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

Not necessarily Alamannic.

Now, according to Professor Wilhelm Arnold, the German writer who has recently given the closest attention to these local names, the patronymic suffix [p360] 'ingen' is one of the distinctive marks of settlements of Alamannic and Bavarian tribes, and denotes that the districts wherein it is found have at some time or another been conquered or occupied by them. The heims, on the other hand, in this writer's view, are in the same way indicative of Frankish settlements.[545]

The view of so accurate and laborious a student must be regarded as of great authority. But the foregoing inquiry has led in both cases to a somewhat different suggestion as to their meaning. The suffix heim is Anglo-Saxon as well as Frankish, and translating itself into villa and manor seems to represent a settlement or estate most often of the manorial type. So that it seems likely, that whatever German tribes at whatever time came over into the Roman province and usurped the lordship of existing villas, or adopted the Roman villa as the type of their settlements, would probably have called them either weilers or heims according to whether they used the Roman or the German word for the same thing.

And in the same way it also seems likely, that whatever tribes, at whatever time, by their own choice or by forced colonisation, settled in house communities of tribesmen with or without a servile population under them, would be passing through the stage in which they might naturally call their settlements or [p361] homesteads after their own names, using the patronymic suffix ing.

It is undoubtedly difficult to obtain any clear indication of the time[546] when these settlements may have been made. Nor, perhaps, need they be referred generally to the same period, were it not for the remarkable fact that the personal names prefixed to the suffix in England, Flanders, the Moselle valley, round Troyes and Langres, in the old Agri Decumates (now Wirtemburg), and in the old Rhætia (now Bavaria), and even those in Frisia, were to a very large extent identical.

The names are not clan names, but personal names.

But the identity of the names throughout is very remarkable.

This identity is so striking, that if the names were, as some have supposed, necessarily clan-names, it might be impossible to deny that the English and continental districts were peopled actually by branches of the same clans. But it must be admitted that, as the names to [p362] which the peculiar suffix was added were personal names and not family or clan names—John and Thomas, and not Smith and Jones—it would not be safe to press the inference from the similarity too far. Baldo was the name of a person. There may have been persons of that name in every tribe in Germany. The Baldo of one tribe need not be closely related to the Baldo of another tribe, any more than John Smith need be related to John Jones. The households of each Baldo would be called Baldings, or in the old form Baldingas; but obviously the Baldings of England need have no clan-relationship whatever to the Baldings of Upper Germany.[547] Nevertheless, the striking similarity of mere personal names goes for something, and it is impossible to pass it by unnoticed. The extent of it may be shown by a few examples.

In the following list are placed all the local names mentioned in the Domesday Survey of Sussex, beginning with the first two letters of the alphabet in which the peculiar suffix occurs, whether as final or not,[548] and opposite to them similar personal or local [p363] names taken from the early records of Wirtemberg, i.e. the district of the Rhine, Maine, and Neckar, formerly part of the 'Agri Decumates.'

In Sussex.