A Thousand Years of Cumbria (Background)
It’s been called Cumbria for more than a thousand years – but the county of that name only lasted forty-nine
The first mention of Cumbria comes in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 945AD, when King Edmund overran all ‘Cumbra land’. However, he didn’t incorporate it into England. Instead, he presented it to Malcolm, King of the Scots, as part of an alliance deal – and so it became part of Scotland. Exactly where ‘Cumbra land’ was, is not clear, but the name appears to relate to all the territory from the Clyde valley to Dunmail Raise. A hundred years later, c.1050, an Anglo-Saxon world map made in Canterbury marks ‘Camri’ to the north of the former Roman province of Britannia.[1] Both ‘Cumbra land’ and ‘Camri’ are derived from the Old British (Brittonic) word ‘Combrogi’, meaning ‘fellow-countryman’ – used by the British-speaking peoples of the region to distinguish themselves from the Anglo-Saxons, and the Scots. The same word is also used by the Welsh for their country, ‘Cymru’.
In 1092 the southern part of this Scottish territory was conquered by William II (William Rufus), William the Conqueror’s son and successor, and incorporated into England as the Earldom of Carlisle. However, in 1135, on the death of King Henry I, King David I of Scotland took back control of the area, making Carlisle one of his chief seats of Scots government, until Henry II took it back into England again in 1157. Two new counties were now formed from the former earldom, the northernmost being known initially as the county of Carlisle, but later became known as Cumberland. To the south and east, with the boundary at Dunmail Raise, was Westmorland, named for its position relative to the dales and moors of Yorkshire. In the far south, the peninsulas of Furness and Cartmel, which had always looked to Lancaster rather than Carlisle or Appleby, became part of the county of Lancaster. Not long after, the treaty of York of 1237 settled the border between England and Scotland for all time.
Whether the word ‘Cumbria’ remained in general circulation over the intervening years is not clear. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the adjective ‘Cumbrian’ occurs in 1747 – but this was in a history book, referring to the events of 945, so doesn’t really count.[2] However, later in the 18th century, the antiquary and topographer Fr Thomas West in 1780 wrote of ‘the Cumbrian Lakes’,[3] suggesting the word continued use at least in literary/academic circles. Meanwhile, a new name for the region was emerging – The Lake Counties, Lakeland or the Lake District, including by the Lake Poets of the early 19th century. The development of railways in the 1840s onwards and roads from 1900 reinforced these unifying tendencies.
In the early 1970s a major reorganisation of county boundaries across England took place, affecting Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as Cumberland and Westmorland. In place of the last two, a new entity came into being, to be called Cumbria, that would consist of the county boroughs of Barrow in Furness and Calder (formerly in Lancashire), the administrative counties of Cumberland and Westmorland, Dalton in Furness, Grange and Ulverston from Lancashire, the rural district of North Lonsdale, and elements of the West Riding of Yorkshire[4]. The changes were implemented in April 1974.
However, further changes came to the fore early in the new millennium, and by an Order of 2022[5] Cumbria as a local government authority came to an end on 1 April 2023. It was replaced by an east/west division into the unitary authority of Cumberland and the new non-metropolitan county and new non-metropolitan district of Westmorland and Furness.
Cumbria remains as a ceremonial county for the purposes of the lord lieutenancy and the shrievalty and, just as significantly, as a well-recognised and much-cherished cultural and historical entity.
Text by Bill Shannon and Marion McClintock
Illustration: In October 2020, Cumbria County Council was ‘invited’ by central government to forward ‘locally-led proposals’ for replacing both the county councils and district councils with new unitary authorities. This is the winning proposal, put forward by Allerdale and Copeland districts, featuring a ‘West’ and ‘East’ Cumbria.
[1] Cotton Anglo-Saxon Map, c1025-50: British Library, Cotton Tiberius BV pt I, fol 56v.
[2] Thomas Carte, General History of England (1747).
[4] Local Government Act (1972), Schedule I, Part II
[5] Cumbria (Structural Changes) Order 2022, Part 2, Sections 3 and 4
