Essex
Essex is one of the largest of the six Home Counties, and its maritime position gives it considerable importance. It was one of the early English kingdoms, and for more than a thousand years, it has briefly represented the history of England. In many of its towns and villages, there are monuments of antiquity and treasures of art which help us to realize the past past of our country, and we shall understand much better the progress and development of England as a whole if we first carefully study the geography and history of the county of Essex.
In this chapter, we will consider the meanings of the two words, shire and county, and then endeavor to trace the origin of the county of Essex and its name. For a thousand years and more, the county, or shire, in England has been considered the chief unit of local government in much the same way that the canton is regarded in Switzerland, the department in France, and the state in America. We now have the two words shire and county, but before the Norman Conquest, the word shire only was used.
In the earliest period of our history, the word shire dimply meant a division, and we find the term was thus used to denote the various portions of Cornwall and the two kingdoms of Kent. Then, as time passed, the word acquired a new meaning and was applied to any portion shorn off or cut off from a more significant division. The portion cut off was a share or shire; hence, many of our counties have retained this affix since the settlement of the English in our land.
The word count is due to the Norman invaders who identified the old English shire with their own comitatus, the district of a comes or count. Thus, we use the two words shire and county to denote the larger divisions of our land that were made long ago.
The counties of England differ considerably in their origins. Such counties as Essex, Kent, and Sussex had a different origin from Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. The former are probably survivals of former kingdoms, while the latter are doubtedly shares, or shires, of the kingdom of Mercia. Essex, Kent, and Sussex have kept their names and boundaries from the earliest times, perhaps for more than fourteen hundred years, and it is the knowledge of such facts as these makes the study of county geography and history so fascinating. Indeed, it is not too much to say that some of our counties are the epitome of our national history, and to illustrate the truth, we could not have a better example than the county of Essex.
It is rather difficult to trace the origin of some of our counties and the meaning of their names, but we have no such difficulty in the present case. Here, we have a county with a distinctly English name, which was derived from the Saxons who settled in this part of England. The Saxons were perhaps the strongest of the various invaders of our country in the fifth century, and they were distinguished by the portions they settled along the eastern and southern districts. Thus, we read of the East Saxons, South Saxons, West Saxons, and so on, while the other invaders, the Angles and Jutes, settled elsewhere. The word Essex is thus derived from the East Saxons, and in the English Chronicle, we find it written Easte Saxe. Later, it appears as East Saxe, and in the Domesday Book, it is written Exsessa. Then, the form our historians used Essex, so it has continued to this day.
The East Saxons formed the kingdom of Essex in a district that had been settled by a Keltic tribe known as the Trinobantes, or Trinovantes, a word which means battle-spearers or battle-stabbers. The territory of the Trinobantes was pretty compact, comprising as it did the modern county of Essex and a part of Middlesex, from beyond the Lea to the Stour on the north. Middlesex was included for an extended period in the kingdom of Essex. Then, for some reason, perhaps owing to the growth of London, it was separated from the East Saxon kingdom and made into a county. And this point of interest deserves notice here, for the East Saxon kingdom was also the see of the bishop of London. So it continued till relatively recently when, owing to population growth, Essex was annexed to the see of Rochester and then to that of St Albans. Now, Chelmsford is likely to be the see of a bishop of Essex, thus linking the county with the earliest period of our history.
Thus, we may say that the modern county of Essex grew out of the East Saxon kingdom, which was formed from the territory occupied by the Trinobantes, a Keltic tribe living in Britain when the Romans first landed in our country.
SOURCE: George F Bosworth. Essex. 1909. Cambridge: University Press
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