brought in a custom which recognised daughters such as prevailed at Rothley. To account for it we must conclude that there must have settled among these Middle Angles people who had a custom of female inheritance—at least, in default of sons. As the burgesses of Leicester had another custom—that of junior inheritance—which was different altogether from what prevailed generally among the Saxons or Angles, we are led to the conclusion that the original settlers at Leicester must have come from some other part of the Continent where this custom prevailed; and there is reason to believe it did prevail among the Burgundians of the Baltic or people of Slavic or mixed Slavic descent. Such tribes may have been allies of the Danes who settled in Leicester, Nottingham, and other towns before the end of the ninth century.[1]
The evidence that the five Danish towns of Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford, and Derby, were permanently occupied by Northmen of some kind during the earlier Danish conquests, in or before the time of Alfred, appears conclusive from the reference to these places in the Saxon Chronicle in the year 941. This was the time when Eadmund succeeded Æthelstan, and his various territories are stated. We are told that he subdued Mercia and the five towns ‘that were ere while Danish under the Northmen.’ This statement places the antiquity of the Danish settlement in these towns beyond doubt, and the custom of junior right which is known to have prevailed in four of them, but not in Lincoln, is significant, as pointing to people who had different tribal usages having probably settled in them, although all called Danes. There is, indeed, some evidence that under the pressure of population which urged them to the west, Slavs ‘established themselves in parts of the southern isles of Denmark, Laaland, Falster, and Langeland, where their traditions and place-names bear
- ↑ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 941.
