Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/206

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192
Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.

the Vistula, and appertained to Eastum or Eastland. The old form of the w in Witland is uu, and in this form Uuitland is close in sound to Jutland. It would, from this and other evidence, appear not improbable that Eastmen may have settled among the Jutes in Kent.

The remarkable collection of ancient skulls that formerly existed at Hythe were believed by some who examined them to have been the remains of men who fell in battle. Knox,[1] who examined them in 1860, thought that a large number of them were of the Celtic type, and the remainder of Anglo-Saxon type. Two of the skulls he believed to be those of Lapps. Another observer found broad skulls as well as long ones among them.[2] To account for the broad skulls, we must suppose either a survival in this part of Kent of descendants of the broad-headed men of the Bronze Age—for the later Celts were not of this type—or the arrival with the long-headed Teutonic invaders of some men of a broad-headed race.

In Romney Marsh and the neighbouring portion of the Weald, Beddoe’s observations show that darker hues[3] prevail among the people, and it is near the coast of Romney Marsh that the Domesday place Blachemene-stone—now Blackmanstone—is situated. Such a name is unlikely to have been given to a place on the coast from a survival of dark Celtic people there. As a coast place, it is far more probable that it got its name from dark-haired settlers. This was the country of the tribe known in Saxon time as the Merscwara, and it must be concluded that, whether these people were partly of Celtic descent or not, there was probably some ethnological difference between them and the people in other parts of Kent. Two designations—‘Men of Kent’ and ‘Kentish Men’—have come down to our time. They are certainly old, the former being the designation of the people in the east around Canterbury, and the latter that of those in the

  1. Archæologia Cantiana, xviii. 333-336.
  2. Ibid., 334.
  3. Beddoe, J., ‘Races in Britain,’ 256.