I will not, however, dwell on this side of the argument, more especially as I would rather lay stress on the other line of attack. For this is my distinctive point: I contend that, in studying the place-names into which _ing_ enters, attention has hitherto exclusively, or almost exclusively, been devoted to those now represented by towns or villages. With these it is easy to associate the idea of a clan settlement. But what are we to make of such cases as our Sussex Billingham and Tillingham? We shall search for them in vain in Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary; and yet they are names of the same status as fully developed villages. As a Sussex antiquary has observed (though I cannot accept his explanation): “In the names of many farms we shall likewise find names which also mark whole parishes in the county.” Canon Taylor has unconsciously recorded, in the adjoining county of Kent, evidence to the same effect, observing that “the lone farmhouses in Kent, called Shottington, Wingleton, Godington, and Appleton, may be regarded as venerable monuments, showing us the nature of the Saxon colonization of England.”[31] I say that this evidence is unconscious, for the Canon applies it only to the evolution of the _ton_, and seems not to have observed its bearing on that compound _ing_, which he, like Kemble, fully accepts as proof of a clan community. From Shottington and Godington, as from Billingham and Tillingham, Kemble would have confidently deduced the settlement of a ‘mark’ or clan community; and yet, when we learn what the places are, we see that they represent a settlement by households, not by communities. Here, then, is the value of these cases of what we may term arrested development: they warn us against the rashness of assuming that a modern or even a mediæval village has been a village from the first. The village community may be so far from representing the original settlement as to have been, on the contrary, developed from what was at first but a farmstead. The whole argument of such scholars as Professor Earle here and Dr. Andrews in America is based on the assumption that the land was settled by communities, each of them sufficiently large to have a head, whether civil or military. To that supposition such names as I have mentioned are, I think, fatal.