified it as the boundary between northern and southern   
   English.   
      
   But boundaries are certainly blurred, Adams said: “We find it bizarre   
   that, on the news last night, people were talking about Cheshire as   
   the north … Routinely, politicians describe Hadrian’s Wall as if it   
   was the border between England and Scotland. Well, there’s another 60   
   miles of England beyond Hadrian’s Wall.”   
      
   Adams has excavated widely in Britain and abroad, and he will include   
   his research in a forthcoming book, titled Aelfred’s Britain: War and   
   Peace in the Viking Age, to be published by Head of Zeus on 2   
   November. It is a companion volume to his previous early medieval   
   histories, The King in the North and In the Land of Giants.   
      
   In the new book, he notes that, before the second decade of the 10th   
   century was out, new fortresses or burhs were constructed at 19 sites   
   strung out on a broad line between the Thames and the Mersey,   
   unmistakable in their offensive purpose. That line roughly follows   
   Watling Street.   
      
   “It has an ancient and continuing geographic distinction, barely   
   noticed by today’s midlanders. Broadly speaking, to the north-­east   
   all the rivers flow into the Wash or North Sea on the east side, or   
   the Irish Sea on the west. To the south and west every river drains   
   into either Severn or Thames. This is England’s natural fault line,   
   its continental divide: the watershed that divided and divides north   
   from south (epitomised by the famous Watford Gap, on the A5/M1   
   north-east of Daventry); and I have no doubt that Scandinavian armies   
   and settlers knew its imperatives.”   
      
   https://t.co/3vjGNfZr7H   
      
      
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   Steve Hayes   
   Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/   
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