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settled in the earlier stages of the English conquest. The hamlet or small-field system survives in the regions where the Celtic resistance was more stubborn, and where the occupation was later in time and milder in character. Western Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, the old West Wales, is a region of this character, so is the old Strathclyde, and of course Wales itself, including Monmouthshire and Cheshire. The natural conclusion to draw from the facts of distribution is that the compact village and the large field are to be attributed to the English invaders, that they settled the land in their own way and according to their own ideas, and that they did not adopt the methods of the Celtic-speaking people whom they displaced. If this inference be valid, it affords additional evidence of the thoroughness of the English conquest. If the tillers of the soil, the lowest stratum of society engaged in cultivation, had been enslaved in large numbers, it is certain that their methods of cultivation would have survived with them. The facts are otherwise. Just as the Celtic place-names have disappeared from the midlands and the south, so the Celtic agriculture has literally "gone west" with them.

A pregnant observation of Nasse may be remembered in this connexion. He argued that the large field system was exotic in England, that it properly belonged to a region of lesser rainfall more suitable for corn growing and less suitable for pasturage. The strongest evidence of the survival of the village community is found in just such a region, the basins of the Elbe and Weser, from which the English invaders are believed to have come. This certainly accords with the conclusion that they probably brought with them the agricultural methods to which they had been accustomed.

Then we have the peculiar Kentish system, with a field system of its own, a peculiar measure of land-the jugum, compact and rectangular in shape-and a peculiar system of inheritance. It is not the midland system, neither is it the Celtic system. Dr. Gray has no difficulty in drawing the conclusion that it is a survival of Roman agriculture. Now Mr. Chadwick, arguing from totally different facts, has inferred that the conquerors of Kent came from the Rhine lands. In their original homes they would have seen and practised Roman methods, and imported these methods with themselves; just as the invaders of the midlands, who lived far beyond imperial influences, brought their own open field cultivation.

A danger to be specially guarded against is the tendency to exaggerate the antiquity of particular villages. Large numbers of them are younger than Doomsday. A parish may contain prehistoric and Roman monuments within its ambit, but that is no ground for saying that the present settlement has anything to do with the Romans or more ancient peoples. There are one hundred and fifty Newtons and Newtowns in England besides many more in the anglicised parts of Wales. It is certain that every one of them was so-called because it was a new" tun," and that the lips that gave it that name for that reason spoke the English tongue and none other. Maitland has emphasized the historical importance of the surnames of English villages. They abound all over the country, but in some districts more than others. Some are commonplace enough. When a new Middleton was planted men could think of nothing better to call it than Other Middleton. Nether Stowey (sacred to Coleridge) is distinguished from Over Stowey, which is slightly more imaginative. Huish Episcopi (sacred to Bagehot) is apparently to be distinguished from Huish Champflower. This belongs to a later age, for the surnames are Norman, and the places, though both in Somerset, are distant from one another. They speak of a time when communications had improved and administration become more scientific, of a time when the existence of two Huishes within the same county would cause confusion. More important are the examples that are contiguous to one another. As an extreme instance a township in Norfolk called Burnham is divided into nine such villages, each with its distinctive surname. It is impossible to refuse assent to Maitland when he argues that these things speak of increase of population, of colonisation, of reclamation of forest and waste and marsh, of expansion, of new settlement; and all after the original townships had been planted and the country settled under its present names. The earlier settlements bore the distinctive names, as may also some of the later ones, but generally laziness or lack of imagination prevailed, and the new settlement had to be contented with an adjective.

Now, thanks to Mr. Crawford, we are in possession of evidence still more direct and convincing-the evidence of the spade which none can gainsay. The photographs and plans that were reproduced in "Air Survey and Archæology" clearly bring out one dominant fact that no student of English history can afford to

forget for one moment—that the English invaders were a valley people with a lowland agriculture, and that the Celtic or RomanoBritish people whom they dispossessed were an upland people with an upland agriculture. In Wessex, at any rate, we have numerous remains of the upland villages, and the new instrument of air photography is revealing them more and more. In the district of Cranbourne Chase and Grovely, several of them have been excavated by General Pitt-Rivers and others, so that their characteristics have been accurately ascertained. The settlement invariably stood on high ground and looked towards the valley for its boundary, while the English village that succeeded it stood on the low ground and drew its boundary on the higher levels. The upland village sites contain relics dating to the end of the Roman occupation-since when they have been completely deserted. The valley settlements of the English yield nothing earlier than their own period.

Moreover the boundaries of the English townships, and in some instances of the English counties, ran right through the old settlements which became the forest and waste of the newcomers. Some of the older settlements on the high ground still exist, but they are exceptional. The town of Shaftesbury appears to be a conspicuous example. Any such deserve most careful examination as to the form of the village, the nature of the field system, and the manorial customs. So also do any places that suggest by their names that they were once occupied by Welsh people— the Waltons, Walcotes, and so forth. All these things are set out in detail by Mr. Crawford in a paper shortly to appear, and he summarises his conclusions in these words :

We know the sites where villages stood in both the RomanoBritish period and the Saxon. We find, on the one hand, villages on the uplands and none in the valleys; and on the other, villages in the valleys and none on the uplands. We find, further, that the Saxon valley-settlements fall naturally into groups, with a common frontier; and this common frontier runs right through the middle of the RomanoBritish settlement areas, and the fields associated with them. In one case the common frontier is also a county boundary; and passes through the middle of two Romano-British villages, both of which, as it happens, have been thoroughly and exhaustively excavated. neither village has a single object of Saxon date been found; and there is reason to suppose that they were abandoned early in the fifth century and never re-occupied. No post-Roman objects, and none of the very different and typically Saxon objects, have ever been found in a RomanoBritish village of Wessex.

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Much more research in different parts of the country will be necessary before the subject is completely elucidated, but one conclusion at least is clear. The compact village of the midlands and south, as far as this island is concerned, is indubitably English, not Roman, not Celtic, much less prehistoric. No preceding people had any part or lot in its formation; it is more English than Parliament, more English than our language, even more purely English than the common law. In a greater measure than any other institution, it is our very own.

H. J. RANDALL

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A CENTURY OF SUBURBANIZATION

LMOST exactly a hundred years ago, William Cobbett denounced the continued growth of London, in the terse and vigorous English of which he was a master, as a menace to the prosperity of the country, a drain on the national vitality, and a great wen on the sturdy frame of John Bull. The metropolis, he held, was the haunt of "the locusts called middlemen, who create nothing, add to the value of nothing, and improve nothing ; but live in idleness out of the labour of the producer and consumer": a collection of Jews, Quakers, fundlords, and tax-eaters -robbers, thieves, and liars all, parasites who settled in the town, preyed on the country and read "the bloody Times and THE EDINBURGH REVIEW" to the greater damnation of themselves and of England.

Cobbett's social philosophy was essentially that of the peasant. Soil, climate, rent, tenure, wages-he missed hardly a point that concerned the producer. But he ignored or resented the distributor, the dealer in transport, and above all, the speculator. He preferred the village fair to the shop, which was gradually superseding the old country method, and at heart would probably have preferred the still more primitive method of barter to the fair.

The town to him was the countryman's market, no more: "What is the shop and the shop-keeper for? To receive and distribute the produce of the land." And since anything more than this was mere knavery, it followed that improvements in transport, which tended to concentrate men and goods in towns and great cities, were an unmitigated evil. "The facilities which now exist," he wrote, "of moving human bodies from place to place are amongst the curses of the country, the destroyers of industry, of morals, and happiness."

This comprehensive denunciation reads oddly when we recall that the London of 1827-the famous year in which Mr. Pickwick went to lodge with Mrs. Bardell, in Goswell Road-had no railways, no railway stations, and no trams. Cabs were dear and bad; the private post-chaise was very expensive. There were no great hotels, and long-distance passengers slept when necessary at the

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