A detective’s guide to English place names
And the hidden history they reveal
In my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, there’s an abrupt but relatively modest (100m / 330ft) change in elevation which separates the upper from the lower city.
This is formed by the Niagara Escarpment, and, despite the fact that it barely makes your ears pop as you go up and down, we flatter ourselves by calling it the Mountain. Everyone in Hamilton calls it this, as strange as it may seem to people who come to live here from places where there are actual mountains. But even they get used to it eventually.
Place names are like this: what seems strange for an outsider is simply part of the scenery for a local, despite the fact that many place names are, indeed, very strange or mysterious. And nowhere is this truer than in England, where a commuter might pass by seven mysteries, four references to wars of conquest, and one well-disguised obscenity on their way into the office.1
The place names of England can be divided into four groups according to their language of origin. The earliest layer is composed of names of Celtic origin, reflecting the languages spoken in Britain from before even Roman times.
The next layer comes from Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons who arrived after the collapse of Roman rule in Britain. On top of that, we have names derived from Old Norse, which date back to the period of Viking settlement in England.
Finally, the most recent layer consists of names which come from some variety of French: the legacy of the Norman conquest.2
These layers tell the story of English history in miniature, with all its conquests, migrations, and usurpations. That strange name on the map may hide the presence of a Norman lord’s manor or the homestead of a Viking settler, if only we could make those mumbled syllables — -ham, -thorpe, -bury — speak a little louder.
It’s a task for a linguistic detective.
What I propose to give you is a guide to simplify your detective work: a cheat sheet that will tell you what kind of name you’re dealing with, when it dates back to, and what it tells you — at least, in all likelihood — about the history of the area.
Of course, as with so many things in history, there is often more to the story than meets the eye. A Celtic name may date back to the time before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons… or it may have been given in the reign of James I by someone who identified a particular river in front of him with something he had read about in an ancient text.
This happened with the Adur river in Sussex, which was renamed from the Bramber in the 17th century after the Roman fort Portus Adurni ‘Port of Adurnos,’ which was (incorrectly) supposed to be at the mouth of the river.3
But you can’t appreciate the exceptions until you’ve seen the rule, so let’s get started with the big question: How do English place names work?
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Totta was here
Today, the vast majority of place names are more or less meaningless: they’re arbitrary labels assigned to a place.
From time to time, something somewhat comprehensible peeks out: Woodbridge probably had a, well, wood bridge at one point, as surely as Hatfield was a field.
But these are often red herrings: Slaughter was more likely named after a dreadful patch of mud (from Old English slōh ‘slough’) than a dreadful battlefield. But names where we can easily piece together the meaning are the exception rather than the rule.
This was not the case originally: names were given to places because the names described the place in some way. Place names, as a rule, originally meant something. This is good news for us as linguistic detectives, because it means there’s actually something for us to discover, or rather, recover.
Throughout English history, a name was given to a place for one of three reasons: (i) because that place marked the territory of a group of people; (ii) because that place was a homestead, farm, or village; (iii) because the landscape in that place had some distinguishing feature.
Let’s follow the place name researcher A. D. Mills and give a name to each of these types.4 We’ll call the places named after a people’s territory folk names. The names of particular settlements we’ll call habitative names. And the names that come from some feature of the landscape we’ll call topographical names.
Now, let’s take a tour of these three types of name, using examples drawn from the Anglo-Saxon period, which gives us our largest chunk of English place names. We’ll talk about the later and earlier influences afterwards.
Folk names are the least common of the three types. These referred originally not to places but to peoples. With time, the name of the people was transferred to the place that people inhabited. Two famous examples of folk names — taking the term quite literally in this case — are Norfolk and Suffolk, originally Norþ folc ‘North folk’ and Sūþ folc ‘South folk,’ respectively.
Other examples of folk names are the places in England with the suffix -ing or -ings, which once was a way to refer to a kinship group descended from, or otherwise associated with a particular person: so Hastings was once Hǣstingas, the descendants or followers of someone named Hǣsta. These -ingas names are very old indeed, dating back to the early days of Anglo-Saxon settlement in England.
Most names, however, are of one of the two other types: habitative and topographical names.
Habitative names are like folk names in that they (sometimes, at least) tell us about who lived in an inhabited place. But, unlike folk names, they also include a name for the inhabited place itself: some word meaning ‘homestead,’ ‘farm,’ or — a perennial favourite in place name etymologies — ‘enclosure.’
So habitative names are typically made up of two parts: the name for the habitation, and some kind of a descriptor.5
Some common Old English elements for the habitation component are hām ‘homestead,’ tūn ‘enclosure,’ wīċ ‘dwelling’, and burh ‘fortified place.’6 The descriptive component could be an indication of who lived in the place, or it could be another kind of description. So Tottenham is Tottan-hām ‘Totta’s homestead’ but Marston is mersċ-tūn ‘marsh enclosure.’
Finally, topographical names merely describe a place without any reference to human habitation. Instead, they tell us about a physical feature of the landscape, although this feature may be artificial, such as a bridge.
Then, when a settlement was later built close to this physical feature, the name was transferred to the settlement. Examples of topographical names are Greenhill — no prizes for guessing what that originally meant — and Oxford ‘ford of oxen.’
Folk, habitative, and topographical names make up the vast majority of English place names. I’ve concentrated on these types as they appear in Old English names, as this is the most common origin for English place names, but names of these types can also be traced back to the three other languages that made up the stock of English place names — well, perhaps not folk names, but the other two can.
So let’s leave behind Old English for a moment and turn our attention to these other languages and the place names they gave to England. We’ll start with the most recent entrant into the history of English place names, that is, French. But to understand the role of French in shaping how we talk about the English landscape, we’ll need to open up one particular book first.
The better to tax you with, my dear
There is one source which stands head and shoulders above all others as a source of valuable information about the history of English place names, and that is the Domesday Book or the ‘Book of the Day of Judgement.’
Despite the name, it wasn’t an apocalyptic text — except perhaps from the perspective of the landowner — but rather a survey of who owned what in England, written with the goal of taxing landowners more effectively.
The Domesday Book was compiled in 1086 on the orders of the King of England (William the Conqueror, you may have heard of him), and its peculiar nature, as a comprehensive record of land ownership, means that it contains thousands upon thousands of place names. In fact, the Domesday Book often marks the first time a particular place name is recorded.
What’s especially interesting is how sticky these place names have been: most of the names found in the Domesday Book can still be found on a map today, although the spellings have often changed.
What these early attestations show us is that the place names of England are mostly at least a thousand years old. Of course, most will have been older still: the names recorded in the Domesday Book must have been in oral use for many generations prior. Some were also recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources, such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in particular if there had been a battle there) or in earlier land charters.
One of the reasons William the Conqueror compiled the Domesday Book was the fact that a lot of English land had changed hands as a result of his invasion. The old, Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was dispossessed of their lands, which were given to new, Norman owners, and the King wanted to ensure that, amidst all this chaos, the rights of the Crown hadn’t been trampled on: the Crown was then, as it is now, a major landowner.
The new owners of these lands, being Normans after all, spoke not English, but French. It’s interesting, then, that very little French influence can be found in the names of the Domesday Book. The new Norman landowners tended to keep the names of their new estates intact.7
The biggest impact French had on the place names of England was to create so-called double-barrelled names, such as Sutton Courtenay and Wootton Bassett, where the name of the owner of a place is suffixed to the name of the place itself. And since the owners had French names, the place name was now (partly) French.
These double-barrelled names came into existence to distinguish between two identically named towns. So if you see one of these double-barrelled names as you’re poring over a map, you’re looking at the legacy of the Norman Conquest a thousand years ago.
Now, if we expand the scope of our search to names derived from French in general, we find only a few which fall into two of the three categories I mentioned earlier: for example, Vauxhall is a (partly) French habitative name, meaning ‘Falkes’ (a French name) hall’. Malpas (Old French mal pas ‘bad pass’) is a topographical name. French didn’t provide any folk names, to my knowledge, at least.
All in all, despite the seismic impact of the Norman Conquest on English life, the language of the Normans had a fairly light touch on the English landscape. The same cannot be said of the Vikings, however.
The long arm of the Danelaw
The Vikings were Scandinavian raiders, traders, and settlers, whose activity (if I can put it slightly euphemistically) in England extended from the late 8th century to the mid-11th century, only coming to an end in 1066, the same year as the Norman Conquest. Over the course of this “Viking Age,” England was changed dramatically, as Scandinavians took power in parts of England (and, eventually, for a period, all of England, during the reign of Cnut and his family in the early 11th century).
Scandinavian influence was strongest in the north and east of England, as this is where Viking rule had lasted the longest, and where Scandinavian settlement had been concentrated. This area in the northeast of England is known as the Danelaw, so named because it was the area subject to Danish, rather than English, law.
These Vikings spoke a language called Old Norse, which was related to the Old English spoken by their adversaries and neighbours, the Anglo-Saxons. The two languages were probably closely enough related so that the Anglo-Saxons and their new Norse neighbours could understand each other. As a result, many Norse words entered the English language over the course of the Middle Ages.
Unlike French, Old Norse left a deep mark on the map of England, littering at least part of the landscape with names. But because Old Norse and Old English were so closely related, these names don’t necessarily look Scandinavian: the close relationship between the languages allowed them to pass into English without too much trouble.
Once you know what you’re looking for, however, place names of Old Norse origin start to jump out at you. The key is looking for elements derived from words found in Old Norse but not found in Old English. The most obvious are to be found in the Old Norse habitative names. If you see a name ending in -by, -thorp(e), or -toft, check your GPS. You’re probably in the Danelaw.
These elements come directly from Old Norse words for types of settlement, akin to the Old English tūn ‘enclosure’ or hām ‘homestead.’ The names in -thorp(e) reflect Old Norse þorp ‘isolated farm’ (the þ represents a ‘th’ sound – more on that here), just as the names in -by reflect býr ‘settlement.’ The name element -toft originates from Old Norse tupt ‘homestead’ (here the p is pronounced more like an f).
Another clue that you’re dealing with a name of Norse origin is the presence of a cluster pronounced sk. This sequence was common in Old Norse but rare or absent in Old English. This trick, by the way, also works for general English vocabulary: skin, sky, skirt are all Old Norse loanwords into English.
Knowing all this, you’ll see why the (in)famous Scunthorpe8 is a good example of an obviously Norse name: it has both the sk cluster in Scun- and the Scandinavian element -thorpe. If we look at its spelling in the Domesday Book, we see it spelled Escumetorp, which gives us a clue as to the meaning of the first element: it’s probably an Old Norse personal name Skúma, with the whole name meaning “Skúma’s outlying farm.’9
I ♥️ New Boar-Settlement
To complete our picture of the sources of English place names, we now need to jump back to before the Anglo-Saxon period to see the contribution of Celtic languages10 to the English landscape. These are less commonly found than names from Old English or Old Norse, but many of the Celtic names that remain are extremely famous.
And the circumstances of their adoption sheds some light on what happened in that mysterious period between the end of Roman Britain and the development of literacy in the later Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
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