The River Trent is the third longest river in the United Kingdom.

From its source on the Staffordshire Moors, all the way to its emptying out into the frigid North Sea,

via the Humber Estuary, it cuts an impressive swath through the English Midlands.

Over a thousand years ago ago these wind-swept

plains and sleepy hills were the heartlands of an early medieval kingdom. For a

century and more the most powerful in Britain. We know it as Mercia. Around halfway along the river sits just one of the

many settlements founded by those Anglo-Saxon newcomers during the early Middle Ages.

The city of Nottingham. The past can still be seen here if you look hard enough in the right places,

in the limestone caves that permeate the underbelly of the city,

and by the imposing hilltop citadel atop its highest cliffs.

Like nearby Derby and Leicester, cities with Roman foundations, Nottingham may in fact predate the coming of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries,

a situation hinted at by an earlier

Brythonic name meaning place or city of caves, though no archaeological evidence has

yet been found for this. It is during the twilight years after the collapse of

the Western Roman Empire

that the first verifiable evidence for Nottingham is found.

A time of warring clans, shifting alliances and a new Germanic culture arriving from across the North Sea.

Yet also, one of the periods in history with the least amount of verifiable historical information.

Just to the north and west of Nottingham, fierce peccanseite or peak landers claimed the land.

To the south it was the Tomseite.

But in the land around Nottingham we find a unique situation,

the Snottingers, perhaps reflecting the name of an individual clan chieftain,

...