History of Herefordshire

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The known history of Herefordshire starts with a shire in the time of King Athelstan (r. 895–939), and Herefordshire is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1051. The first Anglo-Saxon settlers, the 7th-century Magonsætan, were a sub-tribal unit of the Hwicce who occupied the Severn valley. The undulating hills of marl clay were surrounded by the Welsh mountains to the west; by the Malvern Hills to the east; by the Clent Hills of the Shropshire borders to the north, and by the indeterminate extent of the Forest of Dean to the south. The shire name first recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle may derive from "Here-ford", Old English for "army crossing", the location for the city of Hereford.

The area was absorbed into the Mercian kingdom by Offa of Mercia (r. 757–796), who – traditionally – constructed Offa's Dyke as a boundary to keep warring Western tribes out of Mercia: an early indication of ambivalent relations between the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh. The shire as an administrative unit was developed from Burghal Hidage (c. 915–917),^{[citation needed]} of Alfred the Great's son Edward the Elder (r. 899–924) and from the Shire-reeve courts of the Hundred.^{[citation needed]} In 676, during the reign of King Æthelred of Mercia the Archbishop of Canterbury Saint Theodore of Tarsus founded the Diocese of Hereford to minister to the minor sub-kingdom of Magonsaete, and he appointed Putta as the first Bishop of Hereford. The establishment of a centre of law and justice was supported by a monastic chapter that flourished during the tenth-century reformation.^{[citation needed]} Hereford's geographical location at the hub of the shire allowed Anglo-Saxon ealdormen to manage affairs; and Hereford played a vital role in the Scandinavian wars until Ralph, Earl Hereford was deposed (1055) by the regal Earl Harold Godwinson.

In the feudal Domesday Survey some adjacent areas of the Welsh Marches are assessed under Herefordshire. The western and southern borders remained debatable ground ("Archenfield") until, with the incorporation of the Welsh Marches in 1535, considerable territory was annexed to Herefordshire. These areas formed the hundreds of Wigmore, Ewyas Lacy and Huntington, while Ewyas Harold was subsumed into Webtree Hundred. At the time of the Domesday Survey the divisions of the county were very unsettled. As many as nineteen hundreds are mentioned, but these were of varying extent, some containing only one manor, some from twenty to thirty. Of the twelve modern^{[clarification needed]} hundreds, only Greytree, Radlow, Stretford, Wolphy and Wormelow retained their original Domesday names.^[1] The others were Broxash, Ewyas-Lacy, Grimsworth, Huntington, Webtree and Wigmore. Herefordshire is on the Welsh border (and before that the ancient boundary of the Welsh Marches).

In the modern era the boundaries of the Forest^[which?] were not set until 1750, by which period several Bishops' Peculiars^{[clarification needed]} were reassessed for land valuation and redistribution. Some land in the north-west of the county was ceded to Shropshire, and some land in the east to Worcestershire. However, in the south-west the Golden Valley lands were confirmed as Herefordiensis (Herefordian). A unique source for the history of the county is the Chained Library at Hereford Cathedral which contained some of the earliest printed books in Europe, printed by the Gutenburg press. During the English Civil Wars it acted as a royal treasury.

During the medieval period the county had been defined in law by violence and cruel punishments.^{[clarification needed]} It played a large part in various civil wars and gave rise to Lollardism.^{[citation needed]} A fiercely independent folk and a position on the border with Wales gave the county a reputation for a frontier mentality. Many were hanged for hayrick burning, owing to the relatively low agricultural wage, during the Swing Riots and later^{[citation needed]}. However, in contrast to Norfolk, for example, it did not form a militant agricultural workers' union.^{[citation needed]}

Herefordshire continued to be backward in industrial development: the canals and railways arrived later than elsewhere in England. Development reflected local needs: processing cider apples, manufacturing agricultural machinery. It was not until the 1930s that the first female councillors were elected, and that a rural bus service could provide a short journey into Hereford.^{[clarification needed]} The population remained static for 150 years until 2000, at about 150,000.^{[citation needed]}