202 Edington or Yatton the Ethandun of Alfred’s Victory ? 
now spelt with th, as father, mother, hither, thither, which in 
Anglo-Saxon were feeder, modor, hider, pider. uther is a strong 
case in point, for in all Germanic languages it means, as in Greek 
and Latin, the feeder, and feed is always spelt with dand not th. 
For instance 
1. Mes. Goth. fadan feed fadar 
2. Angl.-Sax. fedan E feeder 
3. Old Fries. feda * feder 
4. Dutch voeden Bs vader 
5. Iceland: feedi Bs fadir 
6. Old Swed. foda be fodur 
7. Danish fide 4 foder 
8. Old Saxon at food fader 
Murder from the Anglo-Saxon mor%or is the only instance where 
% has become d or ¢ before a vowel. There are a few like Hadfield 
and Sutton, where it has changed before a consonant. 
As to the rival claim of Yatton, the distance appears too great 
for the first two days’ march of unembodied levies, and in the state 
of forest, in which the intermediate country was then lying; but 
this is a strategical question with which I will not meddle. Those 
who have maintained this idea, which Whitaker first published, 
have taken Highley near Melksham for the Iglea where Alfred 
encamped the night before the battle. But Highley, in the first 
place, is not an island, and then the seeming identity of sound be- 
tween the words is a delusion. How Highley was originally spelt, 
I cannot discover. There is no mention of it in old books and 
maps. But if since the Conquest it has always been spelt as at 
present, it is an entirely different word from Ig-lea, and in Anglo- 
Saxon times would have been written Hig-lea, or Heah-lea. The 
H, as before observed, was formerly in this, as in other Germanic 
languages, a most important letter. Among all the names in 
Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus that begin with I, At, or E, there is 
not one which in modern English has assumed an initial H; nor 
is there one beginning with H, which has dropped it. I=gfeld, 
Igford (near Bradford), Igset and Igtun are now called respectively 
Tfield, Iford, Eyset and Eyton. This coupled with the fact that 
