Truro Museum, with a runic figure stamped on it, proves that among the metal-workers in that county during the Anglo-Saxon period there must have been some to whom the runic letters were known. The figure on this block is, Stephen says, a well-known character of the English type, and has the equivalence of the letters st.[1] It must be remembered, as already mentioned, that the Goths of Scandinavia, who first wrote in runic letters, were the most skilled metal-workers in Europe during the centuries immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire. Runic letters similar to those on the block of tin now at Truro have lately been discovered in an inscription found at Ödemotland in Norway, the identification of which was one of the last made by Stephens before his death.[2] Another discovery pointing to Scandinavians or their descendants in Cornwall is that of the inscribed slab found at Lanteglos between Bodmin and Camelford, and now, or lately, in the rectory grounds at Lanteglos. It is not in runic letters, but in an old dialect resembling a Scandian dialect, and identified by Stephens as about A.D. 1100 in date.[3]
There can therefore be no doubt that people speaking dialects of the Old Norræna or Danish language were settled in isolated colonies at an early period on the coasts of the south-western counties, or that in the tenth century, when King Edgar ordered his laws ‘to be common to all the people, whether English, Danes, or Britons, on every side of my dominions,’ he had in view these maritime settlements in the south as well as the great Danish settlements in the north and east.
The arrangement of the homesteads over a great part of the south-western counties, more particularly in the hilly parts, is even at the present time largely that of isolated farms and hamlets. This is probably a survival of that of the Celtic tribesmen,[4] who had both permanent and temporary homesteads, feeding their herds in summer
