Names 335

A major cultural, as opposed to linguistic, issue is that of the retention by women of their inherited surname on marriage. The literature of the social psychology of this phenomenon is reviewed and discussed by Duggan, Cota & Dion (1993) with a plea for further study, as done for instance by Murray (1997). It is clear that ‘retaining’ women are viewed stereotypically in a much different light from those who follow tradition and adopt their husband’s surname. More significant formally, however, has been the introduction of new non-traditional practices. One is forming a surname on marriage by merger (e.g. Taygan from Taylor and Regan); according to Brightman (1994: 9), this is now done by about 2 per cent of American women, but I have no figures for men. Another is abutting the surnames of both parties or hyphenating them to form a new surname for both or for their baby (as opposed to women simply using both, generally with the married name second, as with Hillary Rodham Clinton), as allowed for instance by the rules for surnaming of babies in the province of Saskatchewan. More radical is adopting at random a surname which is not that of either. None of these marriage-related practices has become systematic, and some gay couples in stable relationships do similar things. All have in common, of course, the rejection of the traditional practice whereby the bride adopts her groom’s surname.

An unresearched historical development involves shift of stress in surnames whose forms might with some latitude suggest a French name with a suffixal element. Established ‘English’ names such as Burnett, Ovett, Mantell and Purcell, which originated with initial stress, are now often pronounced with final stress. We must assume that the motivating factor is the cachet of French names, especially in the nineteenth century; few have gone so far as to completely frenchify the spelling, though I have spotted the occasional Burnette.

6.5Place-names

The key texts for the study of place-names in England are the introductory book by Cameron (1961/1996), and two specialised volumes on the relation between place-names and history (Gelling, 1997) and on the relation between place-names and topography (Gelling & Cole, 2000). There is a new comprehensive place-name dictionary by Watts (2004), complementing the former standard works by Ekwall (1960) and Mills (1998), and a dictionary of place-name elements is under way (Parsons et al., 1997–), eventually to replace the previous standard work by Smith (1956). The key data for interpretation is furnished by the county volumes of the Survey of English Place-Names (1923–>) and a few published volumes or unpublished dissertations outside this series on counties which have not yet been fully surveyed (Wallenberg, 1931, 1934; Mills, 1976; Padel, 1985; Coplestone-Crow, 1989; Coates, 1989; Cameron, 1998; Watts, 2002; and the dissertations by Cullen, 1997 and Horovitz, 2005). Other

Names 337

fact that in mid-Saxon times there was an agricultural upheaval which resulted in radical changes to the settlement pattern (Hamerow, 1991). There was an opportunity for wholesale renaming as new nucleated settlements sprang up. It is no longer possible to be sure that the familiar English names are the ones originally bestowed on the places; that this was the case remains nothing more than the default assumption.

We will begin by considering place-names as names for parts of the geographical space of England, remembering that the greater part of southeast Scotland is the northernmost region of the original English linguistic area and is to be understood as included in ‘England’ where necessary, and that the same applies to areas of eastern Wales. This will allow us to consider names of geographical regions, natural features both large and small, political-administrative regions, settlements considered both as inhabited places and as ecclesiastical parishes, and the microstructures of human activity such as fields and managed aspects of the landscape, archaeologically significant structures such as barrows and ‘hillforts’, streets and elements of townscape such as blocks and buildings. Evidence for the early forms of names for these features is unevenly distributed in time. To some extent this is controlled by the nature of the thing named; there was no significant townscape naming before the Middle Ages, and modern fields are in many parts of the country the products of eighteenth-century changes in agricultural practices (Field, 1972, 1993). There is on the whole more early evidence for the names of larger features than smaller ones, though the accident of extant records means that there is better early information for the south than the north, and areas remote from settlement tend to be late in the record; the great mountain Helvellyn (Cu/We) is not recorded till the sixteenth century despite having a name that could be at least 1,000 years older than that (Coates, 1988: 30–3). Allowing for these skews of the record, settlement-names, especially when they apply also to parishes, tend to hit the record early in their history, as do the names of major features, especially rivers, and those other features which may delimit boundaries, especially of the parish or what would later be called the manor. This skew results in a linguistic skew. Presumably the Britons who lived here before the English named the same range of things as their new political masters, even if they conceptualised them differently (natural features could be viewed as supernatural beings, like the river Dee ‘the goddess’; the English observed features inhabited by divinities rather than manifesting them, like the various Puckpools ‘pool inhabited by a goblin’). If the evidence can be taken at face value, the English took over names for some larger features, including some settlements and districts and rivers (and the further west one goes in England the more evidence for such borrowing one finds), but they appear to have wiped clean any Brittonic microtoponymy except where we have watertight historical evidence for the survival of Welsh and Cornish into medieval times (especially Cornwall, west and southwest Herefordshire and west Shropshire, and to some extent northern Cumberland; on all this see Coates & Breeze, 2000: 1–14 et passim).

Names 339

writing, though Latin was also a language of record. After 1066, a bureaucracy was installed where, irrespective of the writers’ native language, Latin and French were the languages of record; the scribal practices adopted were in part those used for Latin, but otherwise those originally applied in the writing of French late in the first millennium. These did not sit easily with the phonology of English, and there was a period where the recorded names may be hard to interpret, i.e. to assign to known places. By the thirteenth century, those who applied the conventions were again producing passable renderings of the phonology of English names, and they often begin to show affinity with the forms current now. Until the fifteenth century, they are often still in French or Latin texts and influenced to some degree by that context, e.g. by being formed and spelt in a way suitable for declension in Latin (normally first-declension feminine – Exonia for Exeter, for instance, or more mechanically the twelfth-century Stouenesbia for Stonesby (Lei)); administrative writing in English belongs only to the period since Henry V set the tone for the use of English in chancery.

Some problems for name scholars emerge from these facts. Firstly, that of tying up OE-period and later ME-period forms of names: often the OE ones have undergone radical transformation, and it is not always obvious that the political and linguistic revolution of 1066 is solely responsible. It is now believed that the Gislheresuuyrth recorded in 695 is Isleworth (Mx); the second element of the personal name, -here, is irrecoverable from post-Conquest sources, possibly because of phonetic or morphological reduction during the late AS period. A medial -ing- vanishes between OE and ME in the record of Charlbury (O). Such may be the case, undiscoverably, with many other names that we first know only later in history. Secondly, there is the problem of understanding names which are recorded for the first time by French-using clerks. Not all English names – far from it – are recorded in OE times, and many are first known in Domesday Book (1086) or documents of an even later period. This may mean that the earliest intelligible forms of names of English origin may appear as late as the thirteenth century, up to 700–800 years after they were formulated. Thirdly, English itself has changed, partly under the impact of the medieval triglossia. OE words that could serve as place-name elements have been replaced by others; English noun and adjective morphology has been radically simplified; and both phonology and orthographic practice have changed. Furthermore, the recorded vocabulary of OE has been augmented by words found only in place-names and established by the techniques of comparative and internal reconstruction. For instance, a noun corresponding to the adjective steep has been plausibly conjectured from the shape of place-names in southern England, and backed by the existence of corresponding nouns in continental Germanic languages. A word corresponding to German naß ‘wet’ is needed for a name such as Nateley (Ha) (‘wet wood’) which is otherwise difficult to explain. Other words have been convincingly conjectured because they satisfy OE word formation; *r¯ımuc ‘edge’ is plausible in Ringwood (Ha) because the word r¯ıma ‘rim’ is recorded and because the suffix -uc is known in