[17] 2nd ed. p. 178.
[18] English Village Community, pp. 169, 170.
[19] He writes, of ing, that “Mr. Kemble had overlooked no less than 47 names in Kent, 38 in Sussex, and 34 in Essex” (ed. 1888, p. 82).
[20] The Lewes Priory Charters afford instances in point.
[21] Archæological Review, iv. 233 et seq.
[22] One would like to know on what ground the suffix “-well,” familiar in Essex (Broadwell, Chadwell, Hawkwell, Netteswell, Prittlewell, Ridgwell, Roxwell, Runwell), but curiously absent in Sussex, is derived from the Roman ‘villa.’ It is found in Domesday precisely the same as at the present day. Yet Professor Earle writes of “Wilburgewella” that it is “an interesting name as showing the naturalized form of the Latin villa, of which the ordinary Saxon equivalent was haga” (Land Charters, p. 130). This latter equation seems to be most surprising. It is traceable apparently to a charter of 855, in which we read of “unam villam quod nos Saxonice ‘an hagan’ dicimus” (Ib. p. 336), an obviously suspicious phrase. There is no ground for terming the ‘Ceolmundinge haga’ of a starred document (Ib. p. 315) a villa, while the ‘haga’ of another (Ib. p. 364) is clearly a haw, as in ‘Bassishaw.’ Yet another charter (Ib. p. 447) is not in point.
[23] But the more closely one investigates the subject the more difficult one finds it to speak with absolute confidence as to the original existence, in any given instance, of an ing in the modern suffixes -ingham and -ington.
[24] “It is probable that all the primitive villages in whose name the patronymic ing occurs were originally colonized by communities united either really by blood or by the belief in a common descent (see Kemble)”—Stubbs (Const. Hist). “Harling abode by Harling and Billing by Billing, and each ‘wick’ and ‘ham’ and ‘stead’ and ‘tun’ took its name from the kinsmen who dwelt together in it. In this way the house or ham of the Billings was Billingham, and the township of the Harlings was Harlington”—Green (‘Making of England,’ p. 188). “Many family names appear in different parts of England.... Thus we find the Bassingas at Bassingbourn.... The Billings have left their stamp at Billing, in Northampton; Billingford, in Norfolk; Billingham, in Durham; Billingley, in Yorkshire; Billinghurst, in Sussex; and five other places in various other counties. Birmingham, Nottingham, Wellington, Faringdon, Warrington, and Wallingford are well-known names formed on the same analogy.... Speaking generally these clan names are thickest along the original English coast, etc.”—Grant Allen (Anglo-Saxon Britain,’ p. 43).
[25] “The German theory, formerly generally accepted, that free village communities were the rule among the English, seems to have little direct evidence to support it” (Social England, i. 125).
[26] Ibid. i. 130; cf. Canon Taylor: “The Saxon immigration was doubtless an immigration of clans.... In the Saxon districts of the island we find the names not of individuals, but of clans.”