Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/401

Rh shading of the southern dialects, in which ‘I be’ and ‘thou bist’ are common, into the north-western. That some settlers in Shropshire came up the river is probable from the dialect and from some of the customs. Borough-English, which still survives at Gloucester, prevailed in the English part of Shrewsbury. In this county also there were, at the close of the Saxon period, tenants called coscets, few in number; but as coscets are peculiar to Wiltshire, these may have been descendants of Gewissas who had migrated.

Along the border counties of Wales there was necessarily going on during the Anglo-Saxon period some racial fusion between the tribal people respectively of the Teutonic and Welsh races. As the Welsh were driven westward from the Midland counties, their agricultural system of isolated homesteads appears to have been commonly adopted. Villages of collected homesteads, like those between the Elbe and the Weser, or east of the Elbe, and such as are found in Northamptonshire and the adjacent counties, are comparatively rare along the Welsh border. Giraldus tells us that in the twelfth century the houses of the Welsh tribesmen were not built either in towns or villages. Like other pastoral people, they had two sets of homesteads, feeding their herds in summer on the higher ranges of the hills and in winter in the valleys. The Old English settlers along the border counties adopted this system, or brought it with them, and many of the isolated hamlets on the higher slopes of the hills were probably in their origin only summer shelters.

The original settlement of Cheshire must have been, at least in part, a direct one, and not wholly an extension of local colonies from the Staffordshire side. A similarity has been noted between the Cheshire dialect in some respects and that of Norfolk, while the intervening 25—2