If it were the case that the English _ham_ represents the Roman _villa_, this remarkable group on the borders of Kent and Sussex should indicate a dense Roman settlement; but of such settlement there is, I believe, no trace existing. Conversely, we do not find that the sites of Roman villas are denoted by the suffix _ham_.[22] From considering this group as a whole, I advance to two settlements on what is known as the Tillingham River, namely, Billingham and Tillingham. One would not easily find names more distinctive of what Kemble insisted on terming the mark system, or what later historians describe as clan settlement. Parenthetically, I may observe that while _ham_ is common in Sussex, the compound _ingham_ is not. This is well seen in the group under consideration. The same may, I think, be said of Essex, while in North Suffolk _ingham_ begins to assert its predominance. The frequent occurrence in Norfolk and Lincolnshire renders it a note of Anglian rather than Saxon settlement.[23] And now for Billingham and Tillingham. Billing is one of the most common of the so-called patronymics; and there is a Tillingham in Essex. Whether we turn to the specialist works of such writers as Stubbs and Green, or to the latest _compendia_ of English history as a whole, we shall virtually always read that such names as these denote original settlement by a clan.[24] In venturing to question this proposition, I am striking at the root of Kemble’s theory, that overspreading theory of the Mark, which, as it were, has shrunk from its once stately splendour, but in the shadow of which all our historians since his time have written. Even Professor York Powell, although he rejects the mark theory,[25] writes of “the first stage” of settlement: “We know that the land was settled when clans were powerful, for the new villages bear _clan names_, not _personal names_.”[26] The whole theory rests on the patronymic _ing_, which Kemble crudely treated as proving the existence of a mark community, wherever it occurs in place-names.[27]