Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/22

8 Bearing in mind these circumstances, we cannot wonder if it should appear that the original Anglo-Saxon settlers in some instances called their neighbours in the next settlement, if they were of a different tribe, by the tribal name to which they belonged, or one expressive of the sense of strangers or foreigners. Such a meaning is apparently conveyed by the use of the Anglo-Saxon prefix el, other, strange or foreign. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Danes, Norse, and Wends, comprised people of many various tribes, speaking many various dialects, some of which must have been less intelligible to people who as English settlers lived near them than their own vernacular speech. In this sense they would be more or less strangers to each other, and such a line of cleavage would be more marked in those cases in which different local customs prevailed in neighbouring townships. In some parts of England we may still find here and there traces of old place-names denoting, apparently, the idea of other, or strange, people. Such Anglo-Saxon names as Elmanstede, now Elmstead, in Kent, and Elmenham, now Elmham, in Norfolk, probably had this original signification. They can hardly be words derived from inflected names. These and other similar names express the sense that the inhabitants in these hams, steds, worths, beorhs, and tons, were other men or strangers to the people living near them, who probably gave the places these names. It is difficult to see what other meaning can be attached to such names as Elmanstede and Elmenham. They apparently point to conditions of early settlement somewhat similar to those under which townships are formed in many instances in the western parts of the United States and Canada. There emigrants of various European nations are forming their new homes in separate communities of their own people, while others in neighbouring townships who are