24 A GontribuMon to the Anthropology of Wiltshire. 



something more than two hundred and ten before the conquest : 

 of course the holdmgs of the natives are generally small, but 

 Brictric and two or three others have considerable estates.^ Dorset, 

 for example, had suffered much more, and there hundreds of small 

 landholding thanes, or yeomen, disappear from the record. 



No conspicuous racial movement has taken place in Wiltshire 

 since the conquest. Wiltshire was well peopled : there would be 

 no great gaps to be filled up with Norman or Breton peasants, as 

 in Yorkshire or Salop ; and there was no large city like Bristol or 

 Winchester to attract French citizens and traders. De Gray Birch, 

 apparently copying Ellis, finds in Domesday a population of 10,150 

 male adults, made up of : — capital holders, 156 ; undertenants, 286 ; 

 villans, 3049 ; bordars, 2754 ; cottiers, 1418 ; servi, 1539. 



It occurred to me as possible that the proportion of villans to 

 bordars and cottars and slaves might l^e found to be greater in 

 those parts of the county which were early conquered by the 

 Saxons, than in those which were occupied later, after Christianity 

 had made some progress among the conquerors. This was on the 

 assumption that the villans were the representatives of the Saxon 

 ceorls ; while the lower grades were mostly descended from the 

 vanquished Eomano-Britains. 



The distribution of ranks in sundry other counties does not 

 appear destructive of this view ; but I have not space and time 

 now to develop it, and to combat some obvious objections. 



I therefore undertook a count of the Domesday population of the 

 several ranks, dividing the county into East, West, and Doubtful 

 or Mixed. In the first division I placed those manors which drain 

 into the Thames and the Hampshire Avon and their tributaries, 

 except the Deverill ; in the second those diaining into the Bristol 

 Avon, the Stour, and the Deverill ; and in the third those on the 

 watersheds, and those which I could not identify. The results 

 were as follows : — 



' It was at the witan held at Salisbury, I think, that " the English bought 

 back their lands." Perhaps more Hampshire and Wiltshire men than men 

 of other counties had the opportunity and availed themselves of it. 



