upon British Ethnology. 
209 
they were in the time of King Alfred, 1000 years ago. And 
in Alfred’s time we learn from Asser that even the Isle of 
Thanet was also known by its British name Ruim, and 
Nottingham as Tiggocobanc, just as at the present day a 
well-known Cumberland mountain is sometimes called Blen- 
cathra, and sometimes Saddleback. It is also worth notice 
that when Alfred was hard pressed by the Danes, and became 
a fugitive, it was to a refuge in Somerset (or West Wales) 
that he retreated, and from West Wales he collected most of 
the army that enabled him to defeat the Danes at Edington, 
and make the peace of Wedmore. And we have no reason 
to suppose that the extension of the frontiers of Mercia and 
Northumbria at the expense of Wales and Strathclyde was, 
on the whole, attended by greater slaughter and devastation 
than were the wars between the Angle and Saxon kings 
themselves. For with states as with languages, a slight 
superiority tends to increase by the mere influence of grow¬ 
ing prestige; and a small state to welcome the over-lordship 
of a larger and more quickly increasing one, as a means of 
insuring protection and peace. 
The very valuable work of Mr. F. Seebohm on ‘ The 
English Village Community ’ gives most important evidence 
tending to show a much greater continuity between the 
Romano-British and the Anglo-Saxon community than has 
generally been supposed. He points out that the land-system 
of the Saxon hams and tuns was a manorial one, and that 
there is no foundation for the view that “ the Saxons intro¬ 
duced everywhere free village communities on the system of 
the German mark , which afterwards sank into serfdom under 
manorial lords.” He then considers the question whether 
the Saxons introduced the manorial system themselves or 
adopted it on finding it already established in Roman Britain. 
It appears that the hams of England are most numerous in 
the south eastern counties Rom Lincolnshire and Norfolk to 
Sussex, and that they are densest in Essex, in which county, 
however, the h is often dropped and becomes am. Passing 
to the continent, Mr. Seebohm shows that the heims—the 
equivalent of the hams—are most numerous in what was 
