The Meaning of Old English Stow and the Origin of the Name of Bristol
Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 132 (2014), 67–73 The Meaning of Old English Stow and the Origin of the Name of Bristol By DAVID H. HIGGINS Instances of Old English (OE) stow in the major place-names of England occur frequently in certain parts of the west and south-west of the country: especially in Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire (Fig. 1). It is noticeable that occurrences of the word are only thinly spread in the remainder of the country south of the Humber.1 In counties of the west and south-west of England where the term occurs, 90% of the examples of the ‘generic’ element stow are conjoined with a saint’s name (the ‘qualifier’), i.e. the sacred personage to whom a church or chapel in question is dedicated, such as SS James (Jacobstow in Cornwall), John (Instow in Devon), Edward (Eduuardesstou, later Stow-on-the-Wold, in Gloucestershire), Martin (Marstow in Herefordshire). There is now general agreement amongst toponymists that stow, by the time of its appearance in the west and south-west of the country (i.e. in regions adjacent to, or recently appropriated from, Celtic or early Welsh kingdoms) was the normal Anglo- Saxon equivalent term for Celtic *lann (Welsh llan), meaning originally ‘enclosure’, but soon, in a more specialized and extended sense, ‘(Christian) burial-ground, church-site’. This lexical transposition, *lann>stow, in the west and south-west took place at different times. Documentary evidence for this transposition survives particularly in Devon during the county’s radical ‘Englishing’ by Wessex from broadly the 8th century onwards, while in parts of Cornwall the 8th and 9th centuries are notably flagged.
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