Lastly, I must speak, very briefly, of the criticism to which my work has been exposed, although I do so with much reluctance. Honest criticism one welcomes: difference of opinion one respects. But for that uncandid criticism which endeavours to escape from facts, and which is animated only by the wish to obscure the light, no excuse is possible. The paper on “Anglo-Norman Warfare” will illustrate the tactics to which I refer; and the weight to be attached to Mr. Oman’s views may be gathered from that on “Bannockburn.” But, apart from the necessity of these exposures in the cause of historical truth, the papers which contain them will, I trust, be found of some service in their bearing on the tactics and poliorcetics of mediæval England, and on the introduction, in this country, of tenure by knight service. It is the object also of the “Bannockburn” paper to illustrate the grossly-exaggerated figures of mediæval chroniclers, a point which, even now, is insufficiently realized. Here, and elsewhere, it has been my aim to insist upon the value of records as testing and checking our chronicles, placing, as they do, the facts of history on a relatively sure foundation.
I
The Settlement of the South-and East-Saxons
I would venture, at the outset, to describe this as a “pioneer” paper. It neither professes to determine questions nor attempts to exhaust a subject of singular complexity and obscurity. It is only an attempt to approach the problem on independent lines, and to indicate the path by which it may be possible to extend our knowledge in a department of research of which the importance and the interest are universally recognised.
It is the fine saying of a brilliant scholar, I mean Professor Maitland, that “the most wonderful of all palimpsests is the map of England, could we but decipher it.”[10] But the study of place-names has this in common with the study of Domesday Book. The local worker, the man who writes the history of his own parish, is as ready to explain the name it bears as he is to interpret the Domesday formulæ relating to it in the Great Survey, without possessing in either case that knowledge of the subject as a whole which is required for its treatment in detail. On the other hand, the general student, from the very wideness of his field, is deprived of the advantage conferred by the knowledge of a district in its details. In the hope of steering a middle course between these two dangers, I have specially selected two counties, both of them settled by the Saxon folk—Sussex, with which I am connected by birth; and Essex, with which are my chief associations. And further, within these two counties I restrict myself to certain classes of names, in order to confine the field of enquiry to well-defined limits.
The names with which I propose to deal are those which imply human habitation. And here at once I part company with those, like Kemble and other writers, who appear to think it a matter of indifference, so long as a name is formed from what they term a patronymic, whether it ends in-ham or-ton, or in such suffixes as-hurst,-field,-den, or-ford. To them all such names connote village communities; to me they certainly do not. If we glance at the map of Domesday Sussex,[11] we see the northern half of the county practically still “backwoods” eight centuries ago.[12] If we then turn to the Domesday map prefixed to Manning and Bray’s Surrey, we find the southern half of that county similarly devoid of place-names. In short, the famous Andredswald was still, at the time of the Conquest, a belt, some twenty miles in width, of forest, not yet opened up, except in a few scattered spots, for human settlement. The place-names of this district have, even at the present day, a quite distinctive character. The hams and tons of the districts lying to the north and the south of it are here replaced by such suffixes as -hurst, -wood, -ley, and -field, and on the Kentish border by -den. We may then, judging from this example, treat such suffixes as evidence that the districts where they occur were settled at a much later time than those of the hams and tons, and under very different conditions. The suffix -sted, so common in Essex, is comparatively rare in Sussex, and we cannot, therefore, classify it with the same degree of certainty.
Taking, therefore, for our special sphere, the hams, the tons, and the famous ings, let us see if they occur in such a way as to suggest some definite conclusions. The three principles I would keep in view are: (1) the study, within the limits of a county, of that distribution of names which, hitherto, has been studied for the country as a whole; (2) a point to which I attach the very greatest importance, namely, the collection, so far as possible, of all the names belonging to this class, instead of considering only those which happen to be now represented by villages or parishes; (3) the critical treatment of the evidence, by sifting and correcting it in its present form. The adoption of these two latter principles will gravely modify the conclusions at which some have arrived.
There is, as Mr. Seebohm’s work has shown, nothing so effective as a special map for impressing on the mind the distribution of names. Such a map is an argument in itself. But although I have constructed for my own use special maps of Sussex and Essex, they cannot here be reproduced.
I now proceed to apply the first principle of which I spoke, that of examining a single county in the same way as others have examined the maps of England as a whole. I doubt if any county would prove more instructive for the purpose than that of Sussex, of which the settlement was developed in isolation and determined by well-defined geographical conditions. Whatever may be said of other suffixes, Mr. Seebohm has shown us that, even allowing for a large margin of unavoidable error, the terminations -ing and -ham are not distributed at random, but are specially distinctive of that portion of England which was settled by the earliest immigrants and settled the most completely. As a broad, general conclusion, this is virtually established. Now, if we turn to the map of Sussex and ask if this general principle can also be traced in detail, the first point to strike us, I think, is the close connection existing between the hams and the rivers. The people, one might say, who settled the hams were a people who came in boats. Although at first sight the hams may seem to penetrate far inland, we shall find that where they are not actually on the coast, they almost invariably follow the rivers, and follow them as far up as possible; and this is specially the case with the Arun and its tributary the Western Rother. Careful examination reveals the fact that, while to the south, round Chichester Harbour and Selsea Bill, we find several hams, and find them again to the north in the valley of the western Rother, there are none to be found in the space between, which shows that the men who settled them found their way round by the Arun and not overland. I need hardly observe that the rivers of those days were far larger than the modern streams, and their water level higher.
It is anticipating somewhat to point out that the same examination shows us a large group of tons covering this district away from the river, where we find no hams. Evidently these suffixes do not occur at random.
And now let us pass from the extreme west to the extreme east of the county. Here, instead of a group of tons with a notable absence of hams, we find a most remarkable group of hams, absolutely excluding tons. To understand the occurrence of this group on the Rother—the eastern Rother—and its tributaries, it is essential to remember the great change that has here taken place in the coast line. Unfortunately Dr. Guest, who first discussed the settlement of Sussex, entirely ignored this important change, and his followers have done the same. The late Mr. Green, for instance, in his map, follows the coast line given by Dr. Guest. Thus they wholly overlooked that great inlet of the sea, which formed in later ages the harbours of Winchelsea and Rye, and which offered a most suitable and tempting haven for the first Saxon settlers. The result of so doing was that they made the earliest invaders pass by the whole coast of Sussex before finding, at Selsea Bill, one of those marshy inlets of the sea, where they could make themselves at home. Therefore, argued Mr. Grant Allen,[13] “the original colony occupied the western half of the modern county; but the eastern portion still remained in the hands of the Welsh.” The orthodox hypothesis seems to be that the settlers then fought their way step by step eastwards, that is, towards Kent, reaching and capturing Pevensey in 491, fourteen years after their first landing.[14] As against this view, I would suggest that the distribution of Sussex place-names is in favour of vertical not lateral progress, of separate settlements up the rivers. And, in any case, I claim for the group of hams at the extreme east of the county the position of an independent settlement, to the character of which I shall return.