Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Welsh in Dorset / by Thomas Kerslake. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![Wentssete, belonged to the Dunssete, but [now] more rigbtly they belong to tbe Westsexan.” Here, two local tribes or septs are evidently spoken of. Lambarde and Wilkins, place tbeir Wentseete in Dimetia, rougbly now comprising tbe diocese of St- David’s. Mr. Thorpe suggests Athelstan’s decreed frontier of the Wye as the point of contact of the two nationalities con- cerned in the Code. Although he does not mention Gwent, Monmouthshire, he seems to have been attracted by that name as the probable equivalent of Wentseete ; but “ Gwent ” is com- mon to this and many other British districts. He may also have been slightly influenced by the neighbourhood of the “Magessete,” about Herefordshire ; * the only example of the suflB.x “-ssete,” besides Dorset, Somerset, and Wilset. The date of the Code is uncertain. Wilkins conjectures it in “tempestate Ethelradi Eegis;” but whatever may be its date, it must have been far to late for the Cambrian Gwent to have adjoined any people that could possibly have been called “West Saxons.” A “ stream ” is also mentioned in the Code, as if it was the boundary of the rights of the two peoples. Sir P. Palgrave had adopted the river Exe, in conformity with the theory which he had raised out of the recorded joint dcccupation of Exeter, that the course of that river had divided the two races of Saxons and Cornish-Welsh, east and west, in Devon; but it has been elsewhere shewn that in Exeter they were divided, north and south; and both, as far as that city is concerned, were on the east side of the river. Mr. Thorpe adopts the Wye as the stream suitable to his conjecture. But the nine sections of the Code are evidently not only calculated for a particular and limited locality, but the most important of them relate to strayed or stolen cattle, “ over a stream,” from either people. It may be a question whether both rivers, the Wye and the Exe, at the parts required, are not too large for a “stream” requiring a special legislation for stolen cattle. * This trace of a West-Saxon peculiarity seems to favour a belief, that Herefordshire=“Tfery llwg ” was the “ Feathau leag” of the second advance of Ceawlin a.d. 584, instead of the Severn Valley and Cheshire, as proposed by Dr. Edwin Guest,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22473191_0029.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
