Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/16

2 him, and some of the historians who followed them, have, however, assigned a greater value to Bede’s early narrative than he himself would probably have given to it. In this work it will be our aim to gather what supplementary information we can from all available sources, and among the more important subjects that will be dealt with are the evidence of ancient customs and the influence of family organization as shown by the survival of many ancient place-names.

Anyone who departs from the beaten track, and attempts to obtain some new information from archæological and other research bearing on the circumstances of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, will find many difficulties in his way, and that much time is required to make even small progress. Here and there, however, by the comparison of customs, old laws, the ancient names of places, and other archæological circumstances, with those of a similar kind in Scandinavia or Germany, some advance may be made.

It is to tribal organization and tribal customs that we must look for explanation of much that would otherwise be difficult to understand in the Anglo-Saxon settlement and the origin of the Old English race. Many of the ancient place-names can be traced to tribal origins. Others, whose sources we cannot trace, probably had their origin in tribal or clan names that have been lost. Many of the old manorial and other customs, especially those of inheritance, that survive, or are known to have prevailed, and the variations they exhibited in different English localities, were probably tribal in their origin. The three national names, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, denoting the people by whom England was occupied, were not the names of nations, as nations are now understood, but convenient names for confederations of tribes. The dialects that were spoken by the English settlers were probably mutually intelligible, but were not, until the lapse of centuries, one speech. Their variations have