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Did You Know? The word 'shire' means something which has been shorn off, or separated. The district of Gloucester was shorn off from the great territory of the Mercians, and became Gloucestershire.

Did You Know? The nickname 'Unready' is derived from the word 'un-raed' which meant 'lack of council' or 'ill-advised'. It seems that 'King Ethelred the Unready' was either easily persuaded or made bad decisions, or both!

Did You Know? Mercia was originally an Anglo-Saxon kingdom centred on the valley of the River Trent in what is now the Midlands. By 1007 it was a province of Saxon England.

History

The year 2007 has been recognised as the 1000th birthday of the county of Gloucestershire. Various historians believe 1007 to be the year that the territory of Mercia was divided into shires and the county of Gloucestershire came into existence.

In a paper by C. S. Taylor, first published in 1898, he notes that none of the Mercian shires were mentioned in historical documents before the year 1000. They begin to appear in documents during the last years of the reign of King Ethelred II, aka 'Ethelred the Unready' (978-1016). This narrows Gloucestershire's birth date down to some time between the years 1000 and 1016.

The year 1007 seems most likely. It was during this year that King Ethelred appointed his son-in-law as ealdorman of Mercia. England was being invaded by Danish armies, and cash was needed to fund a navy and crew to defend Mercia. Eadric 'the greedy' divided the old kingdom into counties in order to tighten his grip on the taxation system. This has become the basis for the theory of the origins of Gloucestershire (as with all the other counties of Mercia including, for example, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire).

Towards the end of the 11th century the boundaries were expanded to include the forest district between the Wye and the Severn was added to Gloucestershire. Winchcombeshire had become part of Gloucestershire by 1016 at the latest and might have been in it from 1007.

The High Sheriff convened a 'Grand Jury' on 26 October 2006 to consider the circumstances and likely date of the birth of the shire of Gloucester. Based on this evidence it was concluded that this year of 2007 most likely marks 1000 years since the county began.

Though inspired by a sense of history, the Millennium Celebrations will also encourage thinking about the next 1000 years: what challenges must be faced now if we are to sustain all that we value for future generations.