480
APPENDIX A.
difficulty in a voyage from the Elbe or Skager Hack to England :
and the conquest of the Orkneys and Hebrides, of the south of
Ireland and Man, nay of large tracts of England by the Scandi-
navians in the ninth, tenth and following centuries, may supply
the means of judging how similar adventures were conducted by
populations of the same race, and as noble spirit, nine hundred or
a thousand years before.
The following additions may be made to the evidences given in
this chapter.
A marked linden or lime-tree is noticed in Cod. Dipl. No. 1317.
Again in Kent we hear of earnes beam, the eagle’s tree, ibid.
No. 287 : it is more probable that this was a tree marked with the
figure of an eagle, than that a real bird of that species should
have been meant. Eurther in the boundary of the charter No.
393 we have, on Siin merkeden ok, to the marked oak.
The sacred woods are again mentioned by Tacitus, Annal, i. 59,
where he tells us that Arminius hung up the captured Roman
ensigns to the gods of the country, in the woods, Zucis : we hang
them up in cathedrals. See also Tac. Germ, vii., Annal, iv.
22.
The character of the Mark or March is very evident in the fol-
lowing passage : “ Siquidem in Lindeseia superior! extat prioratus
qui Marchby dicitur, Iongas ас Iatas pasturas pro gregibus alendis
inhabitans, non omnino private iure, sed eomɪɪɪuɪɪem cum com-
patriotis Iibertatem ex dono patronorum participans,” etc. Chron.
Lanerc. an. 1289. See also the quotations from the Indiculus
Pagan, and Synod. Leptin, an. 742, in Moser, Osnab. i. 52, and
the whole of his twenty-ninth chapter, for the religious rites with
which boundaries were dedicated, especially vol. i. p. 58, note c.
It is more than one could now undertake to do, without such
local co-operation as is not to be expected in England as yet, but I
am certain that the ancient Marks might still be traced. In look-
ing over a good county map we are surprised by seeing the syste-
matic succession of places ending in -den, -holt, -wood, -hurst,
-fold, and other words which invariably denote forests and outlying
pastures in the woods. These are all in the Mark, and within
THE MARK.
481
them we may trace with equal certainty, the -hams, -tιins, -worδigs
and -stedes which imply settled habitations. There arc few coun-
ties which are not thus distributed into districts, whose limits may
be assigned by the observation of these peculiar characteristics.
I will lay this down as a rule, that the ancient Mark is to be recog-
nised by following the names of places ending in -den (neut.),
which always denoted culile ferarum, or pasture, usually for
swine. Dcnu, a valley (fem.), a British and not Saxon word, is
very rarely, perhaps never, found in composition. The actual
surface of the island, wherever the opportunity has been given of
testing this hypothesis, confirms its history. But there arc other
remarkable facts bearing upon this subject, which are only to be
got at by those who are fortunate enough to have free access to
manorial records, before the act of Charles II. destroyed all feudal
services in England. A striking example of the mark-jurisdiction
is the “ Court of Dens,” in Kent. This appears to have been a
mark-court, in the sense in which mark-court is used throughout
this second chapter, and which gradually became a lord’s court,
only when the head markman succeeded in raising himself at the
expense of his fellows : a court of the little marks, marches, or
pastures in Kent, long after the meaning of such marks or marches
had been forgotten : a court which in earlier times met to regulate
the rights of the markmen in the dens or pastures. I am indebted
(among many civilities, which I gratefully acknowledge) to the
Rev. L. Larking of Ryarsh for the following extracts from Sir
Roger Twisden,s journal, which throw some light upon what the
court had become in the middle of the seventeenth century, but
still show its existence, and lead us to a knowledge of its ancient
form.
The reader who feels how thoroughly English liberty has become
grounded in the struggles between the duties and privileges of
various classes, how entirely the national right has been made up
and settled by the conflict of private rights, how impossible it
was for the union of empire and freedom to exist,—or for impe-
rium and freedom to co-exist, without the battle in which the
several autocracies measured their forces and discovered the just
VOL. I, 2 I