Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/389

 Reviews. 353

name Oxford which occurs on page 269. The statement (page 301) that "the -by place-names in the Danish districts of England must be regarded by their parallelism to the bys of ancient Gothland to have been folk-villages" is plausible, but ignores the fact that in many of these names the -by suffix is compounded with a personal name in the possessive case. It is difficult to see what such names as Brocklesby, Barnetby, and Grimsby can have meant if they did not mean that the places in question were originally owned by Brocwulf, Beortnoth, and Grim. The process which transformed such estates into the unmanorialised vills revealed by Domesday Book is one of the obscurest problems of Anglo-Saxon history, but Mr. Shore took no account of the difficulty. In connection with this subject we may note that Mr. Shore follows Kemble's arbitrary explana- tion of the -ing suffix in place-names; an explanation which of course is very convenient for an author whose work, like the present book, is based on the assumption of the tribal structure of Anglo-Saxon society.

It is an ungrateful task to give adverse criticism to a book which, whatever its defects, expresses the result of personal research in a region where such research is urgently needed. It is only through the labours of many individual scholars that some vague outline of the early social condition of the English people will at last begin to appear. But Mr. Shore's method was far too unscientific, the ground which he attempted to cover was far too wide, for his work to have any appreciable share in advancing this result. When English place-names have been traced to their origin and classified, when what is archaic in local custom has been distinguished from what is only a development of feudal law, when anthropological statistics have been multiplied and interpreted, some more fortunate scholar may undertake with a prospect of success the work attempted by Mr. Shore.

Students of Maine's Ancient Law have long felt the need of an edition of this book in which its conclusions are reviewed in the light of recent research in the wide field covered by its brilliant author. Such an edition is now supplied by Sir Frederick Pollock, Maine's successor in the chair of Jurisprudence at