Möller[1] identifies the language of the Jutes and Kentish people with that of the Chaucians. There is, also, mention of a people named the Eucii in alliance with the Saxons, and that they settled in Kent. These may be a tribe of the Chaucians, for Hengist and Horsa are said to have come from Engern, which at that time extended over the land of the old Chaucians on the Lower Weser.[2] The reference, whether traditional or otherwise, to a tribe known as the Eucii cannot but be of interest in considering the evidence which points to the existence of a tribe of Eocce in North Berkshire, of which some of the surviving traces may be the names of the river Ock, the Oke stream at Hook Norton, and that of Eoccenford, the earliest name for Oxford.
The personal freedom of all the people of Kent assists us in tracing the probable colonization of parts of the Upper Thames valley by migrations from that county. The manorial tenants called cottars, who are mentioned in Domesday Book, were freemen in some respects, and, as already stated, are found in considerable numbers in Middlesex. They occur still more frequently in parts of Berkshire near the river, and are also mentioned numerously in parts of Oxfordshire in the Hundred Rolls. The Berkshire cottars enumerated in the Domesday Survey lived in certain hundreds and not in others. These hundreds were Benes or Cookham; Heslitesford, near Wallingford; Blewbury, adjoining it on the west; Wantage; and Gamensfeld or Ganfield, which lay between the Wantage Hundred and the Thames. Five Berkshire hundreds close to, or not far from, the river were thus specially characterised by cottars. That they were the descendants of an original class of free settlers is probable from their number in various places. Cholsey had 98 of them, and Blewbury 65. In Heslitesford Hundred, which included Cholsey, there were altogether
