July, 1327. Even in that great district which forms the borderland between Yorkshire and Lancashire stories are still current of the reception which the inhabitants of the Yorkshire valleys sometimes met with when they crossed the moorlands into Rossendale in Lancashire. The traditional reception of such a stranger was to call him a foreigner, and to ‘heave a sod at him.’ Such an old local tale conveys to us an idea of the isolation that must have prevailed among some at least of the neighbouring settlements of the Old English, especially when inhabited by people descended from different tribes, and not comprised within the same hundred or area of local administration. Thorold Rogers tells us that in the Hampshire Meon country the peasantry in one village, West Meon, had an open and hearty contempt for the inhabitants of the two neighbouring villages which, in the case of one, was almost like the dislike of the Southern French for the Cagots. There was, he says, a theory that the inhabitants were descended from the ancient Britons, whom the Jute settlers had failed to drive out of their morasses.[1]
On this subject of strangers in race settled near each other Seebohm says: ‘The tribal feeling which allowed tribesmen and strangers to live side by side under their own laws (as with the Salic and Ripuarian Franks) was, it would seem, brought with the invading tribes into Britain.’[2] In the cases in which strangers in race lived near each other there was little under ordinary circumstances to bring them into social intercourse, and the sense of estrangement was not altogether removed after many generations. It is difficult to see the occasions on which the people of different primitive settlements some miles apart would have opportunities of meeting if they were not included within the same hundreds or wapentakes.
