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A
Placename Journey
In the Times
obituary of Margaret Gelling, President of the English Place-Name
Society, and another in The Economist (May 16th 2009), mention is made of two main types of place names:
"Overall, place names may fall into two basic
types — “habitative” and “topographical”.
The former contain a word referring to a settlement such as -cot (cottage),
-worth (enclosure), -ham (homestead) and -tun (farmstead).
Tun has developed into the modern -ton, as in Newton and Chesterton.
Topographical names do not contain any word for a dwelling or habitation
but name the place purely with reference to the features in the landscape." |
| "... settlements named from natural features,
such as -dun and -hyll (both meaning hill) and -denu and -cumb (which
mean valley). Because the different habitative terms (-cot, -tun,
- worth) show patchy or distinct distributions on maps, they seem
to make suggestions about the development of Anglo-Saxon naming and
settlement when examined across the country as a whole. Topographical
names, by contrast, tend to appear all over the country, with no obvious
patterns, apart, as Gelling observed, from that determined by physical
geography." |
The writer refers to the way that topographical names
were used precisely and consistently refering to specific shapes of nearby
hills or valleys. Previous attempts at defining the meanings of village names tended to be vague and suggest personal names - "Ulla's farm" or "Grim's homestead". However Gelling looked extremely closely at the topography of a place and discovered detailed meaning in topographical place names:
Names ending in
- -hoh (heel), refer to sharply projecting pieces of
ground (eg Wivenhoe)
- -ofer (bank), indicates the tip of a flat-topped
hill spur (eg Wooller)
- -hop (valley) signifies a “remote place enclosed
by hills
- -hamm (a piece of land almost enclosed by water)
- -ham (a man-made enclosure)
- -den (from denu a long and sinuous river)
- -denn (a woodland pig pasture)
- -halh (a nook or hollow eg Coggeshall
- -fyrhth (scrubland at the edge of the forest)
- -waess (land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly)
- -dun (hill), signifies a flat-topped hill
suitable for settlement.
A
letter to the Times by Karl Wittwer, Maidstone, Kent expresses
it similarly:
To the casual glance, Old English seems
to have a bewildering set of synonyms for features such as hills
(hyll, beorg, hlaew, ora, hrycg and so on) and valleys (which may
be bodhm, denu, geat, hop, etc).
Work by Margaret Gelling, latterly in partnership
with Ann Cole, has revealed that these terms each describe a different
shape or type of natural feature, which were unlikely to change
with the passing of years, and which would have been of use to the
traveller in navigating the landscape in which he found himself. |
Go
on a placename journey around England.
On your journey
you will need to pass through places which have names with their origins
in the languages of the Celts, Romans and Scandinavian invaders.
You may start
and finish at any point in England. You have one hour to make your journey.
You will need a reference book showing the etymology of placenames, a
roadmap and a blank map on which to mark your route. Use the blank map
to mark the place's position and the margin around it to write the name
and etymology.
At every place
you should decide whether or not to look up the placename in your reference
book. When you have looked it up you may decide to add it to your list.
The list should have five Celtic names, five Roman names, ten Scandinavian
names and five other names making a maximum of 25 placenames.
Two marks will be awarded for each name with a correct etymology.
2 marks will be deducted for any placename also collected by another group,
1 mark if it is the same placename but in another location.
Your journey
must be completed during the first lesson.
The second lesson will be for counting up marks, comparing maps and writing
up and discussing your findings.
you should categorise your findings under the following headings:
a) etymology
b) county
c) suffix
Answer the question "How can you identify the origin of placenames
from their suffixes?"
Evaluate the
task and suggest changes that could be made to make the task more effective.
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