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Stretton Grandison (He), Hatfield Peverel (Ess), Milton Keynes (Bk)); sometimes such a surname premodified, and where it did so it was in the genitive, as with Bingham’s Melcombe (Do). Some place-names are modified by a term indicating their civil status, the most frequent instance being ‘market’, as in the English chipping, which premodifies (Chipping Sodbury (Gl)), the Latin forum, which postmodifies (Blandford Forum (Do)) or the Anglo-Norman market, which may do either (Market Rasen (L), Downham Market (Nf)).
English names in Scotland may have superficially similar forms, but postspecification is strongly represented, as in Gaelic, leading to the strong suspicion that it may be a substrate effect in Scots. Whilst Castle Cary in Somerset is to be understood as ‘the place called Cary that has a castle’, Castle Cary (Stirlingshire) is ‘the castle belonging to the Cary family’, i.e. a head-first construction seen also in Kirkcudbright, and we also find characteristic postmodification by a PP with of, as in Gatehouse of Fleet (Kirkcudbrightshire), Yetts o’ Muckhart (Clackmannanshire). Places sharing a frequent name such as Kirkton may have them distinguished by (of + place-name), as with the following in Angus: Kirkton of Kingoldrum, of Glenisla, of Tealing, and so on. A hamlet or other new development within a parish (or the equivalent) may be named in a structurally similar way, as with Coaltown of Wemyss in Wemyss (Fife) and Spittal of Glenmuick (Aberdeenshire). This construction extends also to the names of natural features; there are many streams with names of the type Water of X, for instance (Nicolaisen, 2001: 79–80).
6.5.5 |
Place-names and urban history |
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Street-naming (see Room, 1992) took its classic form in medieval times in London and the smaller cities like Norwich, York and Bristol. Names consisted of a generic element preceded by a modifier of exactly the same range of types that we noted earlier for major place-names plus directional names of the type (the, later omitted) London Road ‘highway to London’. The generic element was usually street (and in formerly Danish areas the equivalent gate), lane, row, by the sixteenth century alley and (in Edinburgh) wynd, and where appropriate market or an equivalent or hyponym or meronym (e.g. Poultry ‘hen market’ in London and The Shambles ‘butcher’s stalls’, Carlisle; The Bull Ring, Birmingham; Beast Fair, Snaith (YWR)). There was occasional metonymic use of topographical terms such as hill, and of the names of buildings for the streets in which they were situated (e.g. Minories, London, and Whitehall, Westminster); and the names of many other buildings, especially inns and taverns, and of the dedicatees of churches, were compounded into lasting street-names. The enormous majority of medieval street-names can be regarded as having been ecologically appropriate; their relevance to the place named was almost exceptionlessly obvious. The range of generics in towns remained practically unchanged for centuries until the addition of road and way (in non-directional names) in the modern era. Both of these are significantly absent from pre-1600 names in London, Bristol, Cambridge,
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Leicester, Lincoln and Chester, with the few exceptions like le Endelesweye ‘the endless way’ in thirteenth-century Cambridge, Posterne-Way in Chester in 1415 and the unusual name embedded in Sanvey Gate in Leicester (Sand Way), an occasional race-track. There are no roads in Lincoln before New-Road in 1790, and few elsewhere before 1800. Road in urban names might be applied to a thoroughfare of unusual width, i.e. designed with riding traffic in mind, and between towns to a highway or turnpike (as with London Road, Welford Road and Narborough Road in Leicester), or a major highway whether turnpiked or not. Some later roads previously had other generics, as with Knighton Road (previously Highway), Leicester. From the eighteenth century, however, with the advent of urban planning, a proliferation of terms occurred, first geometrical (crescent, square, terrace, circus) and social-functional (parade, drive), and then some which reflect post-revolutionary Paris (avenue, court, mansions, place and ultimately boulevard), even where, as in the case of avenue ‘approach’, the word itself had been in English for some time without finding its way into names. As villages expanded into towns during the Industrial Revolution, fields were enclosed and eventually sold off for speculative building, field-names were deployed in street-names, and, somewhat later, rural generics like close and garth ‘field’ and drove/drift ‘path for driving animals’ came into use (but rarely field itself unless incorporated into a single word or earlier-established field-name like Springfield). The rural idyll of suburbia then provided grove (usually of course with a tree-name as specifier, elm and lime being dominant), green, mead(s) and gardens and the like; the touristic requirements of the Picturesque movement added prospect and (later) view; and non-vehicular thoroughfares might be walk, suggesting invigorating country hikes. In the midtwentieth century some of the system of onomastic restraint was abandoned, and streets might be called The X (usually in the plural, with a final syllable of the form -ings very popular); The Avenue (passim), The Cresta (Grimsby (L)), The Sidings (Lyminge (K)), The Moorings (Pill (So)), The Swallows (Wallsend (Nb)). In such names, X could be but was by no means necessarily a traditional generic. Street itself became decidedly unfashionable and was deployed very rarely after about 1920, presumably because it had come to suggest insalubrious urban development.
Several regions or individual towns have locally distinctive streetor alleyname generics: examples include backs (Bristol), batch in various Somerset towns, wynd (Edinburgh and some northern English towns), chare (Newcastle upon Tyne and Hexham), loke in East Anglia and twitten (almost exclusively Sussex). Some stock names are also partly regionalised, like the Fore Street frequent in towns of the southwest of England, which often alludes to the line of a High Street projected beyond a city wall or boundary, as at Exeter. Other recent developments are too idiosyncratic to discuss here.
House-naming as a mass activity is a phenomenon of the nineteenth century onwards. Bestowed names fall overwhelmingly into a small number of categories: names derived from local topography; names referring to vegetation (The Elms, Fern Villa) in idealized conceptions of landscape such as those discussed fully
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by Schama (1995) (Fernleigh, Ferndale); transferred place-names; humorous references to the owner’s name or the financial burden of ownership (Costa Packet, as in this instance often alluding to one of the other categories, and the famous Cobwebs, an acronym for ‘Currently Owned By Woolwich Equitable Building Society’); other word-plays (Rest-a-Wyle, Dunroamin; again typically presented as if a place-name); and allusions to the history of the building (The Old Forge). The history and sociology of such name-giving practices (see Miles, 2000) is tied closely to general cultural history, and fashion in other spheres of human endeavour is reflected in the choice of names at particular times.
6.5.6 |
Place-names in languages arriving after English |
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Settlement by Scandinavian speakers from the later ninth century onwards has had a profound impact on the naming of certain areas of the British Isles (Fellows-Jensen, 1972, 1978, 1985). In England, Scandinavian primary place-names can be found over much of the east midlands and the north, and especially densely in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. This evidence is the only linguistic evidence for where Scandinavians settled, apart from the vocabulary of regional dialects. It is generally believed that some areas were characteristically Danish and some Norwegian, and this can also be read off from the map, but there are references to both of these stocks outside their primary areas and it would be misleading to think rigidly in terms of ethnic zones. The onomastic impact can be seen in the use of place-name generics whose modern forms are by ‘village, farm’, thorp(e) ‘secondary settlement, hamlet’ (though this reinforces the use of a phonologically similar native English term; on some problems with by see Fellows-Jensen, 1992), toft ‘farmstead, house-plot’ (on which see Gammeltoft, 2003), kirk ‘church’, wath ‘ford’, beck ‘stream’, foss/force ‘waterfall’, dale ‘(major) valley’ (or in minor names ‘share of land’, from a different Scandinavian word *deil-) and lound/lund ‘grove’. Some of these terms were taken up into the general vocabulary of the northern and eastern dialects (see Cox, 1988 and 1990 for discussion of some key elements), and this may pose difficulties for deciding whether a name of apparently Scandinavian form really does originate in that language. Driby (L) has an English specifier ‘dry’ (compare Scandinavian þur-), which may suggest that the name was created by English speakers, though we cannot discount the possibility that the English word had been borrowed into the local Scandinavian; there is practically no surviving textual evidence for the Scandinavian of England. Equally, Scandinavians may have partly renamed an existing place with a name such as *Dryton. Conversely, Austwick (YWR) has a Scandinavian specifier ‘east’ and an English generic ‘dependent farm’. Place-name scholars have long recognised a category of names with an English generic and a Scandinavian personal name as E1; they are normally now called Toton-hybrids after Toton (Nt); here, the personal name is Tofi, apparently inflected in Scandinavian (i.e. Tofa, not *Tofes), which leads to much difficulty in imagining whether these were English or Scandinavian settlements,
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ethnically or linguistically, and the matter could do with further research (Coates, forthcoming b).
Some English and Scandinavian words for the same notion are of course conspicuously different from each other, and it is easy to tell which has been used: for instance the English tun¯ and ford versus Scandinavian by¯ and vað; but other pairs are identical, such as those represented by modern moor and house. Still other pairs are distinguished phonologically, such as stan¯ and *stein- ‘stone’, brad¯ and breið ‘broad’, gar¯ and geiri ‘triangular piece of land’. But it is not always easy to tell in what language a particular name was first formulated. It is by no means rare for places with names recorded in what appears to be an English form in Domesday Book and of English appearance now to have records in medieval times with elements in Scandinavian guise, and some elements, especially church and kirk, may alternate in names into early modern times (see Figure 1.6 in Chapter 1).
The question of the original language of a name is interwoven with the whole issue of how long Scandinavian continued to be spoken in England, which is far from easy to decide. The facts just mentioned could suggest that Scandinavian was spoken into the early Middle Ages, but this possibility needs to be distinguished carefully from the possibility of partly relexified dialects of English coexisting with more traditionally English ones and exchanging lexical material with them, and from that of more generally Scandinavianised dialects of English showing a range of Scandinavian substrate features. Much work still remains to be done on the contribution that onomastic evidence can make to the resolution of the issue of the survival of Scandinavian (see Coates, forthcoming b, for a brief overview, after Fellows-Jensen, 2000 and Parsons, 1997), and to the general linguistic question of language contact.
Scholars often write as if Scandinavian found in England was Old Norse (ON), the developed literary dialect of West Scandinavian. For some purposes this does little real harm, but Scandinavian this side of the North Sea has not undergone several of the sound changes that characterise ON, for instance the diphthongisation of [e] to [ja] and of [a] to [jo] under the influence of the vowel of a following syllable ([a] and [u] respectively); note ON fjall ‘mountain’ and tj˛orn ‘mountain lake’ but in England fell and tarn. There is no evidence in England for a nominative singular inflection, but there is some evidence for words in different inflectional classes than in classical ON. Place-name elements should therefore be cited in a reconstructed Anglo-Scandinavian form, as done where necessary in this section. Since there is some evidence for both East and West Scandinavian features in different regions, it would be better still to distinguish Anglo-East Scandinavian (Anglo-Danish) from Anglo-West Scandinavian (Anglo-Norwegian), the former for instance having a genitive singular in -a and the latter in the more conservative -ar, displayed most often in case marking of the E1 of compound place-names.
A characteristic feature of Anglo-West Scandinavian place-naming is the socalled inversion compounds, where the specifier follows the generic. These are especially numerous in Cumberland and adjacent counties of Scotland, where
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we find for instance Kirkoswald (Cu and Ayrshire). These respond to Irish/Manx name-syntax, and they suggest that Vikings from Man and Dublin might have used this syntax with their own Scandinavian name-elements. This possibility is borne out by the truly Celtic names in Cumberland and adjacent areas with the same syntactic form, such as Greysouthen (Cu) and Crossmichael (Dumfriesshire), and the Torthorwald (Dumfriesshire) which Nicolaisen (2001: 143) takes to be a Gaelic name denoting the possession of a Scandinavian man.
A recent issue has been what the distribution of Scandinavian place-names can tell us about the nature of ninthand tenth-century settlement. The work of Cameron (1965, 1970, 1971 (1977)) demonstrates that we are not dealing with a straightforward land-grab by the victorious Danish army in the later ninth century. In Lincolnshire, at least – part of the Danish heartland – the Scandinavian-named settlements show a clear affinity with geology yielding soils of lower agricultural value (as rated by twentieth-century geographers) than those with English names. Cameron concludes that this demonstrates peaceful infill by a wave of posthostilities immigrants rather than a rush for the best land by successful marauders. That is an appropriate conclusion provided we assume that Danes did not also take over English-named settlements without renaming them. We know that some renaming took place (Northworthy (Db) famously became Derby, a Danish military headquarters), but there is no compelling evidence against Cameron’s thesis.
For a couple of centuries after the Norman Conquest many of the records of English place-names are due to scribes trained in the orthographic system for rendering Old French and in many cases ignorant of the names they were trying to render. This raises a difficult methodological problem. Since many of our placenames are not recorded before the Conquest, especially in the north of England and Scotland, we are often faced with early records which may not reliably represent names in their contemporary phonological form, and later records at variance with these which are more in tune both with the modern form of the name and with the presumable etymology. DB gives Ormeresfelt for Dogmersfield (Ha) and Scache(r)torp for Scottlethorpe (L), the latter so divergent as to rouse the suspicion that its E1 has been substituted. Some typical normanisms were discussed by Zachrisson (1924), still a handy checklist when used with Clark (1992c).
By far the largest group of French names consists of names for major estates giving an aesthetic judgement about the places (rare indeed in English names), and most contain AN bel ‘beautiful’: Belper (Db) ‘beautiful retreat’, Belvoir (Lei) ‘beautiful view’, Bewdley (Sa) ‘beautiful place (or, perhaps better, ‘monastery’)’. Monasteries might also have pious French names: Vaudey (L) ‘God’s valley’, Gracedew (Lei) ‘thanks to God’, Dieulacres (St) ‘may God increase it’. The probability that French was the working language of some orders is revealed by the final form of the names of some Cistercian foundations such as Rievaulx (YNR) ‘valley of the river Rye’ and Fountains (YNR). Unique among parishnames is Miserden (Gl), whose early spellings reveal it to be of a type still found