stream coming from the south. The united streams are thence-forward known as the Sheath, which flows on through Sheffield, marking the division between Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Lim Brook is probably quite a modern name. The stream itself was formerly called a lim or torrent, and the word is still found in the neighbourhood of Sheffield as lumb, or lum. In Anglo-Saxon the word is found as hlimme. The boundary between the two counties is continued by the so-called Lim Brook up to its source in the White Moss. Lim Brook, a tributary of the Sheath, forms the northern boundary of the ancient hamlet called Dore. The Sheath and this tributary, which now in part divide the counties of York and Derby, in part divided also the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia.
The village of Dore has been the scene of one of the most important events in English history. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle declares how in the year 827 Egbert, King of the West Saxons, 'led an army to Dore against the Northumbrians, and they there offered him obedience and allegiance, and with that they separated.'[1]
More than a century later, or in the year 942, another MS. of the A.-S. Chronicle thus refers to King Edmund's expulsion of the Danes from Mercia:—
- Her Edmund cyning˙ Engla Ъeoden˙ maga mundbora˙ Myrce ge eode˙ dyre dæd fruma˙ swa Dor scadeЪ˙ hwitan wylled geat˙ and Humbra ea˙ brada brim stream.
In modern English:—
- Here Edmund King,
- ruler of Angles,
- protector of clansmen,
- Mercia obtained,
- dear deed-doer,
- as Dor divideth:
- gate of the white well,
- and Humber's river,
- broad sea stream.
Here is a distinct allusion to Dore as a boundary of Northumbria, but the language of the Chronicle here leaves it doubtful whether a stream or place is meant.[2]
- ↑ And se Ecgbright lædde fyrde to Dore wið Norþan humbra and hi him þær eadmedo budon˙ and þwærnessa˙ and hi mid þan to hwurfon.—Earle's ed., 1865, p. 65.
- ↑ The monastery of Beauchief was founded in 1183 in a place called Dorehéseles. Of the Sheath, Hunter writes:—'Branches of hazel, a tree with which the vale of Beauchief abounds, are sometimes found deeply embedded in the earth near the course of this river, which seem to have been brought down ages ago, at the time of some extraordinary flood' (Hallamshire, p. 3).
