The <I>Wic</I> Element in Place Names

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Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith 4

00 Introduction. The Place Name Meme wic 347

385 Old English wic has contributed to a huge number of place names around Britain, in which it is now spelled wick, wich, week, wyke, or 2018/2019 something similar. Early investigators translated wic as ‘dwelling, building or collection of buildings for special purposes, farm, dairy farm’ and in the plural as ‘hamlet, village’ (Smith, 1956), to which Ekwall (1964) added further translations of ‘town, port, harbour’ and sometimes ‘salt-works’. Gelling (1967, 1978) noticed that places named wicham in Anglo- Saxon times tend to lie close to Roman roads and/or early archaeological traces. She believed that wic was a loan-word from Latin vicus, a view shared by most other commentators. Thus Draper (2002) wrote “Clearly, Contents it was the Latin word vicus that somehow gave rise to the Old English wīc, The wic Element in Place Names 347 but how, when, and by whom was this achieved?” When Coates (1999) reviewed wic, he referred to “what must Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith 347 have been called vici by Latin-using Roman-Britons”, but he strug- gled to understand how vici could have evolved into later wic places. He noted that wics were often subsidiary places, dependent on somewhere else. We began paying attention to wic while working on a big project (written up online at www.romaneranames.uk) to examine in detail all 570 or so geographical names that have survived from Roman times throughout Britain. Five of those names contain an element related to Latin vicus, which made it important to understand what vicus really meant. That turned out to be an unexpectedly big task. A preliminary reconnaissance, looking at the limited area of Kent, has already been published (Durham and Goormachtigh, 2015). The present article widens the scope, to look at the whole of Britain, a longer

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 348 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith time scale, and a fuller linguistic picture. It sets out to answer three main questions: 1. What was the core meaning of wic? Medieval people could talk about going to “the wic” and expect to be understood, but none of the main types of wic-named place (harbour, dairy-farm, saltern, beach, etc) could plausibly be the origin from which all the others derived. Nor can a memory of Roman times or an outlying place supply a complete answer. We end up suggesting that wic’s core meaning was ‘trading place’. 2. What was the core meaning of vicus? It changed in meaning over the centuries but it too probably started out meaning ‘trading place’. However, vicus places almost never turned into wic-named places in Britain and elsewhere. So what happened, as a matter of history and anthropology, to produce that apparent disconnection? 3. What was the deep Indo-European root behind wic and vicus? It was probably related to way and via, and meant something like ‘set apart, outlying’, but ultimately had many and remarkably diverse descendants. We suggest a possible evolutionary tree of semantic development, for linguists to discuss.

Data Collection

All place names that contain a letter sequence wick, wich, wik, vik, wyke, week, wyck, or wig were collected from the Ordnance Survey Open Data 50K gazetteer, and combined with lists published by other researchers who had examined old charters and Domesday Book. To save space here, the resulting data set (currently of 1262 names with their locations) and a discussion of our inclusion/exclusion criteria have been posted online1. Figure 1 shows a map of all sites on the British mainland, plus some off- shore islands, but not Orkney and Shetland. A partial list of post-Roman wic-related names on the Continent was also collected and posted online2.

1 www.romaneranames.uk/resource/wickdata.doc 2 www.romaneranames.uk/resource/wiceuro.doc

Another data set was built, and also posted online3, of evidence for over 200 Roman vici with identifiable locations. It includes all known sites (about 70) on the Continent near to Britain, as shown in Figure 2 below. Data came partly from ancient maps, but mainly from inscriptions (see the Clauss-Slaby epigraphic database www.manfredclauss.de). The existence of a vicus is often deduced from a mention of vicanus ‘vicus dweller’, but not from its more common relative vicinus ‘neighbouring’. The precise spelling vicus is rare, and one must delve quite deeply into Latin grammar, Roman history, and epigraphic practices to make sense of all the grammatical cases, abbreviations, and damaged words, and to rule out alterna- tive interpretations as part of vicit ‘he conquered’, vixit ‘he lived’, viceni ‘twenty each’, etc.

A Latin Loan Word?

Gelling (1967, 1978) famously observed that more than 30 places with early names wicham (or similar) lie near Roman roads and/or early habitation sites. We checked that this remains true in the light of recent archaeology and maps4. In fact her data set could be expanded by a factor of maybe 3 or 4 by including other early wic-based names with Roman asso- ciations. The second elements include -ham, -hamm, and -tun, with a range of meanings related to modern home, hemmed-in (enclosure), estate, etc. Wic-based place names appear infrequent in the parts of Britain where Celtic languages persisted. In Gelling’s day it was generally assumed that the home language of ordinary Romano-British people was like very early Welsh. This was the underlying (often unstated) reason for believing that Old English wic came directly from Latin vicus: it belongs among the short list of English place-name elements (such as street, chester, font, and port) generally considered to be genuine survivals from Latin without the intervention of French. There are problems with this logic. Did country districts really change their dominant language radically (from Celtic to Latin and then

3 www.romaneranames.uk/resource/vicroman.doc 4 www.romaneranames.uk/resource/wickhams.doc

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 351 to Germanic) twice in a few centuries? What distinguished vicus from cognate words already circulating in northern Europe, where large settlements, long-distance trade networks, and popular assemblies already existed before Rome was founded? On the other hand, in the period AD 600 to 900, anyone literate enough to write wic surely knew some Latin. It is abundantly clear (for example from Frankish coin inscriptions) that wic was understood to be essentially the same word as vicus. We need to ask what vicus really meant, as distinct from what dictionaries claim that it meant.

The Linguistic Background

Current linguistic doctrine, spelled out in numerous books, is that a PIE root *weik- with a sense of ‘household’ or ‘clan’ gave rise to Greek οικος ‘house’ (probably from earlier *ϝοικος) and to Latin vicus ‘street, village’. OE wic is said to have come from vicus (in which V was pronounced like modern W) and developed by generally well-understood processes into the later wick/wich/week/etc spellings. Norse vik ‘bay’ is said to come from an entirely separate PIE root, and led to other, mainly northern, wick/ wyke/etc place names. There are many difficulties with this viewpoint. The word Viking has long been problematic. Where do OE wician ‘to camp temporarily’, wice ‘office, duty’ and wecg ‘wedge’ fit in? If wic was a loan-word from Latin, why are there so few comparable descendants in Romance-language place names? Why is the French place-name ending -ville a marker for regions of former Germanic speech? Note that this article does not put accents on Greek letters or on wic (wīc/wíc), because they were used inconsistently in early sources and dis- play badly on some screens. Here is a table of all the currently recognised PIE roots that may be relevant. Several slightly different analyses exist, beyond the classic dictionary of Pokorny (1959), but the presentation and typography here fol- low Watkins (2011):

PIE root approximate meaning some modern descendants *weik-1 clan, social unit villa, economy, parish *weik-2 a magical/religious notion witch, guile, victim *weik-3 to resemble icon *weik-4 to bend, to wind vetch, vicar, vice, weak, week, wicker, wicket, wych-elm *weik-5 to conquer victor, evict *wekti- thing, creature wight *wekw- to speak voice, vocal, epic *weg-1 to weave, web veil *weg-2 to be strong or lively wake, vigor *wegh- to go (by vehicle) way, weight, earwig, Norway

Instantly one can see a problem: does vicus really belong just with *weik- 1? Obviously some of these roots need to be amalgamated, but, as Coates (1999) put it: “What semantic nucleus is common to them, i.e. what is the essence of wīc-hood?” James Clackson helpfully suggested to us that the answer may lie in a neglected article by Szemerenyi (1977). While discussing kinship terms, with particular reference to eastern (In- do-Iranian) languages, Szemerenyi found it hard to anchor all of wic’s rela- tives securely in a single PIE root. He concluded that a noun meaning ‘clan’, a social group larger than a family, probably arose from a verb meaning ‘to go, to march’. So “*wik- was originally a group of humans on the move: it was only later that this term was also applied to the settlement of the clan.” In other words, at a deep level wic is related to way, German Weg, and Latin via. This fits the explicit statement by the Roman scholar Varro that urban vicus came from via. This article says little about historical phonology. This is partly because the authors have professional backgrounds in science and geography, not linguistics, but mainly because too little is really known about the ethnic make-up of ancient societies. It is often unsafe to analyse words and languages with divergent evolutionary trees because, as Garrett (2006) explained, convergence towards standards was such an important process.

Latin Vicus

Most dictionaries translate vicus as something like ‘row of houses, street, city district, collection of dwellings’. British archaeologists routinely

interpret vicus as an extramural settlement or ‘small town that had grown up around a military site’ (Ireland, 2008). This is a distortion, because Romans would have called such settlements canabae and most vici were not situated beside forts. The crucial point is that a vicus was primarily a concept, an administrative structure, and only secondarily a set of buildings. Mattingly (2006) offered a better definition: “a small settlement below the level of a civitas, with streets but no walls, and administratively attached to a res publica or larger town. The term thus implies a dependent settlement.” However, that is not ideal either, because it ignores the huge changes in Roman life over a thousand years. For a really full discussion of the word vicus, in all its diverse manifestations, possibly the best source is Grenier (1873). Grenier started from a text written by Festus in about AD 170, which mentions three distinct usages of vicus. Usage one of Festus (whose critical piece of original Latin survives only in a mutilated form5) can perhaps best be translated thus: ‘among these vici, some have a political organisation and legal system, others have none of that but are merely places where markets are established for trading purposes and involve the annual appointment of magistrates of the vicus in the same way as magistrates of the pagus’. Usage two of Festus referred to parts of cities under imperial authority, wherein the lower social classes, free not slaves, and often citizens, were encouraged to organise themselves and feel a bit Roman. Usage three, the least common, resembled Greek οικος in referring to a single building complex, containing apartments for rent, which had separate entrances for each tenant (unlike an insula). Those last two usages existed inside cities, which mainly lay around the Mediterranean rather than in northern Europe A vast amount has been written about Roman law and the administrative status implied by various Latin words: civitas, colonia, municipium, pagus, saltus, urbs, vicus, etc. Particularly relevant for Britain is the survey by Tarpin (2002) of vicus and pagus across the western Roman Empire. He

5 Vici [appellari in]cipiunt ex agris qui ibi villas non habent ut Marsi aut Peligni. Sed ex vic[t]is partim habent rempublicam et ius dicitur, partim nihil eorum et tamen ibi nundinae aguntur negoti gerendi causa, et magistri vici, item magistri pagi quotannis fiunt. Altero, cum id genus aedificio[rum defi]nitur, quae continentia sunt oppidis, quae itineribus regionibusque distributa inter se distant, nominibusque dissimilibus discriminis causa sunt dispartita. Tertio, cum id genus aedificiorum definitur, quae in oppido privi in suo quisque loco proprio ita aedifica[n]t, ut in eo aedificio pervium sit, quo itinere habitatores ad suam quisque habitationem habeant accessum. Qui non dicuntur vicani, sicut hi, qui aut in oppidi vicis, aut hi qui in agris sunt, vicani appellantur.

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 354 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith found 400 or so mentions of vicus in classical texts, plus a similar number in inscriptions from the western Roman Empire, which broke down thus:

85 referring to vici and vicani in Rome 143 from other parts of Italy 61 from upper Germany and Rhaetia 46 from Gaul (8 in Aquitania, 13 in Celtica, 25 in the south) 31 from Belgica and lower Germany 21 from Iberia 7 from Britain

A map of vici on the nearby Continent (Figure 2) does not fit the extramural-vicus idea favoured in Britain, because almost no vici were located beside forts on the Roman limes frontier or on the lower Rhine.

Nor do trade links with Britain seem relevant, since no vicus places lie in the flat farmlands of northern France or the Rhine/Maas/Scheldt delta. Instead they lie mainly along economically important roads. One series of vici linked the river Rhone to the Rhine, running from modern Geneva towards Basel. Another prominent series runs from modern Cologne to Trier, which was an administrative capital of the northern Roman Empire, Augusta Treverorum. There were also multi-vicus clusters around Mainz and Metz. Only one of the sites in Figure 2 led to a descendant wic-like name. Marsal, in Lorraine, lies close to modern Moyenvic and Vic-sur-Seille, analogous with Middlewich and countless Wick-somethings in England. It is the likely source of an inscription mentioning vicani marosallenses from 44 BC, and of coins marked marsallo vico from AD 665. That inscription, from barely 14 years after Julius Caesar conquered the area, is one of the earliest pieces of firmly dated evidence for avicus , narrowly beaten by Cicero’s mention, in about 69 BC, of a vicus at Hebromagus (modern Bram in the south of France) on the ancient trade route through Toulouse (Gayraud, 1970). Outside the area of this map there were huge numbers of vici in Italy, a few in southern France, plus a light sprinkling in Iberia, Provence, and near the Danube. Many soldiers seem to have retired and given their names to vici near the Black Sea. In a fertile region of Turkey, Antioch of Pisidia had a cluster of vici with names modelled on those of the mother city, Rome. In North Africa vici often bore the personal names of rich landowners who set them up and petitioned the Emperor for permission to operate markets. Tarpin (2002) concluded that vici in the west met the strategic needs of Empire. They existed mainly where Rome needed to control territory and especially roads. They respected the scattered places where ordinary people chose to live, without being trampled on by forts or forced into Mediterranean-style cities. Obviously there may be bias due to differential survival of evidence, but it seems safe to notice the aspirational character of a vicus, which symbolised commitment to the Roman ideal. Stek (2009) studied the earliest vici in Italy, drawing partly on Capo- grossi Colognesi (2002), and concluded that vici did not develop spon- taneously among indigenous populations before the Pax Romana arrived. They arose from the spread of Roman administrative ideas more than from outgrowth of local cultures.

Almost all the datable evidence for vici and vicani comes from after 7 BC, when the first emperor, Augustus, oversaw some administrative reforms within the city of Rome that made vicus mean a neighbourhood, as a subdivision of a regio. Rome ended up with 265 vici, and Constantinople would later have 322. Names have been preserved in various sources for about 117 distinct vici at Rome (for example Vicus Patricius), but when they can be pinned down to specific locations most were streets (39 definitely and 15 probably), and only two were districts. Richardson (1992) defined the primary meaning of vicus as a street that was relatively flat but not necessarily straight, as distinct from a clivus that climbed a slope, or a via that was a road outside the city. So much for urban vici, but another strand of evidence points toward the suburbs. In AD 216 Ulpian wrote that vicinal roads are in, or lead to, vici (viae vicinales in vicis sunt vel quae in vicos ducunt), clearly under- standing a vicus as being out of town. Some vici were administratively subject to a parent town, an idea picked up in the later German words Weichbild or Wigbold, which meant the outskirts of a city or the rural area where the city’s laws applied, particularly to control local market trading. Around AD 620, Isidore of Seville wrote that vicus, castellum, and pagus were places where ordinary people lived, but which did not have the status of a civitas. Roman treatises on agronomy and most poetry do not mention vici at all. Military authors, such as Caesar in Gaul, were happy to boast about conquering enemy oppida or castella but just mentioned vici in passing as places that their troops burned down. Urban vici were generally mentioned in a pejorative sense, though Caesar and his successors (and perhaps Rome’s kings much earlier) accepted vici inside Rome as convenient bite-sized chunks of the city for the censuses needed for taxation and for distribution of free food. There was a common trope of a formulaic list of ‘every type of habitation’, exemplified by the phrase in vicos vel in villas aut civitates in the Vulgate Bible (Mark 5:56). Many vici had an official who was rather like a combination of local priest, mayor, police chief, and market superintendent. Grenier (1873) argued that these officials were elected under the Roman Republic, but after Augustus launched the Empire they were appointed and their name changed from magister vici to vicomagister. ‘Parish’ would be a good translation for a vicus subject to external authority (as the etymologies

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 357 of both vicar and parish reveal), whereas ‘guild’ might better fit a self- governing vicus, with authority coming from below. The highest concentration of vici on the Continent near Britain was in north-eastern Gaul, notably on linear trade routes radiating from Augusta Treverorum. The Treveri supplied many personnel to the Roman army, including a cavalry unit active in conquering Britain, and the wife of the procurator (chancellor of the exchequer) of Britannia in AD 61. That whole area (Lorraine, Luxembourg, Rhineland) entered history speaking Germanic languages, not the vulgar Latin that turned into French further south. Historians debate how far the post-Roman dom- inance of Franks resulted from major tribal migrations versus a mere change in warlords – much the same issue as with Anglo-Saxons in Eng- land. The northern, once-Germanic zone of France is sharply delineated by place names ending in –ville (Nonas, 2013). They mostly came from Latin villa, which De Vaan (2008:675) derived from PIE *weik-1 ‘clan’ plus PIE *(s)lagw- ‘to seize’. Our hypothesis that the root meaning of Latin vicus was ‘trading place’ rests fundamentally on a geographer’s view of where vici were located, along rural trading routes and urban streets, on the outskirts of cities, and near rivers. A vicus was just somewhere that ordinary people congregated peacefully to exchange goods and services. Trade need not necessarily be formally organised, though Festus did mention weekly (nundinae, literally ‘ninth day’) markets. The original nucleus of Rome was probably an island in the river Tiber, a trading place where inland farmers could meet salt traders from the coast, possibly under some kind of religious sanction. In due course the mercantile heart of the Roman Empire became the forum, which was linked to the cattle market beside the river Tiber, by a street that ran along the side of the Capitoline Hill, roughly parallel with the cloaca maxima, a ditch that drained valley-bottom swamps. That fundamental street, which could almost be called the High Street of ancient Rome, was the Vicus Iugaria. One place described as an insignificant vicus by Roman authors and as an εμποριον by Strabo was Cannae, famous for Hannibal’s victory in 216 BC, which lay downriver from the city of Canusium. It is easy to imagine there an unfortified settlement full of people hustling for a living, much like any third-world village or urban street market today.

Latin Vicis

Modern English vice versa preserves another Latin word whose nominative singular form has never been observed, but would theoretically be *vicis or *vix. It is usually translated as ‘change, interchange, alternation, succession, vicissitude’, but perhaps ‘reciprocal behaviour or conduct’ is better. It is the root of modern English vicar and the prefix vice-, which was particularly productive in early French and shows up in viceroy, vice- admiral etc, meaning ‘deputy’ or someone acting in place of an absent superior. Any text needs to be analysed carefully to see whether vicus or *vicis is intended, as one can see by listing their noun declensions:

singular plural nominative vicus *vicis vici vices accusative vicum vicem vicos vices/vicis genitive vici vicis vicorum vicum dative vico vici vicis vicibus ablative vico vice vicis vicibus

The Latin etymology dictionary of De Vaan (2008) has separate entries for vicis ‘turn, occasion’, vicus ‘village, block of houses’, and vix ‘hardly’. Observed spellings raise phonological difficulties if one wishes to retain the multiple PIE roots suggested by Pokorny and others. Vicus and *vicis are linguistic doublets, two words very similar in form but subtly different in spelling and meaning. The English language is richly endowed with examples: cattle and chattels, cavalry and chivalry, etc. We think that vicus and *vicis were originally just one word, whose original meaning was, as Szemerenyi (1977) suggested, a group of humans on the move, later applied to the settlement of the clan. Anywhere with more than a few dwellings would naturally develop Adam-Smith- style division of labour, so the meanings ‘exchange’ and ‘village’ were probably inextricably linked from the beginning. The PIE root *weik-4, to which dictionaries assign *vicis, has descendants in many language families. The basic ‘exchange, swap’ meaning is well preserved by German Wechsel, Scots or northern English wissel, Old Norse vixla, etc. Sanskrit is interesting because it has viSTI ‘changeable,

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 359 by turn’ as well as words in the ‘village’ family. It follows that semantic divergence began at the PIE stage, and Latin usage was not so much the parent as the rich uncle of usages in other languages. Various ‘turn back’ words, also attributed to *weik-4, will be discussed below. Travel, trade, distance from a centre of power, and finance seem to have been all connected in the minds of early people. Latin vectigalia is an interesting word that originally meant something akin to road tolls or cus- toms duties, derived from vecto a variant spelling of veho ‘to transport’, but it evolved into a general word for ‘taxes’. French viguerie meant ‘local court’.

Vici and Vicani in Britain

Civilian settlements appear to have existed outside every independent Roman fort of reasonable size in Britain and Germany (Sommer, 2006). Geophysical investigations, allied to aerial photography and archaeological digs, show that such settlements mostly took the form of rows of buildings beside the main road leading into a fort, which often broadened out into what looks like a marketplace. But are modern archaeologists jus- tified in using vicus for such places in Roman times? Relevant evidence surviving from Roman Britain consists essentially of four place names that contain elements similar to vicus, three inscriptions that mention vicus and seven that mention vicanus, plus one tribal name. Here are their details: • Londinium (London): Vico Iovio on a lead sheet. • Durobrivae: cvnoarus vico duro on pottery from an industrial centre near Peterborough, where the main north–south route up eastern England later called Ermine Street crossed the river Nene near its tidal limit. • Lindum (Lincoln): vic hrapo mercuresium on a inscription from the next choke point on that main road, where hrapo resembles Old Norse hreppr ‘rural municipality’, which was much like a Roman vicus. • Petuaria (Brough-on-Humber): vici petv on a stone from the north side of the river Humber on the line of that main road. The name

Petuaria might fit a community of ferrymen, derived from PIE*pet- ‘to rush, to fly’, seen in Latin compitum ‘crossroads’ and Compitalia, the Roman festival particularly celebrated by vici. • Delgovicia (probably Malton, Yorkshire). The name might fit a community engaged in making fibulae, garment fastenings because of Old Irish delg and OE dalc ‘brooch’. • Γαβραντουικων was Ptolemy’s name for a ‘bay suitable for a harbour’ somewhere near Bridlington and Flamborough Head. • Vindolanda (on Hadrian’s Wall): vicani vindolandesses on one inscription. The best-recorded troops there were Tungrians and Bata- vians, from around the lower Rhine. • *Velunion (an uncertain spelling) and/or Borcovicium was the name of Housesteads fort on Hadrian’s Wall, noteworthy for extensive agricultural and industrial activity nearby and for inscriptions left by Fris- ian troops using a Germanic language. • Velunia (Carriden near Bo’Ness): vikani consistentes castell veluniate on an inscription. The much-discussed ancient word *vellaunus ‘commanding’ (Evans, 1967), has its best parallels in Germanic languages. This Roman fort on the south side of the river Forth may have served as a supply base and command centre for the eastern end of the Antonine Wall. Other evidence hints that after Roman times an emporium persisted and the area was settled by Frisian migrants. • Maglona was probably the Roman name of the fort at Old Car- lisle Farm, near Wigton in Cumbria, where an inscription vik mag aram was found. Wigton is claimed (debatably) not to be derived from wic. • Longovicium (unlocated but probably in Cumbria) may have been a shipbuilding site because navis longa ‘long ship’ was the usual Roman name for a warship. • Ordovices starts like Latin ordo ‘governing council’. These people lived in north Wales, where lead/silver mines and druid-fuelled rebel- lions interested the Romans. • Vicanus shows up as a personal name in inscriptions at Cirencester and at Richborough. • Victoria probably referred to the Roman victory at Graupius mons, near Duncrub in the Ochil Hills in Scotland. It shows the ‘fighting’ sense of *weik-5.

These abbreviated notes are extracted from fuller presentations of evidence on the romaneranames and manfredclauss websites and sometimes update Rivet and Smith (1979). They highlight possible cultural links across the North Sea that may shed light on the people involved in vici. Notice the absence of links between ancient vicus-based names and later ones based on wic.

Greek Forms

Greek οικος was cognate with Latin vicus, but no ancient writer ever linked the two words. When translating from Latin into Greek, classical authors rendered vicus as κωμη ‘unwalled village’ or στενωπος ‘narrow passage’, never οικος. Greek manuscripts of the New Testament described inhabited places where Jesus travelled as κωμη, or αγρος ‘fields’, orπολις ‘city’. Οικος did resemble vicus in being primarily a concept, a ‘household’ or ‘estate’, rather than a physical building. Its parent was arguably the verb οικεω ‘to inhabit, to colonise’, which has a big ecosystem of descendant words in English. The way that ancient Greeks created a diaspora of colonies, from Crimea to Marseilles, after they outran their homeland’s agricultural potential and mastered the sea, is exemplified byΜονοικος , literally ‘alone οικος’, modern Monaco. As Szemerenyi (1977) pointed out, semantic evolution from a verb meaning ‘to settle’ towards a noun meaning ‘settlement’ is easier to imagine than in the other direction, from a noun meaning ‘house’ towards a verb meaning ‘to build a new house’. Greek εποικισις ‘settlement of a colony’ may even show up in Roman Britain. The Ravenna Cosmography mentioned Epocessa and Ypocessa somewhere near the middle of Offa’s Dyke – possibly a duplication, possibly two instances of the same type of place. Εποικεω could mean ‘to settle with aggressive intent’. Ancient Greek had another, often forgotten, relative of οικος and vicus. Εικων ‘image’ had suffered a typically Greek loss of an initial W sound compared with Latin victima ‘sacrificial animal’, as in other cognate pairs εικοσι/viginti ‘twenty’ and ιταλος/vitulus ‘bull (calf)’. Its parent verb εικω ‘to seem like’ also meant ‘to retire, give way’. All this begins to makes sense in the context of ancient religion.

The usual Greek translation of Latin victima was ἱερα ‘offerings’. The adjective ἱερος focussed primarily on places (sanctuaries or temples) and meant ‘sacred, holy, set apart’, whereas in modern English the word hier- atic has evolved to focus on the officiating human priest. In John’s gos- pel 18:13 Caiaphas the high priest was αρχιερευς in Greek but auhumists weiha in Gothic. A key feature of sanctuaries was to be situated on neutral ground away from tribal centres. They were protected by religious taboos and survived economically on the offerings of the faithful, whose sacrifices were eaten in communal feasts, not wantonly destroyed. To meet the demand for temple sacrifices, Greek sanctuaries had patches of land set aside τεμενος( ‘cut out’) to graze cattle, even if it would have been more efficient to grow crops there. An obsession with cattle was deeply embedded in Greek culture (McInerney, 2010) even though ancient Greeks had lost much of the pastoral heritage of their Indo-European prior elite and Greece is not prime cattle-rearing country. Homer’s poems, probably created around 800 BC, repeatedly mention how cattle served as standard units for measuring value among early people. Even when coins started appearing around 600 BC they often bore cattle designs and it is argued that oxhide-shaped in- gots were an early form of currency. Priests became deeply involved in commerce, leasing land for graz- ing, organising feasts, taking their cut, and arbitrating in disputes. Their set-apart sanctuaries pioneered the market economy for humble people. This logic supplies a likely reason why a single word root meaning something like ‘set apart’ later developed towards senses as apparently different as ‘trading place’ and ‘heathen idol’. Ancient Greek literacy provides a window into the process with well-recorded vocabulary.

Gothic weihs

The earliest attested Germanic language is Gothic, into which Ulfilas translated the New Testament in about AD 350. He used a word weihs, which is probably cognate with Latin vicus because Gothic h represented a

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 363 sound like Greek chi or modern German ch. Once again there is no simple, one-to-one correspondence between vicus, weihs, and κωμη. The really important lesson to be drawn from Gothic texts is that weihs had another meaning, of ‘holy’, plus a related verb weihan or weigan ‘to consecrate’. It has clear parallels across Germanic languages: OE weoh or wih ‘idol’, German Weihnachten ‘Christmas’, and Old Norse vé ‘shrine’. OE wigbed ‘altar’ and wiglung ‘sorcery’ were derived words, as were several English place names, such as Wye or Weedon. Early Germanic religion appears to have inherited from deeper In- do-European roots a twofold concept of holiness. Gothic hailags was cognate with modern ‘holy’, but it actually meant something closer to modern ‘wholesome’, whereas weihs meant something like ‘set apart’ or ‘sacred’ (Ælfric, 2014). Weihs and its cognates were marginalised after Christianity deliberately tried to stamp out old beliefs, but the idea of divine apartness survived: think of isolated monasteries, consecrated ground, or rood screens in churches. This interpretation of weihs ac- cords well with Szemerenyi’s clan-on-the-move idea for the deep origin of wic etc. There was yet a third sense of Gothic weihan, equivalent to OE wigan, Old Nose veginn, or Latin vincere, meaning ‘to fight’. An elementwig in personal names, such as Ludwig or Wiglaf, king of Mercia and also mentioned in Beowulf, is usually interpreted as referring to prowess in war. Where is the semantic link between fighting and other wic-like words? Did warfare necessarily involve travel? Some national constitutions explicitly describe homeland defence as a sacred duty. It seems to be part of human nature to defend territories as fiercely as any wild animal, so that fighting was primarily an outlying activity, to be done at the border. Many societies now ritualise this activity into sporting events. Diamond (2012) described militarised clan boundaries but most apposite are these words of Julius Caesar about Germanic tribes: ‘It is a matter of the greatest glory to the tribes to lay waste, as widely as possible, the lands bordering their territory, thus making them uninhabitable. They regard it as the best proof of their valour that their neighbours are forced to withdraw from those lands and hardly any one dares set foot there ... Robbery, if committed beyond the borders of the tribe, is not regarded as disgraceful.’

Other Germanic Forms

Modern English retains far more wic-like words than is commonly real- ised. The Oxford English Dictionary recognises five main meanings for wick or wike, of which three (‘abode/town/farm’, ‘creek or inlet’, and ‘jurisdiction of an official’) can be explained as derived from the ‘trading- place’ concept. Wich or wych as ‘salt-making site’ fits that concept too. Then there are words with a sense of going there-and-back (like the travels of a trader) or into a corner, such as wick meaning ‘corner of mouth or eye’or ‘to drive a stone between two guard stones, in curling’. OE wicu ‘week’ came originally from four phases of the moon. Greek εικω ‘to retire’ is probably cognate. Maybe Dutch wijken ‘to yield, recede, disappear’ (compounded into afwijken ‘to deviate’, uitwijken ‘to emigrate, avoid collision’) is too. It is less easy to explain wick meaning ‘bundle of fibres’, which must be ascribed to *weik-4 ‘to bend, to wind’, along with wicker, wicket, wych-elm, and weak. The earliest known mention of Vikings is in Old English, not Norse, as wicingas in the poem Widsith. Apparently these wicingas were not yet sea-robbers, merely peaceful travellers. Other attested OE words refer to dwelling places (wicstede, wicsteall, wiceard, wicstow), official functions (wice, wicgerefa, wicþegen, etc), and to camping temporarily (wician). All these can be seen as aspects of the ‘trading-place’ concept. The perceived equivalence of wic and vicus is obvious, for example, in an AD 800 mancus coin issued by King Coenwulf, inscribed de vico lundoniae while Lundenwic was active, which the British Museum de- scribes as England’s answer to Charlemagne’s vico dorestatis. Between about AD 500 and 800, literally hundreds of places across the Merovin- gian (or “Frankish”) empire from the Rhine to the Pyrenees produced coins bearing inscriptions such as ivegio vico. Many place names in Scandinavia end in –vi compounded with a deity name, so they probably had a vé ‘shrine’ at their heart. The commonest single name invoked on Roman-era stone altars in England (apart from the tritely Roman Jupiter etc) was Veteri (also spelled Hvetiri, etc), which strikingly resembles Norse Vættir ‘nature spirits’. Wicked and witch, have been given connotations of evil and heresy by Christianity, but wily, perhaps from an early form *wihl, has not gone so far downhill.

The name Hwicce, of a tribe in the Gloucester-Worcester area, has provoked much discussion, recently examined by Coates (2013). He dis- missed the parallels with OE hwicce ‘box, chest’ (as in the Ark of the Covenant, probably a precursor of modern English hutch), originally suggested by Margaret Gelling, and with witches, much enthused over by Yeates (2009). Several place names have been unconvincingly claimed as derived from Hwicce. However, the Celtic analysis of Hwicce offered by Coates is also unconvincing. It seems not to have been pointed out that Hwicce makes perfect sense meaning ‘outliers’. From an early English point of view they were border people, described functionally without necessarily implying political unity. This analysis matches the meaning of Mercia further north and contrasts with Powys, across the border in Wales, which possibly came from Latin *pagenses, meaning people of the pagus, country cousin of the word vicus. The native language of Hwicce peasants is unknown, but might have been Old English or Old Welsh. The ruling class probably started out as Roman gentry, fluent in Latin but with ethnic roots as likely from the Rhineland or Greece as from Britain. So it would be unwise to dwell on the initial H of Hwicce, beyond noting that Old English HW generally turned into modern WH and was related to Welsh GW, Irish F, and Latin QU. The closest modern parallel to Hwicce may be whig, which was first recorded in 1645 as meaning ‘country bumpkin’, perhaps referring to a representative sent up to the city from a rural meeting place. As an ordinary English word, wight can mean a strong warrior, which perhaps links up with PIE *weik-5 ‘to conquer’, discussed above. It can also mean a companion spirit, which was presumably the sense of the early form Wiht of the Isle of Wight, which was Latinised into Vectis (Durham, 2011) and can now be seen as a development of wic’s core meaning of ‘apart’ or ‘outlying’. Vectis had parallels elsewhere, notably in the tin- trading island of Ικτιν mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, never conclusively identified, though the strongest candidate is Burgh Island. There is even an intriguing parallel around Whitton, in the Humber estuary, on the approach towards York. Modern Dutch has words such as afwijken ‘to deviate’, uitwijken ‘to emigrate, avoid collision’, and wijken ‘to yield, recede, disappear’, with a common base of ‘to go elsewhere’.

Celtic Forms

Celtic-language dictionaries seem heavily influenced by their compilers’ awareness of Latin vicus. Pughe (1832) defined Welsh gwig as ‘a strait place; a corner, nook, or angle; a cove; a little retreat, or opening in a wood, being such a situation at the Britons, who lived by hunting and tend- ing their flock, generally built their hamlets in; hence in after times it de- noted a fortress, a place of security, a town’. Armstrong (1825) defined Gaelic fich as ‘country village’ and Bock (2012) defined Cornish gwig as ‘village’. Recent authoritative dictionaries show that the Celtic languages parallel English in having multiple meanings for words like wic. Thus Old Irish fích meant ‘village, a rural district, indefinite stretch of land’, which makes it similar, but not identical, to Latin vicus, and it also meant ‘feud, anger’. Welsh gwig is much the same: it has been interpreted as ‘town, street, wood’, or ‘strife, battle’, or ‘creek, cove, small bay’. Matasovic (2009) envisaged a proto-Celtic word *wexta- ‘time, course, turn’ as the past participle of PIE *wegh- ‘to convey’. This brings Celtic into conformity with other language families discussed here, having inherited words descended from the deep root about people on the move root suggested by Szeremenyi (1977). Old Irish fecht ‘expedition, raid’ seems to have preserved that sense well. Celtic, like Germanic and Latin, shows a confusion with, or sense development to, fighting. Latin supplied many loan words to Welsh and strongly influenced Old Irish texts. So, if Latin vicus was indeed the source of words like wic and gwig, one might expect to see strong traces in the place names of historic- ally Celtic-speaking areas. However, fewer than 30 names (such as Gweek, Dinorwig, and Wigtown) are real candidates, and most of them look as if they came from English or Norse rather than being Celtic survivals. For example, in south Wales Kenfig was an Anglo-Norman mercantile out- post, often attacked by the Welsh. Many place names that now look impeccably Celtic were formerly Germanic, especially those named by Scandinavian sailors. Such men were mostly peaceful traders, even if they are remembered mainly as violent robbers, who left little long-term trace in places as diverse as Dublin, Kiev, Sicily, and Byzantium, presumably because they went native and married local women. Similarly, names that probably started out contain-

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 367 ing vik have been reinterpreted into other languages. The critical question here is whether any firm evidence can be found that ancient Celtic forms truly led to wic-based names. The spelling wig is relatively common in Wales and the border counties, but it cannot be a diagnostic marker for Celtic speech because it also appears at more than 60 places in lowland areas around Britain combined with impeccably Germanic elements. And, besides, it may often represent the OE word for ‘pagan shrine’. Also common in Wales is the name ending –wy, which Wyn Owen and Morgan (2007) explained as ‘bending, turning’ or ‘(land) belonging to, territory of’. However, a meaning like ‘way’ may be better for several Welsh river names, judging by their ancient forms: Canovium now Conwy, Τοβιοs now Tywi, etc. Breeze (1998) thought that Wigan in Lancashire, plus names such as Lledwygan in Wales, contain a diminutive of the precursor of Welsh gwig. Ekwall (1960) thought that Wigmore in Herefordshire came from Welsh gwig mawr, ‘great gwig’. In Brittany, a list of names from the 900s mentioned guic- mor. These names cannot be traced back far enough to exclude a Germanic precursor, especially since Norse Wigmar ‘great in war’ is a likely source of Breton Guigemar (in a poem from the 1100s) and the people called whigga- mores (plus variant spellings) who revolted in south-west Scotland in 1648. The Historia Brittonum survives in Latin manuscripts written in Latin after AD 800 but probably embodies material from centuries earlier. It mentions Cair Guinntguic, apparently a Welsh version of Venta-wic, Win- chester, and its suburb now called Weeke. Cornish guicgur ‘merchant’ was recorded in about 1200. On balance, it seems most likely that Celtic languages began using their wic-like words in the sense of ‘village’ and (as we suggest) ‘trading place’ at least as late as their neighbours to the east. Direct descent from Latin vicus is possible, but not proven.

Other Language Families

Sanskrit had a verb vic ‘to separate’ and a noun veza ‘settler, neighbour, small farmer’, while Avestan had vīs ‘village’. Old Russian весь ‘village’

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 368 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith is cognate, and the very productive prefixвы - ‘out’ may be also. Lithu- anian viespats ‘prince’ exemplies Baltic-language forms from an older waisis ‘settlement’. Tocharian, an Indo-European outlier language, was spoken in the area now occupied by people called Uyghurs, a name of unknown etymology. It was the specialist expertise of Szemerenyi in these languages that led him to think about the clan-on-the-move deep PIE root. Without those skills it is easy cherry-pick the words most closely related to vicus meaning ‘village’. Italy contained a patchwork of diverse languages before Rome became dominant. Some early inscriptions show veicus, which was probably a precursor of vicus rather than a country-bumpkin dialectal variant. One sister language of Latin, though markedly different, was Umbrian, in which vuku meant ‘sacred place’. It has been linked to Latin lucus ‘sacred grove’, ac- cepting an L/W consonant interchange as in modern Polish Ł, but a link to vicus seems better. A money ingot from about BC 250 was marked vukes sestines, probably ‘vicus of Sestinum’ in Umbrian.

Trading Places

Historians adopted wic as a general word for waterside places in north- west Europe with archaeology suggestive of trading and dated between AD 600 and 900. The best-known examples of such an ‘emporium’ (a word used by Bede to describe London) in Britain are Lundenwic (Lon- don) described in detail by Blackmore (2011), Hamwic (Southampton), Gipeswic (Ipswich), and Eoforwik (York). Examples on the Continent include Quentovic (in France), Dorestadus (now Wijk bij Duurstede on the Rhine), Birka (Sweden), and Kaupang (Norway). The conference-report volume by Hill and Cowie (2001) discusses all the accepted wic sites plus 20 or so possible candidates. Many were at or near a former Roman site. Sometimes it is possible to supply a plausible name for the Roman site: Hamwic ≈ Clausentum; Sandtun (West Hythe) ≈ Lemanis; Dover = Dubris; Luce Sands, Wigtownshire ≈ Brigomono and Αβραουαννου; Sandwich ≈ Rutupis; Seasalter ≈ Durolevo or Regulbio; Bantham ≈ Sarna; Dorestad ≈ Levefanum.

Evidence for this wic phenomenon tends to lie hidden under shifting sand dunes, silted-up estuaries, or urban sprawl, and analogous sites may have been lost to coastal erosion, notably around the North Sea. Thus Roman Lugdunum was off modern Katwijk, in the Netherlands. In East Anglia a Roman fort known as Walton Castle was off Felixstowe, across an estuary from Harwich, and Roman Durolavi was probably near the lost town of Dunwich. The geographical positions of trading sites were generally conserved from Roman into post-Roman times, even as the shapes of coastlines and estuaries altered, and overall patterns of commerce evolved. Many Roman towns evolved into later county towns, but we know only three wic places that preserved stubs of their Roman names: Lundenwic (Londinium), Eo- forwik (Eburacum), and Guinntguic (Venta Belgarum). Now it is time to examine the wic-based place names of modern Brit- ain, starting in the north.

Nordic Bays

The highest concentration in Britain of wic-like names is in Orkney and Shetland. The Ordnance Survey collected names in the northern isles after the Norn language had died out, so their true age is uncertain, but they are generally thought to contain a word for bay or inlet, descended from Old Norse vík. They often show on the map as a doublet of a coastal bay and a nearby settlement, such as May Wik and Maywick. Lerwick has the main harbour of the Shetlands. Close inspection of all these sites reveals that the characteristic that distinguishes them from other sea inlets (called firths, geos, or voes) is boat-friendliness: 70 out of 75 wick sites in Shetland can be seen in aerial or touristic photos on the Internet to have a beach of sand or shingle, where people could easily get into and out of boats. Just five lie inland or on a thoroughly hostile shore. In Orkney, 20 out of 23 wick sites are good landing places for boats. Another 4 wicks are on the adjacent Scottish mainland, including the substantial harbour at Wick. Four more wick-named bays are on the Isle of Man, four are on the coast of Pembrokeshire, and Smerwick is on the Irish

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 370 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith coast. The name shifts from wick to wyke for 5 out of 6 bays of lakes in Cumbria, and for 14 out of 15 coastal bays in Yorkshire. Norway looks much the same. A brief scan of www.norgeskart.no reveals prodigious numbers of place names that end in –vik (Narvik, Brei- vik, Lavik, etc) scattered all around the indented coastline. It is even more difficult than in Orkney and Shetland to see whether each –vik name belongs more to bay or settlement, and perhaps both really relate to a beach, but it is noticeable that vik names within Norwegian fjords usually occur at ferry landing-points, which are obvious sites of exchange. Watson (1904) explained Gaelic –aig endings of coastal names in north-west Scotland as descended from Norse –vik. This prompted Fraser (1994) to look at the geography of 18 of these places, which all had access to arable land, fresh water, and timber, besides somewhere to launch a boat and reach the open sea. However, he did not go on to suggest that a vik was primarily a settlement and the ‘bay’ meaning is a later derivative or red herring. Writing about places on the coast of Normandy, Lepelley (2005) inde- pendently defined Old Norse vik as ‘small bay with access to land’. Some modern names there retain their final consonant (Plainvic, Sanvic, etc) but others have lost it (Brévy, Cap Lévi, Houvi, Vasouy, etc). Further north in France, in floodable land near the coast, names derived from Flemish wijk often now look more French or English, such as Audruicq, Craywick, or Salperwick. The usual linguistic interpretation is that these names came from Old Norse vík, whose modern descendants (Norwegian vik, Danish vig, etc) mean ‘inlet, bay, creek’. We do not know enough about Scandinavian languages to unscramble all the grammatical forms or to attempt proper statistics, but it seems likely that the earliest –vik names marked trading places and the ‘bay’ interpretation is a latter generalisation. This fits with the observation that late-settled areas (Norway, Faeroes, Iceland) seem to have more –vik names than Denmark or Sweden. The first Viking raids on Britain were recorded in the AD 790s, but it has long been suggested that more peaceful traders preceded these violent robbers. One of the earliest known OE words, written in about AD 680, was uuícingsceadae glossed with Latin piraticam. It is unlikely that the wicing part originally meant ‘pirate’, because the second element supplied the sense of harm; it is a precursor of modern scathe and probably related to the Scotti sea-raiders mentioned from

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 371 about AD 300. OE wician meant ‘to encamp, to stop in the course of a march, to land’. Heide (2005) listed six theories that have been proposed to explain the word Viking, of which three involve verbs meaning ‘withdraw, leave’, ‘deviation, detour’, and ‘to travel, to go’. He noted the existence of places called Víkin ‘the vík’ and suggested that the essential meaning of vík might have originally been ‘the act of turning aside’ rather than ‘bay’. Mees (2012) built on this to interpret Vikingr as ‘someone who goes on a (nautical) turning’. Neither of these two authors took the final logical step of recognising that Viking voyagers were originally traders. However, they did highlight turning. This allows us to understand how *weik-4 ‘to bend, to wind’ (with its weird array of descendants, including weak, week, wicker, and wych- elm) may unite with all the other *weik- roots. The very essence of trading was to go somewhere, then turn around and come back. Old Norse had a verb víkja ‘to move, to turn’ so maybe a Norse word existed with the original Indo-European sense of ‘outlying’, which allowed vik to mean ‘trading place’ very early. The Goths, who probably originated around the Baltic Sea, started pressing towards the Roman Empire around AD 160 and later temporarily governed much of it. Their name survives in the Swedish island of Gotland, which had many long-distance trading sites controlled by local families, in Viking times, and is now rich in vik names. At present, majority thinking holds to the idea that vik was a loan-word from Latin, just like wic. It is thought that Scandinavian ships were not propelled by sails until well after Roman times, so the idea of long voyages with heavy cargoes might be a cultural import from the south. If that view is correct, the main early Scandinavian word was vé ‘shrine’, recognisable in place names from its propensity to couple with a deity name.

Water Transport

Selkirk (1995) argued that the Roman army did as much as possible of its logistics by water, sometimes using small boats on amazingly small rivers. This annoyed some archaeologists, but really he was just stating two uni- versal truths: that heavy cargoes can travel much more cheaply on water

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 372 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith than on land, and that altering water channels can be a more efficient use of manpower than building roads. In fact, river banks next to Roman forts in Britain have a statistically stronger claim to the word vicus than extramural settlements do. Much the same argument holds for OE wic. Almost within living memory, a large proportion of ordinary British farms had their own dock giving access to the local river or canal. This can be seen, for example, in John Constable’s paintings of barges on the Essex river Stour or at the working museum of Morwellham Quay in Devon. At the start of this investigation we took very seriously the hypothesis that wic started out meaning ‘river wharf’ or at least ‘place to get into a boat’. However, it fails when checked against our big database, because the proportion of wic-named places does not rise far enough above the nor- mal propensity of settlements to develop beside water. In mainland Britain 88 definite ports have wic-based names, 7% of the total number. Some are active ports now (such as modern Harwich and Ipswich, or former Hamwic and Jorvik). They include fishing harbours (Wick, Gweek), river ports (Greenwich, Redwick), or small places that have jetties from which pleasure boats, lifeboats, canal barges, etc depart (Hampton Wick, Hack- ney Wick). Up to 50% of other wic-named sites might plausibly have been served by boats in the past, when humans were more willing to spend all day in a boat and had altered the natural landscape less. In short, wic and waterside are definitely correlated but not strongly enough to suggest causation. Access to navigable water was not the defin- ing characteristic of a mediaeval wic. This conclusion is reinforced by looking closely at particular areas we know well. The Isle of Wight is rich in harbours, notably the busy mediaeval port at Brading (killed by siltation), the Roman ferry-embarkation place in Gurnard Luck (silted-up), waterside stone quarries at Quarr and Bem- bridge (exhausted), and a Stone-Age river port at Alversone (dried up recently). None of these historic ports has a wic name, whereas places that do (Weeks and Wigmore Copse near Ryde, Bagwich and Week Farm near the ultimate source of the eastern river Yar, and Wicken Hill Lane in the south) would have been painful to serve by boats. The really interesting question is why so many wic-named places were in wholly dry situations, unsuitable for trading heavy goods. Presum- ably their emporium function was quite small, like a precursor of a modern village shop not a shopping mall.

Salt

Allen (1889) suggested that wic names first arose at coastal salt-making places, then transferred to inland places such as Droitwich. It is hard nowadays to believe how important the ancient salt trade was. Remarkable tonnages of salt needed to be shipped around just to meet the physiological needs of people and animals in pastoral societies. Each dairy cow needs an extra 10 kg or so of NaCl per year above what grass can supply in rainy Britain (where water washes soluble salts out of pasture and down into the ground) just to replace losses in milk and excreta. In some habitats, salt availability was a key determinant of human population size, because win- ter survival depended on how much preserved food had been stored away, notably salted meat, milk, and fish. States went to war over salt, taxed it, and paid salaries with it. Archaeologists think that salt was a key factor in the expansion of early farmers and Indo-European languages around 4000 BC or earlier. Evidence of prehistoric wealth sometimes shows up in areas that later prospered from salt making, for example the megalith rows and mounds of Carnac in Brittany (Weller, 2015) Ancient pottery vessels (briquetage) used to boil brine at inland salt springs sometimes have been found, for example in the Cucuteni culture in Romania (Brigand and Weller, 2018). If there was a prehistoric word associated with salt it was probably salt itself, most likely derived from the way crusts form on drying lakes or marshes because so many S-vowel-L words refer to something low down or dirty. Krahe (1964) listed 30-plus ancient river names beginning with Sal- that may be associated with the transport of salt. In Roman Britain the three known instances of Salinis or Σαλιναι are not associated with a place named vicus. One stand-out example linking salt, vicus, and modern wic-related place names is Vic-sur-Seille, in Lorraine, mentioned above. Near Vigo, in Spain, there was a Roman fishing harbour, coastal salterns, and industrial production of garum, salty fish sauce. In Britain, most suitable sites on the coast have almost certainly produced salt from seawater at some time (Murphy, 2011) but few coastal salterns are associated with wic names. One at Wyke Regis in Dorset was active in Roman times (Bailey, 1963). In Essex over 300 Red Hills have been mapped, which are gigantic piles

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 374 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith of industrial waste from Iron-Age or Roman-era salt-making, sticking up through a metre or more of silt (Fawn et al., 1990). Some of Canvey Island’s many salterns were probably originally Roman (Linder, 1938). The earliest known written reference to –wick names there was in 1263 (Rippon and Wainwright, 2011), but Camden (1610) described Canvey as “so low that often times it is quite overflowen, all save hillocks cast uppe, upon which the sheepe have a place of safe refuge. ... and to make cheeses of Ewes milke in those dairy sheddes of theirs that they call there wiches.” Coastal salterns were often surprisingly far inland, fed by seawater channelled inland at high tides. The best location for salt-making probably depended on a balance between all the inputs (sea water, flat land for it to evaporate, clay to make boiling pans, fuel, human labour, etc) and where the potential customers lived. A common technique was to heap up salt- encrusted soil, leach out a concentrated brine, and then boil that down. Around the North Sea one well-documented mediaeval technology was to use peat like a sponge to absorb sea water, dry it and burn it, and then leach salt out of the ashes. In modern Dutch the word wijk can mean a channel leading into a peat bog. Most salt-producing wic-named places in mediaeval Britain lay well inland. They had a competitive advantage over coastal sites because they started with brine that was more concentrated than the sea in sodium chloride and less in bitter-tasting magnesium chloride. The main examples are:

Droitwich, plus Upwich, Middlewich, and Netherwich in Worcestershire Nantwich, Northwich, Leftwich, and Middlewich in Cheshire Fulwich in another part of Cheshire Wychbold and Wyken Farm in Shropshire Shirleywich and Baswich in Staffordshire.

Salt-transporting routes away from such places can often be mapped by place names along ancient roads, such as those radiating from Droitwich (Hooke, 1985). Other sequences of wic names apparently lead away from salt-producing sites on the coast, such as Bude (Cornwall), Saltfleet (Lin- colnshire), or the Norfolk Broads. At least 30 places in Britain have names based on wic plus a product usually preserved with salt: cheese, butter, bacon, etc. They include Chis- wick/Keswick, Butterwick, Spitchwick, plus possibly Fishwick, Elwick

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 375 and Swanwick. Maybe the 51 Hardwicks and Herdwicks, plus a few other places, were salt consumers too. To summarise this section, salt cannot supply the linguistic origin of wic and vicus. Salt is just a surrogate for commerce more generally. At salterns, salt and fuel were traded, while everywhere else salt was a key product sold at markets.

Observed Forms of British wic Names

Wic commonly occurs as a simplex place name element in Britain. We found 33 completely plain instances (13x Wick, 7x Week, 4x Weeke, 3x Wig, 2x Wyke, plus Wike, Wyke, Wych, and Wyche) plus 16 almost-plain ones (Weeks, Wix, Wyck, Y Wig, Wicken, Wykey, etc). Also wic-derived words appear in 44 anodyne combinations with words such as North, West, Upper, Lower, Middle, and Old. Furthermore, 36 instances exist of Wick Farm, Week Farm, etc (plus many more slightly variant forms), which shows that that meaning cannot have been plain ‘farm’, because farm farm would be a silly tautology. All these numbers are slightly a matter of interpretation, but their essential thrust is clear: wic had a very definite meaning as a word, such that ordinary people could speak of going to “the wic”, where only one such entity existed within any given administrative area, be it manor, parish or hundred. Possibly the commonest compound wic name is Hardwick (24 simplex variants, plus 28 more complex forms). Assuming that the first element meant ‘herd’, one should presumably add variants of cow-wic (10x), butter-wic (7x), or cheese-wic (12x), plus at least a dozen references to other animals or farm products: goat, goose, honey, etc. ‘Specialised farm’ cannot explain these agricultural references, because most subsistence farmers feed their families with a range of crops and animals. A Contin- ental parallel is Koetelwijk, the harbour area of Bruges, Belgium, which contains koetel ‘cow’. Hardwick/Herdwick makes sense as ‘stock market or fair’. The Herdwick sheep breed of Cumbria may have originated as ‘sheep traded at market’.

At least 38 or more names Berwick, Barwick, etc match the attested word berewic. OE bere is generally translated as ‘barley’, but Ekwall (1960) suggested a more general sense of ‘corn’, and there may be confu- sions from other words meaning ‘pasture’ or ‘byre’. Berwick upon Tweed could have been the ‘corn market’ focal to the Tweed valley, a major corn- producing area. We suspect that berewic often meant ‘tithe barn’, which slightly stretches the concept of market trading. The related name Barton, from beretun, is even commoner. For example, Bradford on Avon still has a splendid 14th-century tithe barn, built at Barton Farm for the distant Shaftsbury abbey. Traditional organisation of agrarian trading is an understudied subject, since the early modern writer William Marshall (1798), and we have not done statistics on all the elements associated with wic. A few are topographical: Lowick is low, Fenwick had fens, Spaldwick had a ditch, and so on. Swanwick and Swanage probably refer to swans. Alnwick on the river Aln pushes the question back to what ancient Alauna meant. Some elements associated with wic (or Latin vicus) imply subordination to another site. Few wic names have a personal name as first element (in Surrey there is one doubtful instance out of 23 names). This implies that wics were sites of collective activity. In the English Place-Name Society’s volume for Surrey (Gover et al., 1934.) wic is given as always occurring within, or comprising, an estate (i.e. a manorial) name; whereas it is unrecorded as a ‘minor or field name’. So it cannot be a simple topographical term. Clearly, a wic indicates a site of special community interest. Since first elements frequently name agrarian produce, the picture in Surrey can best be explained as a pattern of tithe barns and ‘butter crosses’, plus the sort of village greens with their pounds or stock en- closures that dot the Surrey Weald. Just across the boundary in Sussex is Rudgwick, which might be ‘wic on the county boundary ridge’. The early economy here seems indeed to have been stock-rearing on the Weald’s many marshy commons, given the region’s sundry parishes named with animal first elements (Cowden, Cowfold, Horsted, Horsham, etc), including in Surrey’s case three estates called Gatwick (‘goat wic ’), and several villages specifically called ‘-fold’ (that is, animal fold). In very few regions do clusters of parishes have wic names, but North- umberland is an exception (with Alnwick, Lowick, Fishwick, etc) and

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 377 personal-name prefixes seem also to occur there. Perhaps in an unstable border area few real villages initially existed and the only stable sites were fairs for the local produce, including sites controlled by named warlords with fortified farmsteads. Some wic sites are so isolated that it is hard to imagine many people living there, but this is not unusual for rural fairs, which often took place periodically at remote neutral sites, such as on tribal boundaries in Roman Gaul. The clustering of particular trades on specific market streets seen in medieval towns often persisted at out-of-town fairs. Smethwick might have been where West Midlands blacksmiths gathered on the heath to exchange their wares.

Conclusions. The Emergence of Vici

At the start of this investigation, data collection and analysis seemed like the key to finding out how wic and vicus originated. We hoped that the sheer quantity of information available nowadays, especially through the Internet, would show a timeline in the development of wick-named places. One specific type of wick, perhaps port or saltern, would then emerge as primary, with a clear path of semantic evolution leading to all the rest. That idea turned out to be wrong. What was supposed to be a mere introduction to this article, dealing with linguistic issues, ended up being its core, because the key developments that led to wic and vicus happened deep in prehistory. When they started being written down the game was almost over, because their basic meaning – an exchange place or process – was already fixed. Specific realisations, such as a waterside market or extramural settlement, are mere variations on that basic theme. Our conclusion can be brutally summed up with one sentence: Latin vicus is essentially the same word as *vicis. Peering into the distant past requires expertise in anthropology and archaeology, which are not our specialty, and anyway new developments in DNA sequencing are causing a revolution in thinking. So the diagram of semantic developments, in Figure 3, should be regarded purely as a focus for discussion, to show where difficulties lie and where fresh insight is needed. Beside the general point that grand syntheses of historical events are always to be mistrusted, this diagram should really be sprin- kled with criss-crossing arrows and question marks, because languages develop less as an evolutionary tree and more as a network than used to be believed. Everything starts from a word for travel, with possessions or in a vehicle, whose descendants in English include the words way and wagon. This led to Szemerenyi’s deep root for wic, the clan on the move. Another verb of motion offers an interesting parallel, since the word trade comes from the same root as tread. The essence of trade is to procure goods from a distance, and for that someone necessarily has to travel. Hunter-gatherers typically do a lot of travelling, but they have few possessions, and most of those belong to the group, not the individual. Some core Indo-European vocabulary (host equals guest, giving equals

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The wic Element in Place Names 379 receiving, and so on) suggests that reciprocal obligations guided interper- sonal relationships since early in human history. Archaeologists envisage then a shift to gift exchange, with proper commerce developing much later. Anthropologists discuss when trade and exchange started (Doǧan, 2008), but it was almost certainly after people settled down in farms, or around herds. Any organised group that masters a technology to travel (horse, wagon, or boat) faces a trilemma – to trade, raid, or settle – neatly exemplified by the three distinct senses of the word Viking: peaceful traders, sea-pirates, and founders of viks. Similar processes played out in many areas at many dates. For example, in the Mediterranean think of Minoan sailors, the pirates stamped out by Pompey, and Greek settlements. Development to the sense ‘outlying, set apart’ is most evident from words about religion (vé, weoh, εικων, victima, etc) and possibly from geographical outliers (Wight, Hwicce, Uyghur). Another logical sense development is to fighting (victory, Ludwig, etc), best done on other people’s turf. ‘There and back’ words (wicker, weak, etc) might have developed from the travels involved in trading. There was a stage in human history when iron weapons and other technology first allowed governments to establish large armies and rulers needed to think seriously about logistics. Any expeditionary force will eventually exhaust its supplies brought from home and need to find more food. Foraging (i.e. stealing from local people) may work for a while, but the best long-term solution is to pay soldiers in coins and force local people to pay taxes in coins. It may sound rather glib, but precisely this process has happened repeatedly around the world. It tends to coincide with the emergence of new philosophical ideas worldwide, as exemplified by Confucius, Buddha, and Pythagoras. Proper coinage started to appear around 600 BC, when “coins and markets sprung up above all to feed the machinery of war” (Graeber, 2011). We suspect that this was the point when the words vicus ‘emporium’ and *vicis ‘exchange’ took off. Markets lubricated with coins automatically match producers to consumers. The proposition that Rome offered to conquered peoples might be put into words like this: our army has imposed peace; you are more prosperous because you no longer live in fear of raids from neighbouring tribes; we will tax you to pay our army; and we will recruit your surplus children as soldiers and housemaids.

To explain markets, many textbooks still cling to the myth of primeval barter. However, coincidence of wants – trader A has what trader B wants, and vice versa, at the same moment – rarely happens in practice. In fact, ancient trade mostly relied on credit – A knows B and they trust each other enough for their mutual indebtedness to balance out long term (Graeber, 2011). The problem then becomes that business deals are hard to arrange if both parties do not already know each other by reputation or cannot count on ever seeing each other again. Solving that problem requires the involvement of a trusted third party, which is usually some combination of government (i.e. superior military force) and religion (i.e. socially accepted ethical standards). Early rulers, such as Hammurabi in 1800 BC, created standard weights and measures, and laid down rules of ethical conduct, but did not go on to invent coins. Payments had to be expressed using commodities with an inherent value that cannot be faked: salt is a good example and cattle come close. Coins unlocked economic growth because they allowed anonym- ous trading. Anyone could buy anything from anyone, without prolonged negotiation, once coins circulated at emporiums. It merely required an authority figure to validate the coins, while standing back from actual transactions. The patron of an emporium might be royal (emperor, war- lord, etc), religious (temple, monastery, etc), or democratic (town council or just established custom), but would usually be represented locally by an official. If this logic is correct, the market economy was born roughly when Rome was founded. A new word was needed for places where trade was open to all comers, and we suggest that in Latin that word was vicus. It does not matter whether *vicis ‘exchange’ was its older or younger twin, or whether a precursor of wic already existed in northern Europe. A word that primarily described the function of an emporium would naturally get applied to its location, which would often be at the tidal limit of a signifi- cant river, or a coastal beach protected from storms, or the outskirts of a town with a substantial hinterland. Rome’s distinctive contribution was a wider economic context, the first European common market. Coins stamped with the emperor’s head made customers at a vicus aware of belonging to a big Empire, especially after Augustus’ reforms gave a standard religious and administrative structure to many vici. And of course any market needs a regular time and place, which is much simpler in a time of peace and stable government.

Obviously there were changes over time. The heyday of Anglo-Saxon wics lasted barely three centuries before trade pulled back inside the walls of mediaeval new towns, but that is long compared with the 15 years aver- age lifespan of a modern company. Size too varied greatly, from huge county fairs to tiny coastal settlements. And a monastery tithe barn was probably more orderly than the street trade in a poor quarter of a city. The most enthusiastic adopters of the Roman vicus model seem to have lived around the river Moselle and Augusta Treverorum (Trier), in the Lorraine/Rhineland area. Germania inferior was a turbulent and imper- fectly documented Roman province (Lendering and Bosman, 2012), so it is impossible to be certain why vici caught on there. Our best guess is that it was imperial Roman policy to encourage settlement there of people who considered themselves Roman, to hinder the passage of northern barbar- ians towards the fleshpots of Gaul. Retired soldiers from humble backgrounds probably made up many of the vicani. Continuity of location was strong, but not perfect. This is not really strange, considering how transient great trading places have proved to be throughout history. Only a particularly advantageous geographical situation could make an ancient emporium survive into a modern city. The norm is for a city to buzz with economic activity for a while, but then its harbour silts up, or technology changes, or the political environment turns hostile. On the other hand, continuity of name was weak. It looks as if, when trade picked up in Britain after the post-Roman “Dark Ages”, wic was often the most appropriate word to use for a trading place. Other words that filled that niche elsewhere in Europe do not appear to have reached Britain: εμποριον (literally ‘on journey’), platea (the source of place and piazza), αγορα (‘assembly place’), forum (‘pass-through place’), and souk. Other central places in ancient Britain where trading happened had names with semantic roots (as far as we currently know) in activities other than commerce. They include Coria, Mediolanum, Portus, and Venta, plus the elements Banna-, Duro-, –magus, and Veno-. Conversely, words that do refer to commerce (modern English market, exchange, shop, fair, cheap, purse, rink, counter, etc; other languages bourse, Handel, and торг) have not been recognised in ancient names. Semantic evolution from ‘emporium’ to the main types of wic place recognised in mediaeval Britain is straightforward. Scandinavian vik shows

Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 382 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith how a little cluster of houses, plus their access point to the sea, could be named as a trading place. Translating Viking as ‘trader’ and noting OE wician ‘to camp temporarily’ fits this picture. There is often a grain of truth in national stereotypes. Is it coincidence that wic and its cognates flourished in parts of north-west Europe famous for their petite bourgeoisie? In the 1600s the Dutch were the top traders of the world, before that title passed to Britain’s nation of shopkeepers. In a landscape that is generally flat, never far from water, and modestly endowed with natural resources, it makes sense for people to trade together consensually with a minimum of control from the top. In short, the place- name element wic symbolises the birth of the market economy.

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The &lt;I&gt;Wic&lt;/I&gt; Element in Place Names

The <I>Wic</I> Element in Place Names