Trans. Bristol & Archaeological Society 134 (2016), 251–256

A Lost Place-Name: Godringhill in

By RICHARD COATES

Godringhill is a lost place-name. It was the name of one of five prebends associated with the college of secular priests (canons) at Westbury-on-Trym.1 The history of these prebends is carefully reconstructed by Orme and Cannon,2 as far as the available evidence permits, and will not be repeated here. Their account supersedes the one by Thompson,3 which they critically analyse and some important details of which they reject: for example, the idea that the endowments of Westbury college were originally exploited collectively, not privately and individually. The only purposes of this note are to explain the name of Godringhill, which is presumably that of a place, but which does not appear in the record except as that of the prebend, and to try to identify its geographical location, to the extent that it had one. Between the 11th and 16th centuries (and perhaps earlier), Westbury college and adjacent Henbury parish had an intimate relation with the diocese of Worcester, the details of which fluctuated (but that is passed over here). Bishop Wulfstan had acquired the college for the diocese c.1093, and gave it Henbury church and its tithes as part of its endowment.4 Henbury continued to be subject to the bishop, since it was not only his parish but also an episcopal manor, whose buildings served as a southern palace when necessary. Both Henbury and Westbury parishes were in the bishop’s hundred of Henbury. The bishop could, therefore, act more or less as he pleased (subject in theory to due process) as regards the disposition of assets in this area. Almost all the endowments of land for the Westbury prebends appear to have been situated within the bounds of Henbury parish. This indicates that the bishop was not in general free to dispose of lands in Westbury parish that did not have a primary ecclesiastical function, e.g. chapels and housing for churchmen. As Orme and Cannon convincingly suggest, the prebends are probably to be associated with the large number (41) of detached parcels of Westbury parish situated in Henbury parish, ranging in size from several contiguous enclosed fields or woods to the large houseplot of a ‘manor’, Henbury Awdelett, to individual furlongs or even perhaps strips within a furlong of an originally open field. These never paid tithe to Henbury, and survived as an administrative anomaly for three and a half centuries after the dissolution of the monasteries (including colleges like Westbury), to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey as late as the 1880s, before being eliminated in 1886 under the provisions of the Divided Parishes and Poor Law Amendment Act of 1882. Whilst it has not been possible to associate every one of these patches and slivers of land with particular prebends, the general picture is clear; the idea that the prebends each have at least one

1. A prebend was a parcel or set of parcels of land or other sources of revenue from which a stipend was derived to support individually a canon of a collegiate church or cathedral. 2. N. Orme and J. Cannon, Westbury-on-Trym: monastery, minster and college (Bristol Rec. Soc. 62, 2010), esp. ch. 1. 3. A.H. Thompson, ‘Notes on the ecclesiastical history of the parish of Henbury’, Trans. BGAS 38 (1915), 99–186. 4. Victoria County History of Gloucestershire [VCH Glos.], II, 106–8. 252 A LOST PLACE-NAME: GODRINGHILL IN HENBURY geographical anchor appears beyond dispute. That is, they do not consist solely of services of men, fines, rights such as heriots and tithes and the like. That makes it very probable that their names are not arbitrary, but are each taken from a parcel of land, though not all parcels of a prebend are necessarily at or near the place whose name they bear. What Orme and Cannon take to be an early list of what were, or evolved into, the lands of Godringhill prebend5 includes not only the place so named, but dispersed lands in Westbury, Charlton, Ableton and an unidentified place called Kedemuta (really Redwick),6 as well as other non-territorial dues. Orme and Cannon show that the five prebends were at first named after a current or previous holder;7 for example, ‘the prebend of John de Kirkby’, but came to be known instead by a place- name, either alone or linked in sequence with the names of former prebendaries in a lawyerly way to establish continuity of title. Three of the five are readily recognizable as names of places within the boundaries of the enormous medieval parish of Henbury: , Henbury itself and Lawrence Weston. Orme and Cannon are more tentative about Holley, but as they observe,8 it ‘may survive at Hollywood Hill, half a mile south of Compton Greenfield church over which Holley had claims’, adjacent to which is Hollyhill Wood. This is therefore surely right; there are no other names resembling Holley/Holly in the parish. Better still, the first series one-inch Ordnance Survey map shows Holly House, in whose grounds Hollywood Tower now stands.9 Holley was also associated with, and sometimes called, St Werburgh, after the chapel just over the parish boundary in Westbury (or just on it), which must have been part of its endowment, the only securely identifiable parcel of the Westbury prebends not definitely in Henbury, except the prebendaries’ own houses close to the college buildings by the Trym. That leaves Godringhill, the most valuable of the prebends, which, although allocated to a mere deacon and not a priest, was equal in revenue to the holding of the college’s dean in the 1291–2 Taxatio Ecclesiastica.10 It is recorded in the following spellings:11

5. Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 17. 6. Kedemuta is the reading of the name in a charter transcribed into Bishop Giffard’s register (1268–1301), f. 278v., as reported by Thompson, ‘Notes’, 103. The relevant charter is not printed in J.W. Willis Bund (ed.), The Register of Bishop Godfrey Giffard, Part I, 1268–73 (Worcs. Hist. Soc. 1902). Presumably influenced by Cattybrook in nearby parish, Thompson interprets it implausibly as ‘Cattymouth’. This spelling and the interpretation are also the ones given in M.G. Cheney, D. Smith, C. Brooke and P. Hoskin (eds), English Episcopal Acta 33: Worcester 1062–1185 (Oxford, 2007), 80–1, apparently quoted from Thompson’s article, which the editors call ‘important’. However, there is no extant ‘Cattymouth’ place-name, and the tiny brook had no conventional mouth even before the disruptive building of the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway in 1859–63, but seems on the Almondsbury tithe map (now accessible through the Bristol Know Your Place website, http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/kyp), to disappear into an unmarked sinkhole on a field boundary. Also, the required spelling-changes, though not entirely implausible, are anomalous and not supported by parallels in nearby Glos. names. In fact, the form in Giffard’s register is really Redeuuica, i.e. Redwick. Thanks to Worcs. Record Office for supplying a digital image of the relevant folio. 7. Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 34. 8. Ibid. 34, note 57. 9. However, on the Henbury tithe map (1840) this is named Compton House, from being partly in Compton Greenfield, which in medieval times formed part of Henbury parish and was associated with Holley prebend: Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 18–19, 41–2. Compton Greenfield was later a separate parish before being merged into Almondsbury. 10. Taxatio database (www.hrionline.ac.uk), WO.GL.BR.23, in which it is called ‘Nicholas de Wodeford’s prebend’: Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 34, 38. 11. Not in A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire (Cambridge, 1964), II–III. RICHARD COATES 253

Goderingehella, 1125×41.12

Gudheryenghull, 1195.13

Goderynghull, 1353.14

[prebend of] Wodeford alias Trillek or Goderynghull, 1400.15

Goderynghull, 1402.16

Goderynghille alias Trillek or Wodeford alias Brianesprovendre, 1402.17

Goderynghill alias Trikhill or Wodeford, 1417.18

Godrynghill, Goderinghull, 1417.19

[prebendi de] Godringhull alias Wodforde sive Trykhyll aut Briam, 1456.20

Goodrynghyll (described as a manor), 1535.21

Goodrynghill (described as a manor), 1544.22 The first element may be interpreted in the same way as that inGotherington , north of Bishop’s Cleeve, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon male personal name Gōdhere (‘good’ + ‘army’) + -ingtūn (particle indicating association + ‘farm, village’). According to Smith,23 the personal name in Gotherington might be Gūðhere (‘battle’ + ‘army’), but the weight of evidence and the fact that spellings with appear earlier than those with are against this. The forms are likely to be due to a well-known frequent change of [d] > [ð]24 before [r] in later Middle English. Only three of these spellings are medieval. There was evidently some bureaucratic doubt about the

12. In Bishop Giffard’s register – see note 6; Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 17. 13. Ibid. 20. The eccentricities of this spelling may in part be due to its being in a papal document confirming the episcopal grant, the original of which is lost. 14. Calendar of Patent Rolls 1350–4, 405: ‘grant to the king’s clerk Master John de Bryen of the prebend of Goderynghull in the collegiate church of Westbury, in the king’s gift by reason of the voidance of the bishopric of Worcester’. Note the recurrence of his name in later records. 15. Ibid. 1399–1401, 136: ‘which Master John Bryan lately had’. 16. Ibid. 1401–5, 121. 17. Ibid. 157. 18. Ibid. 1416–22, 128. 19. T.S. Holmes (ed.), The Register of Nicholas Bubwith, Bishop of Bath and Wells, vol. 1, 1407–24 (Somerset Rec. Soc. 29, 1914), 279. 20. Calendar of Papal Registers, XI, 120. 21. Valor Ecclesiasticus, II, 433. 22. Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, XIX(1), 175; see Bristol Record Office [BRO], AC/AS/1/1; H.J. Wilkins, The Letters Patent of King Henry VIII, granting Westbury-on-Trym collegiate church and college, etc., together with all their endowments, to Sir Ralph Sadleir (Bristol, 1909). 23. Smith, Place-Names of Glos. II, 87–8. 24. Pronounced like in this, not like in thin. Symbols in [square brackets] represent sounds in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association; symbols in represent spellings in letters of the conventional alphabet. 254 A LOST PLACE-NAME: GODRINGHILL IN HENBURY true name of the place, because Hugh de Upton is on record, in an Assize Roll of 1287, as stating that it was Godringdon [sic] not Goterington.25 This could suggest that one or more of the medieval spellings were meant to represent [t], not [ð], which would further undermine the case for an original Gūðhere. Finally, there are no known records of Gūðhere as a personal name (though it is formally credible), whilst Gōdhere is found as the name of a London moneyer (Godere)26 and in a will of c.1000 (Goder).27 We can assume that the was not changed to in the name of the prebend because it was essentially a name surviving in a written tradition and not a place-name in everyday spoken use by local people. The final element in the name of the prebend is clearly Old English hyll ‘hill’, showing a range of spellings appropriate to the Middle English outcome of Old English [y] (, , ), including the appropriate to the West Midlands dialect to which that of medieval Gloucestershire is generally reckoned. On balance, then, the name of the prebend is likely to contain the same personal name as Gotherington, and to be interpretable as ‘hill associated with Gōdhere’. The earliest surviving spelling, with <-e-> before hella, suggests a possible alternative with the first element in the genitive plural (Old English -inga-): ‘hill of people associated with Gōdhere’, but the rest of the fairly limited evidence is consistent. We may safely conclude, as Orme and Cannon do, that at least part of the prebend’s endowment was at a hill. The named land was described as cultura ‘cultivated land’ in Bishop Simon’s grant in the early 12th century, and in the papal confirmation of Bishop Sully’s grant (1195). It is not clear to me why Orme and Cannon conclude further that ‘Godringhill appears to have been a hill which was partly cultivated and therefore partly not’.28 They may be right, but the wording of the grants does not require this deduction; nothing precludes it from having being wholly under cultivation. They suggest it may have been King’s Weston Hill, parts of whose flanks (though not the summit ridge) are host to some of the scattered detached parcels of Westbury: nos 25–30 on the north side of the ridge on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of the 1880s, and nos 31–8 on the south side, at least some of which were arable even in the 19th century. It would make more sense to associate the sloping parcel 19 (and the nearby 15, 16 and 17) with Lawrence Weston, to which it was adjacent;29 as are in fact 25–8, and that might suggest that if Godringhill was, or was near, King’s Weston Hill, it would have included the southern parcels rather than the northern ones. The large parcel no. 4, consisting today mainly of Haw Wood, which is on Mount Skitham, a hill with an obscure but modern name (first recorded 1830) east of Hallen, together with 18, might be seen as an alternative candidate, since these are not adjacent to Holley, whilst other detachments in the same general area are. That is probably as far as we can safely go without new evidence, and of course the prebend included scattered lands in addition to those whose name it bore.

25. Smith, Place-Names of Glos. II, 88. 26. F. Colman, Money Talks: reconstructing Old English (Berlin, Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 56, 1992), 292. 27. Electronic Sawyer website (esawyer.org.uk), S 1487. 28. Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 34, note 57. 29. Within this parcel 19 was Chapel Cottage. The cottage was described as a ‘consecrated building’ in 1860: A.M.E. Harford (ed.), Annals of the Harford Family (London, 1909), 113. It was referred to in an anonymous article in the Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror (16 June 1950, p. 4) under its then- current name, Church House. Judging by these mentions, it was clearly the old Lawrence Weston chapel building itself, and people alive in 1950 remembered services being held there. The name does not therefore allude to the nearby Methodist chapel, now demolished. The chapelry and prebend of Lawrence Weston were not identical concepts, and the prebendary canon would not have been obliged to officiate at the chapel, which was a matter for the vicar of Henbury. RICHARD COATES 255

Wherever we may conclude Godringhill to have been, its name has clearly been seized on by an unknown Bristol City Council planning officer to provide the street-nameGoodring Hill on the Lawrence Weston housing estate,30 for which Veronica Smith had no explanation.31 In historical writings,32 the prebend is sometimes referred to as Goodringhill, which is the form that inspires the Lawrence Weston street-name. The spelling with a single is preferred in this note as being the only one in use before Valor Ecclesiasticus and the dissolution of the monasteries, after which the prebend is no longer mentioned except in historical references. Perhaps this is the place to note that there is a ‘good ring’, an enigmatic circular feature of early Iron Age date on top of King’s Weston Hill, just upslope from detached parcel 31 of Westbury parish, which was sample-dug by Philip Rahtz and his team in 1956 during investigation of an adjacent feature.33 The structure of the medieval name is incompatible with such a derivation, should anyone be reckless enough to propose it, because of the persistent between the and the where none would be expected grammatically if we were dealing with a ‘good ring’.

30. Highway adopted in 1956: BRO, 40287/20/214; mapped and named already, though unadopted, in 1949. The Council at the time had the policy of choosing street-names with specific local associations. Familiarity with this area of historic Henbury’s connection with Westbury must also have inspired the nearby Deans Mead and Kirkby Road, the former apparently from a field-name and the latter from the prebendary John de Kirkby mentioned above, despite his dubious reputation as a ‘scandalous pluralist’, bane of the London aldermanry and effective revenue collector on behalf of Edward I: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Jn Kirkby d. 1290. Ottery Close and Burycourt Close commemorate medieval prebendaries of Lawrence Weston: H.C.W. Harris, Housing Nomenclature in Bristol (Bristol, 1969), 37–9. It is debatable which prebend was held by Kirkby: Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 202. 31. V. Smith, The Street Names of Bristol, 2nd edn (Bristol, 2002), 130. 32. e.g. VCH Glos. II, 106–8; H.J. Wilkins, Westbury College from a. 1194 to 1544 A.D. (Bristol, 1917), 74; C.D. Ross (ed.), Cartulary of St Mark’s Hospital, Bristol (Bristol Rec. Soc. 21, 1959), 121. 33. P.H. Rahtz, ‘Kings Weston Down Camp, Bristol, 1956’, Proc. Univ. Bristol Spelaeological Soc. 8.1 (1956), 30, 32.