Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/148

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Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.

are some Letts within Prussia at Koenigsberg.[1] From their race connection, some Livonians, Letts or Lechs, and other Eastmen, may well have come to England with Fins among the Angles, Jutes, or the later Danes. There can be no doubt, from the Anglo-Saxon coins found, of communication between England and their country. In numerous instances people from Scotland were called Scot by Englishmen among whom they lived, others were called Waring from the Waring tribe, and Fleming from the Flemings. Similarly, the persons called Lyfing, Livingus, and Leving, in the Anglo-Saxon records[2] may very likely have obtained their names from the ancient Livs or Livonians, a name as old as Anglo-Saxon times.

The place-names supply a few traces of Lechs, under which names Livonians, some of whom still speak Lettish, may have been included. These Lech names occur in only a few parts of England, and these where Danes and other tribal people from the Baltic settled. That some representatives of the Lechs and other tribes of the Baltic near them may have settled in England is not improbable. The records of St. Edmund’s Abbey certainly tell us of an invasion of Britain by tribes from the Vistula,[3] and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us of an invasion in the year 1064 of Rythrenan, probably ancestors of the Ruthenians of Russia, into the country around Northampton.[4]

In Domesday Book there is a record of a man named Fin holding land at Cetendone in Buckinghamshire. Over his name the word ‘dan’ is written, apparently for explanation in the usual way that he was a so-called Dane. During the later Saxon period all the immigrants into England from Baltic countries probably came under

  1. Sweet, H, Philological Soc. Trans., 1877-1879, p. 47.
  2. Codex Dipl., No. 956, and Searle, W. G., ‘Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum.’
  3. ‘Memorials of St. Edmund’s Abbey,’ edited by T. Arnold, Index, and ii. 113.
  4. Anglo-Saxon Chron., MS., Cott. Tib., book iv.