Naming Shirehampton and the Name Shirehampton
Naming Shirehampton and the name Shirehampton Richard Coates University of the West of England, Bristol Shirehampton is a village in southern Gloucestershire, England, which has been absorbed into the city of Bristol. It has expanded into a suburb with a population of 6867 in 1991 (census figure; the precise figure is not readily deducible from later census data).1 Its territory included, until 1917, what was marshland and is now Avonmouth port and suburb. The historical development of its name is easy to follow in broad but unrevealing terms, though there is a considerable amount of problematic detail. In this article I explore what it is possible to deduce about aspects of the processes involved in its evolution, which are not at all straightforward. The paper can also be taken as an object lesson in the lexical-semantic and phonological difficulties of historical onomastics, and in the pleasures of travelling unexpected byways in the history of onomastics and in cultural history. But historical onomastics, in the sense of establishing the etymology of a name, is not the same as exploring the history of a name, and not the same as the historiography of a name. In analysing Shirehampton and its name, we shall look at all of these techniques and processes in detail. In this article I attempt to explore the historical onomasiological questions of what this particular tract of ground has been called over the centuries, and why; the semasiological question of the use of the place’s name or names in derived names (commemoration); and the historiographical question of what scholars have deduced from the place’s name or names: first and foremost the history of the interpretation of the place’s name or names (changing views on its/their etymology, and the consequences of changes in such provisional knowledge), but also changing views about the identification (denotation) of the name or names featuring in the record, and some real-world consequences of that.
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