people called Willa or Wilte. There were tribes in England named East Willa and West Willa;[1] and such Anglo-Saxon names as Willanesham;[2] Wilburgeham, Cambridgeshire;[3] Wilburge gcmæro and Wilburge mere in Wiltshire;[4] Wilburgewel in Kent;[5] Willa-byg in Lincolnshire;[6] Wilmanford,[7] Wilmanleáhtun,[8] appear to have been derived from personal names connected with these people. I have not been able to discover that any other Continental tribe of the Anglo-Saxon period were so named, except this Wendish tribe, called by King Alfred the men of Havel, a name that apparently survived in the Domesday name Hauelingas in Essex. The Wilte or Willa, tribal name survived in England as a personal name, like the national name Scot, and is found in the thirteenth-century Hundred Rolls and other early records. In these rolls a large number of persons so named are mentioned—Wiltes occurs in seventeen entries, Wilt in eight, and Wilte in four entries. Willeman as a personal name is also mentioned.[9] The old Scando-Gothic personal name Wilia is well known.[10]
The great Wendish tribe which occupied the country next to that of the Danes along the west coast of the Baltic in the ninth century was the Obodriti, known also as the Bodritzer. From their proximity there arose an early connection between them and the Danes, or Northmen. In the middle of the ninth century we read of a place on the boundaries of the Northmen and Obodrites, ‘in confinibus Nordmannorum et Obodritorum.’[11] The probability of Wendish people of this tribe having settled in England among the Danes arises from their near proximity on the Baltic, their political connection
- ↑ Cart. Sax., edited by Birch. i 416.
- ↑ Codex Dipl., No. 931.
- ↑ Ibid., No. 967.
- ↑ Ibid., Nos. 641 and 387.
- ↑ Ibid., No. 232.
- ↑ Ibid., No. 953.
- ↑ Ibid., No. 1205.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Hund. Rolls, vol. ii., Index.
- ↑ Stephens. G., ‘Old Northern Runic Monuments,’ iii. 122.
- ↑ Monumenta Germaniæ, Scriptores ii. 677, A.D. 851.
