Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/23

Rh doing the same are of other races, and are strangers to them. The newer Anglo-Saxon race is being rejuvenated on American soil, as the older stock was by similar conditions formed in England. The isolation of many of the earliest villages in England may probably be seen in the traces we find of the primitive meeting-places for exchange of commodities—i.e., the earliest markets. These are not in the towns, but on the borders or marks of the early settlements, where people of neighbouring places appear to have met on what was perhaps regarded as neutral ground. Some of these old border places may still be recognised by the name staple, although by the rise of newer villages they may be border places no longer. Thus, in Hampshire we have Stapler’s Down, south of Odiham; Stapeley Row, Ropley; Staple Ash, Froxfield; Stapleford, Durley; Staple Cross, Boarhunt; and Stapole Thorn, a name that occurs in a Saxon charter on the south of Micheldever. An example on the border of two counties is that of Dunstable, and another is the Domesday place Stanestaple, in Middlesex.

Even as late as the time of Henry I. there are orders that neighbours are to meet and settle their differences at the boundaries of their land, and there are many traces of the meeting-places of courts having been at the boundaries of ancient settlements.

The settlers who became the ancestors of the Old English race were people of many tribes, all included within the later designation Anglo-Saxon. They were not exclusively Teutonic, for among them was a small minority of people of various Wendish tribes, the evidence of whose immigration will appear in subsequent pages. In regard to speech, there must have been many dialects at first, and we can trace, more or less, the use in England of three classes of them—viz., the old Germanic, whether Old Frisian or Old Saxon; the Old Norrena, now represented by the Icelandic; and the Old Slavic speech of