there must have been among them, as the old place-names indicate, but the villages which the Danes established were clearly part of a State or States in which the prevailing type of settlement was Scandian and not Germanic. Nothing is more remarkable in considering the evidence which the Domesday Book affords of the different classes of tenants who cultivated the land on which they lived than the far greater proportion of freemen or socmen settled within the old Dane-law, as compared with those parts of Mercia to the west of it or with Wessex. The -ing place-names which are characteristic of the Saxon State are not conspicuous in Lincolnshire, but the -bys and -thorpes abound. These -bys apparently mark the Old English homes of men among whom the German system of village life was not the prevailing one, and on looking for their analogies in Continental lands, we must turn to Denmark and the Scandian peninsula. As already mentioned, the ancient kingdom of the Danes about A.D. 880 included the provinces of Skane, Halland, and Blekinge.[1] It will be seen, therefore, that emigrants from these provinces who in the ninth century would be called Danes were probably also called by their tribal names.
If we study the settlement of England by the light of the very scanty historical records alone which have come down to us, without reference to that which may be derived from the archæology and anthropology of the districts from which our forefathers came, we shall not be able to arrive at any conclusion more satisfactory than that which satisfied the chroniclers who copied from Bede. They tell us nothing of runes or of the parts of the Continent where the people lived who wrote in these old characters, and where they did not, which we now know from archæological inquiry; nor do they tell us anything of the different shapes of the skulls or the complexion of the Anglo-Saxon people in various parts of
- ↑ Otté, E. C., ‘Denmark and Iceland,’ p. 69.
