The History of Place Names

Edinburgh

The origin of our village and town names can provide a fascinating insight into their history. Did you know that the study of place names is called toponomastics? Generally, places have earned their names from the people that founded the settlement, the surrounding landscape, or the flora and fauna that have featured there. Over time, with the evolution of language and through local dialects, place names have changed throughout generations, sometimes becoming quite different versions of what they were hundreds of years ago.

Castle Combe

The UK has had a varied history, having been home to many conquering invaders and numerous tribes. Consequently, our modern place names have been contributed to by the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and even the French. We often think of the Romans as having founded our major cities but their Latin names were either based on the existing Old English ones or were so radically different that their use hasn’t survived (for example, the Roman Verulamium for what is now St Albans). Many people think the word ‘chester’ is Roman but in fact its roots are Celtic. Manchester is derived from the Celtic words mamm meaning ‘a breastshaped hill’ and ceaster – ‘a fortified city’. Most of our current city, town and village names were given to them by our most ancient ancestors. Tre in a place name denotes a homestead or hamlet and was usually paired with the name of the person who owned it, so Tregare in Wales means ‘Gare’s home’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their proximity across the Bristol Channel, this prefix is seen even more widely in Cornwall. Another common Cornish prefix is penn which is a ‘headland’. Penzance is a conjugation of penn and sans which together mean ‘holy headland’. Like tre, a town or village name ending in by is Old Norse for ‘homestead’. The Vikings are also responsible for place names that begin or end with

holm. In Old Norse, this meant ‘island’ and usually referred to a settlement surrounded by marsh or water. Water, especially rivers, features widely in place name origins. For example, Luton is derived from ‘Lea’ after the river that flows through it and tun which is Anglo-Saxon for a large farm or settlement (which probably later evolved into our modern word ‘town’). Another common place name inclusion is ‘ham’. Hamm was Anglo-Saxon for ‘small village’ and is almost certainly the origin of the word ‘hamlet’. Mor(e) or Mer referred to a ‘lake’ in Old English (mer also means ‘sea’ in French). You can find variations of it in town names such as Cromer and Swanmore. Numerous places have the word bury in them. This did not refer to a burial plot as it might sound but is the Old English word for a large estate, known by the Anglo-Saxons as a burh. The root has also given rise to towns with ‘borough’ and ‘burgh’ in them. Stead or sted comes from the Anglo-Saxon word stede for ‘place’ (hence the word ‘homestead’ means ‘place of home’.) Featured in the town names of Stow, Stowmarket and Stow on the Wold (from wald or weald being the Old English for ‘forest’), a stow was somewhere holy. Less obviously, it also gave Bristol its name as the town was originally called ‘Brigg’s Stow’ meaning ‘the holy place by the bridge’. The suffix ley signifies a forest clearing and there

are many villages and towns in the UK ending in -ley or -ly that date from a time when our island was covered in woodland. The Viking word was thwaite, seen particularly in the north today. One interesting suffix is wick or wich. This was the Anglo-Saxon noun for ‘produce’ and was bestowed on a farm with a prefix that told you what it produced. So, for example, Greenwich is said to have originally been an arable farm some distance from London, Woolwich, a sheep farm, while Chiswick would have been a dairy farm (chis being ‘cheese’). Other Old English words which feature in place names are cott or cote for ‘small house’ (hence our word ‘cottage’), clopp meaning ‘small hill’, combe which referred to ‘a valley’, holt for ‘a wood’, and den which was a pasture, usually for livestock like pigs (not to be confused with the suffix don which comes from the word dun meaning ‘hill’.) Many of our county names also have ancient origins. For example, ‘Essex’ was the place where the East-Saxons settled (‘East Sax’), ‘Sussex’ the South-Saxons, and Middlesex, which has now been absorbed into Greater London, was where the Middle-Saxons lived. East Anglia was also named from the tribe that once inhabited it, the Angles. Although today it is difficult to still see their origins, deciphering old place names can give us the strongest clue as to how the landscape must have once looked.

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