QJorttpU mtiincraity ffiihrarg BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library DA 670.H4B21 Place-names of Herefordshire 3 1924 028 035 693 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028035693 THE PLACE-NAMES OF HEREFORDSHIRE THE PLACE-NAMES OF HEREFORDSHIRE Their Origin and Development by The Rev. A. T. BANNISTER, M.A. All the profits of this publication will be given to the Hereford Branch of the Red Cross Society. I916 Printed for the Author ' THE PLACE-NAMES OF HEREFORDSHIRE Their Origin and Development by The Rev. A. T. BANNISTER, M.A. Canon Residentiary of Hereford Cathedral Author of ' Herefordshire and its Place in English History ' Editor (for the Cantilupe Society) of ' The Register of Adam de Orleton I916 Printed for the Author : eambriBge PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS ; PREFACE ' "HE ideal book on Herefordshire place-names has yet to I -*- be written. It would need, in its author, the knowledge of phonological laws possessed by Professor Wyld, the Celtid scholarship of the late Sir John Rhys, and Dr Horace Round's familiarity with the nth and 12th centuries. The present writer, having no claim to rival any of these, has tried, never- theless, to build upon their foundations. The place-names of our county, where English, Welsh, and Norman-French influences acted and re-acted upon one another for centuries, ought to throw some valuable side-lights on our history. I have, therefore, in the scanty leisure hours of the last few years, put together the following list of practically all the early forms of Herefordshire names. The work has been laborious, but to me most interesting; and I trust it may be of interest and assistance to other students. I have to acknowledge the kind and ready help of several scholars whom I have consulted on difficult points. In par- ticular I am bound to mention Dr Horace Round, Mr Egerton Phillimore, and the Rev. J. B. Johnston. I have felt much diffidence in regard to the considerable number of Celtic names but the Rev. T. Gray Jones, of Ebbw Vale, most kindly placed his intimate knowledge of Welsh at my service, and I have VI PREFACE dealt with them as best I could, with a fearful remembrance of Dr Bradley's scathing remark that ' it would be just as reasonable to try to read Virgil by means of a French dictionary and no grammar, as to try to translate ancient British names by means of a Welsh dictionary.' Fortunately for me, no great number of Herefordshire place-names are really 'ancient British,' and for most of these I have been able to find expert knowledge in the valuable notes of Dr Henry Owen and Mr Egerton Phillimore to ' Owen's Pembrokeshire.' The larger number of Welsh place-names in Herefordshire are comparatively modern, as I have shown in the Introduction. As regards either Welsh or English names I shall gratefully welcome suggestions and corrections. A. T. B. January 1916. INTRODUCTION ' Much of our history that is still dark,' says Dr Round, ' is written in the names that our remote forefathers gave to their English homes.' These names in the i8th century, and indeed through most even of the 19th, were looked upon as a fit subject for the wild and ignorant guess-work which has filled our books of antiquities and our county histories with many misleading theories. It is scarcely too much to say that no work on English place-names has any scientific value before 1901, when Professor Skeat introduced modern methods of investigation by his Place-names of Cambridgeshire. The new scientific treatment of place-names is a simple application of common-sense to the subject : —to ask, first, what are the earliest forms of the name? next, can any meaning be attached to the earliest form ? and, lastly, how has this early form developed into the present-day name? Even when we have laboriously tried to answer these questions, it is not always possible to arrive at the true meaning of the name. Yet in- ability to find a satisfactory meaning is no reason for acquiescing in a guess which we know to be wrong. A collection of early forms enables us at least to reject those popular meanings which have often been handed on through centuries of false etymology. For ' folk-etymology is always with us, and the too ingenious antiquary is no modern phenomenon.' Even Leland was not the first to corrupt place-names by elaborately imaginative explanations. Giraldus Cambrensis and Robert of Gloucester had done it before him ; and, before them, Henry of Huntingdon can hardly mention a place without proceeding to explain the meaning of its name. ; viii INTRODUCTION If we can find our earliest form in an Old English Charter, it is usually possible to get at the true meaning with certainty. But, more commonly, the first occurrence of the name is in Domesday, or in the Testa de Nevill, that is, in records compiled by foreign scribes, who wrote down, as nearly as they could, the sound of the name, as they heard it from the natives. Imper- fectly acquainted with English, they rarely heard correctly, and so the forms they write usually suggest rather than express the true Old English word. Thus in Herefordshire one of the Old English Hundreds was Wimundestreu, i.e. 'Wigmund's tree.' But the Norman-French scribe in Domesday writes it, in different entries, Wimundstruil, Wimstruil, and Wim Strut. Occasionally he seems to have copied his form from an earlier document, and then he is fairly correct. But more usually it is plain that he is trying to spell phonetically names from a language he does not know and cannot pronounce, and for which his alphabet had not always proper symbols. He almost always puts ck for k initial tk is usually t, and medial th is always d. He hates all gutturals, k, ch, or gh, and often boldly changes them into st— a practice which gives us the clue to many puzzling forms. He usually writes plain s for sh, or else prefixes e. In spite of these drawbacks, Domesday remains our chief storehouse of early ' place-names ; and, as Dr H. Bradley says, if we understand the principles of its orthography we can often discover with certainty what the names really were.' In the Testa de Nevill the case is far otherwise. ' It has long,' says Dr Round, 'been at once the hunting-ground and the despair of the topographer.' The spelling throughout is hopelessly wild—though, finding many such entries as Solbedune for Shobdon, one wonders how much of this is due to the tran- scribers and editors of the badly-edited text of 1807, which is the only one in print as yet. But many of the mistakes must be attributed to sheer stupidity or carelessness on the part of the original scribe. As an example of what he usually does with English names we may take this (Kingstone) entry ' Welketon, Cobbewell, La Marc,' by which he means ' Webbeton, Caldewell, la Mare,' i.e. the present Webton, Coldwell, and Meer Court. Naturally when he gets to the Welsh names in Archenfield, his INTRODUCTION ix mistakes are even worse. We can scarcely hazard a guess as to what places he means by Trayhac, Laund', or Attelgunt, all in Archenfield\ The English settlers in Herefordshire spoke the Western variety of the Mercian dialect, which differed in many particulars even from the Eastern Mercian, and still more from the North- umbrian and Wessex dialects (though it has some few features which or, seem Wessex-born, as Mr A. J. Ellis thinks, are due to Welsh influences). Most of what we call ' Anglo-Saxon literature ' is in the Wessex dialect, which is full of diphthongs. But the Mercian dispensed with these diphthongs of which the West Saxon was so fond. He said all for eall, seep for sceap (= sheep), liht for leoht (= light), and wall for weall^. He softened g into y, saying (as we see in our Herefordshire place- names) yard for geard, and yatt for geat. He said hill when the southern dialects said hull, and the Kentish hell. And he shortened the ponderous Wessex personal names into almost their modern forms. It is probable that soon after 'the victory of Chester, in or about the year 615, the earliest bands of Mercians pushed to the westward of the Severn, and settled in our county. But it was during the seventeen years of Wulfhere's vigorous reign (659-675) that the English rule was firmly established in Herefordshire, and Wulfhere's brother Merewald appointed sub- regulus of the Magesaetas^ as the new settlers to the west of the Malvern Hills now began to be called. It seems fairly certain that before the end of the century Mercia had already reached more or less its westernmost limit, and that the great work of Offa, in the next century, was one of definition and development rather than of conquest. But this 7th century settlement of Herefordshire was, of necessity, sporadic and incomplete. Throughout the county, and beyond it to the west, the woods were particularly dense. The ley of the Mercian settler was simply a clearing in the forest, 1 Even these examples are sufficient to show that modem English has developed the other two, helped out of the Mercian dialect, which, being intermediate between to interpret between North and South.