Beormingas
Beormingas | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5th century–7th century | |||||||||
| Capital | Birmingham | ||||||||
| Common languages | Common Brittonic (Britanni) Old English (Englisc) | ||||||||
| Religion | Celtic paganism Anglo-Saxon paganism | ||||||||
| Government | Tribal Kingdom | ||||||||
| History | |||||||||
• Established | 5th century | ||||||||
• Disestablished | 7th century | ||||||||
| |||||||||
Etymology
The Beormingas were one of the tribes of Anglo-Saxon Britain.[1] The root beorma is a noun meaning yeast or leavening agent.[a] The suffix -ing is a cognate of inge, an ethnonym for the Ingaevones.[b][2][3] The suffix -hamm is the Old English for enclosure, land hemmed by water or marsh or higher ground, land in a riverbend, rivermeadow or promontory". Both appear as -ham in modern place-names.[4] Attributions to a personal name Beorma[5] are examples of non-historical founding myths.[6] [7]
History
Their territory possibly formed a regio or early administrative subdivision of the Kingdom of Mercia.[8] The extent of their territory has been reconstructed by identifying linkages between the later medieval parishes and manors that replaced it, suggesting that the regio would have extended from West Bromwich in the west to Castle Bromwich in the east, and from the southern boundaries of Sutton Coldfield in the north to the northern boundaries of Kings Norton and Northfield in the south.[9]
Regiones in the West Midlands were often served during the early Anglo-Saxon period by a minster, whose minster parish coincided with the tribal land-unit.[10] Two such minsters have been identified in the Beormingas' area: one at Harborne with a minster parish that included Edgbaston, Handsworth, West Bromwich, Great Barr, Selly Oak and probably Birmingham itself;[11] and one at Aston with a minster parish that included Erdington, Castle Bromwich, Deritend, Water Orton and Yardley.[12] Aston's placename suggests that it may have been established as a sub-minster of Harborne, which would have therefore been the original minster of the Beormingas.[13]
The Beormingas are likely to have been of Anglian origin, and to have formed part of the gradual Anglian settlement of the valley of the River Trent spreading upstream from the Humber Estuary. The location of the placename Birmingham suggests that the tribe may have formed part of the Tomsaete or Tame-dwellers, who are recorded as occupying this area of the valley of the River Tame in later Anglo-Saxon charters and formed one of the core groupings of the Kingdom of Mercia.
Notes
- ^ The implication is the Beormingas were known for the brewing of beer. Archaeological and literary evidence supports the mass production of beer for Rome’s legions serving on Hadrian’s Wall. Bishop's Storford was organized around the brewing of beer in the Middle Ages Such a tribe would likely have been indigenous Britons that amalgamated with the Angles of Mercia.
- ^ A West Germanic cultural group living along the North Sea coast in the areas of Jutland, Holstein, and Frisia in classical antiquity.
References
- ^ Gelling 1956, p. 14
- ^ {{cite web| url = https://names.ku.dk/place-names/common_place-name_endings/inge/%7Ctitle = Settlement names in -inge|work = Names in Denmark| date=15 July 2011 |publisher = Department of Nordic Research|access-date=17 May 2022.
- ^ Synopsis of the Deutsches Wörterbuch (in English) at the Language Research Centre, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, retrieved 27 June 2012.
- ^ Mills, A. D., A Dictionary of English Placenames. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
- ^ Room, Adrian: "Dictionary of Place-Names in the British Isles", Bloomsbury, 1988
- ^ Brewer's Britain & Ireland: The History, Culture, Folklore and Etymology of 7500 Places in These Islands. Ayto, John; Crofton, Ian. Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006
- ^ Ingram, James Henry (1823). The Saxon chronicle, with an English Translation and Notes, Critical and Explanatory. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row.
- ^ Gelling 1992, p. 140.
- ^ Leather 2001, pp. 7–8.
- ^ Bassett 2000, pp. 13–14.
- ^ Bassett 2000, pp. 17–19.
- ^ Bassett 2000, p. 12.
- ^ Bassett 2000, p. 20.
Bibliography
- Bassett, Steven (2000), "Anglo-Saxon Birmingham", Midland History (25), University of Birmingham: 1–27, ISSN 0047-729X
- Gelling, Margaret (1992), The West Midlands in the early Middle Ages, Studies in the early history of Britain, Leicester: Leicester University Press, ISBN 0-7185-1170-0
- Leather, Peter (2001), A Brief History of Birmingham, Studley: Brewin Books, ISBN 1858581877