I have said that the river Sheath is the dividing line of the counties of York and Derby, as it was of the two ancient kingdoms. Its proper spelling is Scheth or Sheath, and it is so found as late as the seventeenth century. To shed hair, as is well known, is to separate it. Shed and sheth are both found with the same meaning.[1] The meaning of the river name is, then, certain and plain. It is the divider or separater, and its etymology is found involved in the very word used by the chronicler—'scadeЪ.' The river was the dividing line, but the village formed a division also. It was the door,[2] the pass, the gate, the entrance into the kingdom of Mercia.
Another piece of evidence, moreover, remains to show that here was the frontier line which divided two hostile peoples, and which defined for the Northumbrian the limits beyond which he must not go. Contiguous to Dore, and to the south of that village, is a hamlet called Totley.[3] This hamlet stands on the summit of a steep hill, which descends very abruptly towards the north. In the Domesday Book it is called Totingelei. There can, I think, be little doubt that this was once a place of defence from which the men of Derbyshire repelled the attacks of the enemy. Toot hills, tot hills, and toting hills are often met with in our early literature. In Lord Londesborough's pictorial glossary of the fifteenth century 'a
- ↑ The river is called the Sheath in Harrison's Survey of Sheffield, 1637, a MS. referred to hereafter. See Miss Baker's Northants Glossary, s. v. 'Sheth'; also Wilbraham's Cheshire Glossary, s. v. Shed. It occurs as Scheth in the Obituarium of Beauchief Abbey (Addy's Beauchief, p. 48). This document is of the twelfth or thirteenth century.
- ↑ This word dor seems to have been used as a common name for a mountain pass, as we see in Cod. Dipl., 570 (p. 79), that in a description of bounds a dor occurs between two brooks.—Earle's A.-S. Chronicle, p. 328.
- ↑ There was a royal park called Tottele or Tottelay in Holderness. In the year 1296 the king's writ was directed to the bailiff og Holderness, reciting 'quod Thomas de Normanville nuper Escaetor noster ultra Trentam terras diversorum hominum partium illarum infra parcum nostrum de Tottle quem per ipsum Thomam nuper fieri precepimus inclusit' (Inq. post mortem, 24 Ed. I., No. 64). In this document I notice the name of Radulphus de Wellewyk. In 1325 Ralph de Wellewick, miles, granted lands in Dore, co. Derby. About 1280 Thomas del Holm granted lands in Totley, co. Derby (Derb. Arch. J., iii. 95). This Ralph de Wellewick appears to have been lord of the manor of Dore, and there would thus appear to have been some connexion between this remote village and the people of Holderness.
