5 A Look at Archaelogy

Lindow Man

 Well, you always wanted to know what people looked like in the past, so here's something to haunt you. When normal people stumble over corpses, they turn pale, call the police and have nightmares for months. Not so the archaeologist. Before you can turn round they have decamped with the body, examined the stomach contents, checked the length of the fingernails and done a reconstruction of the head. Voila!

Now you know what the Celts looked like, in Cheshire, two thousand years ago. Lindow Man was dug up in 1984 during peatcutting at Lindow Moss. Other bodies have been discovered in the same bog. He has been dated as living somewhere between 2BCE and CE 119, died at the age of 25, was about 168 cm in height. He was probably upper class. His hands and fingernails showed no signs of manual toil, his moustache and beard were neatly trimmed. He had eaten an oat and wheat bannock, cooked on a heather fire.

Lndow Man:Reconstruction

He died a horrific death. There were two blows to the head, followed by strangulation. His throat was possibly slit. It is thought he might have been a ritual sacrifice to the gods. He has similar injuries and similar stomach contents to other bog bodies, with th exception of the beard.

Other bodies have since been dug up in the Moss. Was it a religious site?

Bog men -and women have been found throughout Germanic Europe, in Denmark, Holland, and Germany. Julius Caesar and other Roman writers observed that the tribes indulged in human sacrifice. People have speculated that the killlings were to please the Anglo-Saxon goddess, Eostre, but what is this custom doing in Celtic Britain? Was he part of a tribe of illegal immigrants who had dodged immigration? They have even dug up bog men in the Outer Hebrides, where no Germanic tribe arrived until the Vikings hit the scattered churches and pillaged their wealth.

Was he simply a murder victim?

It just goes to show that history is much more complicated than we think. And one should thank the archaeologists for blowing away some of the false theories that have been around.

When there are few written records, it is difficult to peel away the layers and find the truth. it's all right to speculate, but tomorrow, something else might turn up and destroy our most cherished misconceptions.

But at least we know now what people looked like, what food they ate, and, in the case of some of the continental bodies, what clothes and ornaments they wore.

I just wish I knew why we find Celts practising what was supposed to be a Germanic rite.

A curious footnote to this story is that the police were hunting for the body of a woman suspected of having been murdered. When the body of a woman was dug up in Lindow Moss, the murderer confessed to killing his wife. The corpse was 1800 years old!

I hope you did not mind this little diversion! Back to the Saxons and more archaeology!

4.Early Beginnings

Early England

Wot's this, you say?

And this???



Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni

The Last Celt to take on the Romans- except for the Picts





Life is tough if all you want is a few pics and some family gossip. All I can say is that history has a lot to do with it! You don't know who you are if you don't know your history. This is not intended to be a complete history, just a few choice chunks. You have been warned.

Now that historians have got away from the"Great Men" theory of History, archaelogy has become more thorough, and so has history. Excavations in West Stow and other sites suggest that the area has been populated since c5000BCE,  with the Celtic tribes being the first of which we have written record.

Julius Caesar, no less, had a look at Britannia in 55 and 54BCE. Incensed at the help the tribes were giving to their cousins over the Channel, he mounted two expeditions and decided he had more important things to do, like taking over Rome and getting himself murdered. He also remarked disapprovingly on the habit of the Celts of performing human sacrifice. I hasten to add that we have moved on.

Back came the Romans in 44 AD. The Celts were regarded just as so many underlings and slaves, and when they rose under Boudicca, they had ample cause. Forget the legends bout Roman civilisation. They were in it for the money. Their seizure of Boudicca's land, of which they had a half share anyway, their whipping of the queen and rape of her daughters bought about the burning of Roman settlements including London and St Albans, and the massacre of Roman settlers.

But the brave, disorganised Celts were no match for the Legions, and the Romans "pacified" the Celts so well that they never rose again. Those to the South of Hadrian's Wall, anyway! One look at the the wild mountains of the Highlands, and the Romans decided that civilisation ended in Northumberland.

As Empires rise, so they fall, and when the Romans left Britain in 410 CE, they left the Celts to the Germanic tribes which had been trying to bypass customs and immigration for some time.

So we have the Angles, Saxons, Frisians et al arriving to take over. As my ancestry is 40% Germanic, I have a vested interest in making them look good, but I'll try to be dispassionate.

What a fierce and bloody history we have. Anyone who says England is not as civilised as it used to be, hasn't studied its past.

3.Finding the Family

Whybrow Family Crest

WHYBROW
Whybrow would appear to have as many variants as modern diets, but would appear to have descended from the name Anglo-Saxon Wigburh, meaning  War Fortress. It may refer to a geographical location, or to an ancestress. No one knows. There are Whybrows recorded in Devon and London, but the name is nicely sprinkled over East Anglia, where the Angles, the Saxons and later the Danes settled.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Peterborough Chronicle

The first mention of the name is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 901, as a personal name, and interestingly, in the church rolls in Bury, Suffolk between 1182-1211. There are records of the name in London and Devon, but perhaps they are like the Cambridges, and have been in the area for a long time.

But why this obsession with Anglo-Saxons? Personal peeve. I spent years in the history classroom where I was told how the Normans conquered England and civilised the backward Anglo-Saxons.

Personally, I thought William the Conqueror was of the stuff of which nightmares were made, and totally approved of his servants' behaviour when horrible old monster died in Normandy. They robbed him of everything they could carry, and decamped, leaving him to rot.

William of Normandy(seated)
The Bayeaux Tapestry

In the next post, I shal try to put the Cambridges in context. I am not writing a history book, but if you don't look at people in terms of thir background and history, you get cardboard cutouts.

2. What's In a (Sur)name

Researching family trees is a business fraught with perils, none more dangerous than surname research.

Many people go into research hoping they will find someone famous to boast about, and seize on any theory which will help to shore up their hopes. Better to hope that the famous will be your descendants.

Although patronymics were used in early times, which is where the "Mac" and the Irish "O" come in, surnames were not generally used in England until the Normans arrived in 1066. They were devoted to records, the most famous of which is the Domesday Book. Good records meant efficient taxation collection, so the fact that my ancestors are listed in it is a dubious honour.

 

As people rarely moved far from their places of birth, a man could be known as Roger of Cambridge, Roger the Smith, Roger the Hawk.One could be named after one's birthplace, one's occupation, one's personal qualities.
So what do we have to work with, here?
There are three basic surnames to  deal with first: Whybrow, Cambridge and Cleal.

CAMBRIDGE

Cambridge Crest

Let's take Cambridge first. It is not a patronymic according to the normal rules. One would not normally name one's offspring Cambridge if one was the Duke of Cambridge. The lucky lad would be "Fitzherbert" or whatever your christian or surname was in early days. The Duke of Clarence, one of George III's sons, had a host of FitzClarences, and one Norman "Gerald" had descendants called Fitzgerald. They went on to cause some trouble in Ireland.

I like to think the Cambridges were named after the Cambridge on the Cam. It would mean that they are a part of a very ancient history. Of course, up to a hundred years ago, history was about "great men". Very few women about. Ordinary people were a kind of background to the knights in shining armour, some of whom were illiterate, violent louts. So we learned endless stories about kings and emperors.

G M Trevelyan

One of the those who changed this view of history was G M Trevelyan, the great social historian. Born into the gentry of Northumberland, although the family originated further south he was almost the inventor of social history. He has been accused of painting rural England as a kind of heaven, and he certainly hated the city slums, where the poor lived in horrible misery and squalor, but he took the trouble to actually find out what their lives were actually like. Long ago, my great grandfather, tramping the Northumberland hills, met a moustached man who had a long conversation with him, some of it about the price of food. The name Trevelyan meant nothing to him at the time, but the meeting is now part of a family tradition.

He also wrote about the Italian Risorgimento(Revival), and cheerfully accepted the brickbats thrown at him about bias, saying he couldn't have written much without it.

What's wrong about being a Cambridge of Cambridge?

1.Cleals and Cambridges: Best Viewed From First Post



ONE of the Cleall Coats of Arms



 This is intended to be the history of an intertwined family, the lives, ancestors and descendants of Florence Emma Cambridge and George Leonard Louis Cleall.

The blog is not intended to be a dry rendition of who married who, but will attempt to place the actors in this family drama against the history of their times. So we will travel from Hauxton to Hermanus, from Pakistan to Palestine.

You are invited to contribute, and to repair any errors.

Bon Voyage!