Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/119

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Our darker Forefathers.
105

any case, people of these races were acting together in the Danish expeditions against England. It is likely, therefore, that when permanent settlements were formed adjoining townships would be occupied by people of this alliance. This consideration helps us to identify Wendlesbury in Hertfordshire.[1] Wendover and its neighbourhood in Buckinghamshire, the Anglo-Saxon Wendofra,[2] and Windsor, anciently Wendlesore,[3] close to the southern border of that county, were probably named after settlers who were Wends.

If British people were left, as suggested, like an eddy between the main lines of the Anglo-Saxon advance east and west of these counties, would it not be very surprising that the advancing Saxons should make no use of the existing Roman roads—the Watling Street, Ikenield Street, and Akeman Street—which passed through parts of these shires, while the Ermine Street also went through Hertfordshire? To suppose that invaders and subsequent settlers would have forsaken the excellent roads which the Romans had made, and in their advance would have passed through the more difficult country east and west of them, thus leaving undisturbed a British population. is most unlikely.

Secondly. these counties are not specially marked by the survival of Celtic place-names, nor by a dialect containing words of Celtic origin. In Anglo-Saxon times there was, however, a place named Wealabroc, in Buckinghamshire.

Thirdly, it should be remembered that the western border of Buckinghamshire was at one time the western frontier of the Danelaw, which comprised fifteen counties known as Fiftonshire, until after the Norman Conquest, and that Danish law survived for more than a century after the Conquest east of this frontier.[4] This fact points

  1. Codex Dipl., 826.
  2. Dipl. Angl. Ævi Sax., by B. Thorpe, 527.
  3. Codex Dipl., 816.
  4. Cottonian Liber Custumarium in Liber Albus, ii. 625.