lenburg and Pomerania, they are found to be Wends and of Slavonic descent. Again, there is the historical name Gewissæ or Gewissas for the tribal settlers in Wessex, and the manifest interpretation of this name as confederates. There is, next, the settlement of Jutes in the Isle of Wight and South Hampshire, and the identification of these as Goths by the statement of Asser, and the discovery of a runic inscription on a relic found in the Isle of Wight. The alliance of Goths with Vandals, so potent elsewhere in Europe, could scarcely have been altogether absent in England, and particularly in Dorset and Wilts, where Vandal place-names survive. As the Northern Goths spoke a dialect of the Northern tongue, and had a custom of partible inheritance, we might expect to find traces of their Northern speech and of their customs in early Wessex, and of both the speech and custom of inheritance we find unmistakable traces.
The settlement of some part of Wiltshire by people of the Wilte tribe from the south of the Baltic or the right bank of the Elbe does not appear to be unlikely. Schafarik, a great authority on Slavonic antiquities, connects our English Wiltshire with this Slavonic tribe,[1] but some of our own philologists derive the name from Wilton, the town on the river Wiley.[2] The Wiltshire settlers are, however, mentioned by the name Wilsæte in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the year 801, nearly 200 years before the name Wiltonscire occurs. The name Wilsæte long survived, and is mentioned in Ethelweard’s Chronicle about A.D. 973. The name ‘Wiltene weie’ for the road from Damerham to Wilton is also used in a charter dated 946, and Wiltene, a variant of Wiltena, is the genitive plural of Wilte. Such being the facts, the derivation of the name Wiltshire from Wilton is clearly wrong. In a district that affords other traces of Wendish settlers the Wilte name may have been the origin of the Wilsæte name, and that of the
