Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/31

 'goddess', implying that the personified river was an object of worship. One or two of the river-names found in later records are more intelligible. We have several rivers named Avon, which is merely the common Welsh word for 'river'. The streams had no doubt proper names of their own, but the Anglo-Saxons did not get hold of them. The river Ock, which falls into the Thames at Abingdon, is called in Old English charters Eoccene; and this seems to show that the name is derived from the British ehōc (modern Welsh ehawg), a salmon. There are very sufficient reasons why no tributary of the Thames now contains salmon; but it may well have been otherwise fifteen hundred years ago.

Let us now consider the names that were given by the Angles and Saxons. In absolute strictness, it is not correct to speak of these names as having been 'given'. The Anglo-Saxons deliberately gave names to their children, their swords, their houses, and their ships; but they do not seem to have been in the habit of inventing or choosing names for places. How then, it may be asked, did the names come into existence? The question may best be answered by citing a few examples. A thousand years ago or more, a man named Brihthelm lived on the coast of Sussex. When his neighbours spoke of his abode as Brihthelm's tūn—this word, now pronounced 'town', having then the sense of 'farm enclosure'—they were clearly not inventing a name for the place, but merely referring to it in the most obvious way possible. But long after Brihthelm was dead and forgotten, Brihthelmestūn continued to be the name of the farm and of the village that had gathered round it. The village grew into a large town, which till quite lately was called Brighthelmstone, though the name is now contracted to Brighton.

Again, on the Thames some fifty-five miles in a straight line from London there was a ford over which drovers led their cattle, and a few miles higher up there was another ford