PREPARATORY TO A DICTIONARY OF SUSSEX PLACE-NAMES Richard Coates University of the West of England, Bristol © 2017 First tranche: place-names in A, E, I, O and U 1 Foreword It is now almost 90 years since the publication of Allen Mawer and Frank Stenton’s standard county survey The place-names of Sussex (English Place-Name Society [EPNS] vols 6-7, Cambridge University Press, 1929-30). While I was living and working in Sussex, before 2006, it had long been my intention to produce an updated but scaled- down of this major work to serve as one of the EPNS’s “Popular” series of county dictionaries. Many things have intervened to delay the fulfilment of this aspiration, but it struck me that I could advance the project a little, put a few new ideas into the public domain, and possibly apply a spur to myself, by publishing from time to time an online “fascicle” consisting of analyses of selected major or important names beginning with a particular letter. Here are the first five, dealing with the letters A, E, I, O and U. Readers are invited to send any comments, including suggestions for inclusion or improvement, to me at
[email protected]. With that end in mind, the present work consists of an index in electronic form of the names covered by Mawer and Stenton, kindly supplied many years ago, before I was acquainted with the joys of scanning, by Dr Paul Cavill. For some of these names, those which Percy Reaney called “names of primary historical or etymological interest” (interpreted subjectively), I have constructed a dictionary entry consisting of evidence and commentary in the usual way, plus a National Grid reference and a reference to the relevant page-number in Mawer and Stenton (e.g.