The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

Do they represent clan settlements?

The reader of recent literature bearing upon the history of the English conquest of Britain will have been struck by the confidence and skill with which, in the absence of historical, or even, in some cases, traditional evidence, the story of the invasion and occupation of England has been sometimes created out of little more than the combination of physical geography with local names, on the hypothesis that local names ending in 'ing,' or its plural form 'ingas,' represent the original clan settlements of the German conquerors. Writers who rely upon G. L. Von Maurer's theory of the German mark-system have also naturally called attention to local names with this suffix as evidence of settlements on the basis of the free village community as opposed to those of a manorial type.

Local names with this suffix, it is hardly needful to say, are found on the Continent as well as in England. [p348]

How, it may well be asked, does the evidence they afford of clan settlements or free village communities comport with the thoroughly manorial character of the German settlements on the lines described by Tacitus?

What Germans did Tacitus describe?

Now, in order to answer this question, it must first be considered how far the description of Tacitus covers the whole field—whether it refers to the Germans as a whole, or whether only to those tribes who had come within Roman influences, and so had sooner, perhaps, than the rest, relinquished their earlier tribal habits to follow manorial lines.

So far as his description is geographical it is very methodical.

Those within the limes.

(1) There are the Germans within the Roman limes.[525] These included the tribes who, following up the conquests of Ariovistus, had settled on the left bank of the Rhine in what was then called the province of Upper Germany, including the present Elsass and the country round the confluence of the Rhine with the Maine and Moselle. These tribes were the Tribocci, Nemetes and Vangiones.[526] Further, there were the tribes or emigrants, many of them German, gradually settling within the limits of the 'Agri Decumates.' Lastly, there were the Batavi and other tribes settled in the province of Lower Germany at the mouths of the Rhine, shading off into Belgic Gaul.

Northern tribes outside it.