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)

This inference might possibly be confirmed by the fact that the isolated clusters of names ending in 'ing' on the west of the Rhine, correspond in many instances with the districts into which we happen to know that forced colonies of families of these and other German tribes had been located after the termination of the Alamannic wars of Probus, Maximian, and Constantius Clorus. These colonies of læti were planted, as we have seen, in the valley of the Moselle, and the names of places ending in 'ing' are numerous there to this day. They were planted in the district of the Tricassi round Troyes and Langres, and here again there are numerous patronymic names. They were planted in the district of the Nervii round Amiens close to the cluster of names ending in 'ingahem,' so many of which in the ninth century are [p359] found to belong to the Abbey of St. Bertin. Lastly—and this is a point of special interest for the present inquiry—we know that similar deportations of tribesmen of the Alamannic group were repeatedly made into Britain, and thus the question arises whether the places ending in 'ing' in England may not also mark the sites of peaceable or forced settlements of Germans under Roman rule.

They lie, as we have seen, chiefly within the district of the Saxon shore, i.e. east of a line between the Wash and the Isle of Wight, just as was the case also with the survivals of the right of the youngest.

If evidence had happened to have come to hand of a similar deportation of Alamannic Germans into Frisia instead of Frisians into Gaul, the coincidence would be still more complete.

The suggestion is very precarious. Still, it might be asked, where should clusters of tribal households of Germans resembling the Welsh Weles and Gavells be more likely to perpetuate their character and resist for a time manorial tendencies than in these cases of peaceable or forced emigration into Roman provinces? Who would be more likely to do so than troublesome septs (like that of the Cumberland 'Grames' in the days of James I.) deported bodily to a strange country, and settled, probably not on private estates, but on previously depopulated public land, without slaves, and without the possibility of acquiring them by making raids upon other tribes?

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 time546 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.

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.'

As regards the supposed patronymic names in the district between Calais and St. Omer, Mr. Taylor states that 80 per cent. are found also in England.549

We may take as a further example the resemblance between names of places occurring in Sprüner's maps of 'Deutschlands Gaue' in the Moselle valley and those of places and persons mentioned in early Wirtemberg charters.

The following coincidences550 occur in the modern Champagne, which embraces another district into which forced emigrants were deported.

And so on in about forty cases.

A comparison of the fifteen similar names in Frisia occurring in the Fulda records, with other similar names of places or persons in England and Wirtemberg, gives an equally clear result.

It is impossible to follow out in greater detail these remarkable resemblances between the personal names which appear with a patronymic suffix in the local names in England and Frisia, and certain well-defined districts west of the Rhine, and the local and personal names mentioned in the Wirtemberg charters. The foregoing instances must not be regarded as more than examples. And for the reasons already given it would also be unwise to build too much upon this evident similarity in the personal names, but still it should be remembered that the facts to be accounted for are—(1) The concentration of these places with names having a supposed patronymic termination in certain defined districts mostly within the old Roman provinces. (2) The practical identity throughout all these districts of so many of the personal names to which this suffix is attached.

The first fact points to these settlements in tribal households having taken place by peaceable or forcible emigration during Roman rule, or very soon after, at all events at about the same period. The second fact points to the practical homogeneity of the German tribes, whose emigrants founded the settlements which [p366] in England, Flanders, around Troyes and Langres, on the Moselle, in Wirtemberg, in Bavaria, and also in Frisia, bear the common suffix to their names.

The facts already mentioned of the survival to a great extent in the same districts, strikingly so in England, of the right of the youngest, and in Kent of the original form of the local custom of Gavelkind, point in the same direction.

Taking all these things together, we may at least regard the economic problem involved in them as one deserving closer attention than has yet been given to it.

In conclusion, turning back to the direct relation of these facts to the process of transition of the German tribal system into the later manorial system, it must be remembered that the holdings of tribal households might quite possibly be, from the first, embryo manors with serfs upon them. They might be settlements precisely like those described by Tacitus, the lordship of which had become the joint inheritance of the heirs of the founder. As a matter of fact, the actual settlements in question had at all events become manors before the dates of the earliest documents. We have seen, e.g., that the villas belonging to the monks of St. Bertin, with their almost invariable suffix 'ingahem,' were manors from the time of the first records in the seventh century, and they may never have been anything else. We have seen that in the year 645 the founder of the abbey gave to the monks his villa called Sitdiu, and its twelve dependent villas (Tatinga villa, afterwards Tatingahem, among them)553 with the slaves and coloni upon them. They seem to [p367] have been, in fact, so many manorial farms just like those which, as we learned from Gregory of Tours, Chrodinus in the previous century founded and handed over to the Church.

We have not found, therefore, in this inquiry into the character of the settlements with local names ending in the supposed patronymic suffix, doubtful as its result has proved, anything which conflicts with the general conclusion to which we were brought by the manorial character of the Roman villa and the manorial tendency of the German tribal system as described by Tacitus, viz. that as a general rule the German settlements made upon the conquest of what had once been Roman provinces were of a strictly manorial type. If the settlements with names ending in ing were settlements of læti or of other emigrants during Roman rule, taking at first the form of tribal households, they at least became manors like the rest during or very soon after the German conquests. If, on the other hand, they were later settlements of the conquerors of the Roman provinces, or of emigrants following in the wake of the conquests, they none the less on that account soon became just as manorial as those Roman villas which by a change of lordship and translation of words may have become German heims or Anglo-Saxon hams.

It is certainly possible that during a short period, especially if they held no serfs or slaves, tribal households may have expanded into free village communities. But to infer from the existence of patronymic local names that German emigration at all generally took the form of free village communities would surely not be consistent with the evidence.