Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/287

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Settlements in the Thames Valley.
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which had flowing from it the stream called by the old name Oke, is the Domesday name for Hook Norton, and in one of the manuscript copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the date 914, it is written Hocceneretune. There was a place in Buckinghamshire called Hocsaga in Domesday Book, and the tribal name of the Chaucians may have survived locally, like that of the Gewissas, until after the Norman Conquest; for the Hundred Rolls relating to Oxfordshire show a greater number of inferior tenants entered under the names Choch, Cocus, Coc, and Hok than in any other county.

The evidence of the settlement of Kentish people or others of the Frisian or Gothic race that is supplied by the relics which have been found in the Upper Thames valley is very strong. At Iffley and at Abingdon brooches of the peculiar Kentish pattern have been found, and are now shown in the Anglo-Saxon collection in the British Museum. The relics discovered at Brighthampton and Wittenham, where Anglo-Saxon cemeteries were explored, show a strong resemblance to those found by Kemble at Stade in North Germany.[1] The ornamented pattern of a mortuary urn containing cremated remains found at Brighthampton closely resembled one found at Stade, where a very large number were discovered, all apparently containing cremated remains. Urns containing calcined human bones were also numerously found at Wittenham, and were of a similar pattern to those found at Stade.[2] In considering these resemblances, we must remember that Stade is near the lower course of the Elbe in the middle of the country anciently inhabited by the Chaucians.

All these circumstances which indicate a settlement of Chaucians around Oxford among other Frisians, Goths, and Kentish people, cannot be mere coincidences.

There remains one other point—viz., the probability of some connection of the Chaucians with the Jutes.

  1. Akerman, J. Y., Archæologia, vol. xxxvii.
  2. Ibid., vol. xxix.
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