Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 134 (2016), 251–256 A Lost Place-Name: Godringhill in Henbury By RICHARD COATES Godringhill is a lost place-name. It was the name of one of five prebends associated with the college of secular priests (canons) at Westbury-on-Trym.1 The history of these prebends is carefully reconstructed by Orme and Cannon,2 as far as the available evidence permits, and will not be repeated here. Their account supersedes the one by Thompson,3 which they critically analyse and some important details of which they reject: for example, the idea that the endowments of Westbury college were originally exploited collectively, not privately and individually. The only purposes of this note are to explain the name of Godringhill, which is presumably that of a place, but which does not appear in the record except as that of the prebend, and to try to identify its geographical location, to the extent that it had one. Between the 11th and 16th centuries (and perhaps earlier), Westbury college and adjacent Henbury parish had an intimate relation with the diocese of Worcester, the details of which fluctuated (but that is passed over here). Bishop Wulfstan had acquired the college for the diocese c.1093, and gave it Henbury church and its tithes as part of its endowment.4 Henbury continued to be subject to the bishop, since it was not only his parish but also an episcopal manor, whose buildings served as a southern palace when necessary. Both Henbury and Westbury parishes were in the bishop’s hundred of Henbury. The bishop could, therefore, act more or less as he pleased (subject in theory to due process) as regards the disposition of assets in this area. Almost all the endowments of land for the Westbury prebends appear to have been situated within the bounds of Henbury parish. This indicates that the bishop was not in general free to dispose of lands in Westbury parish that did not have a primary ecclesiastical function, e.g. chapels and housing for churchmen. As Orme and Cannon convincingly suggest, the prebends are probably to be associated with the large number (41) of detached parcels of Westbury parish situated in Henbury parish, ranging in size from several contiguous enclosed fields or woods to the large houseplot of a ‘manor’, Henbury Awdelett, to individual furlongs or even perhaps strips within a furlong of an originally open field. These never paid tithe to Henbury, and survived as an administrative anomaly for three and a half centuries after the dissolution of the monasteries (including colleges like Westbury), to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey as late as the 1880s, before being eliminated in 1886 under the provisions of the Divided Parishes and Poor Law Amendment Act of 1882. Whilst it has not been possible to associate every one of these patches and slivers of land with particular prebends, the general picture is clear; the idea that the prebends each have at least one 1. A prebend was a parcel or set of parcels of land or other sources of revenue from which a stipend was derived to support individually a canon of a collegiate church or cathedral. 2. N. Orme and J. Cannon, Westbury-on-Trym: monastery, minster and college (Bristol Rec. Soc. 62, 2010), esp. ch. 1. 3. A.H. Thompson, ‘Notes on the ecclesiastical history of the parish of Henbury’, Trans. BGAS 38 (1915), 99–186. 4. Victoria County History of Gloucestershire [VCH Glos.], II, 106–8. 252 A LOST PLACE-NAME: GODRINGHILL IN HENBURY geographical anchor appears beyond dispute. That is, they do not consist solely of services of men, fines, rights such as heriots and tithes and the like. That makes it very probable that their names are not arbitrary, but are each taken from a parcel of land, though not all parcels of a prebend are necessarily at or near the place whose name they bear. What Orme and Cannon take to be an early list of what were, or evolved into, the lands of Godringhill prebend5 includes not only the place so named, but dispersed lands in Westbury, Charlton, Ableton and an unidentified place called Kedemuta (really Redwick),6 as well as other non-territorial dues. Orme and Cannon show that the five prebends were at first named after a current or previous holder;7 for example, ‘the prebend of John de Kirkby’, but came to be known instead by a place- name, either alone or linked in sequence with the names of former prebendaries in a lawyerly way to establish continuity of title. Three of the five are readily recognizable as names of places within the boundaries of the enormous medieval parish of Henbury: Aust, Henbury itself and Lawrence Weston. Orme and Cannon are more tentative about Holley, but as they observe,8 it ‘may survive at Hollywood Hill, half a mile south of Compton Greenfield church over which Holley had claims’, adjacent to which is Hollyhill Wood. This is therefore surely right; there are no other names resembling Holley/Holly in the parish. Better still, the first series one-inch Ordnance Survey map shows Holly House, in whose grounds Hollywood Tower now stands.9 Holley was also associated with, and sometimes called, St Werburgh, after the chapel just over the parish boundary in Westbury (or just on it), which must have been part of its endowment, the only securely identifiable parcel of the Westbury prebends not definitely in Henbury, except the prebendaries’ own houses close to the college buildings by the Trym. That leaves Godringhill, the most valuable of the prebends, which, although allocated to a mere deacon and not a priest, was equal in revenue to the holding of the college’s dean in the 1291–2 Taxatio Ecclesiastica.10 It is recorded in the following spellings:11 5. Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 17. 6. Kedemuta is the reading of the name in a charter transcribed into Bishop Giffard’s register (1268–1301), f. 278v., as reported by Thompson, ‘Notes’, 103. The relevant charter is not printed in J.W. Willis Bund (ed.), The Register of Bishop Godfrey Giffard, Part I, 1268–73 (Worcs. Hist. Soc. 1902). Presumably influenced by Cattybrook in nearby Almondsbury parish, Thompson interprets it implausibly as ‘Cattymouth’. This spelling and the interpretation are also the ones given in M.G. Cheney, D. Smith, C. Brooke and P. Hoskin (eds), English Episcopal Acta 33: Worcester 1062–1185 (Oxford, 2007), 80–1, apparently quoted from Thompson’s article, which the editors call ‘important’. However, there is no extant ‘Cattymouth’ place-name, and the tiny brook had no conventional mouth even before the disruptive building of the Bristol and South Wales Union Railway in 1859–63, but seems on the Almondsbury tithe map (now accessible through the Bristol Know Your Place website, http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/kyp), to disappear into an unmarked sinkhole on a field boundary. Also, the required spelling-changes, though not entirely implausible, are anomalous and not supported by parallels in nearby Glos. names. In fact, the form in Giffard’s register is really Redeuuica, i.e. Redwick. Thanks to Worcs. Record Office for supplying a digital image of the relevant folio. 7. Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 34. 8. Ibid. 34, note 57. 9. However, on the Henbury tithe map (1840) this is named Compton House, from being partly in Compton Greenfield, which in medieval times formed part of Henbury parish and was associated with Holley prebend: Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 18–19, 41–2. Compton Greenfield was later a separate parish before being merged into Almondsbury. 10. Taxatio database (www.hrionline.ac.uk), WO.GL.BR.23, in which it is called ‘Nicholas de Wodeford’s prebend’: Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 34, 38. 11. Not in A.H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire (Cambridge, 1964), II–III. RICHARD COATES 253 Goderingehella, 1125×41.12 Gudheryenghull, 1195.13 Goderynghull, 1353.14 [prebend of] Wodeford alias Trillek or Goderynghull, 1400.15 Goderynghull, 1402.16 Goderynghille alias Trillek or Wodeford alias Brianesprovendre, 1402.17 Goderynghill alias Trikhill or Wodeford, 1417.18 Godrynghill, Goderinghull, 1417.19 [prebendi de] Godringhull alias Wodforde sive Trykhyll aut Briam, 1456.20 Goodrynghyll (described as a manor), 1535.21 Goodrynghill (described as a manor), 1544.22 The first element may be interpreted in the same way as that inGotherington , north of Bishop’s Cleeve, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon male personal name Gōdhere (‘good’ + ‘army’) + -ingtūn (particle indicating association + ‘farm, village’). According to Smith,23 the personal name in Gotherington might be Gūðhere (‘battle’ + ‘army’), but the weight of evidence and the fact that spellings with <d> appear earlier than those with <th> are against this. The <th> forms are likely to be due to a well-known frequent change of [d] > [ð]24 before [r] in later Middle English. Only three of these <th> spellings are medieval. There was evidently some bureaucratic doubt about the 12. In Bishop Giffard’s register – see note 6; Orme and Cannon, Westbury, 17. 13. Ibid. 20. The eccentricities of this spelling may in part be due to its being in a papal document confirming the episcopal grant, the original of which is lost. 14. Calendar of Patent Rolls 1350–4, 405: ‘grant to the king’s clerk Master John de Bryen of the prebend of Goderynghull in the collegiate church of Westbury, in the king’s gift by reason of the voidance of the bishopric of Worcester’. Note the recurrence of his name in later records. 15. Ibid. 1399–1401, 136: ‘which Master John Bryan lately had’. 16. Ibid. 1401–5, 121.