APRIL 79 



possessions. The tribe or sept of the restless Celt yielded 

 place to the family and village system of the more 

 business-like Teuton. Around the original tun or en- 

 closure of the Saxon farmer a number of dwellings arose. 

 In proportion as he prospered in agriculture he employed 

 more hands or ceorls, for whom cottages were built within 

 another tun; wherefore the name Carlton, Charlton, or 

 Chorlton occurs more than one hundred times on our 

 maps. The Carlton Club has more or less pretension 

 to be aristocratic: a less complimentary name for it 

 than Carlton the home of churls could hardly have 

 been devised by the committee of the Reform itself. 

 Charlcote, also, is met with in most English counties, 

 but the Anglo-Saxon cota was most often used in the 

 dative or locative plural cotum or cotan at the cottages ; 

 hence such deceptive forms as Coatham and Cottam in 

 Yorkshire and Cotton in Derbyshire. 



A group of cottages clustering round the original 

 settler's tun the defensive enclosure against natives, 

 neighbours, and wild beasts soon developed into a 

 village within its own tun. There is no better marked 

 class of names than those of English villages, and none, 

 thanks to the invaluable record of Domesday, of which 

 the original form may be ascertained with so much 

 certainty. 



When the Saxons had been in possession of our land 

 for about four centuries, a new race of invaders and 

 settlers appeared on the scene, Danish pirates known as 

 Vikings, because they came from the great vik, now 

 called the Skager Rack, and Norsemen from the fiords 

 of Norway. The most unmistakable signs of Scandinavian 

 place-names are the suffixes -by, -thwait, -thorp, -bster, 



