the circumstance that as late as the time of the Domesday Survey payments to the royal revenue from this county were made in Danish money, twenty silver pennies being reckoned to the ora. The survival of the custom of inheritance by the eldest daughter in the absence of sons at Middleton Cheney,[1] in the south-west of the county, is confirmatory evidence of Norse colonists.
In Northamptonshire we find also a trace of the Frisians, under the Northern name Hocings, in the name of the Domesday hundred Hocheslau.
There are reasons for believing that Northamptonshire was partly occupied by immigrants into it from the north-east, as well as others from the south-west. Sternberg, who wrote many years ago on its dialect and folk-lore, says that two distinct and opposite modes of speech may be observed among the rurul population of the two extremities of the county.[2] This immigration from two directions would probably be up the river valleys from the Wash, and along the Roman roads from the south and west. Among its immigrants, earlier or later, some Wends must have been included. It has already been pointed out that in the old place-names Wendlingbury, or Wendlesberie and Wansford, also called Wandlesworth,[3] in the Nen valley, we have traces of Wendish settlers, and these people have also apparently left other traces in the folk-lore. The most remarkable instance is that of the May-trees, which at the present time are such a characteristic custom in Russia. In Northamptonshire a young tree ten or twelve feet high used to be planted in some villages before every house on May Day, so as to appear as if growing.[4] This custom does not apparently prevail except in Slavonic counties, and where old Wendish settlements were made.
