HERTFORD, the county town, is of immemorial antiquity.  The origin of the name has elicited much learned conjecture, and Hertford is one of several places held to be the Durocobrivis mentioned by Antonine.  It is the Herudsford (i.e. red ford) of the Venerable Bede.  That it was a town of some importance on the river Lea even in the days of the Trinobantes seems indisputable.  Norden conjectured that the true name of the town was Hartford, so called because in Saxon times, when the surrounding country was densely wooded, the harts crossed the river by a natural ford at this spot.  However this may be, the old borough seal, three or four centuries ago, bore as a device a hart in shallow water.  The rivers Rib, Beane, and Maran all unite with the Lea in the immediate neighbourhood.  Some reference may be here made to the doings of Alfred the Great in this neighbourhood.  By putting together what is recorded by William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Asser and others we learn that in the twenty-third year of Alfred’s reign the Danes infested the Thames with their ships, sailed up the Lea in the lighter of their crafts, and built a fort about 20 miles from London, at or near what is now the town of Ware.  Presently, in the course of their many foraging excursions, they sailed farther up the river towards Hertford, stripped the people in the town and burnt down many houses.  They afterwards established a garrison near the town.  Alfred brought his army down to the river side the following year and made a careful survey of the Danish fort and of the character and position of their ships.  He is said to have passed from place to place in a boat, drawn by a horse, and to have carefully ascertained the depth of the water at different points.  The precise nature of his subsequent operations is not well known, but he is said to have diverted the course of the river, to have erected a dam (Shass) at Blackwall, and by these means to have grounded the Danish fleet.  The Danes held a treaty, and eventually withdrew into Cambridgeshire and Gloucestershire; the Londoners came down to the scene of Alfred’s ingenuity and destroyed or appropriated the Danish ships.

Of the castle, built by Edward the Elder in 905, there still remain several large fragments of an embattled wall, partly Norman, and a postern gate.  Of its history only a few leading facts can be mentioned here.  William I. entrusted it to the keeping of Peter de Valoignes; it was besieged by Louis the Dauphin, and capitulated on the Feast of St. Nicholas in 1216; it was granted, together with the town, to John of Gaunt, Earl of Richmond, in whose time Kings John of France and David of Scotland were prisoners within its walls, and after the Earl had been created Duke of Lancaster he held a court in the castle for three weeks.  It was the last prison house of Isabella, widow of Edward II.  Henry IV. gave the castle to his wife Joan; Henry V. to his wife Katherine of France; and Henry VI. to his wife Margaret of Anjou.  Elizabeth and James I. are both said to have visited this castle.  Charles I., on 3rd May, in the sixth year of his reign, transferred it to William Earl of Salisbury.  It was seized by the Parliament during the Great Rebellion.