The <I>Wic</I> Element in Place Names
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applyparastyle “fig//caption/p[1]” parastyle “FigCapt” Philology, vol. 4/2018/2019, pp. 347–385 © 2019 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith - DOI https://doi.org/10.3726/PHIL042019.11 2019 The wic Element in Place Names 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 some- where 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 through- out 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 pre- sent 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 descend- ants. We suggest a possible evolutionary tree of semantic develop- ment, 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 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 349 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/ 350 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith 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 gram- matical 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 habita- tion sites. We checked that this remains true in the light of recent archae- ology 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 set- tlements, 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 dic- tionary of Pokorny (1959), but the presentation and typography here fol- low Watkins (2011): 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/ 352 Anthony Durham & Gavin Smith 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.