inscriptions on wooden tablets, on rude stone monuments, or on utensils
of metal-work. A golden drinking-horn found in Sleswick, and engraved
with the maker's name, referred to the middle of the fourth century,
contains the earliest known specimen of the English language.

The early English society was founded entirely on the tie of blood.
Every clan or family lived by itself and formed a guild for mutual
protection, each kinsman being his brother's keeper, and bound to avenge
his death by feud with the tribe or clan which had killed him. This duty
of blood-revenge was the supreme religion of the race. Moreover, the
clan was answerable as a whole for the ill-deeds of all its members; and
the fine payable for murder or injury was handed over by the family of
the wrong-doer to the family of the injured man.

Each little village of the old English community possessed a general
independence of its own, and lay apart from all the others, often
surrounded by a broad belt or mark of virgin forest. It consisted of a
clearing like those of the American backwoods, where a single family or
kindred had made its home, and preserved its separate independence
intact. Each of these families was known by the name of its real or
supposed ancestor, the patronymic being formed by the addition of the
syllable _ing_. Thus the descendants of Ælla would be called Ællings,
and their _ham_ or stockade would be known as Ællingaham, or in modern
form Allingham. So the _tun_ or enclosure of the Culmings would be
Culmingatun, similarly modernised into Culmington. Names of this type
abound in the newer England at the present day; as in the case of
Birmingham, Buckingham, Wellington, Kensington, Basingstoke, and
Paddington. But while in America the clearing is merely a temporary
phase, and the border of forest is soon cut down so as to connect the
village with its neighbours, in the old Anglo-Saxon fatherland the