opposite. The North Frisian area comprised the parts about Husum, Bredsted, and Tondern, on the mainland of Schleswig, where the Frisians were distributed over some thirty-eight parishes, which, along with the inhabitants of the islands, gave a population in 1852 of about 30,000, In this northern province of Germany, as in Holland, the same process of absorption is going on, and more rapidly perhaps in Schleswig than in East Friesland. In these disappearing Frisians we may see the last remnants of a vigorous ancient nation, largely concerned in the conquest and settlement of England, and numerously represented among the ancestors of the English people.
Several dialects of the Frisian language still survive, and a characteristic suffix for their place-names is the termination -um. This is the equivalent of the English -ham and the German -heim. In Friesland itself the places with names ending in -um are abundant. Within a few miles of Leeuwarden sixteen out of twenty-four places have this characteristic ending.[1] In Northumberland many place-names terminate in -ham, but this suffix is in almost all instances pronounced -um.
Latham says that there are one or two names ending in this Frisian suffix in the Danish isles of Fyen and Sealand and this may be a trace of former settlements on the Baltic. Their trading voyages certainly led them there, and they were so closely connected with the Goths and Angles in alliance, and probably in early commerce, that Frisian settlements on the Western Baltic coast probably existed. They were also in communication and in alliance, at least from time to time, with the Wends or Vandals of the south coast of the Baltic. Alliances, indeed, played a very important part in the earlier conquest of England by the Anglo-Saxons, and in its later conquest by the Danes. In both of these conquests the Frisians took part. Some came in the former period
- ↑ Van Langenheuzen’s Map, 1843, quoted by Latham, R. G., ‘Germania,’ Notes, p. 119.
