The Wirral Thing

 

The Danish historian, archaeologist and politician  J.J. Worsaae wrote the following in 1852:

“The name of the village of Thingwall in Cheshire affords a remarkable memorial of the assizes, or Thing, which the Northmen generally held in conjunction with their sacrifices to the gods.

It lies, in conjunction with several other villages with Scandinavian names, on the small tongue of land that projects between the mouths of the rivers Dee and Mersey. At that time, they generally chose for the holding of the thing, or assizes, a place in some degree safe from surprise. The chief ancient thing place for Iceland was called, like this Thingwall, namely Thingvalla, originally þingvöllr, þingvellir (pl) of the thing-fields.”

The local administration that Worsaae is referring to in his 1852 book “An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland” is the Thing at Thingwall in Wirral (ON Þingvöllr, from þing=assembly and völlr=field, “Assembly Field”). Before he wrote this, which significantly was eight years before O’Donovan published in Ireland his discovery of the Three Fragments, historians were completely unaware of the significance of the Scandinavian settlements that had taken place in the North-west of England during the 10^th century and in the dark concerning the extensive Norwegian contribution to this movement. Worsaae would also have been unaware of the consequences of the expulsion of the Norsemen from Ireland in 902AD, but what his book did was to make English historians realise for the first time that Scandinavians came into England from Norway as well as Denmark.

The Things provided the means of government throughout the Scandinavian world. The corresponding place in Iceland, Þingwellir (vellir=fields, the plural of völlr) was used from 930AD until relatively recently. Although the place of government in Iceland has moved from there the government is still known as the Althing (Old Norse Alþingi – the “All Thing”) and the government in Norway at Oslo is still referred to as “Storting” (from Old Norse stór-þing “the Great Thing” – stór has been considered as the same element in Wirral’s Storeton).

The Wirral Thing

The precise location of the Wirral Thing referred to in Worsaae’s classic work is believed to have been at Cross Hill, across the Barnston Road (A551) from the reservoir, and a site which would have provided a reasonable elevation for a speaker to make himself heard. The site would have been right at the centre of the Scandinavian colony.

The antiquity of the Wirral Thing would have dated from not long after Ingimund’s arrival

in 902AD or thereabouts and, if so, would have pre-dated the Iceland Alþingi by some 30 years and also Isle of Man’s Tynwald, dated as 975AD, by some 70 years.

 

Field names around Cross Hill, c1850. The large part of it to the left of the A551road is now the site of the reservoir. The mound is on the right of the road. Reproduced by permission of Aliki Pantos and the Journal of English Place-Name Society.

Cross Hill, 2023

The Scandinavian settlers had established soon after their arrival a community with a clearly defined boundary, its own leader (Ingimund), its own language (Norse), a trading port (Meols) and place of assembly or government (the Thing). Although officially in the North-west corner of English Mercia, the political situation was so confused in the 10^th century - at least in the first decades - that the Scandinavian community was politically independent and answerable to nobody else, so at least initially it would have had complete autonomy, i.e. it formed in effect a North Wirral Parliament! The planning and execution of attacks on Chester was a demonstration of this autonomy. From 920AD with the Mercian leader Edward the Elder (who had effectively taken over from Æthelflæd) apparently purchasing some land in the area from Scandinavian overlords, its powers may have been put more in check with Mercian authority. Its official role, at least for a period, may have been reduced to that of a local government but still serving a population generally hostile to Mercia. 

Function of the Thing

 

The purpose of a Thing was to assemble representative people from the community to decide on matters of administration, policy (including military) and law. Popular codes of law used by the Norsemen were the “Grey-Goose code (Grágás) originating from the Trondheim area from King Magnus the Good, son of Ólaf the Saint. It is thus possible that the Wirral Thing had a similar legal code to Grey-Goose, a code which was also used by Icelanders. Also important was the “Bjarkø law”: this was a special law governing commercial and mercantile affairs and was at one time accepted as a kind of international law. International trade through Scandinavian Wirral’s port at Meols might also have been regulated by the Thing.

 

Throughout the Viking world there were two types of Thing – the district or Fylkis-thing, which was equivalent to local government with limited powers and answerable to higher authorities, and the central or Lögthing (or “Logthing”), which had far reaching powers at national and regional level. The Althing “All-thing” at Thingvellir, Iceland, and the Storting at Oslo are both examples of a Lögthing or Central Thing. The Wirral Thing would have had scheduled meetings once or twice yearly, and also when emergencies arose.

 

Hustings, Hustings!

 

Before general elections in the United Kingdom, candidates are exposed to ‘Hustings’. The modern term Husting is now used in connection with meetings or gatherings concerning a major election. In Victorian times it was used to describe tribunals in the city of London. The origins are Scandinavian, deriving from the hus-thing or “House thing”.

Things in the British Isles

 

J.J. Worsaae wrote on p158 of his 1852 book the following about the Things in the British Isles:

 

“The Danes and the Norwegians in North England settled their disputes and arranged their public affairs at the Things, according to Scandinavian custom. The present village of Thingwall (or the Thing-fields) in Cheshire was a place of meeting of the Thing, and not only bore the same name as the old chief Thing place in Iceland, but also the old Scandinavian Thing places, “Dingwall” in the north of Scotland; “Tingwall” in the Shetland Isles; and “Tynewald” or “Tingwall” in the Isle of Man.”

 

Thingwall in Wirral is one of ten or eleven place-names in the British Isles which are known to have derived from these ancient Thingwalls or meeting places. The others are:

 

Tingwall, Shetlands

Tingwall, Orkney

Tiongal, Isle of Lewis

Tinwhil, Isle of Skye

Dingwall, Ross-shire

Tinwald, Dumfriesshire

Dingbell Hill, Northumberland (possibly)

Thingwalla, Whitby

Tynwald Hill, Isle of Man

Thingwall Hall, West Lancashire

 

Thing-haug names

 

There is also another group of names in northern and eastern England which preserve the place-name Thing, but in conjunction with haugr (mound). Examples are Thingoe in Suffolk, Thinghou in Lincolnshire, Thinghou in Norfolk, Thynghowe in Nottinghamshire, as well as Fingay Hill in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It is significant that these names appear in areas of marked Norwegian or Danish settlement and there are no such examples in areas such as southern or south-western England, which have little evidence of Scandinavian settlement.

Lifetime of the Wirral Thing

 

The lifetime and power of the Wirral Thing is difficult to assess. The Wirral Thing apparently had some degree of autonomy for at least a significant part of the 10^th century. The powers would wax or wane depending on what was going on in the global English-Scandinavian struggle for supremacy. Clearly, from the stories of the attack on Chester in the formative years, the Wirral Thing was autonomous in its authority, even though nominally the area was still part of English Mercia under Æthelflæd’s jurisdiction. It is clear she allowed the Wirral Norse to rule themselves and only tried to check their activities when they developed designs on Chester.

 

King Canute and the Normans

 

The Battle of Brunanburh in 937AD would have, at least for a while, compromised the freedom of the Scandinavian communities of the North-west. The powers of the Wirral Thing would have been suppressed, although all warring factions presumably cleared off shortly after the battle. It is not known how rapidly the Thing would have recovered after this, although the period of rule by the Scandinavian kings of England in the early decades of the 11^th century would have provided the optimum environment for them to thrive as local government institutions. The Wirral Thing – or resonances from its pre-conquest structure – also appeared to have played an important role in the post-conquest administration of North Wirral, which essentially formed the ‘Caldy Hundred’. What gives us a clue about that is that the baronial arrangement of North Wirral after 1066 was quite different here compared with elsewhere. It was for the most part split into four compact parcels and given to four of the most powerful Norman barons of Cheshire, in contrast with the rest of the Wirral, where the Domesday holdings were dispersed.

 

John McNeal Dodgson wrote in 1957 that the North Wirral situation “represent a Norman adaptation of an administrative pattern that already existed when the Norman earls took over the shire. It looks as though the Norse enclave in Wirral was so politically distinctive that it justified a special feudal administration.”

 

Dodgson also wrote:

 

“The Norse element must have remained dominant for some time; at least long enough to impress its consciousness of identity upon the pattern of regional government over and above the parochial level, as the distribution of certain place-names in Wirral indicates. The place Thingwall is in the northern end of the peninsula and can only be the meeting-place of a Norse organisation. In Domesday Book, what is now the Hundred of Wirral was known as the Hundred of Wilvaston (OE Wīglāfes-tūn ‘Wiglaf’s farmstead’), which met at Willaston. Half-way between Thingwall and Willaston is Raby, ‘the farmstead at the boundary-mark’. It looks as though the Norse colony had a defined boundary, within which it owned its jurisdiction. This special jurisdiction is commemorated also in feudal arrangement of north Wirral in post-Conquest times.

 

Emergency Meetings of the Things

 

There would have been at least two occasions of emergency for the fledgling community on Wirral. The first would have been in 907AD, if the Ingimund tradition is to be believed. The Ingimund story reports how, some five years after the settlements started, the colonists became discontent with the poor quality of much of the land they had been allocated and so Ingimund “came to the leaders of the Norsemen and the Danes; he made a great complaint in their presence, and he said that they were not well off without good lands and that it was right for them to seize Chester and to possess it with its wealth and its lands … Let us beseech and implore them first and if we do not get them willingly in this way let is contest them by force:. This meeting is most likely to have taken place at Cross Hill.

 

Almost two generations on, in 937AD, if the great weight of evidence is to be believed, a much larger crisis appeared to arise for the local Thing and its energetic, but largely peaceful or Anglo-Scandinavian community.

 

Thingwall in the Domesday Book

 

In Domesday, Thingwall is called Tvigvelle and it is owned by William Malbank.

 

 

The entry reads:

 

“The same William hold Thingwall and Durand of him. Vetrlithr held it and was a free man. There is 1 hide paying geld. There is land for 2 ploughs. In demesne is 1 [plough] and 2 slaves and 1 villan and 1 border have another [plough]. TRE (1066) it was worth 8s now (1086) 5s.”

 

The entry tells us that at the time of the Conquest, Thingwall was held by somebody with a Norse name, which means “Winter traveller”. It was quite a small settlement and was worth less in 1086 than it had been in 1066.

 

The above is an abridged version of “The Things of Wirral and West Lancashire” from Stephen Harding’s book “Viking Mersey” 2002, Countyvise Limited.

The book is available online for free at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen-Harding/publication/300735116_Viking_Mersey_Scandinavian_Wirral_West_Lancashire_and_Chester/links/5a9127faa6fdccecff0279a0/Viking-Mersey-Scandinavian-Wirral-West-Lancashire-and-Chester.pdf