May G. Williamson the Non-Celtic Place-Names of the Scottish Border Counties
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May G. Williamson The Non-Celtic Place-Names of the Scottish Border Counties Unpublished PhD thesis , University of Edinburgh, 1942 Some Notes on the Late May Williamson’s Doctoral Thesis at the University of Edinburgh, 1942 On-line publication through the website of the Scottish Place-Name Society is the first time that May Williamson‟s thesis on The Non-Celtic Place-Names of the Scottish Border Counties (Berwickshire, Roxburghshire, Selkirkshire and Dumfriesshire but not Peeblesshire) has been published in any form. It is nearly seventy years since May Williamson worked on it. Inevitably, therefore, it contains some information which is incomplete in the light of more recent discoveries, and some conclusions which with the benefit of more information and decades of scholarly debate, for instance on the dating and significance of certain Old English place-name elements, would probably not now be reached. However, it is still an extremely valuable resource – which is why the SPNS decided to invest money and effort in making it more widely available – and many will appreciate the new ease of access to it, compared to having to consult and make notes from the typed thesis at the Edinburgh University Library in George Square. It remains valuable because the sources for old forms of the place-names are in large part still those available to May Williamson; because it includes the only published and readily available compilation of sources for a large number of place-names of Germanic formation in most of the Border counties; because its explanation of „Geography and Dialect‟ on pages ii to vi of the preface is a helpful summary scarcely in need of up-dating; because the elegant, uncluttered style and the often sharp insights make for pleasant reading; but above all because despite the necessary health warning due to its age its commentaries on elements and place-names are still to a great extent valid. The comment on the readability of the thesis inevitably applies more to the discursive historical sections of the preface than to the main text which accommodates the discussion of elements and place-names and lists the sources. At the very beginning of the preface May Williamson notes that she had been constrained by the terms of her scholarship to “…pursue advanced study or research in Scottish Language and Literature with special reference to dialects on both sides of the border and to such border antiquities and music as bear on the subject”. Accordingly, as she continues: “In order to satisfy these requirements as far as possible, rather more attention has been given to historical and dialectal notes than is usual or necessary in place-name studies”. Between the lines we may read that she found the obligation somewhat irksome, but we may now be grateful for the extra breadth and depth that it gave to her studies. Despite the title‟s reference to non-Celtic place-names, therefore, the preface actually includes much information about Celtic-speaking populations, and discussion of a number of Celtic place-names, in sections on „The Roman Period‟ to „The Battle of Brunanburh‟ which took place in or about 937. It is these background historical sections that are bound to seem least reliable after decades of scholarly research and reconsideration of the early historical period by historians, archaeologists and linguists. For instance the hoard of luxurious late Roman metalwork found on Traprain Law in East Lothian would now generally be thought to have been deposited by Brittonic-speaking natives, rather than by Germanic raiders; and the favoured location for Brunanburh has tended to gravitate to Bromborough in the Wirral rather than to follow May Williamson‟s preference for Burnswark in Dumfriesshire. Occasionally her relative unfamiliarity with Celtic languages may show, as in baldly listing the personal name *Branoc among Old English personal names, without giving the possible justification for this classification that a Brittonic name, a diminutive of bran „raven‟, might have been adopted into the name stock of speakers of Old English. Her reliance on 1 inch to 1 mile Ordnance Survey maps is understandable, especially in a period of war-time stringency, but if she could have referred to larger-scale maps, which name more small-scale features of the landscape, she would doubtless have found that the Old Norse topographic elements gil and grein had been adopted widely into what became the Scots tongue and were not necessarily indicators of Scandinavian settlement. As was conventional at the time but is less usual practice now, the element headings use the most ancient Old English forms and do not separately classify later medieval and early modern derivatives of those elements in Scots, where these rather than ancient forms were used to form new place-names. However, such reservations are outweighed by admiration for the continuing validity of much of May Williamson‟s clear and penetrating thinking. A neat instance of this is her use of a recorded form of the valley name Annandale – the river name being well documented from Roman times as Celtic – reformulated with a Scandinavian genitive as „dale of [man called] Ǫnundr‟; from this at first sight inconsequential information she makes the important deduction that the presence of people with a Scandinavian background in that area must have been such that it would seem natural for the name of the district to be attributed to a man bearing a Scandinavian name. The primary structural division of the body of the thesis is by place-name generics rather than by parish as had already become the pattern for county publications of the English Place-Name Society. Thus, had May Williamson‟s judgements of the attribution of place- names to particular elements been erratic or systematically flawed, the discussion of elements would have been nearly worthless and the usefulness of the whole work to present-day place-name studies would have been largely limited to information about older forms of names; and then only by using the index to locate entries for particular places. On the contrary her concise discussions of how the generics were used, with contrasts and comparisons to usage in England, especially of course in the English border counties, are tightly argued and nearly always still compelling. So are her attributions of particular place- names to elements – sometimes not the superficially obvious ones – with pertinent and astute observations about local topography and pronunciation as well as comments on the significance of early forms. Such observations are a testament to the thoroughness of her research. Where there may now be disagreement with the thesis about what a name originally denoted, as for instance with Coldingham because of recent thinking that relatively late, northern formations in –ingahām may refer to an English-speaking monastic community rather than a pioneer community of secular Anglo-Saxon colonists, it is far more likely to be because of things that May Williamson could not have known in 1942 than any failure to make best use of resources then available. Since most of the place-names dealt with are not as old as Coldingham or the elements as historically and linguistically problematical as -ingahām (which would now be divided into several formations of different origins and meanings), thanks to the quality of the author‟s scholarship much of the thesis could have been written today. W Patterson The following were involved in preparing and checking the transcript of the thesis:- Typing: Margaret Wilkinson; proof-reading: Peter Drummond, Dr Alison Grant, William Patterson, Dr Margaret Scott, Dr Doreen Waugh. Work on the digitising of the thesis was carried out at the Scottish Place-Name Survey in the University of Edinburgh, by kind permission of Dr Margaret Mackay. Thanks are also due to others unnamed, in the Scottish Place-Name Society, in the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere, who permitted, encouraged, or provided practical assistance and advice, and without whose contributions this on-line publication would not have been achieved. i /i/ PREFACE This thesis has been produced under the conditions of the Gatty (Florence Emily and Charles Tindal) Memorial Scholarship, the holder of which “must pursue advanced study or research in Scottish Language and Literature with special reference to dialects on both sides of the border and to such border antiquities and music as bear on the subject”. In order to satisfy these requirements as far as possible, rather more attention has been given to historical and dialectal notes than is usual or necessary in place-name studies. The following work is intended as a survey of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian place-name material in the Border Counties. I have tried to demonstrate what types of names occur, where they are situated, and roughly to what period they belong. Thus it has been more convenient to group the names under their endings than to arrange them by parishes in the manner of the English Place-Name Society’s (EPNS) volumes. It is almost impossible to date Scottish place-names with any certainty since spellings for the majority are not found before the 13th century, but /ii/ generally they may be classified under three headings:- (a) Old English (b) Middle English (c) Scandinavian, and Middle English of Scandinavian origin Between the first two classes there must be a good deal of overlapping. It is known that names in -ing, -ingahām, -ingtūn and -hām probably ceased to be formed after the Old English (OE) period, but many of the other habitational endings which in England belong to this time must have continued to be formed at a much later date in the North. Similarly many of the names classified as Middle English (ME) may belong to the OE period.