Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/251

Rh alone on some, and both classes on some other manors—points unmistakably to a peculiarity in the customs of Saxon Wiltshire distinct from those which prevailed in other counties. This sharp distinction must have arisen from some ancient cause, and it is very difficult to see what it could have been except the attachment of people of different tribes to the immemorial customs of their race. If this is the explanation, the question arises whether we can identify any of these ancient Wiltshire people by their peculiar customary designations of coscets and cottars. The name coscets is spelt in Domesday Book in four ways—viz., coscets, coscez, cozets, and cozez. The spelling is of little importance, the sound of the word is the same in each case. In Lower Saxony, near the old Wendish country, there exist, or have existed until modern time, tenants of a cottar kind who are, or were, known by the names kater, kotter, kotsass, and kossat, and these have been identified as the representatives of the cottars and coscets of our Domesday Survey.

Those Wends who were known by the tribal name Wilte, or Men of Havel, and were located partly on the right bank of the Elbe below Magdeburg, could easily have sailed to England direct from their own territory. The evidence of the settlement of people of a non-Teutonic race with others in early Wessex is of a cumulative kind; any one part of it may be inconclusive, but the whole evidence proves the case. There is the statement of Bede that Rugians were one of the tribes from which the English of his time were known to have been descended. There are the old Rugian place-names in Hants, Wilts, and Dorset of the Saxon period. There is also the fact that as far back as historical references to Rügen and its people extend, or to the tribes on the coasts of