The Commune of London, and other studies

by John Horace Round

If it were the case that the English ham represents the Roman villa, this remarkable group on the borders of Kent and Sussex should indicate a dense Roman settlement; but of such settlement there is, I believe, no trace existing. Conversely, we do not find that the sites of Roman villas are denoted by the suffix ham.[22]

From considering this group as a whole, I advance to two settlements on what is known as the Tillingham River, namely, Billingham and Tillingham. One would not easily find names more distinctive of what Kemble insisted on terming the mark system, or what later historians describe as clan settlement. Parenthetically, I may observe that while ham is common in Sussex, the compound ingham is not. This is well seen in the group under consideration. The same may, I think, be said of Essex, while in North Suffolk ingham begins to assert its predominance. The frequent occurrence in Norfolk and Lincolnshire renders it a note of Anglian rather than Saxon settlement.[23] And now for Billingham and Tillingham. Billing is one of the most common of the so-called patronymics; and there is a Tillingham in Essex. Whether we turn to the specialist works of such writers as Stubbs and Green, or to the latest compendia of English history as a whole, we shall virtually always read that such names as these denote original settlement by a clan.[24]

In venturing to question this proposition, I am striking at the root of Kemble’s theory, that overspreading theory of the Mark, which, as it were, has shrunk from its once stately splendour, but in the shadow of which all our historians since his time have written. Even Professor York Powell, although he rejects the mark theory,[25] writes of “the first stage” of settlement: “We know that the land was settled when clans were powerful, for the new villages bear clan names, not personal names.”[26] The whole theory rests on the patronymic ing, which Kemble crudely treated as proving the existence of a mark community, wherever it occurs in place-names.[27]

Now the theory that ing implies a clan, that is, a community united by blood or by the belief in a common descent,[28] may be tested in two distinct ways. We may either trace its actual use as applied to individuals or communities; or we may examine the localities in the names of which it occurs. I propose to do both. The passage usually adduced to prove the ‘clan’ meaning is the well-known genealogy in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: “Cerdic was Elesing, Elesa was Esling, Esla was Gewising,”[29] etc. Even Mr. Seebohm reluctantly admits, on this “evidence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” that ing was used as alleged. But it always seemed obvious to me that this passage, so far from proving the ‘clan’ meaning, actually proved the opposite, namely, that the patronymic changed with every generation. Again, if we turn from the Chronicle to the Anglo-Saxon charters, we find inga normally used to denote the dwellers at a certain place, not the descendants of a certain man. It is singular that Kemble, although he was the first to make an exhaustive study of these charters, classed such names with the other ings, from which they were quite distinct.[30] His enthusiasm for the ‘mark’ carried him away. In Sussex, we have, as it seems to me, a very excellent illustration; the name of Angmering, the present form, occupies, as it were, a medial position between the “Angemare” of Domesday and the “Angmeringatun” of Alfred’s will. Here, surely, the Angmeringas were those who dwelt at Angmer, not a ‘clan’ descended from a man bearing that name.

I will not, however, dwell on this side of the argument, more especially as I would rather lay stress on the other line of attack. For this is my distinctive point: I contend that, in studying the place-names into which ing enters, attention has hitherto exclusively, or almost exclusively, been devoted to those now represented by towns or villages. With these it is easy to associate the idea of a clan settlement. But what are we to make of such cases as our Sussex Billingham and Tillingham? We shall search for them in vain in Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary; and yet they are names of the same status as fully developed villages. As a Sussex antiquary has observed (though I cannot accept his explanation): “In the names of many farms we shall likewise find names which also mark whole parishes in the county.” Canon Taylor has unconsciously recorded, in the adjoining county of Kent, evidence to the same effect, observing that “the lone farmhouses in Kent, called Shottington, Wingleton, Godington, and Appleton, may be regarded as venerable monuments, showing us the nature of the Saxon colonization of England.”[31] I say that this evidence is unconscious, for the Canon applies it only to the evolution of the ton, and seems not to have observed its bearing on that compound ing, which he, like Kemble, fully accepts as proof of a clan community. From Shottington and Godington, as from Billingham and Tillingham, Kemble would have confidently deduced the settlement of a ‘mark’ or clan community; and yet, when we learn what the places are, we see that they represent a settlement by households, not by communities.

Here, then, is the value of these cases of what we may term arrested development: they warn us against the rashness of assuming that a modern or even a mediæval village has been a village from the first. The village community may be so far from representing the original settlement as to have been, on the contrary, developed from what was at first but a farmstead. The whole argument of such scholars as Professor Earle here and Dr. Andrews in America is based on the assumption that the land was settled by communities, each of them sufficiently large to have a head, whether civil or military. To that supposition such names as I have mentioned are, I think, fatal.

Yet another point must be touched on as to this alleged patronymic. To Kemble, as I have said, it was of small moment what suffix his ‘marks’ bore. Indeed, those that denoted forest were to him specially welcome, because he associated the idea of a ‘mark’ with that of a forest clearing. But we who have seen that such suffixes as -field, -hurst and -den are distinctive of those districts untouched by the early settlers cannot recognise such names, for instance, as the Itchingfield or Billingshurst of Sussex as denoting village communities. Again, in the Anglo-Saxon charters the characteristic den of Kent is frequently preceded by ing; and if these dens were clearly from the context only forest pastures for swine, we must here also reject the ing as proof of a clan community. One may also glance in passing at such names as the “Willingehala” of Essex, now “Willingale,” and ask whether a clan community is supposed to have settled in a hall?[32]

I trust that I have now sufficiently shown that even where ing genuinely enters into the composition of a place-name it is no proof of settlement by a clan. Kemble looked on the typical ‘mark’ as “a hundred heads of houses,” which he deemed “not at all an extravagant supposition.”[33] I think that even at the present day a visit to the hams and tons of Sussex, and, in some cases, to the ings, would lead us in practice to the opposite conclusion, and would throw the gravest doubt on the theory of the village community. I was trained, like others of my generation, to accept that theory as an axiomatic truth; but difficult as it is to abandon what one has been so taught, the solitary manor house, the lonely farm, is a living protest against it. The village community of the class-room can never have existed there. On paper it holds its own: solvitur ambulando.

But the fact that a place bearing a typical clan name may prove to have been but a single homestead takes us farther than this. Ing, which Canon Taylor has described as “the most important element which enters into Anglo-Saxon names,” has been held to denote settlement not merely by a clan, but by a portion of a tribe bearing, both in England and abroad, one common name. Kemble insisted strongly upon this,[34] and is duly followed by Canon Taylor[35] and others. On the same foundation Mr. Andrew Lang has erected yet another edifice, tracing the occurrence in scattered counties of the same clan name to the existence of exogamy among our forefathers. And this ingenious suggestion has been adopted by Mr. Grant Allen.[36] But the very first instance he gives, that of the Hemings, will not stand examination.[37]

As yet I have been dealing with those ‘clan names’ in which the presence of the ing is genuine; and I have been urging that it is not proof, as alleged, of settlement by a clan. I now pass to those place-names in which the ing is not genuine, but is merely a corruption. That such names exist has always, of course, been admitted,[38] but their prevalence has not been sufficiently recognised. And not only are there large deductions, in consequence, to be made from the so-called clan names, but even in cases where the ing is genuine the prefix is often so corrupt that the name of the clan deduced from it is altogether wrong.