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http://www.britannia.com/tours/rhood/nottingham.html
Our family lived in a suburb called Sherwood two and a half miles further north (see aerial photo below) but I went to a secondary school on the bank of the River Trent a couple of miles south of the centre. I had to take two buses to get to school and I caught the second one in the Market Square, just to the right of where the pictures were taken. Nottingham's original name was `Snotengaham', which means in old English `the settlement of Snot's people'. Snot and his followers perhaps founded a village there in around 600 A.D. Before this time the Trent had probably formed the boundary between lands conquered by the English, who had recently arrived in Britain from mainland Europe, and the original Celtic inhabitants, who remained independent in the north and west of the island. Possibly Snot's people lived for some time on the south bank of the Trent and crossed over when Celtic power was weakening. The site of their new home was attractive because it was on the top of a sandstone cliff near the first point where the Trent was shallow enough to be forded. It was easy to tunnel into the |
The Norman and English towns had separate local governments until about 1300 but their inhabitants came together to buy and sell in the area which is now Market Square. The boundary wall between the two districts survived down until the 18th century and a virtual reconstruction can be seen in a video produced recently by Nottingham Trent University It was probably the Normans who changed the name from `Snotingham’ to `Nottingham’ since the combination `sn’ is difficult for speakers of French to pronounce. The change was a lucky one for all the people of the town because in modern English slang the word `snot’ means secretions from inside the nose!
To the north of the town Sherwood Forest was kept in the medieval period as a special hunting area for the king but it |
Robin Hood as imagined by Louis Rhead in 1912 http://www.geocities.com/puckrobin/rh/robpics.html#rhages
The figure of Robin Hood is often used as a symbol of the city and also its best-known football club, Nottingham Forest. |