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The town has a long, if quiet history. It has been said that Corby has a long ancestry but little history. A long ancestry is true enough - it goes back over 3,000 years. A skeleton of a Bronze Age Man has been found buried here. The date was accessed by dating a dagger which was found with the body. No other traces of pre-historic Corby have been found. This is not surprising for the Rockingham Forest area was densely overgrown until recent times.
In the days of the Ancient Britons the CORITAVI TRIBE occupied this district. But all that has been found of Celtic Briton in Corby is a solitary coin of the BRIGANTES a tribe inhabiting what is now Yorkshire.
Looking at the map there is an interesting lane called Dag Lane. It is situated between Lloyds Road and Tunwell Lane. Interesting why? - you may ask - a dag is the soiled wool around a sheep's bum.
Corby Village, 1910, looking down The Jamb towards Rockingham Road. The Cardigan Arms is on the left hand side of the photo.The buildings at the front on the left hand side are still there today.
Taken in 1936, it shows the grave yard as it was before a substantial amount of it had to be removed to make way for the roundabout and dual carriage way.
The houses behind the trees were knocked down in the early sixties to make way for new development.
Situated on Church Street, the demolition also included the Black Horse public house and Parliament house, which stood on the end of Church Street, and most Sundays locals would congregate outside it for public debate. Whoever had something to say stood on a large stone and said their piece.
The Romans were certainly here and maintained a station between RATAE and DUROLIPONS (now Leicester & Godmanchester). More significant to Corby, they knew of and worked the iron ore deposits, smelting them with charcoal. They also made pottery and in 1903 one of their kilns was discovered by navvies digging along Weldon Road. These traces are few and faint. We do not even know the early local names.
The Anglo-Saxon invasion began in the 5th Century and Northamptonshire was one of the first areas to be settled, and settled thickly by the Anglos. Their place names, Rockingham, Geddington, Brigstock etc. are all around us today.
Corby, however, was founded by the Danes, who invaded England during the 6th and subsequent centuries. They pushed their way up the Willstrem (River Welland) splitting into two groups at Peterborough (The Wash reached that far inland), some going North to Lincolnshire and the rest West to establish a clearing in the Rockingham Forest. They fought their way inland and settled under the Viking leader KORI (it's an old Scandinavian personal name). CORBIE as such arose out of a clearing in the virgin forest in what was a Saxon area with NO FELLOW COUNTRYMEN much nearer than Stamford. Danish customs, especially those of inheritance, were introduced one by one. Riding the Stang - giving offenders a rough ride astride a pole is a very old Danish custom, and is still used in Corby once every 20 years on Pole Fair day.
The village asserted itself in the Mid 10th century, when King Edgar set up the CORBIE HUNDRED with a local Moot Court to govern the other villages bounded by KingsCliff, Weston by Welland and Geddington. All this time the iron working continued. It is referred to in the Doomsday Book, the first great Census of 1086. As being on the decline, the trade died out only to be revived at the end of the 19th century. The book records that there was 1 _ hides of land (say a couple of farms) owned by the crown. Rockingham Forest was early made a Royal Forest and many Kings of England and William of Scotland hunted its deer.
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