and Winkton in the south. This custom is only recorded in Domesday Book in the southern counties of Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey, Kent, and Berkshire, but it may have prevailed on manors elsewhere without being specially mentioned. It is referred to in the tribal laws of the Franks and of the Angles and Warings.[1] Its existence at the present time in Norway and its survival in the Norse islands of the Orkneys and Shetlands may afford a clue as to whence the Scandinavians, whether the earlier Goths or the later tribal settlers in England, came. The Danish conquerors of Wessex were probably to some extent supplied with lands within that State itself, and it is not improbable that depopulated Saxon manors and lands or forest clearings were given to them. We can scarcely think that Cnut, King of Denmark and King of Wendland, whose name is so much connected with Wessex, and who when in England chiefly resided within it, would fail to provide his followers with lands near the seat of his government at Winchester. The thorpe place-names in the old parts of Wessex, of which there are a considerable number, support this view. Other Norse names, such as Hurstbourn, formerly known as Up Husbond and Down Husbond, are clearly Scandinavian. The forest land around Up Husband or Hurstbourn Tarrant was called Wikingelega Forest,[2] or later Wytingley Forest, a name derived from Wikings.
These considerations open up the still larger question, What was the relationship of the Goths at the time the Gewissas settled in Hampshire to the people known as Northmen? The term Northmen had certainly a wider significance than its limitation to the Norse or people of Norway. All the four chief Northern nations of antiquity, Goths, Danes, Norse, and Swedes, spoke the old Norrena dialects or language,[3] of which the best-
