Wednesday 13 September 2017

English Place Names

I often drive through a town or village and wonder about its name. There are some strange ones out there - Chapel-en-le-Frith, Stoke Poges, Egremont, Kingston Bagpuize, Ashby de la Zouch... 



Also odd are the ones that aren't pronounced anything like they should be. Happisburgh in Norfolk, for example. Yep, that's right, it's pronounced Hazeburra. Oh I know, let's not even get started on the boroughs, and burghs, some of which are pronounced burra, and some bruff! (Although I shall return to them later and maybe clear up the confusion.)

With a lot of place-names, it's easy to break them down into their constituent parts and work out what they mean.

The OE (Old English) place names seem to be are straightforward. In an earlier blog post about Wulfric Spott I mentioned his mother, Wulfrun, who gave her name to Wolverhampton.

Her personal name forms the first part of the town name, and the rest consists of ham and ton:~

Ham = farm, settlement, homestead (ON Toft) but we'll see that this is not quite so straightforward...

Ton = enclosure

So it would seem that many place names contain elements of OE or ON (Old Norse) which are simply words to denote topographical or geographical features.

Wic (OE)/By (ON) = market

Thorpe - secondary settlement
Leigh/ley (OE) = woodland clearing- so my fictional village of Ashleigh in Alvar the Kingmaker is 'clearing in the ash forest'
Thwaite (ON) = clearing in Old Norse
Ing (OE) = people



As you can see, the above village name has the elements ing and ham. Great Massingham is in Norfolk. In Cumbria there are a lot of place names with ON origins : Kirkby Lonsdale, Kirkby Thore, Seathwaite.

So far, so straightforward. But all is not as it seems. In her Signposts to the Past, Margaret Gelling dispels a lot of the accepted thinking.

To go back to the element ham:~ Another OE word was hamm, which was not connected. Kingsholme near Gloucester does not mean king’s home, but Kyngeshamme, a water meadow on the royal estate.
“The uncompounded name Ham offers no problems, as it always derives from the topographical term hamm, which has been considered to mean ‘land in a river (bed), promontory, dry ground in a marsh, river-meadow. It may be used on its own, as in East and West Ham, or in a first element, as in some instances of Hampton, but it occurs most frequently as a final element. The habitative term hām, (village, estate) is not used as a simplex place-name and only occurs as a first element if the name derives form a compound appellative like hāmtūn, hāmstede.”

Another pair of similar words which cause trouble are būr (bower) and burh (fort) - and we need to distinguish beorg, from burh, and its dative byrig. Had they been differentiated in Middle English beorg would give berrow or barrow, and burh would mostly give borough while byrig would give bury. Archaeological evidence is needed in these cases to establish exactly how the place-names developed.

Burh can mean not only a hill fort but also a defended manor house as well as the later 'town'.

In the country as a whole, Bury is more common than Borough, Burgh or Brough. The OE final -h could develop into -f in pronunciation but not spelling, as in laugh and tough, and this led to burh becoming Burf as in Abdon Burf, and sometime Berth.

Later on there are instances of byrig meaning manor house:~ Bibury, from Beage, daughter of Leppa, and burh meaning monastery. In the case of Fladbury, this is probably derived from Flæde’s byrig, possibly a manor house built by a widow.
In the case of the element ing, it had always been assumed that newcomers took what land they chose, and that places such as Hastings (followers of Hæsta) and Reading (followers of Réad) were believed to mark those settlements. But Gelling says these were not 'primary settlement' place-names but actually came much later.

Ing sometimes has no filial relationship at all – Clavering in Essex comes about from the element ing being added to clœfre (clover) to give place where the clover grows. The same construction applies to Docking in Norfolk, from docce, the place where dock grows.


There has been a suggestion in recent times that some names came about because the Anglo-Saxons settlers mispronounced the Celtic names they discovered, much as the English in WWI pronounced Ypres as Wipers. Gelling is not convinced that the newcomers had such poor linguistic skills, and she points out that this was not the fate of all the Celtic place names.

Some tun names might have come about because of the Mercian administrators who might have been in the habit of describing places which had Celtic names as the ea-tun (river settlement) and that these names eventually stuck, but this is only a theory.

Where the Celtic, or Pre-Celtic names have been preserved, it is largely in the names of rivers. 

The use of the word walh to mean slave is probably a misconception, and it's more likely that it means ‘a Celt’; however, the reality is that most slaves would have been (descendants) of British who had that status under the Romans. 

The seventh-century king of the Magonsæte, who appears in my latest novel, Cometh the Hour was Merewalh, which has been translated as 'famous Welshman'. That being accepted, it seems unlikely that walh meant 'slave'. 

If the Angles and Saxons had problems with the place-names they encountered, the same was certainly true of the Norman invaders.

The initial sound Y was a problem for the Normans, so Yarrow became Jarrow, Yesmond became Jesmond. These are fairly easy to spot once armed with the knowledge that the letter was not in use in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet. So too the letter Z, which appears in names such as Belsize.

The initial sound in words such as thorn was unknown to the Normans, and they replaced it with T so that Tilsworth probably would have developed into Thilsworth had the conquest not happened.

Wic, the element identified as meaning market, was borrowed from Latin vicus. Before it was used as salt-working centre and ‘dairy farm’, it might have been used by the earliest English speaking people to refer to Romano-British settlements, or to Roman administrative units.

Gelling points out that more than 75% of the instances of places called wīchām were situated directly on or not more than a mile from a major Roman Road.

Often  tūn (ton) developed where an estate was once part of a larger demesne. An estate given to a thegn named Wulfgar came over time to be called Aughton (Aeffe’s estate, Aeffe being Wulfgar’s widow. Likewise an estate granted to Sibba becomes Sibton. Some ton names are more general, Preston (priests), Charlton, (ceorla-ton, enclosure of the the ceorls).

Grim is a nickname for Woden, but not all Grims- are of this origin. Grimr was a common ON personal name. So we cannot assume that all Grims are the devil.

And speaking of personal names, they aren’t all. Whitchurch could be Hwīta’s church, but it could also simply be the white church. 

Another key place in my new novel is Oswestry, universally believed to have developed from Oswald's tree, the site of his killing. But Warburton developed from Wærburg’s farm or estate, where the religious house was dedicated to St Werburgh, probably because the name suggested it, and the same logic should, according to Gelling, be applied to Oswestry, where the dedication of St Oswald probably arose from a place name which did not originally refer to the saint.

Sometimes the ON and OE elements are hard to differentiate.
Brunum or Brunnum in ON corresponds to burna (OE), which gives us the modern burn. Similarly, Lythe could be from ON lith, (slope) or from OE hlith, with the same meaning.

Beck - ON

But there are some words which have no English cognate. Going back to Cumbria we find Wasdale and Watendlath, containing vatn (lake,) Fossdale containing fors (waterfall,) and thveit, (thwaite -clearing.)

Many Scandinavian settlement names of eastern England can be divided into three main categories -by, -thorp, and those combined with English tun combined with a Norse personal name.

PH Sawyer argued that Norse place-names did not denote the settlements of a victorious army, but more likely inferior land. Older villages were probably already on the best sites.
Alford, for example, is much larger than the surrounding places with -by and -thorpe names.

Kirby/Kirkby generally denotes a church village, and is usually borne by places with desirable locations and it is likely that it replaces an older English, or perhaps Celtic name. It might have simply been that kirkby was an appellative applied to any village with a noteworthy church.


Mitchelgate (gate=ON gata - road) in Kirkby Lonsdale

Moving into the the post-Conquest era brings us the wonderful place-names such as Ashby de la Zouch and Egremont. But many of the French names were just stereo-typical descriptions, giving us beautiful seat, beautiful place, beautiful hill. (Belvoir, Beaulieu, Beauvale, Beaumont)

So, next time you drive past a place-name sign, don't assume the obvious; there may be more to the story of the name than meets the eye... 


Wednesday 6 September 2017

Anglo-Saxons in the Scottish Court: Joining up the Dots

Often, fiction has been the lure for me to explore aspects of history which take me sideways, rather than back or forth from my favourite period.

I was reading Queen Hereafter, by Susan Fraser King, which tells the story of Margaret of Scotland. She was English, a member of the Anglo-Saxon royal house whose rule was brought to an abrupt end by the events of 1066. This blog post was going to be a review, but events took a turn which means it has become an adventure, too...

Of the book itself, I can say that it is an accomplished exploration of Margaret's life, thoroughly researched, with credible dialogue and a good sense of time and place. 

The description of the Scottish locations was brilliantly done, and the indoor scenes were beautifully painted. I finished the book feeling glad that I had read it, and that's always a good sign.

I had two tiny niggles: the slight reliance on the past historic tense - she wore, she sat - left me musing that the use of the past imperfect - she was sitting - would give some of the scenes more immediacy and leave the reader feeling a little less detached from the scene being laid out for them. And, occasionally, characters explain, for the benefit of the reader, things which the other character would already know, but this at least shows that the author has done her stuff. I felt safe that I was learning historical facts, that the fiction was woven on a solid frame of truth.

Margaret is portrayed as fervently religious. Reading the book, I wondered if the authors' suggestion is that she was an obsessive compulsive? If so, it's an interesting proposition. Margaret was certainly revered for her religious observance, but on the other hand, was there anything inherently untoward about someone being devout, in those times?


Margaret arriving in Scotland - attribution

I love it when things all fall into place - and it was at this point that they did so, spectacularly. At the same moment as I began reading the chapter in which Margaret arrives at Dunfermline, I found out that our summer holiday booking was for Fife, in Scotland, and we were going to be staying just a few miles outside Dunfermline, where Margaret was buried.

The medieval abbey, founded by Margaret
and rebuilt by her son, David

Margaret's grandfather was Edmund Ironside, the son of Æthelred the Unready who fought, and nearly beat, Cnut. When Cnut became king, Edmund's son, Edward, was exiled, and Margaret was born in Hungary. 

In 1057 her father was recalled to England, being the heir to Edward the Confessor, who was childless and, at this stage, it seemed inevitable that he would remain so. However, Margaret's father died almost immediately upon arrival in England. Her brother, Edgar, became a figurehead for uprising in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings. Margaret, her siblings, and their mother fled north, initially to Northumbria.

There is some dispute as to when and how they ended up in Scotland. The chronicler Simeon of Durham recorded in 1070 that "King Malcolm, with the consent of his relatives, took in marriage Edgar's sister, Margaret, a woman noble by royal ascent." Others place the date of Margaret and Edgar's arrival in Scotland as 1068.

Malcom Canmore's Tower - Pittencrieff Park, Dunfermline 

What I did know about Margaret was that she was canonised, for her piety, charity and strict observance of the Catholic faith. I had never really joined up the dots though, for her new husband, Malcolm III, also known as Malcolm Canmore, is the same Malcolm who appears in that Scottish play ~ it was this Malcolm who slew Macbeth.

A statue of Margaret in the cave where she
is known to have prayed

The descendants of Malcolm III and Margaret dominated the Scottish monarchy for the next two hundred years, although their reigns were not without challenges.

Malcolm's own journey to the throne was a bloody one. The Annals of England and Ireland are in agreement that Macbeth was put to flight by Malcolm in 1054, and later sources agreed with Shakespeare that this battle took place at Dunsinan. Malcolm killed Macbeth near Aberdeen, at Lumphanan on 15th August 1057, and I just happened to be at Malcolm's power base of Dunfermline/Edinburgh on 15th August this year, 960 years later!

It's a possibility that although Macbeth was killed, his army might in fact have been victorious, because Malcolm was still not considered king.


Macbeth at Dunsinane - John Martin
(Public Domain image)

Macbeth's stepson, Lulach, reigned for a short while but was also killed by Malcolm. The Chronicle of Melrose reported that "[Lulach] fell by the arms of the same Malcolm. The man met his fate at Essie, in Strathbogie."

Even so, Malcolm's slaying of Macbeth and Lulach did not eradicate all rivals to the Scottish throne. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's entry for 1078 tells us that "In this year King Malcolm captured the mother of Maelslæta and all his best men, and all his treasures, and his live-stock, and he himself escaped with difficulty."

Maelslæta, or Máel Snechtai, was Lulach's son, and was, according to the Irish Annals, the king of Moray. These same annals record, enigmatically, that Malcolm's son Donald, by his first wife, died 'unhappily' in 1085. Was this retribution for the attack on Máel Snechtai?

Malcolm and his eldest son by Margaret, Edward, were killed at the Battle of Alnwick in 1093, fighting against Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, and it seems that Margaret died of a broken heart, just a few months later.

Her relics drew huge numbers of pilgrims to Dunfermline abbey until the Reformation, 'when heretics stole into the Kingdome, trampled underfoot all divine and human lawes and seized the sacred moveables on [Dunfermline] Church.'

Margaret's Shrine

Margaret is best-known for her piety, and her 'reform' of the Celtic Church in Scotland. This is what I knew of her. Somehow I didn't ever really put her together with Malcolm Canmore, Edmund Ironside, and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Nor, perhaps, had I not read Fraser King's novel, would I have taken quite such an interest in the town of Dunfermline when I visited. Well, I probably would've done, because it's a fabulous place for history fans. Watch out for an EHFA (English Historical Fiction Authors) post about Dunfermline in the near future.

[all photos by and copyright of the author] 

For more about Margaret's connections, you can also see this wonderful website: https://www.allaboutedinburgh.co.uk/