Yet another point must be touched on as to this alleged patronymic. To Kemble, as I have said, it was of small moment what suffix his ‘marks’ bore. Indeed, those that denoted forest were to him specially welcome, because he associated the idea of a ‘mark’ with that of a forest clearing. But we who have seen that such suffixes as _-field_, _-hurst_ and _-den_ are distinctive of those districts untouched by the early settlers cannot recognise such names, for instance, as the Itchingfield or Billingshurst of Sussex as denoting village communities. Again, in the Anglo-Saxon charters the characteristic _den_ of Kent is frequently preceded by _ing_; and if these _dens_ were clearly from the context only forest pastures for swine, we must here also reject the _ing_ as proof of a clan community. One may also glance in passing at such names as the “Willingehala” of Essex, now “Willingale,” and ask whether a clan community is supposed to have settled in a hall?[32] I trust that I have now sufficiently shown that even where _ing_ genuinely enters into the composition of a place-name it is no proof of settlement by a clan. Kemble looked on the typical ‘mark’ as “a hundred heads of houses,” which he deemed “not at all an extravagant supposition.”[33] I think that even at the present day a visit to the _hams_ and _tons_ of Sussex, and, in some cases, to the _ings_, would lead us in practice to the opposite conclusion, and would throw the gravest doubt on the theory of the village community. I was trained, like others of my generation, to accept that theory as an axiomatic truth; but difficult as it is to abandon what one has been so taught, the solitary manor house, the lonely farm, is a living protest against it. The village community of the class-room can never have existed there. On paper it holds its own: _solvitur ambulando_. But the fact that a place bearing a typical clan name may prove to have been but a single homestead takes us farther than this. _Ing_, which Canon Taylor has described as “the most important element which enters into Anglo-Saxon names,” has been held to denote settlement not merely by a clan, but by a portion of a tribe bearing, both in England and abroad, one common name. Kemble insisted strongly upon this,[34] and is duly followed by Canon Taylor[35] and others. On the same foundation Mr. Andrew Lang has erected yet another edifice, tracing the occurrence in scattered counties of the same clan name to the existence of exogamy among our forefathers. And this ingenious suggestion has been adopted by Mr. Grant Allen.[36] But the very first instance he gives, that of the Hemings, will not stand examination.[37]