burly-men and by-law-men are etymologically identical.’[1] As the -by place-names in the Danish districts of England must be regarded by their parallelism to the bys of ancient Gothland to have been folk villages, we may reasonably conclude that those places known by the equivalent names berk, berge, etc., had similar common privileges. In Lincolnshire, at the time of the Domesday Survey, there were 11,503 socmen to 7,723 villeins. This very large number of socmen points to the existence of folk villages in that county containing numerous freemen. As regards the people at the present time, the broad fact at which we can arrive connected with the settlement of this county is that they are in complexion fairer than those of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.
If we were to confine our attention in Lincolnshire to the historical name Angles, that of the people by whom the county is usually supposed to have been originally settled, and to the Danes, by whom it was afterwards over-run and again presumably settled, we should necessarily look only for traces of these two nations or races. If, however, apart from these names and the history, more or less traditional, connected with their invasions, we proceed on inductive lines, and consider the old topographical names of the county, we shall have no difficulty in finding about a dozen groups which are apparently tribal or national names, and these neither Anglian nor Danish. It is very likely, indeed, that the people of various tribes or nations who migrated to Lincolnshire came under the general names of Angles in the former period and Danes in the latter, but they gave their tribal names or personal names derived from their tribes, in many cases, to the new homes they formed. Domesday Book tells us of a group of three names—Frisebi, Frisetorp, and Fristune. These evidently refer to Frisian settlements. Among the Frisian pagi, or tribes, were the Hunsings, and the Domesday account of Lincolnshire tells
- ↑ Skeat, W. W., ‘Etymological Dictionary.’
