Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/38

 named Brihtwold; and a Bedfordshire hundred is called Manshead, though no inhabited place of that name is known.

Many names of towns or villages, though of Anglo-Saxon formation, are derived from the British names of the rivers or brooks on which the places stand, as Cheltenham from the Chelt, Charwelton from the Cherwell. Sometimes, though both the river-name and the name of the place still survive, the connexion of the two is disguised by change of pronunciation. The river Pedrida is now called Parret, but the village-name Pedridan-tūm has become Petherton. Occasionally the place built on the bank of a river is called by the name of the river without any addition, as Thame in Oxfordshire. The Anglo-Saxons were so careful in recording their boundaries that they found it worth while to ascertain the British names of quite insignificant little brooks. Many of these bear no name at all on our modern maps; but their names are retained by villages on their banks. Although Dovercourt looks like a modern name containing the word 'court', it is found in records of the tenth century, and is a British compound meaning 'little water'. And Winfrith, in Dorset, is in Domesday Book written Wenfrode, which shows that it is identical with the common Welsh name Gwenffrwd, 'white brook.'

But it is not always the case, when a town or village has a name similar to that of the river on which it stands, that the name of the town is derived from that of the river. For our map-makers have had an evil trick of inventing names for small streams which they found nameless; and their usual way of doing this has been to take a syllable out of the name of some place on the bank of the river. Thus Kimbolton, in Huntingdonshire, is derived from the personal name Cynebald; but the river on which the place stands has been provided by the map-makers with the name Kim. Similarly, a river-name Hextild has been evolved from Hextildesham, a mediaeval form of the Old Northumbrian