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in the Channel Islands, (la) Musarderie ‘place of [the family called] Musard’. Other French names for major places are scattered, e.g. Mold (Flintshire; from OFr Mont Halt) ‘high hill’ and Pomfret (now standardised in its latinised form Pontefract) (YWR) ‘broken bridge’.

Words of French origin which came to be used as elements include broyle ‘deerpark’, bruyere ‘heath’, chapel, devise(s) ‘boundary’ and usually much later (from the seventeenth century onwards) mount ‘hill’ (but see further below). Sometimes Law French has left its mark on the syntax of a name (as with postposed specifiers) and on the connecting elements that form it. Chapel en le Frith (Db) and Laughton en le Morthen (YWR) are among the most striking, but prepositions and articles may remain fossilised in French (these and Holton le Clay (L), Poulton le Fylde (La)) or alternate with Latin or English elements (Barton in the Beans (Lei) / in Fabis (Nt), two names of identical origin).

In more recent times, minor names have been formed on French models. The most familiar is the eighteenth-century creation Mount Pleasant, now ubiquitous, but the earliest is probably the house Mount Surrey in Norwich, built by the Earl of Surrey in 1542, which has given rise to or encouraged the use as minor local names of many other mount-names with a postposed specifier, such as Mountstephen in Halberton (D) and Mountsorrel (Lei). Other elements favouring this syntax in modern times are seen in Fort William (Inverness-shire), an eighteenth-century name for a fort to keep the Highlanders suppressed, and the names from the period of industrialisation, Port Talbot (Glamorgan) and Port Sunlight (Ch) – contrast Maryport (Cu) and Ellesmere Port (Ch); and in the regional names Vale of York (Y), Forest of Dean (Gl) and Isle of Purbeck (Do), with their French generics and their phrasal postspecifiers (which, in the English instances at least, may go back to medieval documentary antecedents and may be translations of name forms found there).

6.6Conclusion

We have looked at the theoretical issues involved in understanding what it is to be a name, and at the major categories of English names, personal names, surnames and place-names. The chapter has taken a traditional, i.e. England-centred, view of what is fundamental in English onomastics research. The historical orientation has led to concentration on philological questions of remote times, and on structures laid down before the expansion of English beyond its early boundaries. Treatment of name categories has been selective, and has followed the main lines of the most recent general research. There has been little space to cover issues that are important as regards the proportion of the technical literature that they fill, such as improved interpretations of individual place-names, and occasional debunkings, which are frequently carried by the journals Nomina and Journal of the English Place-Name Society, or refinements in the understanding of the regional and demographic sources of particular surnames. These two

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journals both carry substantial annual bibliographies, and there is an annual report on English onomastics in The Year’s Work in English Studies. A major general resource for all onomastics, begun in 2005, is the new bibliographical database of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences. The Council also publishes an annual journal Onoma, each issue of which is devoted to a general, as opposed to a regional, theme, such as names in literature, the teaching of onomastics, or name theory (the topics for publication years 2004–6). Onoma and Names, the journal of the American Name Society, are the only truly general journals of onomastics published (at least in part) in English.

Appendix: abbreviations of English county-names