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Presidential Address: The Historical Bearing of Place-Name Studies; England in the Sixth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2011

F. M. Stenton
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Extract

During the last twenty years, the study of English place names has placed a large body of new evidence at the service of those who are interested in the earliest phases of Anglo-Saxon history. It may at once be admitted that the study has sometimes shown its vitality by becoming controversial, and that much of the evidence may be interpreted in more than one way. It is gradually becoming clear that when all the available material has been collected and discussed, there will remain a very large number of place-names of which no conclusive interpretation is ever likely to be given.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 21 , December 1939 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1939

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References

1 My object in this address is to indicate some historical conclusions which are suggested by the results of recent work on the interpretation of English place-names. I have not attempted to produce original solutions of hard questions, and I have drawn unreservedly on the published work of others. Most of the material which I have used will be found in the volumes of the Survey of English Place-Names, and in the various books and articles through which Professor Ekwall has thrown new light on innumerable branches of place-name study. Sir Allen Mawer very kindly read the address while it was still in typescript, but I must take full responsibility for its contents, and in particular for the historical opinions which are expressed in it.

page 2 note 1 The History of the Norman Conquest of England, I, 18.

page 2 note 2 In much that has been written on this period by others besides Freeman, it is implied that although the greater part of the male population of Britain may have been killed or driven into exile, large numbers of British women survived the Anglo-Saxon conquest. This contrast is not borne out by the character of the British personal names taken into use by the descendants of the first English settlers. The number of British masculine names thus employed, though small, is not insignificant (Förster, “ Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen.” in Festgabe für Felix Liebermann, pp. 174 et seqq.; Smith, Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire, p. xvi). But it may be doubted whether there is any clear example of a British feminine name which passed at an early date into the general body of English personal nomenclature.

page 3 note 1 The Growth of the Manor, p. 117.

page 5 note 1 Collected Papers of Henry Bradley, p. 90. The paper entitled “English Place-Names” from which this quotation is taken was first published in 1910 in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. I. It contains a discussion of ancient British place-names which is of permanent importance, and in the width of its range over the whole field of place-name study, it forms what is in effect a preface to the intensive work carried out by other hands in the following years.

page 5 note 2 As in the Old English Eoforwic from the Romano-British Eburacum through an intermediate British form such as Evuroc. See Bradley, op. cit., p. 91.

page 6 note 1 Thus the Romano-British Durnovaria, now Dorchester, Dorset, appears as Dornwaraceaster in the ninth century. The contracted form Dornaceaster which has produced the modern Dorchester first appears in 937. For the detailed history of the name see Fägersten, Place-Names of Dorset, pp. 1, 2.

page 6 note 2 The name of Mancetter near Atherstone contains the first syllable of the Romano-British Manduessedum, borne by an adjacent station on Watling Street.

page 6 note 3 This river-name probably survives in the name of the village of Leire, situated near to the head-waters of a stream which joins the Soar some seven miles above Leicester.

page 7 note 1 It is probable that Brancaster in Norfolk contains the first syllable of the Romano-British Branodunum, and that Ythancaestir, the early English name of Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex, is derived from Othona, the Roman name of the fort on the wall of which the ancient Saxon church of Bradwell stands. There is no doubt that the names Regulbium (Reculver), Rutupiae (Richborough) and Anderida, borne by other forts of the same series, were familiar to the first English settlers.

page 7 note 2 A certain allowance should no doubt be made for the possibility that in some cases, a Romano-British place-name may have survived the Saxon conquest for a time, and been replaced by a new English name at a later period. In Bede’s time, for example, the place which has been known as Tadcaster ever since the eleventh century was called Kaelcacaestir, a compound which obviously contains the Romano-British name Calcaria, borne by the first station on the Roman road from York to Chester. The second station on this road was known to Bede under its Roman name Campodunum but there is no later trace of this name, and the site of the station cannot be precisely identified. On the other hand, the district in which these names occur belonged to the British kingdom of Elmet, which was not conquered by the Angles of Northumbria until the seventh century, and it would clearly be unsafe to draw general conclusions about the history of eastern England from the survival of British names in a region which, like this, escaped the first impetus of the English attack.

page 8 note 1 English River-Names, Oxford, 1928.Google Scholar

page 8 note 2 In the preface to his life of King Alfred, Asser states that Berkshire derives its name from a wood called Berroc. On the meaning of this name see Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, p. 37.

page 9 note 1 According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it stretched westwards for 120 miles or more from the mouth of the river Lympne.

page 10 note 1 These names are discussed by Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, p. 346, who suggests that they are identical with Pentyrch in Glamorgan, and that each of them may mean “ boars’ hill.” A long series of forms for Pentridge is set out in Fagersten’s Place-Names of Dorset, p. 103. The history of the name is taken back into the eighth century by a charter dated in 762, written for King Cynewulf of Wessex in loco qui dicitur Pentric (Cartulary of Muchelney Abbey, Somerset Record Society, p. 47). There is no reference to Pentrich in Derbyshire earlier than Domesday Book, where it appears as Pentric, a form which is supported by later documents.

page 10 note 2 Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, No. 366. The somewhat complicated history of the name is discussed by Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, p. 413.

page 11 note 1 This important identification was first made by Henry Bradley in a communication to The Academy dated 30 October, 1886. It is reprinted in his Collected Papers, 117–8.

page 11 note 2 I am indebted to Mr. Gerald P. Mander for information about this site.

page 11 note 3 In the foundation charter of the tenth-century college of Wolverhampton, which has only been preserved in a late copy, the river “ Penchrich ” forms part of the boundary of one of the estates with which the charter deals (Monasticon, VIII, 1444).

page 11 note 4 Which had come into being before, and probably long before, 958, when Edgar as king of the Mercians made a charter in loco famoso qui dicitur Pencric (Cartularium Saxonicum, No. 1041).

page 12 note 1 On the barbarous imitations of the coins of the House of Constantine which form an important part of this evidence see Donald Atkinson, The Romano-British Site on Lowbury Hill in Berkshire, 74–5.

page 13 note 1 Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen, II, 2, p. 564, came definitely to this conclusion in his discussion of the lætas who are mentioned in Ethelbert’s laws.

page 13 note 2 A passage in Ine’s laws (24.2) shows that a man of British descent might possess as much as five hides of land.

page 14 note 1 Ine, 32.

page 14 note 2 Whatever may have been the origin of the enigmatical name Cerdic, the name Cædwalla (Old British Cadwallōn) borne by Ine’s predecessor points very clearly to a British element in his ancestry.

page 15 note 1 The most conclusive evidence of such familiarity is the remarkable name Beneficce, which according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was borne by the. Hertfordshire river Beane in the tenth century. There seems no doubt that in this name a British adjective closely related to the Welsh bychan, “ small,” is compounded with a British river-name Ben or Bene. In ancient British compound names, the defining element has the first place, as in Malvern, which corresponds to a Welsh Moel fryn, “bare hill.” The fact that the order of the elements is reversed in Beneficce shows that this name is comparatively a late formation, and it may well be little if any older than the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon invasions. In any case, its survival shows that the English settlers of north Hertfordshire had more than a casual acquaintance with British speech. See Ekwall, English River-Names, 27, 8; Place-Names of Hertfordshire (E.P.N.S.), p. 1.

page 15 note 2 In the only Anglo-Saxon document which mentions Wendover (Whitelock, Anglo-Saxon Wills, p. 22) the name appears in the dative plural form æt Wændofron. It is clearly derived from the chalk stream which rises near the village. This and other British river-names, such as Andover, which are preserved in a plural form in English place-names, are discussed by Ekwall in English River-Names, p. lxxxiii, where it is observed that the form “ implies a considerable familiarity with British on the part of the Anglo-Saxons who adopted the names.”

page 16 note 1 Such as cumb from British kumbā, “valley”; torr, “hill” or “peak”; carr, “rock.”

page 16 note 2 Fobbanfuntan (genitive). Cart. Sax., 588; Hamanfunta, Cart. Sax., 707; Bedefunt, Domesday Book; Wantesfonte, Assize Roll of 1270; Tollesfuntan (dative), Place-Names of Essex, 306.

page 16 note 3 Ceadelesfuntan (dative), Cart. Sax., 883. The Old English personal name Ceadel is one of a group of related names containing the Celtic stem catu, cad, “ battle,” which are discussed by Forster in his article “ Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen ” (Festgabe für Felix Liebermann), pp. 179 et seqq.

page 16 note 4 Teofunten (dative), Cart. Sax., 1138; Byrhfunt’, Cart. Sax., 1161; Funtelei, Domesday Book. The first element of the name Teffont is an Old English word teo, “ boundary ”; that of Boarhunt is the genitive case of the Old English burh, “ fortress.” In Fontley, funta precedes the Old English leah, “clearing.”

page 17 note 1 The Anglo-Saxon form Lindcylene is derived from Lindum colonia by a normal succession of British and English sound-changes through the intermediate British form Lindocolina recorded by Bede.

page 18 note 1 The British place-names of north-western England raise a number of special problems. In the aggregate, they are numerous; and in some parts of Lancashire—notably in the Fylde, in the hills to the north and east of Manchester, and in the eastern part of West Derby Hundred (Ekwall, Place-Names of Lancashire, 225–6)—they occur in groups which suggest that the continuity of British life in those parts may never have been completely broken. Even there, however, they are outnumbered by names which are obviously of English origin, and elsewhere in the northwest, they are distributed with no marked tendency towards agglomeration, among the English, Norse, and Gaelic names which make the local nomenclature of this region the most complex in England. In Westmorland, British names are comparatively rare; and in Cumberland, where they are numerous, the question of their origin and significance is complicated by the probability that some of them are due to the conquest of this country by the Britons of Strathclyde after the collapse of the Northumbrian kingdom in the ninth century (see Ekwall, Scandinavians and Celts in the North-West of England, 104–17).

page 18 note 2 Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, c. 23, where the barbarians invited into Britain after the failure of the British appeal to Aetius are said to have been retained in British pay multo tempore. The rarity of British place-names in Kent is one of the facts which suggest that the English settlement of this country was carried out by invaders of a later generation than Hengest and his followers, who must have become well acquainted with the Romano-British nomenclature of the south-east.

page 18 note 3 Wallenberg, The Place-Names of Kent, p. iv.

page 19 note 1 Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, p. 249.

page 19 note 2 Fägersten, The Place-Names of Dorset, p. xv.