I must not wander too far from what is immediately my point, namely, the grouping of the _hams_ and _tons_ not haphazard but with cause. Even those students who discriminate suffixes, instead of lumping them together, like Kemble and his followers, make no distinction, I gather, between _hams_ and _tons_. Mr. Seebohm, for instance, classes together “the Saxon ‘hams’ and ‘tuns,’”[15] and so does Professor York Powell, even though his views on the settlement are exceptionally original and advanced.[16] There are, however, various reasons which lead me to advance a different view. In the first place, the wide-spread existence, on the Continent, of _ham_ in its foreign forms proves this suffix to be older than the settlement. ‘Ton,’ on the other hand, as is well known, is virtually absent on the Continent, which implies that it did not come into use till after the settlement in England. And as _ham_ was thus used earlier than _ton_, so _ton_, one need hardly add, was used later than _ham_. The cases in Scotland, and in what is known as “little England beyond Wales,” will at once occur to the reader. Canon Taylor states of the latter that the Flemish names, such as Walterston, “belong to a class of names which we find nowhere else in the kingdom,” formed from “Walter and others common in the 12th century.”[17] But in Herefordshire, for instance, we have a Walterston; and in Dorset a Bardolfston, a Philipston, a Michaelston, and a Walterston, proving that the same practice prevailed within the borders of England. Nor need we travel outside the two counties I am specially concerned with to learn from the ‘Ælfelmston’ of Essex or the Brihtelmston of Sussex that we find _ton_ compounded with names of the later Anglo-Saxon period. A third clue is afforded by the later version, found in the _Liber de Hyda_, of Alfred’s will. For there we find the _ham_ of the original document rendered by _ton_. It is clear, therefore, I contend, that _ton_ was a later form than _ham_. Now the map of England as a whole points to the same conclusion; for _ton_ is by no means distinctive, like _ham_, of the districts earliest settled. And if we confine ourselves to a particular county, say this of Sussex, we discover, I maintain, an appreciable difference between the distribution of the _hams_ and the _tons_. While the _hams_ follow the course of the rivers, the scene of the first settlements, the _tons_ are largely found grouped away on the uplands, as if representing a later stage in the settlement of the country. In connection with this I would adduce the “remarkable passage,” as Mr. Seebohm rightly terms it, in one of King Alfred’s treatises, where he contrasts the “permanent freehold _ham_” with the new and at first temporary _ton_, formed by ‘timbering’ a forest clearing in a part not previously settled.[18] It is true that Mr. Seebohm, as I have said, recognises no distinction, and even speaks of this example as “the growth of a new _ham_”; but