THE CHILTERN COUNTRY. 19 
Haveringdon-hill (West Wycombe), &c. All these the Saxons 
must have found in use, and incorporated into their own language, 
like many elements in common names. The district is described 
by the name of Ciltern in the earliest known division of Saxon 
England, given by Camden (Magna Britannia, in Jansson’s Wovus 
Atlas, vol. 4, p. 65), on the authority of the celebrated jurist 
Francis Tate. This singular list probably dates not many 
years posterior to the Saxon invasion; and-the precise meaning 
of the several strange names by which the divisions are de- 
nominated is not yet determined by antiquaries; but we find 
among them plainly and unmistakeably that of Ciltern-setna, 
which is stated to contain seven thousand hides.* Here, then, 
we have the earliest documentary evidence of the name. Probably 
the whole of the district now called Buckinghamshire was in- 
cluded in it; and no one will deny that for harmony, propriety, 
and convenience, the ancient name is to be preferred before the 
modern, or its vulgar abbreviation into Bucks. 
But how came the old name to be cast out? What reason 
induced the surveyors who settled the county boundaries and 
fixed the county names by order of Alfred the Great, to exchange 
the ancient and significant name of Chiltern for one borrowed 
from a little town in a remote corner of the district? The reason 
is, that the Chiltern forest was of little political importance—it 
had no towns or villages to speak of till a long time after the 
neighbouring vales had become thoroughly populated. And such 
importance as it possessed, was rather of a negative than a 
positive kind; for after the Danish invasions had ceased it was 
in the worst possible reputation as the stronghold and hiding- 
place of innumerable thieves, murderers, and scoundrelsof all sorts. 
Thither retired all the vagabonds whom the peace threw out of 
employment—the discontented and disaffected—who together with 
the numerous original members of the most ancient trading 
company in the world, the freebooters, acquired for the name 
of the Chiltern forest an odour which was many centuries 
* The list only includes the cis-Humbrian part of the island, which is 
divided into thirty-four districts, the largest, Wessex, containing 100,000 
hides, and the three smallest only 300 hides apiece. The only names besides 
Chiltern which I can identify with existing divisions are those of Kent, 
Essex, Sussex, and the Isle of Wight. . 
D 
