[118]. Zeuss, p. 584.
[119]. Ibid. pp. 226, 227.
[120]. Cod. Dipl. No. 1135. Wylfinga ford.
[121]. Lines 916, 936.
[122]. Line 58. They are the Ylfingar of Norse tradition. Helg. Hund. l. 5.
[123]. Æscings in Essex, Somerset and Sussex: Alings in Kent, Dorset, Devonshire and Lincoln: Ardings in Sussex, Berks and Northamptonshire: Arlings in Devonshire, Gloucestershire and Sussex: Banings in Hertfordshire, Kent, Lincolnshire and Salop: Beadings in Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex and the Isle of Wight: Berings in Kent, Devonshire, Herefordshire, Lincolnshire, Salop and Somerset: Billings in Bedfordshire, Durham, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Salop, Sussex and the Isle of Wight, etc.
[124]. Water seems the indispensable condition of a settlement in any part of the world: hence, in part, the worship paid to it. It is the very key to the history of the East.
[125]. The solemn apportionment of lands and dwellings is nowhere more obvious, or described in more instructive detail, than in Denmark. Norway and the Swedish borderlands may have offered more numerous instances of solitary settling. The manner of distributing the village land is called Sólskipt or Sólskipti: the provisions of this law are given by Grimm, Rechtsalt. p. 539. There is an interesting account of the formalities used upon the first colonization of Iceland, in Geijer, Hist. of Sweden, i. 159. (German translation of 1826.)
CHAPTER III.
THE GÁ OR SCÍR.
Next in order of constitution, if not of time, is the union of two, three or more Marks in a federal bond for purposes of a religious, judicial or even political character. The technical name for such a union is in Germany, a Gau or Bant[[126]]; in England the ancient name Gá has been almost universally superseded by that of Scír or Shire. For the most part the natural divisions of the country are the divisions also of the Gá; and the size of this depends upon such accidental limits as well as upon the character and dispositions of the several collective bodies which we have called Marks.