4 
Tolman—English Surnames. 
Many of them are used much more frequently as parts of com¬ 
pound words than as independent names; as in Bradshaw, Hen- 
shaw, Lyndhurst, Denman. An old but inaccurate proverb says: 
“In ford, in ham , in ley and ton , 
The most of English surnames run.” 
All such names are place-names. The independent, accented 
words home and town go back to the same words as do the un¬ 
accented suffixes -ham and -ton. Lee (a shelter) and lea (a pas¬ 
ture) explain -ley as a suffix, and also the names Leigh, Lee, 
Lea, etc. Lea is also a Celtic: river-name we have one River 
Lea at London; another flows into Cork Harbor. Hence Lee as 
a place-name may have three separate sources. The names of 
small, towns are more apt to furnish place-names than those of 
large cities like London. Such names were more distinctive, 
and the movement of population was toward the cities. We see 
the English counties in such names as Kent, Norfolk, Lincoln. 
The syllable - ing was the Anglo-Saxon patronymic suffix, 
meaning son of , and then descendant of. “A whole clan or tribe, ” 
says Isaac Taylor, “claiming to be descended from a real or 
mythic progenitor, or a body of adventurers attaching themselves 
to the standard of some chief, were thus distinguished by a com¬ 
mon patronymic or clan name. ” 3 The Anglo-Saxons seem 
to have settled in England by families; and these clan- 
names gave rise to place-names, such as Barking, Dork¬ 
ing, Hastings, Kensington, Wellington, and Banningham. 
More than one-tenth of the towns and villages of England con¬ 
tain this syllable in their names. These places have in turn 
produced surnames. The clan-names of the Scotch have passed 
into surnames directly, without first becoming place-names. 
In the fall of 1888, when in the Black Forest of Germany, I 
noticed that the eastern border of my map of that region con 
tained many places ending in -ingen. I at at once connected this 
suffix with the English -ing, plural -ings. But I did not then know 
that this suffix is found abundantly in the names of places no¬ 
where in Europe except in England, in northern France, and in 
he district on the edge of which 1 then was. I was just west of 
Words and Places, p. 83. 
