Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/298

284 Buchenham, and other names derived from settlers recorded in Domesday Book.

The name East Anglia which was applied to the country of the North folk and South folk is misleading to some extent, for it seems to imply that the settlers were chiefly Angles. If they were all Angles from Danish and Scandinavian lands we might expect to find in these counties some traces of their runic letters. Runes have been found in the Anglian districts north and south of the Humber. They have not been found in Norfolk or Suffolk except in one eleventh-century inscription, which is of much later date. This is an important fact, especially when considered in reference to the absence of any fixed runic monument or inscription in Friesland, Old Saxony, or any part of Germany. ‘The monuments might have been destroyed and disappear,’ says the greatest writer on runic monuments, ‘but if they had ever existed in German or Saxon lands they would have left some trace behind them.’

This at once establishes a sharp line of distinction between the Goths, Swedes, and Norwegians of Scandinavia, the Danes, Angles, and Goths or Jutes of England, on the one hand, and the Saxons, Frisians, Wends, and other nations and tribes of Germany on the other hand. As the latter have left no monuments with runic inscriptions in their original homes, and as certain parts of England which are supposed to have been mainly colonized by them are also marked by the absence of such monuments, the runic inscriptions on fixed objects in England help to prove the settlement in some parts of the country of Goths and other Scandinavians, whether called Anglians or Jutes, or by their later names of Norse and Danes. Similarly, the absence of such inscriptions appears to point to the colonization mainly of those parts of the country which are wanting in them by settlers of other races.