Part 1 – New Overlords
After the Roman army left Britain in AD 410, Anglo-Saxons from North Germany moved in to the south-east, but it took them over 200 years to reach this end of the Peak District. We don’t know whether they then drove out the Celtic inhabitants, but the modern theory is that Celts in the north and west of the country mostly stayed on but with new overlords. That may have been especially so locally, as Celtic settlement names are very rare generally but we have several – Kinder, Werneth, Mellor, Dinting. Claims that Celtic traditions, such as the carving of stone heads, survived into modern times may therefore have a basis in fact.
The Celts tended to farm the lighter soils on slopes, which they terraced to create small fields worked mostly by hand. The Anglo-Saxons, though, had ploughs pulled by teams of oxen which could work heavier, deeper more productive soils in bigger fields, so they established new settlements on more level land. However, they stayed off the valley floors, which were then very boggy and prone to flooding. In 1086 the Domesday Book (see picture, entry for Longdendale) recorded these settlements as they were then and as they had been in 1066 before the Norman Conquest.
Although in much of rural England the Anglo-Saxon landscape can still be traced, in most industrial areas, whilst the village names survive, all physical evidence has been obliterated by factories and houses. However, in Glossopdale and Longdendale, when the factory cotton industry began in the 1780s the wet valley bottoms, shunned by the Anglo-Saxon farmers, were exactly where the mill builders wanted to be. They lowered and straightened the streams, drained the land, built new roads, and established new communities, leaving the old villages high and dry.
Domesday records nine of them – Tintwistle, Hadfield, Padfield, Dinting, Glossop, Whitfield, Chunal, Charlesworth and Chisworth. Simmondley, Gamesley, Arnfield and Crowden aren’t mentioned but have Anglo-Saxon names so must have been there, subsumed within other settlements. In the next part we will look at how they were established and organised.