In the wake of Yorkshire Day, it’s worth remembering – or learning for the first time – where and when the name ‘Yorkshire’ came from.

Here’s an explanation from our trusted member and resident historian, Colin Speakman.

Let’s go back in English history to 1,200 years or so ago, to the ninth century, over two centuries before the Norman Conquest.  Yorkshire became, around that time, an independent Anglo-Viking Kingdom of Jorvik, when people came from what is now modern Sweden and Denmark, to raid, trade, and eventually settle in northeastern England, in the land between the Humber and the Tees.

By the end of the ninth century, they had built homes, cleared fields, set up workshops, intermarrying with the Anglian settlers who had themselves come a few centuries earlier from what is now north Germany and the Danish borderlands.

The new immigrants occupied and expanded the former Roman garrison town of Eboracum (Anglian town and port of Eorforwick) to become a major European trading centre whose name in Norse they pronounced as Jorvik. The Kingdom and City of Jorvik (the Vikings had no different word for “country”) was established around 890 and at that time divided it into Thriddings or thirds, which with constant use became known as the Ridings, a name which has survived to the present day.

After the deposition and assassination of the last Viking King, Eric Bloodaxe, in 954, Jorvik became part of what might be best described as a semi-autonomous province within a loosely federated Kingdom of England, under the jurisdiction of a powerful Earl, loyal to the King, who in later post-Conquest times took the French title as the Duke of York.

Over the years, the name Jorvik was anglicised and shortened to “York”. “Shire” simply meant a division of England governed in terms of law and order and military allegiance to its former Anglo-Viking capital of York and therefore was known York Shire. The name was first written down (as far as we know) within the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1065, just a year before the Norman Conquest and they used the term “shire” to denote that division of the newly United Kingdom of England which belonged, in legal jurisdiction terms (Court Assizes etc,.), to the great Northern City of York.

Over the centuries the words “Shire” (Anglo-Norse) and “County” (Norman French) have become confused and even synonymous. Some modern counties have the suffix “shire” but many others such as Devon or Kent (also an ancient kingdom) do not.  So, in summary, Yorkshire was never one County but three and was ostensibly christened over 1000 years ago, in 1065 and it is worth remembering that York, which for a thousand years was England’s second city from Richard III’s time onwards, was the home of the Tudor Council of the North.

Now you know, you can decide. Is it God’s own County or God’s own Country?

Colin Speakman, Author and Historian.