54 



THE HAMPSHIRE ANTIQUARY & NATURALIST. 



It was so at Hursley the manor of Merdon. When the 

 copy-holderdied on this manor, the interest in the copy- 

 hold passed not to the eldest son, as it did every- 

 where else over Hampshire, but to the youngest. 

 That formerly existed also on one of the manors of 

 Bishop's Waltham. It could be traced also on one c! the 

 manors ofEling. The law books, such as Blackstone, 

 would probably tell them that the custom was 

 brought in or modified by the Normans, and modified 

 afterwards. It was easy enough a century ago, when 

 books were written for a public not so critical as that 

 of the present day, t j find a reason for this ; but this 

 practice of inheritance by the 3'oungest son of 

 Borough English as it was sometimes called could 

 be traced to the remotest antiquity. Coming to the 

 actual occupation of the -county by the Romans, 

 Mr. Shore said it was not necessary to 

 point out that the Romans were great 

 road formers. Wherever they found in the ancient 

 world that Roman influence prevailed there they 

 would find a great impress made. Just as the 

 English impressed their individuality as a nation upon 

 India, so it was in the ancie.it world subjected by the 

 Roman people. There was the impress of the Roman 

 law, which to this day was the foundation of all legal 

 statutes in England. After the Roman period they 

 would find that a great change came over the people 

 in Hampshire. They passed from the tribal condition 

 in which land was held by tribes, to a more or less 

 territorial condition, into districts, and this county, 

 and others, was parcelled out not into tribes only- 

 The earliest recorded of the territorial divisions they 

 could find were called " hundreds." They were not 

 to imagine that these " hundreds " were of Roman 

 origin. He thought not, but of tribal origin, though 

 after a certain time the nature of these communities 

 became not tribal but territorial. No doubt they had 

 in Hampshire the survival of a great many inflences 

 of the Roman occupation. In all probability under their 

 vigorous system of government there must have been 

 a greater fixity among the people. On nearly all 

 their village sites Roman remains were to be found. 

 It might be a coin, found now at Chilbolton, and then 

 another at Upham, or in or near other villages in the 

 county. 



If they looked at many of the country roads they 

 found they were narrow and deeply worn proofs of 

 great antiquity. In the old charters they found roads 

 mentioned as long as a thousand years ago, and one 

 shown on the map before them at Swathling was 

 spoken of as the Law Path. At Redbridge there was 

 one called the Hollow Way mentioned in 1045, ail d it 

 was a country road to-day. It was quite certain that 

 this road could not have originated in Anglo-Saxon 

 times. It was a curious fact that in the Institutes of 

 Justinian, which summarised the laws over the whole 

 of the Roman empire, it was laid down as a right that 

 every man who occupied a holding had his road- 

 way, and that it should be eight feet wide on the 

 straight, and 16 feet wide where the road turned. 



Going along many lanes to-day they would find 

 a great many of that mea.-ureinent. Another 

 curious tiling was found in Roman law in i..reshore 

 rights. The law of Justinian stated th.it the public 

 h.i'l a perfect right to the shore, or beach, as far as 

 the tide rose between high and low water in irk. 

 That was a right, unless conveyed away by medieval 

 charters, to the present day in Ha:n;>-!n'r.-. They 

 could find traces of the Roman survivals in ll.i npsliire 

 in two kinds of people. The old Roman merr : i:i<n.s in 

 England were the perigrini, and the aneien 

 who farmed and could not remove, were the coloni. In 

 the Acts of the Apostles mention was mil: of a 

 Roman colony in Asia Minor ; this would bo precisely 

 the same as such a colony in Hampshire. In order to 

 colonise a certain person was put in possession and 

 he farmed and paid rent, but could not move. They 

 had a survival of that custom in Hampshire, and two 

 distinct cases were recorded in the Doomsday Book. 

 It was singularthatoneof these places borethe name of 

 Colmore near Alton to the present dav. The 

 Roman perigrini \vere the predecessors of the Anglo- 

 Saxon chapmen, who were freemen pledged before the 

 sheriff. Proceeding to the Anglo-Saxon period, Mr. 

 Shore said a great many writers of history told them 

 of the extermination theory that was to say, that the 

 Saxons came and swept everything before them, and 

 that in Hampshire, particularly, after a great battle 

 they all went. Professor Freeman, he believed, 

 adhered to this, but not many more. Passing over 

 that, it was a strange thing to find in the 

 Norman Doomsday Book of 1086 that in Hampshire 

 one man in five was actually a slave ; and ia the Isle 

 of Wight one-third, or i in 3.5 were slaves. He (Mr. 

 Shore) could not imagine that the Saxons brought 

 slaves with them, but in all probability this slave, or 

 serf, population arose from the descendants of the 

 old Celtic people. No doubt in some cases it was the 

 criminal population. But even that was a modifica- 

 tion or survival of the practice under the Romans, 

 who were great slave holders. There were three 

 kinds of people not free, the villeins, the borderers, 

 and the actual serfs. The most powerful arguments 

 against any theory of extermination of tlif> old British 

 population was the language ; the whole county was 

 full of Celtic names. They were chiefly names of 

 water and hills, foreign to the Anglo-Saxon language. 

 If the extermination theory was to prevail, how was 

 it that they called water by such names as " An " and 

 " dwr," hills by the name of ;< knock," and marshes 

 by " eannagh " or " anna" as Andover, some names 

 Cymric and some Gaelic? The future history ot 

 Hampshire, when it came to be written, must utterly 

 ignore this theory. The Saxon monks who wrote 

 400 years after their ancestors came to England 

 knew far less of these early times than was 

 known by those living now. A very important matter 

 relating to the Saxon system in England was the rise 

 of courts. If they wanted to understand the history 

 of Hampshire rightly they must not look to parishes 



