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 Tiggocobauc, 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 from Lincolnshire and Norfolk to
Sussex, and that they are densest in Essex, in which county,
however, the A 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