The Hall of Waltheof/Chapter XXV

by Sidney Oldall Addy

THE byrlaw, or town law, was common to the Danish districts of England, and it seems to have been adopted in places where Danish influence did not prevail. Everybody in Sheffield is familiar with the districts or divisions called Ecclesall Byrlaw and Brightside Byrlaw. As byrlaw is variously spelt and pronounced I give the form adopted by the New English Dictionary, which has the advantage of being in accordance with the etymology of the word. Old people in the neighbourhood of Sheffield pronounce the y of the first syllable like the ee in "beer," and make "law" into "low." The compound word býjar-lög, town law, is not actually found in Old Norse, but it is evidently the true derivation, for býjar is the genitive of bær or býr, a town, and its pronunciation accords with the bier or beer of the Sheffield words.

The byrlaw, as defined by Dr. Murray, was the "local custom or 'law' of a township, manor, or rural district, whereby disputes as to boundaries, trespass of cattle, etc., were settled without going into the law Courts; a law or custom established in such a district by common consent of all who held land therein, and having binding force within its limits."^[1] The "Catholicon Anglicum" a dictionary which, as I have elsewhere maintained,^[2] was probably compiled in this district, defines "byrelawe" as agraria, plebiscitum. In its earliest use the word bylaw is apparently the same as byrlaw, and the Danish bylag is an "association between all or some of the farmers in a rural township." The Swedish byalag, bylag, means a village community.^[3]

Dr. Murray has quoted a document of the year 1303 which shows that in Kent disputes about boundaries were to be settled by the agents of the parties or "by official or specially deputed arbitrators."^[4] They were to be "referred," as lawyers now say, "to arbitration."

In many places byrlawmen were appointed by the Court Leet, which was held once a year in most places, but twice in Sheffield.^[5] Vigfusson quotes the word bæjar-lögmaðr (byrlaw man) from the Diplomatarium Norvagicum of the fourteenth century, and he renders it as "town justice." In the Court Leet this person was a public officer chosen by the jury for a year, and for a particular district. If chosen by the Court Leet he was, in a liberal sense of the phrase, a town justice, the "town" being a mere village or a little collection of houses. If chosen by the parties themselves he was a specially appointed arbitrator, and not a town justice at all.

In this district the word byrlaw has acquired a secondary meaning. It means a district having its own byrlaw or local law court. The borough of Sheffield appears to have had no such court, for "Sheffield Byrlaw" is unknown. As has been shown in the chapters on The Burgery the affairs of the borough were administered by the body of freeholders or freemen forming the burghal community. But outlying districts, such as Ecclesall and Brightside, also required some system of local government, and this was supplied by the byrlaw court, or by the byrlawmen.

According to the laws of Norway made previous to 1263, monster-shapen infants were to be exposed and left to die at the church door. Such infants were to receive the prima signatio—a religious act preliminary to christening, but not baptism.^[6] Under the word "denial" I have made these remarks in the Sheffield Glossary: "I have heard on good authority that in the last century^[7] a child was found one winter's morning in the porch of Norton Church. Its parentage was never ascertained, and it was baptized by the name of Daniel Denial. This surname is yet found in the district, and the story is that such is its origin." I have since made further enquiry about the tradition, and I find that the story is that the child was abandoned by a cruel and unnatural mother. The tradition seems to point back to a custom, similar to that which obtained in Norway, of exposing malformed children in the church porch to die. A few years ago Norton church underwent a process of "restoration," when the remains of a fine Norman^[8] doorway with chevron ornamentation were found within the porch. The font, too, is of the same order of architecture, and is ornamented with some mythical or legendary subject in low relief. It has been noticed that traditions are often of long duration, and this tale of Daniel Denial would naturally cling to a Norman church^[9] if the practice of exposing malformed infants ever obtained there.

Everybody in this neighbourhood must have noticed the frequent occurrence of the yellow gregarious weed called charlock or wild mustard in our arable fields. "When a man," said Lord Palmerston, "walks over a field of turnips and sees it full of charlock, he must say there is room for some improvement."^[10] Now the monks of Beauchief were of the same opinion as Lord Palmerston. It was an established custom amongst their tenants at Norton and Alfreton to rid their lands of these noxious weeds, and tenants who refused or neglected to do so were punished and fined. These weeds, says a modern writer, "are so very detrimental to the husbandman that a law is in force in Denmark which obliges the inhabitants everywhere to eradicate them out of their grounds."^[11] What we have to notice here is that an excellent agricultural rule which the men of this district made for their benefit more than 500 years ago should still be the law in Denmark. I have borrowed my last two examples from a parish which forms one of the boundaries of Hallamshire on the south, but they are near enough to be used as arguments in favour of the Scandinavian influence which prevailed in this district.

In the town and neighbourhood of Sheffield the student of dialect will sometimes meet with words of Scandinavian origin, as for example "wheelswarf." Every Sheffield man has heard of Jack Wheelswarf, the local alias of a grinder. Wheel-swarf means wheel-dust, or dust from a grinding wheel, svarf being the Old Norse word for file dust. But this is not the place to deal with matters of dialect, and I have already dealt with the still-existing traces of Scandinavian influence in the dialect of this district^[12]

Footnotes

1. New Eng. Dict. s. v.
2. Sheffield Glossary, p. xxxiv.
3. New Eng. Dict. s. v. bylaw.
4. Ibid.
5. "Within this mannor is kept a Court Barron once every three weekes and a Court Leet twice every yeare, whereof the chiefest court is kept upon Easter Tuesday (which is there called Sembly Tuesday)."—Harrison in Sheffield Glossary, p. 205.
6. Vigfusson, s. v. prim-signa.
7. In this neighbourhood "in the last century" means "once upon a time."
8. When we speak of Norman architecture do we necessarily mean Norman-French architecture? Was it not also the architecture of the Northman, of the Scandinavian who settled, amongst other places, on the French coast? Only a portion of the chevron ornamentation remained, but from that it was easy to restore the whole.
9. The Doomsday Book records a church at this place.
10. In New Eng. Dict. s. v. charlock.
11. My "Beauchief Abbey," p. 66. Lightfoot's Flora Scotica, i, 489.
12. Sheffield Glossary (English Dialed Society)