more settlers of the Chaucian tribe, and may be compared with that of Cuxhaven at the mouth of the Elbe, which has come down to us in the old Chaucian country itself.
Such old place-names as these in parts of the old kingdom of Mercia show that among the so-called Angles that settled in the Mercian States there must have been people of other tribes. The Angles of these States may have been more Germanic than those of Northumbria. That there were differences is certain from the large number of runic inscriptions on monuments in the northern counties, while only two appear to have been discovered in the Mercian shires—viz., at Bakewell in Derbyshire,[1] and at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire.[2]
The old Mercian counties present a remarkable contrast in the manner in which the original homesteads of the settlers were arranged. In the east midland counties villages of collected homesteads must have very largely prevailed, for this is the common type of village met with in these counties. The old villages with the homesteads more or less collected always was the system in these shires since the coming of the Anglo-Saxon people. They are especially noticeable in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, and they may be commonly seen to have roads leading to them from various directions, originally the ways from the villages to the common fields that lay around them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century 130,000 acres in Huntingdonshire, out of a total of 240,000, were open commonable lands,[3] chiefly pasture. On the other hand, in the west midland counties, such as Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Shropshire, the old Celtic arrangement of isolated homesteads has survived much more largely, especially in the
