The Perils of English Place Names

 

One of my favourite activities when planning a trip to a new area is to open up a map and look at the best routes and any places of interest. These days I’m likely to look at the best route to take, avoiding known bottlenecks, or with interesting places to stop along the way.

Our early forebears might not have had maps, but they too would have known about perils and points of interest on their journey, from the names of the places they would pass through.   A traveller in the early medieval period might be wary of passing through Shackerley (in Lancashire, near Preston). The name means robbers wood!  Sceacere – robber, ley – a clearing in woodland.  Conversely a name ending in “ford” such as  Guildford reveals a river crossing.  Sometimes a ford would be named for the river it crossed, sometimes for the animals that used it – Swinford - swine ford, but could also be descriptive of the crossing – Fulford  or foul ford.

This brief post just looks at England.  Wales, Scotland and Ireland have their own range of derivations and roots and deserve separate consideration by someone who knows more about them than I do.

The information in place names can be roughly grouped into  four types:

Topographical names that tell you about the geography of a site.  Mere – a lake or sometimes just a village with a pond, pen and how are hills, don or dun a low hill or down. Ley, lea, leigh and thwaite are clearings. These feature may no longer exist but give clues to the early landscape. 

Habitative names, these tell us about the settlement, was it a village, a farms, or an estate for instances etc.  The suffixes ham, tun, & wich, thorpe etc. give this information. 

Individuals, Groups and tribes. These typically come from individuals or family groupings. They may tell us about important residents, the land owner or the founder. e.g. Kings Heath in Birmingham is pretty self-explanatory. Less obvious is Quinton - cwen tun - queens village,  Also  - ingas the people of e.g. Birmingham – homestead (ham) of the people of (ingas) Beorma – a person.  

Religious  - these may be pagan or christian in origin.In addition there may be other information about animals ( swin - pigs) that were important, the type of trees in the area, if the land was boggy or the water in the stream or ford was dirty, ful  -foul, slag - slippy, 

So, looking at a map can, if we know what to look for, reveal a lot of information about the underlying geography and what the landscape was like in the early days of its settlement.    

Dr Richard Jones of Leicester University suggests that the chronology of naming is as follows:
Folknames - e.g. Humber & Ingas - e.g. Hastings; people of  Haesta
Pagan religious sites e.g. Wednesbury - Woden 
Names using archaic words
Habitative names - tun etc
Topographical names

The name might be simplex - Combe, Thorpe. A compound name; Oxford -   oxa ford - a river crossing for oxen or cattle,  Redmarley  - clearing (leh) in a reedy (red) marsh (mar). Reverse compound; Aspatria - The ash tree of St. Patrick. Or they can be double barrelled; Kingston Bagpuize  -  King's farm/settlement but it was held by the de Bagpuize family. The addition of an affix gives more information often adding details of who held the settlement (Bishop's Castle)  or distinguishing two similar  locations (Great Barr & Perry Barr)

Obviously there are a multitude of words to describe a place,  the list below gives some of the most common suffixes and components. Most place names in England have their roots in Old English (OE), and less commonly in Latin (L), Celtic - includes Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish  (C), Old Scandinavian (OS) and Norman French (NF). 

Common English Place Name Suffixes (most common meanings)

Aesc (OE) - ash tree
Barr (C) - hilltop
Broc (OE) - badger 
Burgh (OE) - a fortified location
Bury  - from bur (OE) a fortified settlement
By (OS) - a settlement
Caster/Chester/Cester – from caester (L) camp of the legions
Don/den/dun (OE) - low hill
Feld/ Field (OE) - open land
Ford (OE) - river crossing
Bridge – from OE brycg – a bridge
Ham (OE) – farm, homestead or settlement
Heah (OE) high
Hurst (OE) – a wooded hill
Ley, lea, leigh (OE) – a clearing
Pen (C) –  head of a hill
Ster (OS) – farm
Swin (OE) -swine / pigs
Thorpe (OS) – a farm
Thwaite (OS) – clearing
Ton -  from tun (OE) homestead or village
Wald, wheal and wold (OE) – forest but can mean open high ground (e.g. Yorkshire wolds)
Wich / wych/wick– originally from OE wic but is complicated,  can be a trading centre (e.g. Aldwych), a salt production centre (Northwich), close to a roman site, or a dairy farm (Chiswick – Cheese farm)
Worthy/worth/wardine (OE) – enclosed settlement

All this seems pretty straightforward.

But unfortunately not, the way we pronounce words has changed considerably, add to this, variations in spelling and the phonetic transcription of place names by medieval clerks and it becomes apparent that many forces are at play. Then there are the words which look or sound the same but have different meanings ham - village and hamm which has number of meanings, most commonly, land in a river bend.

Guessing is not helpful, take Ashington in Northumberland. It might be assumed that means the tun settlement of the people of Aescwine (a Saxon name). But back in the 13^th century it was spelt as Essenden. Den comes from denu – a valley and aescen – ash trees,  so its meaning is a valley with ash trees.  Similarly, it could be assumed that Wolverhampton is another “people of” derivation, but it is not. The hea in this instance means high – Wulfruna’s high town.

Placenames are fascinating but are not always as straight forward as they seem; it is a very specialist field. As amateurs we can have a go at deciphering but should always check in with the experts.  For up-to-date information on the derivation of specific places then go to Nottingham University’s excellent site Key to English Place-Names (http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk).

Sources and Further Information

For up-to-date information on the derivation of specific places then go to Nottingham University’s excellent site Key to English Place-Names (http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk)
The English Place Names Society (EPNS) publishes volumes on the place names of each county: The Place Names of xxxxxx

For more general information on how experts work out the meanings:
Kenneth Cameron, (1996) English Placenames, pub Batsford books
Margaret Gelling, (1978), Signposts to the Past, pub JM Dent