Fell
A fell is a high and barren landscape feature, such as a mountain range or moor-covered hills. The term is most employed in Fennoscandia, the Isle of Man, parts of Northern England, Scotland. Bekkr -'stream' » beck dalr -'valley' » dale fors -'waterfall' » force/foss fjallr -'mountain' » fell gil -'ravine' » gill/ghyll haugr -'hill' » howe pic -'peak' » pike sætr -'shieling' » side/seat tjorn -'small lake' » tarn þveit -'clearing' » thwaite The English word fell comes from Old Norse fell and fjall, it is cognate with Danish fjeld, Faroese fjall and fjøll, Icelandic fjall and fell, Norwegian fjell with dialects fjøll, fjødd, fjedl, fjill and fel, Swedish fjäll, all referring to mountains rising above the alpine tree line. In Northern England in the Lake District and in the Pennine Dales, the word "fell" referred to an area of uncultivated high ground used as common grazing on common land and above the timberline. Today "fell" refers to the mountains and hills of the Lake District and the Pennine Dales.
Names that referred to grazing areas have been applied to these hilltops. This is the case with Seathwaite Fell, for example, which would be the common grazing land used by the farmers of Seathwaite; the fellgate marks the road from a settlement onto the fell, as is the case with the Seathwaite Fell. In other cases the reverse is true; the word "fell" is used in the names of various breeds of livestock, bred for life on the uplands, such as Rough Fell sheep, Fell Terriers and Fell ponies. It is found in many place names across the North of England attached to the name of a community. In northern England, there is a Lord of the Fells – this ancient aristocratic title being associated with the Lords of Bowland. Groups of cairns are a common feature on many fells marking the summit – there are fine examples on Wild Boar Fell in Mallerstang Dale, on Nine Standards Rigg just outside Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria; as the most mountainous region of England, the Lake District is the area most associated with the sport of fell running, which takes its name from the fells of the district.
"Fellwalking" is the term used locally for the activity known in the rest of Great Britain as hillwalking. The word "fell" enjoys limited use in Scotland, with for example the Campsie Fells in Central Scotland, to the North East of Glasgow. One of the most famous examples of the use of the word "fell" in Scotland is Goat Fell, the highest point on the Isle of Arran. Criffel and the nearby Long Fell in Galloway may be seen from the northern Lake District of England. Peel Fell in the Kielder Forest is situated on the border between the Scottish Borders to the North and the English county of Northumberland to the South. In Norway, fjell, in common usage, is interpreted as a summit of greater altitude than a hill, which leads to a great deal of local variation in what is defined as a'fjell'. Professor of geography at the University of Bergen, Anders Lundeberg, has summed up the problem by stating that "There is no fixed and unambiguous definition of'fjell'." Ivar Aasen defined fjell as a "tall berg" referring to a berg that reaches an altitude where trees don't grow, lower berg are referred to as "berg", "ås" or "hei".
The fixed expression til fjells refers to mountains as a collective rather than a specific location or specific summit. According to Ivar Aasen berg refers to cliffs and notable elevations of the surface underpinned by bedrock. For all practical purposes,'fjell' can be translated as'mountain' and the Norwegian language has no other used word for mountain. In Sweden, "fjäll" refers to any mountain or upland high enough that forest will not survive at the top, in effect a mountain tundra.'Fjäll' is used to describe mountains in the Nordic countries, but more to describe mountains shaped by massive ice sheets in Arctic and subarctic regions. In Finnish, the mountains characteristic of the region of Lapland are called tunturi. In Finnish, the geographical term vuori is used for mountains uplifted and with jagged terrain featuring permanent glaciers, while tunturi refers to the old eroded shaped terrain without glaciers, as found in Finland, they are round inselbergs rising from the otherwise flat surroundings.
The mountains in Finnish Lapland reach heights of up to 400 and 800 metres, where the upper reaches are above the tree line. Those that do not reach the tree line, on the other hand, are referred to as vaara; the mountains in Finnish Lapland form vestiges of the Karelides mountains, formed two billion years ago. The term tunturi a word limited to Far-Northern dialects of Finnish and Karelian, is a loan from Sami, compare Proto-Sami *tuontër, South Sami doedtere, Northern Sami duottar, Inari Sami tuodâr "uplands, tundra", Kildin Sami tūndâr, which means "uplands, treeless mountain tract" and is cognate with Finnish tanner "hard ground". From this Sami word, the word tundra is borrowed, as well, through the Russian language; the term förfjäll is used in Sweden and Finland to denote moun
Fluorite
Fluorite is the mineral form of calcium fluoride, CaF2. It belongs to the halide minerals, it crystallizes in isometric cubic habit, although octahedral and more complex isometric forms are not uncommon. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness, based on scratch hardness comparison, defines value 4 as Fluorite. Fluorite is a colorful mineral, both in visible and ultraviolet light, the stone has ornamental and lapidary uses. Industrially, fluorite is used as a flux for smelting, in the production of certain glasses and enamels; the purest grades of fluorite are a source of fluoride for hydrofluoric acid manufacture, the intermediate source of most fluorine-containing fine chemicals. Optically clear transparent fluorite lenses have low dispersion, so lenses made from it exhibit less chromatic aberration, making them valuable in microscopes and telescopes. Fluorite optics are usable in the far-ultraviolet and mid-infrared ranges, where conventional glasses are too absorbent for use; the word fluorite is derived from the Latin verb fluere, meaning to flow.
The mineral is used as a flux in iron smelting to decrease the viscosity of slags. The term flux comes from the Latin adjective fluxus, meaning flowing, slack; the mineral fluorite was termed fluorospar and was first discussed in print in a 1530 work Bermannvs sive de re metallica dialogus, by Georgius Agricola, as a mineral noted for its usefulness as a flux. Agricola, a German scientist with expertise in philology and metallurgy, named fluorspar as a neo-Latinization of the German Flussspat from Fluß and Spat. In 1852, fluorite gave its name to the phenomenon of fluorescence, prominent in fluorites from certain locations, due to certain impurities in the crystal. Fluorite gave the name to its constitutive element fluorine. Presently, the word "fluorspar" is most used for fluorite as the industrial and chemical commodity, while "fluorite" is used mineralogically and in most other senses. In the context of archeology, classical studies, egyptology, the Latin terms murrina and myrrhina refer to fluorite.
In book 37 of his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder describes it as a precious stone with purple and white mottling, whose objects carved from it, the Romans prize. Fluorite crystallises in a cubic motif. Crystal twinning adds complexity to the observed crystal habits. Fluorite has four perfect cleavage planes. Element substitution for the calcium cation includes certain rare earth elements, such as yttrium and cerium. Iron and barium are common impurities; some fluorine may be replaced by the chloride anion. Fluorite is a occurring mineral that occurs globally with significant deposits in over 9,000 areas, it may occur as a vein deposit with metallic minerals, where it forms a part of the gangue and may be associated with galena, barite and calcite. It is a common mineral in deposits of hydrothermal origin and has been noted as a primary mineral in granites and other igneous rocks and as a common minor constituent of dolostone and limestone; the world reserves of fluorite are estimated at 230 million tonnes with the largest deposits being in South Africa and China.
China is leading the world production with about 3 Mt annually, followed by Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Namibia. One of the largest deposits of fluorspar in North America is located in the Burin Peninsula, Canada; the first official recognition of fluorspar in the area was recorded by geologist J. B. Jukes in 1843, he noted an occurrence of "galena" or lead ore and fluoride of lime on the west side of St. Lawrence harbour, it is recorded that interest in the commercial mining of fluorspar began in 1928 with the first ore being extracted in 1933. At Iron Springs Mine, the shafts reached depths of 970 feet. In the St. Lawrence area, the veins are persistent for great lengths and several of them have wide lenses; the area with veins of known workable size comprises about 60 square miles. Cubic crystals up to 20 cm across have been found at Russia; the largest documented single crystal of fluorite was a cube weighing ~ 16 tonnes. Fluorite may be found in mines in Caldoveiro Peak, in Asturias, Spain.
One of the most famous of the older-known localities of fluorite is Castleton in Derbyshire, where, under the name of Derbyshire Blue John, purple-blue fluorite was extracted from several mines or caves. During the 19th century, this attractive fluorite was mined for its ornamental value; the mineral Blue John is now scarce, only a few hundred kilograms are mined each year for ornamental and lapidary use. Mining still takes place in Treak Cliff Cavern. Discovered deposits in China have produced fluorite with coloring and banding similar to the classic Blue John stone. George Gabriel Stokes named the phenomenon of fluorescence from fluorite, in 1852. Many samples of fluorite exhibit fluorescence under ultraviolet light, a property that takes its name from fluorite. Many minerals, as well as other substances, fluoresce. Fluorescence involves the elevation of electron energy levels by quanta of ultraviolet light, followed by the progressive falling back of the electrons into their previous energy state, releasing quanta of visible light in the process.
In fluorite, the visible
Bishop Auckland
Bishop Auckland is a market town and civil parish in County Durham in north east England. It is located about 12 miles northwest of Darlington, 12 miles southwest of Durham and 5 miles southeast of Crook at the confluence of the River Wear with its tributary the River Gaunless. According to the 2001 census, Bishop Auckland has a population of 24,392, recounted at 16,296 for the 2011 Census; the difference in the two censuses is due to a change in the demarkations of the town boundaries over this period, rather than an actual reduction in the population. Much of the town's early history surrounds the bishops of Durham and the establishment of a hunting lodge, which became the main residence of the Bishops of Durham; this link with the Bishops of Durham is reflected in the first part of the town's name. During the Industrial Revolution, the town grew as coal mining took hold as an important industry; the subsequent decline of the coal mining industry in the late twentieth century has been blamed for a fall in the town's fortunes in other sectors.
Today, the largest sector of employment in the town is manufacturing. Since 1 April 2009, the town's local government has come from the Durham County Council Unitary Authority; the unitary authority replaced Durham County Council. Bishop Auckland is located in the Bishop Auckland parliamentary constituency; the town has a town-twinning with the French town of Ivry-sur-Seine. The town is colloquially referred to as Bish Vegas, the origins of which are unclear; the first part of the name, "Bishop", refers to the land being owned by and the town being the residence of the Bishop of Durham. However, the derivation of "Auckland" is more complex; the present form of the name certainly comes from Old Norse Aukland meaning'additional land'. This could refer to the area being extra land granted to the Bishop of Durham by King Canute in around 1020. However, the name is attested in Alclit; this is similar to Alclut, an early, Cumbric name for Dumbarton which means "rock on the Clyde" or "cliff on the Clyde".
It is believed that'Clyde' may have been an earlier Celtic name for the river today known as the Gaunless, which flows close to the town. Thus before being Norseified as Aukland, Alclit meant'rock of the Clut'. Auckland is used in the settlements of St Helen Auckland, West Auckland and St Andrew Auckland, an old name for South Church, all of which are along the path of the Gaunless; the name Gaunless itself is of Norse origin, meaning useless. It is believed that this derives from the river's inability to power a mill, sustain fish or create fertile floodplains; the earliest known reference to Bishop Auckland itself is around 1000AD as land given to the Earl of Northumberland for defending the church against the Scots. It is mentioned in 1020 as a gift given to the Bishop of Durham by King Canute. However, a village certainly existed on the town's present site long before this, with there being evidence of church on the site of St Andrew's Church in South Church as early as the seventh century.
Furthermore, the Romans had a look-out post where Auckland Castle is sited today and a 10-acre fort at nearby Binchester. There is evidence of possible Iron Age settlements around the town, together with finds of Bronze Age and Mesolithic artefacts. Much of the town's history surrounds its links with the Bishops of Durham. In 1083, Bishop William de St-Calais expelled a number of canons from Durham; some of these established a collegiate church. Around 1183 Bishop Pudsey established a manor house in the town, with a great hall being completed in 1195 on the site occupied by St Peter's Chapel today. Bishop Bek, who preferred the town as his main residence over Durham Castle due to its proximity to hunting grounds converted the manor house into a castle; the grounds of the castle were noted as being large enough to contain 16000 men ahead of the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346. Between 1283 and 1310, Bek was responsible for ordering the replacement of the collegiate church established in 1183 with the Church of St Andrew that stands in South Church today, together with accommodation for the canons.
The collegiate church appears to have supported a school. The collegiate church was re-organised under Bishop Langley in 1428 and at some point in the same century moved to the castle grounds; the college and its school were dissolved in the 15th century. The school was not revived until the reign of King James I when in 1604 Anne Swifte petitioned the King to found a school and the Free Grammar School of King James, the direct antecedent of today's King James I school, was established. Although, the school's early location is unknown, in 1638 Bishop Morton granted the school space in an old chapel in the Market Place. In 1604, James's son, the future King Charles I made the first of three visits he would make to the town during his life. On this visit, his first to England, he was entertained by Bishop Matthew. James himself stayed in Auckland Castle between 17 and 19 April 1617. On 8 May, at Durham Castle King James is reputed to have rebuked Bishop William James so badly that the Bishop returned to Auckland Castle and died three days later.
Charles's second visit to the town was on his way to Scotland on 31 May 1633, when he was entertained by Bishop Morton. His third visit on 4 February 1647 was in less lavish circumstances, as a prisoner. Morton had fled the town in 1640 and the castle was empty; the king had to stay in a public hou
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden was an English-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals and religion, its variety in tone and content, he is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues". He was born in York, grew up near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family, he studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29, he spent five years teaching in British public schools travelled to Iceland and China in order to write books about his journeys. In 1939 he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in 1946, he taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s. From 1947 to 1957 he summered in Ischia, he came to wide public attention with his first book Poems at the age of twenty-three in 1930. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between 1935 and 1938 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer.
Auden moved to the United States to escape this reputation, his work in the 1940s, including the long poems "For the Time Being" and "The Sea and the Mirror", focused on religious themes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. From 1956 to 1961 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Auden and Isherwood maintained a lasting but intermittent sexual friendship from around 1927 to 1939, while both had briefer but more intense relations with other men. In 1939, Auden fell in love with Chester Kallman and regarded their relationship as a marriage, but this ended in 1941 when Kallman refused to accept the faithful relations that Auden demanded. However, the two maintained their friendship, from 1947 until Auden's death they lived in the same house or apartment in a non-sexual relationship collaborating on opera libretti such as that of The Rake's Progress, to music by Igor Stravinsky. Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political and religious subjects, he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, other forms of performance.
Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential, critical views on his work ranged from dismissive—treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot—to affirmative, as in Joseph Brodsky's claim that he had "the greatest mind of the twentieth century". After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films and popular media. Auden was born in York, England, to George Augustus Auden, a physician, Constance Rosalie Auden, who had trained as a missionary nurse, he was the third of three sons. Auden, whose grandfathers were both Church of England clergymen, grew up in an Anglo-Catholic household that followed a "High" form of Anglicanism, with doctrine and ritual resembling those of Roman Catholicism, he traced his love of music and language to the church services of his childhood. He believed he was of Icelandic descent, his lifelong fascination with Icelandic legends and Old Norse sagas is evident in his work, his family moved to Homer Road in Solihull, near Birmingham, in 1908, where his father had been appointed the School Medical Officer and Lecturer of Public Health.
Auden's lifelong psychoanalytic interests began in his father's library. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools, his visits to the Pennine landscape and its declining lead-mining industry figure in many of his poems. Until he was fifteen he expected to become a mining engineer, but his passion for words had begun, he wrote later: "words so excite me that a pornographic story, for example, excites me sexually more than a living person can do." Auden attended St Edmund's School, Surrey, where he met Christopher Isherwood famous in his own right as a novelist. At thirteen he went to Gresham's School in Norfolk. Soon after, he "discover that he lost his faith". In school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922, Caliban in The Tempest in 1925, his last year at Gresham's, his first published poems appeared in the school magazine in 1923. Auden wrote a chapter on Gresham's for Graham Greene's The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands. In 1925 he went up to Christ Church, with a scholarship in biology.
Mining
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth from an ore body, vein, reef or placer deposit. These deposits form a mineralized package, of economic interest to the miner. Ores recovered by mining include metals, oil shale, limestone, dimension stone, rock salt, potash and clay. Mining is required to obtain any material that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or water. Mining of stones and metal has been a human activity since pre-historic times. Modern mining processes involve prospecting for ore bodies, analysis of the profit potential of a proposed mine, extraction of the desired materials, final reclamation of the land after the mine is closed. De Re Metallica, Georgius Agricola, 1550, Book I, Para. 1Mining operations create a negative environmental impact, both during the mining activity and after the mine has closed.
Hence, most of the world's nations have passed regulations to decrease the impact. Work safety has long been a concern as well, modern practices have improved safety in mines. Levels of metals recycling are low. Unless future end-of-life recycling rates are stepped up, some rare metals may become unavailable for use in a variety of consumer products. Due to the low recycling rates, some landfills now contain higher concentrations of metal than mines themselves. Since the beginning of civilization, people have used stone and metals found close to the Earth's surface; these were used to make early weapons. Flint mines have been found in chalk areas where seams of the stone were followed underground by shafts and galleries; the mines at Grimes Graves and Krzemionki are famous, like most other flint mines, are Neolithic in origin. Other hard rocks mined or collected for axes included the greenstone of the Langdale axe industry based in the English Lake District; the oldest-known mine on archaeological record is the Ngwenya Mine in Swaziland, which radiocarbon dating shows to be about 43,000 years old.
At this site Paleolithic humans mined hematite to make the red pigment ochre. Mines of a similar age in Hungary are believed to be sites where Neanderthals may have mined flint for weapons and tools. Ancient Egyptians mined malachite at Maadi. At first, Egyptians used the bright green malachite stones for ornamentations and pottery. Between 2613 and 2494 BC, large building projects required expeditions abroad to the area of Wadi Maghareh in order to secure minerals and other resources not available in Egypt itself. Quarries for turquoise and copper were found at Wadi Hammamat, Tura and various other Nubian sites on the Sinai Peninsula and at Timna. Mining in Egypt occurred in the earliest dynasties; the gold mines of Nubia were among the largest and most extensive of any in Ancient Egypt. These mines are described by the Greek author Diodorus Siculus, who mentions fire-setting as one method used to break down the hard rock holding the gold. One of the complexes is shown in one of the earliest known maps.
The miners crushed the ore and ground it to a fine powder before washing the powder for the gold dust. Mining in Europe has a long history. Examples include the silver mines of Laurium. Although they had over 20,000 slaves working them, their technology was identical to their Bronze Age predecessors. At other mines, such as on the island of Thassos, marble was quarried by the Parians after they arrived in the 7th century BC; the marble was shipped away and was found by archaeologists to have been used in buildings including the tomb of Amphipolis. Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, captured the gold mines of Mount Pangeo in 357 BC to fund his military campaigns, he captured gold mines in Thrace for minting coinage producing 26 tons per year. However, it was the Romans who developed large scale mining methods the use of large volumes of water brought to the minehead by numerous aqueducts; the water was used for a variety of purposes, including removing overburden and rock debris, called hydraulic mining, as well as washing comminuted, or crushed and driving simple machinery.
The Romans used hydraulic mining methods on a large scale to prospect for the veins of ore a now-obsolete form of mining known as hushing. They built numerous aqueducts to supply water to the minehead. There, the water stored in large tanks; when a full tank was opened, the flood of water sluiced away the overburden to expose the bedrock underneath and any gold veins. The rock was worked upon by fire-setting to heat the rock, which would be quenched with a stream of water; the resulting thermal shock cracked the rock, enabling it to be removed by further streams of water from the overhead tanks. The Roman miners used similar methods to work cassiterite deposits in Cornwall and lead ore in the Pennines; the methods had been developed by the Romans in Spain in 25 AD to exploit large alluvial gold deposits, the largest site being at Las Medulas, where seven long aqueducts tapped local rivers and sluiced the deposits. Spain was one of the most important mining regions, but all regions of the Roman Empire were exploited.
In Great Britain the natives had mined minerals for millennia, but after the Roman conquest, the scale of the operations increased as the Romans needed Britannia's resources gold, silver
Durham, England
Durham is a historic city and the county town of County Durham in North East England. The city lies on the River Wear, to the west of Sunderland, south of Newcastle upon Tyne and to the north of Darlington. Founded over the final resting place of St Cuthbert, its Norman cathedral became a centre of pilgrimage in medieval England; the cathedral and adjacent 11th-century castle were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986. The castle has been the home of Durham University since 1832. HM Prison Durham is located close to the city centre. City of Durham is the name of the civil parish; the name "Durham" comes from the Celtic element "dun", signifying a hill fort, the Old Norse "holme", which translates to island. The Lord Bishop of Durham takes a Latin variation of the city's name in his official signature, signed "N. Dunelm"; some attribute the city's name to the legend of the Dun Cow and the milkmaid who in legend guided the monks of Lindisfarne carrying the body of Saint Cuthbert to the site of the present city in 995 AD.
Dun Cow Lane is said to be one of the first streets in Durham, being directly to the east of Durham Cathedral and taking its name from a depiction of the city's founding etched in masonry on the south side of the cathedral. The city has been known by a number of names throughout history; the original Nordic Dun Holm was known in Latin as Dunelm. The modern form Durham came into use in the city's history; the north eastern historian Robert Surtees chronicled the name changes in his History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham but states that it is an "impossibility" to tell when the city's modern name came into being. Archeological evidence suggests a history of settlement in the area since 2000 BC; the present city can be traced back to AD 995, when a group of monks from Lindisfarne chose the strategic high peninsula as a place to settle with the body of Saint Cuthbert, that had lain in Chester-le-Street, founding a church there. Local legend states that the city was founded in A.
D. 995 by divine intervention. The 12th century chronicler Symeon of Durham recounts that after wandering in the north, Saint Cuthbert's bier miraculously came to a halt at the hill of Warden Law and, despite the effort of the congregation, would not move. Aldhun, Bishop of Chester-le-Street and leader of the order, decreed a holy fast of three days, accompanied by prayers to the saint. During the fast, Saint Cuthbert appeared to a certain monk named Eadmer, with instructions that the coffin should be taken to Dun Holm. After Eadmer's revelation, Aldhun found that he was able to move the bier, but did not know where Dun Holm was; the legend of the Dun Cow, first documented in The Rites of Durham, an anonymous account about the Durham Cathedral, published in 1593, builds on Symeon's account. According to this legend, by chance that day, the monks came across a milkmaid at Mount Joy, she stated. The monks, followed her, they settled at a wooded "hill-island" – a high wooded rock surrounded on three sides by the River Wear.
There they erected a shelter for the relics, on the spot where the Durham Cathedral would stand. Symeon states that a modest wooden building erected there shortly was the first building in the city. Bishop Aldhun subsequently had a stone church built, dedicated in September 998, it no longer remains. The legend is interpreted by a Victorian relief stone carving on the south face of the cathedral and, more by the bronze sculpture'Durham Cow', which reclines by the River Wear in view of the cathedral. During the medieval period the city gained spiritual prominence as the final resting place of Saint Cuthbert and Saint Bede the Venerable; the shrine of Saint Cuthbert, situated behind the High Altar of Durham Cathedral, was the most important religious site in England until the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1170. Saint Cuthbert became famous for two reasons. Firstly, the miraculous healing powers he had displayed in life continued after his death, with many stories of those visiting the saint's shrine being cured of all manner of diseases.
This led to him being known as the "wonder worker of England". Secondly, after the first translation of his relics in 698 AD, his body was found to be incorruptible. Apart from a brief translation back to Holy Island during the Norman Invasion the saint's relics have remained enshrined to the present day. Saint Bede's bones are entombed in the cathedral, these drew medieval pilgrims to the city. Durham's geographical position has always given it an important place in the defence of England against the Scots; the city played an important part in the defence of the north, Durham Castle is the only Norman castle keep never to have suffered a breach. The Battle of Neville's Cross, which took place near the city on 17 October 1346 between the English and Scots, is the most famous battle of the age; the city suffered from plague outbreaks in 1544, 1589 and 1598. Owing to the divine providence evidenced in the city's legendary founding, the Bishop of Durham has always enjoyed the title "Bishop by Divine Providence" as opposed to other bishops, who are "Bishop by Divine Permission".
However, as the north-east of England lay so far from Westminster, the bishops of Durham enjoyed extraordinary powers such as the ability to hold their own parliament, raise their own armies, appoint their own sheriffs and Justices, administer their own laws, levy taxes and customs duties, create fairs and markets, issue charters, salvage shipwrecks
Normans
The Normans are an ethnic group that arose in Normandy, a northern region of France, from contact between indigenous Franks and Gallo-Romans, Norse Viking settlers. The settlements followed a series of raids on the French coast from Denmark and Iceland, they gained political legitimacy when the Viking leader Rollo agreed to swear fealty to King Charles III of West Francia; the distinct cultural and ethnic identity of the Normans emerged in the first half of the 10th century, it continued to evolve over the succeeding centuries. The Norman dynasty had a major political and military impact on medieval Europe and the Near East; the Normans were famed for their martial spirit and for their Catholic piety, becoming exponents of the Catholic orthodoxy of the Romance community into which they assimilated. They adopted the Gallo-Romance language of the Frankish land they settled, their dialect becoming known as Norman, Normaund or Norman French, an important literary language, still spoken today in parts of Normandy and the nearby Channel Islands.
The Duchy of Normandy, which they formed by treaty with the French crown, was a great fief of medieval France, under Richard I of Normandy was forged into a cohesive and formidable principality in feudal tenure. The Normans are noted both for their culture, such as their unique Romanesque architecture and musical traditions, for their significant military accomplishments and innovations. Norman adventurers played a role in founding the Kingdom of Sicily under Roger II after conquering southern Italy and Malta from the Saracens and Byzantines, during an expedition on behalf of their duke, William the Conqueror, which led to the Norman conquest of England at the historic Battle of Hastings in 1066. In the ninth century, the Normans captured Seville in Southern Spain, Norman and Anglo-Norman forces contributed to the Iberian Reconquista from the early eleventh to the mid-thirteenth centuries. Norman cultural and military influence spread from these new European centres to the Crusader states of the Near East, where their prince Bohemond I founded the Principality of Antioch in the Levant, to Scotland and Wales in Great Britain, to Ireland, to the coasts of north Africa and the Canary Islands.
The legacy of the Normans persists today through the regional languages and dialects of France, England and Sicily, as well as the various cultural and political arrangements they introduced in their conquered territories. The English name "Normans" comes from the French words Normans/Normanz, plural of Normant, modern French normand, itself borrowed from Old Low Franconian Nortmann "Northman" or directly from Old Norse Norðmaðr, Latinized variously as Nortmannus, Normannus, or Nordmannus to mean "Norseman, Viking"; the 11th century Benedictine monk and historian, Goffredo Malaterra, characterised the Normans thus: Specially marked by cunning, despising their own inheritance in the hope of winning a greater, eager after both gain and dominion, given to imitation of all kinds, holding a certain mean between lavishness and greediness, uniting, as they did, these two opposite qualities. Their chief men were specially lavish through their desire of good report, they were, moreover, a race skillful in flattery, given to the study of eloquence, so that the boys were orators, a race altogether unbridled unless held down by the yoke of justice.
They were enduring of toil and cold whenever fortune laid it on them, given to hunting and hawking, delighting in the pleasure of horses, of all the weapons and garb of war. In the course of the 10th century, the destructive incursions of Norse war bands going upstream into the rivers of France penetrated further into interior Europe, evolved into more permanent encampments that included local French women and personal property; the Duchy of Normandy, which began in 911 as a fiefdom, was established by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte between King Charles III of West Francia and the famed Viking ruler Rollo known as Gaange Rolf, from Scandinavia, was situated in the former Frankish kingdom of Neustria. The treaty offered Rollo and his men the French coastal lands along the English Channel between the river Epte and the Atlantic Ocean coast in exchange for their protection against further Viking incursions; as well as granting to protect the area of Rouen from Viking invasion, Rollo had to swear not to invade further Frankish lands himself, accept baptism and conversion to the Roman Catholic faith of Christianity becoming Christian and swear fealty to King Charles III.
He became the first Duke of Count of Rouen. The area corresponded to the northern part of present-day Upper Normandy down to the river Seine, but the Duchy would extend west beyond the Seine; the territory was equivalent to the old province of Rouen, reproduced the old Roman Empire's administrative structure of Gallia Lugdunensis II. Before Rollo's arrival, Normandy's populations did not differ from Picardy or the Île-de-France, which were considered "Frankish". Earlier Viking settlers had begun arriving in the 880s, but were divided between colonies in the east around the low Seine valley and in the west in the Cotentin Peninsula, were separated by traditional pagii, where the population remained about the same with no foreign settlers. Rollo's contingents from Scandinavia who raided and settled Normandy and parts of the European Atlantic coast included Danes, Norse–Gaels, Orkney Vikings, p
