By-elections - September 20th and 22th

[Sibboleth]

Ah, there's a name for the proposed Ludlow/Leominster seat: Magonsæte!

[gwynthegriff]

Sept 19, 2016 22:38:36 GMT listener said:

Adderbury in Oxfordshire was the country seat of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the courtier of Charles II and Restoration poet, infamous for his satire and erotic imagery.

Imagery? The poems of his I've read didn't leave much to the imagination!

Adderbury was also home to possibly the best flock of Oxford Down sheep ever.

The Adderbury flock, funnily enough.

[gwynthegriff]

The Acton/Hurleston boundary (just west of Nantwich) appears to follow the Roman Road on Cuckoo Lane, Bluestone.

[Pete Whitehead]

Sept 20, 2016 9:28:41 GMT lennon said:

Sept 20, 2016 9:20:50 GMT Crimson King said:

I suspect some of our current boundaries still reflect roman roads or such like

Yes - the A5 in North-West London basically forms the Barnet/Brent-Harrow boundary, and obviously is the original Watling Street. Am sure that there are hundreds of others as well.

The same Watling Street forms most of the boundary between Leicestershire and Wariwkshire

[Sibboleth]

Boundaries of parishes are often used as building blocks for higher government and electoral geographies and they are often based on field boundaries that, in some cases, are even older than Roman roads.

[Adam in Stroud]

Sept 20, 2016 9:20:50 GMT Crimson King said:

Sept 20, 2016 9:11:06 GMT finsobruce said:

Bet he had a few things to say about boundary changes down the years.

I suspect some of our current boundaries still reflect roman roads or such like

If you look at a map of Gloucestershire you'll find a suspiciously straight diagonal line in the county boundary south-west of Cirencester, which is a Roman road.  And the south-western edge of Leicestershire is Watling Street (and therefore also marks the boundary of the Danelaw as defined in Alfred's treaty with Guthrum.)

On Magonsaete: I once tried to work out a new set of shires for the midlands based on the Tribal Hidage, on an alternative history basis assuming unification of England by the Mercians rather than Wessex; and then I tried to work out what the names would be in modern English - so Pecset became Peaksetshire, Wreocensaete became Wrekinsetshire, and Hwicce was Wychshire.  I struggled with Magonsaete, it sounded so un-English, but I think I settled on Maignsetshire.  Mercia as a whole became March.

[LDCaerdydd]

Plasnewydd turnout 23.09%

[LDCaerdydd]

Plasnewydd

Green 93
UKIP 62
Con 115
Plaid 177
LD 1258
Lab 910

Lib Dem gain from Labour

[Old Fashioned Leftie]

Sept 20, 2016 22:04:25 GMT LDCaerdydd said:

Plasnewydd

Green 93
UKIP 62
Con 115
Plaid 177
LD 1258
Lab 910

Lib Dem gain from Labour

Not entirely surprising given current circumstances, but especially as the large student vote was absent until students return next week.

[Adam in Stroud]

Important result that, for us.

Given previous history in the ward it's not a massive surprise, but for that reason I really wanted to see us win it.  If we couldn't win this ward back then I feared for us getting any traction at all in Wales.

Decent margin of victory, too.

[David Ashforth]

[maxque]

Sept 20, 2016 22:04:25 GMT LDCaerdydd said:

Plasnewydd

Green 93
UKIP 62
Con 115
Plaid 177
LD 1258
Lab 910

Lib Dem gain from Labour

LD 48.1% (+15.4)
Lab 34.8% (-2.0)
PC 6.7% (-5.4)
Con 4.4% (-1.2)
Grn 3.6% (-9.2)
UKIP 2.4%

[LDCaerdydd]

Sept 20, 2016 22:04:25 GMT LDCaerdydd said:

Plasnewydd

Green 93
UKIP 62
Con 115
Plaid 177
LD 1258
Lab 910

Lib Dem gain from Labour

Paul Brand from ITV says on Twitter that Labour have 400 members in this ward. I personally think that's inflated but still.

There is a big chunk of this ward which I would class as 'champagne socialists' where Corbyn should be an advantage. Many Labour wards in Cardiff I would say are indifferent or marginally anti-Corbyn but not this one.

[AdminSTB]

Congratulations to the Lib Dems on this and other recent successes. I wonder to what extent this is down to Labour's leadership strife.
Yesterday at conference, Farron indicated his strategy was going to be to target the Blairite wing of the Labour Party (as well as Remainers). As yet, however, the opinion polls are showing no sign of a revival (if anything, it's slightly worse than at the general election). The yellow team need a parliamentary by-election opportunity for things to really take off for them, I think.
EDIT: I'm not thinking of Witney...

[East Anglian Lefty]

Sept 20, 2016 21:00:40 GMT Adam in Stroud said:

Sept 20, 2016 9:20:50 GMT Crimson King said:

I suspect some of our current boundaries still reflect roman roads or such like

If you look at a map of Gloucestershire you'll find a suspiciously straight diagonal line in the county boundary south-west of Cirencester, which is a Roman road.  And the south-western edge of Leicestershire is Watling Street (and therefore also marks the boundary of the Danelaw as defined in Alfred's treaty with Guthrum.)

On Magonsaete: I once tried to work out a new set of shires for the midlands based on the Tribal Hidage, on an alternative history basis assuming unification of England by the Mercians rather than Wessex; and then I tried to work out what the names would be in modern English - so Pecset became Peaksetshire, Wreocensaete became Wrekinsetshire, and Hwicce was Wychshire.  I struggled with Magonsaete, it sounded so un-English, but I think I settled on Maignsetshire.  Mercia as a whole became March.

I'm not sure you'd need to add -shire, given that sæt is used perfectly normally as a county name - think of Dorset and Somerset, where Dorchester and Somerton seem to take their names from the local subdivision, whereas in most other cases the shires are named after whichever town was the most important military staging post in the early 10th century. Mercia would become March, incidentally, as it's the exact same word.

Out of interest, how did you Wychshire compare with the vanished county of Winchcombeshire?

[Deleted]

[marksenior]

Sept 21, 2016 0:08:18 GMT AdminSTB said:

Congratulations to the Lib Dems on this and other recent successes. I wonder to what extent this is down to Labour's leadership strife.
Yesterday at conference, Farron indicated his strategy was going to be to target the Blairite wing of the Labour Party (as well as Remainers). As yet, however, the opinion polls are showing no sign of a revival (if anything, it's slightly worse than at the general election). The yellow team need a parliamentary by-election opportunity for things to really take off for them, I think.
EDIT: I'm not thinking of Witney...

There are as many recent successes against the Conservatives as against Labour . The raw data for opinion polls do in fact show a small uptick on the last GE but this vanishes after weighting and other adjustments . The last Ipsos Mori poll for example had 10% LD and 6% UKIP in its raw data which after weighting became 6% LD and 9% UKIP in the final Headline VI figures .

[Adam in Stroud]

Sept 21, 2016 6:15:53 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

I'm not sure you'd need to add -shire, given that sæt is used perfectly normally as a county name - think of Dorset and Somerset, where Dorchester and Somerton seem to take their names from the local subdivision, whereas in most other cases the shires are named after whichever town was the most important military staging post in the early 10th century. Mercia would become March, incidentally, as it's the exact same word.

Out of interest, how did you Wychshire compare with the vanished county of Winchcombeshire?

You're right about "shire", I was just following the slightly old-fashioned practice that you find on old maps, where, e.g.  Devon and Dorset become Devonshire and Dorsetshire respectively.  But it is not redundant - "shire" seems to mean a division, a shearing off as it were, whereas "saete" means dwellers/occupants and has the same root as "settler"
- I suspect you knew that!  So Dorsetshire is "the government division of the dwellers in the land of the Durotriges".

And, that is indeed the point about "March".  It slightly niggles me that of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, historians have given Mercia a Latinised name (presumably most of the sources are in Latin, unlike the AS Chronicle for Wessex)  which just doesn't sound authentic to me. Too late now.  But Tolkein would have got the point ("The Mark of the Rohirrim" being I imagine the old Brummy's tribute to his childhood home, along with the landscape of The Shire.)

Charters attested by the rulers of the Hwicce seem to coincide with the diocese of Worcester, thus covering Worcs, Glos east of the Severn and Leadon, and some bits of Warks along the Avon.  It'd be a big county, as would Magonsaete (most of Herefordshire and Shropshire!) There's also a charter for Bath which is outside the diocese entirely, though not that far away; nothing in Wychwood, though, oddly.  Winchcombeshire would have been entirely within the Hwicce territory on that basis, but the evidence for it post-dates the Hwicce as an entity.  It seems to have been an Alfredian shire arising on the standard burghal-town-plus-hinterland basis, like all the other midland shires, but was apparently abolished by the notorious Edric Streona in Aethelred the Unready's reign ("he tore up shires like paper" much like the 1974 reforms) as part of a land-grab.  But it has been suggested that there are traces of it having an earlier existence as the heartland of the Hwicce, directly controlled by the family who later became kings of the Hwicce. So in my scheme I had it as a separate small shire - if you're going to use the Tribal hidage as your starting point you end up with gloriously inconsistent sizes of counties - as you probably know, there'd be some especially tiny ones in your neck of the woods.

(David Hill, "An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England" presents the evidence graphically, you'll get a longer discussion is Barbara Yorke "Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England", Steven Basset (ed) "The Origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms" and Carolyn Heighway "Anglo-Saxon Gloucestershire.")

[Deleted]

Sept 21, 2016 8:30:48 GMT Adam in Stroud said:

Sept 21, 2016 6:15:53 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

I'm not sure you'd need to add -shire, given that sæt is used perfectly normally as a county name - think of Dorset and Somerset, where Dorchester and Somerton seem to take their names from the local subdivision, whereas in most other cases the shires are named after whichever town was the most important military staging post in the early 10th century. Mercia would become March, incidentally, as it's the exact same word.

Out of interest, how did you Wychshire compare with the vanished county of Winchcombeshire?

You're right about "shire", I was just following the slightly old-fashioned practice that you find on old maps, where, e.g.  Devon and Dorset become Devonshire and Dorsetshire respectively.  But it is not redundant - "shire" seems to mean a division, a shearing off as it were, whereas "saete" means dwellers/occupants and has the same root as "settler"
- I suspect you knew that!  So Dorsetshire is "the government division of the dwellers in the land of the Durotriges".

And, that is indeed the point about "March".  It slightly niggles me that of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, historians have given Mercia a Latinised name (presumably most of the sources are in Latin, unlike the AS Chronicle for Wessex)  which just doesn't sound authentic to me. Too late now.  But Tolkein would have got the point ("The Mark of the Rohirrim" being I imagine the old Brummy's tribute to his childhood home, along with the landscape of The Shire.)

Charters attested by the rulers of the Hwicce seem to coincide with the diocese of Worcester, thus covering Worcs, Glos east of the Severn and Leadon, and some bits of Warks along the Avon.  It'd be a big county, as would Magonsaete (most of Herefordshire and Shropshire!) There's also a charter for Bath which is outside the diocese entirely, though not that far away; nothing in Wychwood, though, oddly.  Winchcombeshire would have been entirely within the Hwicce territory on that basis, but the evidence for it post-dates the Hwicce as an entity.  It seems to have been an Alfredian shire arising on the standard burghal-town-plus-hinterland basis, like all the other midland shires, but was apparently abolished by the notorious Edric Streona in Aethelred the Unready's reign ("he tore up shires like paper" much like the 1974 reforms) as part of a land-grab.  But it has been suggested that there are traces of it having an earlier existence as the heartland of the Hwicce, directly controlled by the family who later became kings of the Hwicce. So in my scheme I had it as a separate small shire - if you're going to use the Tribal hidage as your starting point you end up with gloriously inconsistent sizes of counties - as you probably know, there'd be some especially tiny ones in your neck of the woods.

(David Hill, "An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England" presents the evidence graphically, you'll get a longer discussion is Barbara Yorke "Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England", Steven Basset (ed) "The Origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms" and Carolyn Heighway "Anglo-Saxon Gloucestershire.")

The Kingdom of the Hwicce is very interesting. It is suggested that it was, in some sense, successor to the Civitas Dobunnorum. It seems to have been Christian from an early date, and - like its eastern neighbours the Gewisse (later the West Saxons) - may have had partly British origins. Early bishops of Worcester bore the title "Episcopus Hwicciorum".

[Sibboleth]

Sept 21, 2016 8:30:48 GMT Adam in Stroud said:

But Tolkein would have got the point ("The Mark of the Rohirrim" being I imagine the old Brummy's tribute to his childhood home, along with the landscape of The Shire.)

Also Mordor can be translated 'The Black Country'

Actually the best thing about growing up in the West Midlands is the local news occasionally going "HOORAY WE'RE MORDOR AND THEREFORE FAMOUS!!!!!!!!!" - I can remember multiple 'is this the tower that inspired...' reports, to which the answer is obviously but probably don't be too proud about that...