What's in a name

Here at South East Searchers, we usually look for history underground but there is also a lot of history hidden in names. Today, we will be looking at what names can tell us about the history of a place.

The ending “Chester” is well known as an indicator that somewhere was important in Roman times – the city Chester being a prime example but Portchester, Winchester, Cirencester all being well known. This can be a bit misleading though as the Romans didn’t name towns that way. Portchester was Portus Adurni, Winchester was Venta Belgarum and Cirencester was Corinium Dobunnorum. The Chester names were given after the Romans left (Romani domum rediērunt for Monty Python fans) and any fortified settlement from the fourth century could have “chester” as part of the name or degenerate forms such as “ester” found in Leicester and “eter” found in Uttoxeter and Exeter.

Ham is a common ending to place names – Birmingham, Fareham, Nottingham and so on. In many cases, this comes from the Saxon word Hām meaning a farm or other settlement, but it could also come from the less common word Hamm, which is a Saxon word for an enclosed area, usually by a river. It is a safe bet than somewhere was important in Saxon times if the place name ends in “Ham” and where Saxons lived – So, the West Saxons (Wessex), the East Saxons (Essex) and the Southern Saxons (Sussex). What we now call England was split up into different Saxon kingdoms in Saxon times.

Even in Roman times, there were different tribes living in England that had been there before the Roman conquest, and we find that in the names – so Venta Belgarum (Winchester) was the capital of the Belgae tribe and Corinium Dobinnorum (Cirencester) was the capital of the Dobunni tribe. Anyway, place names that end “Ham” are usually date back to at least Saxon times.

Places that end in “Ton” or “Tun” are sometimes thought to be Norman, but it was common practice to use the ending to mean that a place was a town in Saxon Britain after 600 CE and before 1100 when the Norman conquest happened. The Normans certainly carried on using “ton” in place names and some places got multiple tags such as Southampton, Northampton and of course Hampton – places that started as small settlements but became towns.

Place names that end “ley” or “leigh” are very common and come from the Saxon word lēah meaning a forest or wood. Given how much of what is now England was forest at the time, it is not surprising that it is a common name and it is a good indication that a place was somewhere in Pre-Norman Britain.

The Normans didn’t change place names very much unless they really disliked them. “Snottingham” was changed to “Nottingham” because they didn’t like the sound and Fulpet (in Essex, meaning “Filthy Hole”) to Belgrave. They did often add a French name to a town when there were multiple places with the same name such as Stoke Mandeville or Sutton Courtenay.  

Sometimes names repeat themselves in different languages such as the River Avon which is River River in English and Welsh (Afon being river). Until I was doing the research for this blog post, I was very fond of the origin story for Torpenhow Hill which is supposed to mean “Hill Hill Hill Hill” but actually comes from the Old English for “The ridge of the hill with the rocky peak” which is less amusing. However, Pendle Hill does indeed mean Hill Hill Hill (Pen being Celtic and Dul being Saxon).

So, we often want to research the history of a place to know if it is worth detecting – and very often, the name of the place gives us the first clue.