Note 1 — PART I.—THE TOWN AND CHURCH

The repeated attempts to connect Southwell with the Tiovulfingacestre of Baeda must be dismissed as unsupported. To make matters more puzzling still, Henry of Huntingdon, who says he relied upon Baeda, writing in the twelfth century, calls the place of the baptising the town “now called Fingecestre.”

There was no such town; there was the little riverside hamlet of Fiscartune, now called Fiskerton, the nearest spot on the Trent to Southwell; and Henry was perhaps thinking of this when he wrote. Baeda says that a convert told a monk named Daeda, and Daeda told him, that he, the convert, had been baptised in the Trent near the “civitas” called in the language of the Angles Tiovulfingacestre. This name has been hopelessly lost. In itself, no place so well satisfies this second-hand account, as where the river, after passing under Clifton Grove, sweeps by Wilford Church. Here the bed is so formed that the priest could stand in comfort, and have plenty of water for immersion; while Nottingham, close at hand, might then have been a settlement sufficiently large to be called a “civitas.” Southwell was not large enough. Or, perhaps, Torksey or Littleborough is meant.