Goring, Sonning, and Charing, and those ending in -ingham, -ington, and others of a similar kind, denoted bodies of kinsmen having an organization of their own. Such names may thus be traced to family settlements, comprising, as time went on, in some cases persons who were not only children or grandchildren of the original head of the family, but relatives within the limit of the sippe, to the seventh degree of relationship. As these settlements sent off some of their number to form other settlements in the forest-land or other unoccupied territory, their kinship to the parent stock would last until the nail had been reached—i.e., the limits of the sippe had been passed—and the rural colonies had formed new kindreds of their own, the original kin or ken name given to them by the first settlers, or the parent stock whence they came, alone surviving to afford us a dim glimpse of their origin. It was one of the duties of the kindred, in the later Saxon time, at least, to see that the landless kinsman had a lord in the folk-gemot, otherwise they had themselves to become responsible for him to the State. This collective responsibility of the kindred survived in England as a tribal usage after many generations of occupation and settlement. It survived for centuries after the introduction of Christianity, which, from the sense of individual responsibility, was opposed to the principle of joint responsibility of the kindred. Nevertheless, this tribal custom, with its wergelds or fines, lasted long, and even the clergy placed themselves under it by claiming that a Bishop’s wergeld to be paid if he were killed should be that of a prince, and a priest’s that of a thane.[1]
From what has been said, it will be seen that the probability of the Domesday names of some of the hundreds being the later names for still older tribal areas of administration is great. These older areas appear in some instances to be known in Anglo-Saxon time by a tribal name. Among such old Domesday hundred names are Honesberie in Warwickshire, Danais or Daneis in Hert-
- ↑ Seebohm, F., ‘Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law,’ 385.
