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. In Herefordshire, particularly in ArchenfieldErgyng ( ), where Welsh and English settlements had long co-existed, the dating of the *lann>stow exchange is fluid, but evidence from available charters suggests an increase in anglicization mostly after the Conquest: for example Lannpetyr (1045) had become Peterstow by 1207, and Lann Sanfreit (1056) was known as Bridstow by 1291.2

1. This countrywide investigation of place-names is based, for ease of reference, on the more than 10,500 or so major entries in total in A.D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-Names (Oxford, 1991). Minor place-names, for example names of hamlets and other small settlements, fields, woodlands and so forth, have had to be omitted on grounds of space, for which the author apologises. But the broad picture is what is sought in this crucial item of research. It is worthy of note, if so far resistant to explanation, that even minor uses of the term stow appear lacking in the west in Somerset (Nether and Over Stowey derive from stan ‘stone’, not stow), Dorset, Worcestershire and Shropshire. 2. The discussion in S.M. Pearce, South-Western Britain in the Early Middle Ages (London, 2004), 142–5, 147–8, is of special interest here. But see also R. Higham, Making Anglo-Saxon Devon (Exeter, 2008), 83–4; O.J. Padel, Cornish Place-Names (Penzance, 1988), 7–9; B. Coplestone-Crow, Herefordshire Place-Names (Hereford, 2009), s.vv; J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), 21, 49. Nicholas Orme in his English Church Dedications, with a Survey of Cornwall and Devon (Exeter, 1996) does not discuss at length the relationship of the terms *lann or stow in his survey at pp. 3–24 but correctly, in this author’s view, accepts stow in the exclusive sense of ‘holy place’, as in ‘Christow’ (Devon) at pp. 144–5. 68 The Meaning of Old English Stow

Fig. 1. Distribution map (by county) of major English place-names in OE stow and stede. DAVID H. HIGGINS 69

OE stow, in its primitive sense, signified simply ‘a place, a geographical location’, like OEstede (‘stead’).3 The latter’s meanings, except in one signal instance, are shared by stow and are discussed below. The ultimate origin of both stow and stede is the Old West Germanic verb ‘[to] stand’ in the sense of ‘[to] occupy ground’. For stow, recent toponymists (Coplestone-Crow 2009, Pearce 2004, Padel 1998, Gelling 1997: see n. 2) have – reasonably but indiscriminately – proposed the simple sense of ‘a gathering place’: a word which, researched here for the first time in its national spread, in fact conveys specific meanings according to geographical and chronological criteria. This author’s investigation establishes that in the eastern counties, where the earliest instances of stow are to be found (the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain having begun on the eastern side of the country in the 5th and 6th centuries), ‘stow’ or ‘stowe’ as an element of a place-name indicates simply ‘a place or location [of local significance]’, regardless of the ownership of the place, the motivation of those attending the place or the use to which the place was put. As regards ownership, motivation and uses, these aspects are indicated in the eastern counties by a variety of affixed qualifiers. Often the distinguished manorial family in occupation of the ‘stow’ is recorded, as in Stow Bardolph and Stow Bedon in Norfolk, Stowlangtoft in Suffolk or Stow Maries in Essex (these families are post-Conquest but hint perhaps that the names of previous Anglo-Saxon land-owners, now lost to history, have been substituted). In this category of ‘stow’, a shared distinguishing feature would often have been a church or other religious foundation, of which the Anglo-Saxon thegn or subsequent Norman lord of the manor was the owner or patron. In these cases – but relatively rare in the eastern counties – the qualifier may be the saint to whom the church is dedicated, as in Hibaldstow in Lincolnshire (Hiboldestou 1086), a county in which the 7th-century saint in question, St Hygebald, is fondly commemorated also in three other churches there. On the other hand, in High and Lower Halstow in Kent (OE halig ‘holy’) worship at some unspecified church, chapel or wayside shrine is implied. Where there is lay public interest in the ‘stow’ in question, its qualifier specifies the function involved: for example, OE pleg ‘play’, i.e. sport and recreation, as in Plaistow (Sussex); OE burh ‘fort’, as in Burstow (Surrey); OE wıc ‘wick’, indicating a specialized role in farming or other industry, as in Wistow (Cambs. and Yorks.); OE fugol ‘fowl’, for the hunting of wildfowl, as in Fulstow (Linc.); late OE –markett ‘market’, for trade, as in Stowmarket (Suffolk). Such breadth in the social uses of ‘stow’ is indicated only on the eastern side of the country. The semantic quiddity of stow is shared – except in one important instance – with OE stede (‘stead’), which is not a notable lexical feature of English dialects in the toponymy of western and south-western counties. On the other hand, stede is found solidly in the eastern counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent and Sussex, with only relatively few instances of stow. Certain Midland counties south of the Humber also employ stede in compound place-names, counties which, if Mills’ critique is reliable, are devoid of major instances of stow: Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. But void of stede altogether are the counties of Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and, as mentioned, all the counties of the west and south-west of the country. Research on the settlement history and dialects of the Anglo-Saxon incomers is required to explain such anomalies. Devon has but one major instance of stede in Mortonhampstead ‘homestead on the moor’; but since the settlement’s name appears as simply Moretone in Domesday, the amplification of the name is both late and virtually tautological (-tone is OE –tun ‘farmstead’, where the family home is already implied). Unlike stow, stede is mostly

3. English place-names in stede here are also based on the selection of major toponymic instances in Mills (1991): see note 2. His published bibliography indicates that in his commentaries he consulted, critically, the study of -stede as a place-name element, published 30 years earlier by I.K. Sandred: English Place- Names in -stead: a thesis, with maps, (Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 2, Uppsala, 1963). 70 The Meaning of Old English Stow found as a dependent element in compound place-names: thus in the early modern period one could talk of ‘a stow’ and make sense, but less frequently of ‘a stead’. Place-names apart, the latter survived parasitically into the modern period in very limited phraseology such as ‘instead of’, ‘in my/his/her etc stead’ and, also in concrete circumstances, beyond toponymy, perhaps anomalously in ‘bedstead’. But stede as ‘place, location’, even ‘ground, land, property’, can be encountered as late as the 12th century, for example in the Bristol Charters where Henry II, between 1164 and 1170, is recorded as granting ‘to my men who dwell in my stead in the Marsh near the bridge of Bristol’ the same rights granted to the burgesses of the town in 1155.4 Otherwise, south of the Humber, in the more easterly counties, place-names with stede are invariably compounded with features such as ‘home, farm, tree, crop, fort, market’: Ham[p]stead/Hempstead (Herts., Essex, Middx., Norfolk) ‘homestead’; Tunstead (Norfolk) ‘farmstead’; Elmstead, Elmsted, Elstead (Middx., Kent, Surrey) ‘dwelling(s) in elm woodland’; Greenstead, Grimstead (Essex, Sussex, Wilts.) ‘dwelling(s) in grassland’; Burstead (Essex) ‘dwelling(s) within or by a fort’; Chipstead (Surrey, Kent) ‘settlement with a market place’, and so forth. To this extent, the uses of stede are identical to those of stow. Striking is the fact that out of the 58 examples of stede in approximately 10,500 entries in total in Mills’ dictionary, only one, Saxtead (Suffolk), is associated (possibly) with a personal name, ‘Seaxa’, which is not known as a saint’s name. Not one major example of stede, therefore, is recorded with an unambiguous religious connotation as the site of a ‘holy place’: this distinction appears to belong exclusively to the competing OE word stow. To recapitulate, in the eastern counties of England, and therefore in the early centuries of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, stow’s general sense as ‘a place [of local significance]’ required a qualifier in order to identify ownership or function. Stow’s exclusive sense of ‘holy place, church or minster’, from the evidence gathered here, belongs instead to the succeeding centuries of the Anglo-Saxon expansion westwards, as native British graveyards and church sites were progressively appropriated and, where necessary, renamed in the language of the Germanic newcomers, especially when the conversion to Christianity of the new inhabitants was at issue. This specialized religious or ecclesiastical sense of stow may well be owed to the influence of the Church, which was the only source of educated functionaries – a class knowledgeable also of Latin – in the Anglo-Saxon period. Stow sufficiently reflects the semantic track of Late Latinlocus , which in its literal sense meant simply ‘place, location’ but, in the Latin of the Church, acquired the additional, specialized sense ‘holy place, church or chapel’ (it is so used passim by Bede). It is to be expected, therefore, that the earliest, 5th- or 6th-century uses of stow, in the east of England – before the processes of the Anglo-Saxons’ conversion to Christianity began with the arrival from Rome of the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury in 597 – should indicate a primitive, unspecific sense of the word as simply ‘a place [of local significance]’, when a qualifier was required to make sense of the generic term in its immediate context. A variety of distinctive functions and pursuits was indicated by these affixes, as we have seen, associatedinter alia with recreation, security, food-gathering (including wildfowling), trading and, importantly, worship. But by the time of the Anglo-Saxon advances into the far west of the country, the sense of stow has become entirely specialized, carrying an exclusive sense of authoritative religious function, when the presence of a church or minster is axiomatic. The process of the religious specialization of the word is a matter of speculation, but it is reasonable to assume that it came about through its association in place-names with particular saints revered on a more or less national scale, particularly Christian warriors who were both kings and martyrs. For example, in central England, in Nottinghamshire, the settlement at Edwinstowe (Edenstou 1086) was so named because its primitive church had for a time sheltered the body of King Edwin of Northumbria, its first Christian king, slain by the

4. N.D. Harding (ed.), Bristol Charters 1155–1373 (Bristol Record Soc. 1, 1930), 4. DAVID H. HIGGINS 71 pagan King Penda of Mercia at the battle of Hatfield Chase in 633. Edwin’s political authority had been of national proportions; he was the first of the three Northumbrian monarchs to be deemed bretwalda by Bede, with authority also over the lands south of the Humber. Edwin’s body was finally given ceremonious burial at Whitby abbey by his daughter Eanflæd (d.c. 704), its abbess, who instituted the countrywide cult of her father before her death. The use of stow in the place-names of the west of England belongs to the middle or late Anglo-Saxon period, according to the local historical circumstances of the spread of Christian monasticism and church foundation. In Somerset, stow does not feature in major place-names (see n. 1); for example, Glastonbury is known in Old English, by c.725, as Glastingburi, that is to say the burh (in the specialized sense of ‘minster’) of (speculatively) the Celtic Glaston people, rather than as the stow of its minster’s founding saint.5 But it is consistent with the late historical spread of the specialized ecclesiastical sense of stow ‘sacred place, church, minster’ in the west, proposed here, that in the late 10th century Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester (963–84) should identify the site of Glastonbury, in the Old English vernacular, as a stow.6 In view of this author’s proposal that Augustine’s first ‘Oak’ conference arguably took place in 603 in Gloucestershire, on College Green,7 it is perhaps of some significance also, not so far appreciated, that the location of the synod was termed a stow in the Early English (Mercian) translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of c.890 commissioned by King Alfred: ‘ðœre stowe, ðe mon nemneð ‘Agustinus ac’ on Hwiccna gemœre and West Sexna’ [‘the stow which is called ‘Augustine’s Oak’ on the borders of the Hwicce and the West Saxons’].8 Therefore to which ‘church or minster’ exactly did the term stowe refer here? Out of the three instances in Gloucestershire of place-names with stow, a transparent dating offers itself in two cases, both of which are late. Stow-on-the-Wold was founded by the monks of Evesham abbey in the 11th century as a commercial venture and was known as Eduuardesstou up to the 16th century. Its church was dedicated to Edward the Martyr, King of England, assassinated at Corfe in Dorset in 979. This royal cult was authorized throughout the kingdom in the laws of King Æthelred II in 1008, following the foundation of the town. Chepstow (OE Ceapstow), is included in the Gloucestershire Domesday (1086) under the Welsh name Striguil (literally ‘river bend’). On the other hand, the Llandaff Charters (Liber Landavensis) arguably records its name in a 12th-century source as Emrygorfa (literally ‘the busy (amrygyr) place (ma/fa)’.9 It is not proposed, however, that in the medieval period the Welsh forms ma/fa implied the strictly religious sense of ‘sacred place’ or ‘minster’ of late OE stow. Therefore if Emrygorfa was straightforwardly calqued on ‘Chepstow’, the ‘stow’ in question must reasonably be considered shorn of any special religious sense. A satisfactory solution to this conundrum, however, lies in a stricter understanding of the chronology. It should be understood that Striguil was first developed from 1067 by William fitzOsbern, earl of Hereford, lord ofStriguil , as an exclusively Norman military town, with an impressive new stone castle, the centre of authority for the commencement of the Norman-led colonization of the Welsh lowland kingdoms of South Wales. The settlement’s early religious

5. For the development of the specialized sense of burh as ‘minster’, see Blair, Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, 250–1. 6. Pearce, South-Western Britain, 144. 7. D.H. Higgins, ‘Aust (Gloucestershire) and Myths of Rome’s Second Augusta Legion and St Augustine’s ‘Oak’ Conference’, Trans. BGAS 129, (2011), 117–38, esp. 126–32. 8. T. Miller (ed.), The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Early Eng. Text Soc., London, 1890–98), II, 2. 9. W. Davies, The Llandaff Charters (Aberystwyth 1979), s.v. 72 The Meaning of Old English Stow history was unimpressive: it offered no more than a minor Benedictine monastic cell established by Earl William as an alien offspring of his favoured priory of Cormeilles in Normandy, its function to collect land-rents in Gwent and channel them back to the mother house. The grand new priory church of St Mary at Striguil/Chepstow, on the other hand, was probably not completed much before the mid 12th century (its impressive Norman western entrance is datable to the early decades of that century). Similarly, the market (ceap), which provided Chepstow with its commercial identity, may not have been granted its charter much before the priory itself was fully functional as the major religious centre of the developing new town. It is more probable, therefore, that if any calque were at issue in the history of Chepstow’s name – which in any case is undocumented before the early 14th century – it was calqued on Emrygorfa rather than the other way round, with the proviso that its stow should be understood as carrying the exclusive sense of ‘holy place, church or minster’. The third instance of a Gloucestershire place-name in stow is Bristol. From the best available archaeological evidence, Bristol’s origins were Late Saxon, its site burgeoning industrially from the late 10th or early 11th century. The town’s economic rise, with its thriving port, was swift, and it was wealthy and secure enough to merit a royal mint from the first decade of the 11th century. What is so far accepted as the earliest instance of Bristol’s name is to be found in the mint’s first coinage, which is of Æthelred II, issued between 1009 and 1016, mint-marked Bricgstow (literally ‘the stow by the bridge (bricg/brycg)’.10 This chronology is consonant with the recent discovery by Roger Leech of a fortified bridgehead on the south bank of the Avon on the line of the modern Bristol bridge – a defensive enclave which he dates to the 11th or, conceivably, the late 10th century.11 As demonstrated above, the precise sense of stow here in the west and south-west of England at this time indicates not sweepingly ‘a place of assembly’, as uncritically stated by recent toponymists, but exclusively ‘a sacred place’ sanctified by the presence of a church or minster of some commanding authority and therefore antiquity. It is therefore crucial to ask precisely to which stow the name Brycgstow then alludes. On the face of it, in the late 10th or early 11th century, when a major bridge at Bristol was newly available, the stow might appear to have been that of St Peter’s church, hard by the bridge, within the royal vill of Barton Regis, a minster later denominated in the Gloucester Domesday of 1086 as the ‘mother church’ of Bristol (‘aeccl[esi]a de bristou’). But if the argument in favour of College Green at Bristol as the first location of St Augustine’s synod of 603 is accepted (see above and n. 7), the term in the late 9th-century translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History cited epigraphically above, which specifically refers to it, must also imply the presence of a church or minster founded some centuries before the foundation of either St Peter’s church or St Mary le Port. This stow, therefore, could only have been that associated with St Jordan of Bristol. By the late 9th century, the working inhabitants of a churchless ‘proto-Bristol’ would inevitably have

10. The assessment of early Bristol’s coinage by L.V. Grinsell, The History and Coinage of the Bristol Mint (Bristol, 1986) is briefly revised – with bibliography – by R.H. Leech, ‘The medieval defences of Bristol revisited’, in L. Keen (ed.), “Almost the Richest City”: Bristol in the Middle Ages (Brit. Archaeol. Assoc. Conference Trans. 19, London, 1997), 18. The royal mint at Bristol, upon its foundation, must have been heavily employed coining silver pennies – the most valuable coin – for ‘Danegeld’ (strictly heregeld ‘war money’) paid to the Vikings by Æthelred II, much of which can be found today in Scandinavian museums: see E. John, Reassessing Anglo-Saxon England, (Manchester 1996), 145–57. 11. Roger Leech also discusses with bibliography the thesis of the possible wide influence on Anglo-Saxon burhs, in this period of aggressive Viking expansion, of the new Frankish settlements furnished with fortified bridges of Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, of which King Alfred (871–99), when a youth, had personal knowledge: ‘Arthur’s Acre: a Saxon bridgehead at Bristol’, Trans. BGAS 127 (2009), 11–20, esp. 16–17. DAVID H. HIGGINS 73 identified ‘their’st ow as that which incorporated St Jordan’s monasterium and reliquary chapel. This, before the imposition of the boundary of the later town walls, lay with seamless access on the salubrious stretch of College Green, just beyond the doubtless huddled housing and polluted industrial sites of the working settlement between the major waters of the Avon and the minor stream of the Frome. St Jordan’s ancient minster, probably named or renamed at an early stage for his master St Augustine the Less of Canterbury, may well have been proto-Bristolians’ acting parish church for three centuries or more before the town’s birth and formal naming in the late 10th or early 11th century, when a major defensible bridge and bridgehead over the Avon became available for the first time. The formal baptism of the newburh of Bristol is not recorded in any chronicle, royal or ecclesiastical, but it looks very possible from the Alfredian translation of Bede’s History, a century before the building of the town’s bridge and the foundation of St Peter’s church, that the settlement’s newly coined name included the late, specialized sense of stow in its formation. If so, it is conceivable that it was the ancient ‘sacred place or minster’ of St Jordan’s missionary foundation that provided – or sanctioned the retention of – the generic element stow in the city’s name Brycgstow.12

12. It must be borne in mind that it was not inevitable that the name of Bristol, Brycgstow, should have included reference to a stow. Other elements were available for the formation of the early town’s name, something that is shown by the lexical productivity of the river-name Æfen or Afen (Avon) in the landscape of Gloucestershire place-names: for example, Æfeningum (Avening, 896, ‘settlement of the people living by the [Little] Avon’) and, if an early settlement indeed existed there, as Mills (1991) allows, Afenemuthan (‘Avonmouth’, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 911). On the pattern of the latter formations, *Afenebrycg (‘Avonbridge’) would have been an entirely appropriate name for Bristol, similar to Axanbrycg in Somerset (Axbridge ‘bridge over the Axe’), an Alfredian foundation of the Burghal Hidage, first recorded in the 10th century. The precise choice of the formation Brycgstow by the city fathers, with its conspicuous use of OE stow in what may now be termed the specialized, late Saxon sense of ‘sacred place with church or minster’, may now arguably be seen as their tribute to St Jordan, the ‘prime mover’, even the unspoken founding saint of their new town and, as far as is known, the earliest named inhabitant on record of their historic region.