Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/15

 widely prevalent, and sometimes frankly avowed, is that no certainty is attainable in the interpretation of place-names, and that therefore it is absurd to reject a pretty or amusing explanation merely because philological pedants, for some unintelligible reason, choose to assert that it is untenable.

Now I hope to show some reason for believing that by the use of proper methods, the origin of our place-names may often be determined with a high degree of probability, and even with positive certainty. That the matter is not of the highest importance may be freely admitted; but as false local etymology has in the past been the source of a great deal of historical error, so sound local etymology may sometimes be a valuable help in the discovery of historical truth. At any rate, if the subject is worth studying at all, it is worth studying with an honest desire to arrive at the truth, even though the truth should turn out, as it sometimes will, to be disappointingly commonplace.

Assuming, then, that we wish to know what our English place-names really do mean, and not to be amused with baseless fancies about them, let us consider what are the methods by which their meaning may be discovered.

A large proportion of the names on our maps are of great antiquity, and occur in existing documents, many of which are more than a thousand, and some nearly two thousand years old. When we have a name to interpret, our first step should obviously be to ascertain its oldest known spelling—or, if possible, the two or three earliest spellings, to avoid the risk of being misled by some ancient scribe's blunder. Of course we have to make sure that the name in our early document is that of the right place—a precaution often neglected with unfortunate results. The next step is to discover what pronunciation the old written form represents. Most of the letters of the alphabet had anciently different sounds from those they have now, and even at one and the same period different writers did not always use the