Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/39

 Hagustaldesham, now Hexham, the 'home' of a hagosteald or unmarried warrior. The name of the river Brain is a figment invented to account for Braintree (in Domesday Branchetreu). The river Penk, in Staffordshire, owes its name to a false analysis of Penkridge into 'Penk' and 'ridge'; but Penkridge is an altered pronunciation of Pencrich, the original form of which appears in the name of the neighbouring Roman station Pennocrucium. It is a compound of the words which in Welsh are pen, head, and crûg, mound. The river at Hitchin has been called Hiz. This is an antiquarian revival of the Norman spelling of Hitchin; the letter z, pronounced ts, having been adopted as an approximate rendering of the English sound tch. The Latin name of St. Albans, Verulamium, was familiar to antiquaries from being mentioned by Bæda, and in the sixteenth century was sometimes used in the anglicized form Verulam. From this was inferred the river-name Ver, which still keeps its place on modern maps. Curiously enough, the same process had been gone through hundreds of years before, for in a tract of the eleventh century on the resting-places of the saints of England, Wærlameceaster (i. e. Verulamium) is said to be on the river Wærlame.

A great deal of popular mis-knowledge about the names of English rivers may be traced to the perverse ingenuity of John Leland, the laborious but not judicious antiquary of the time of Henry VIII. It was he that invented for the river Witham (flowing through the district of Lindisse or Lindsey) the name of Lindis, now familiar to many from its occurrence in Jean Ingelow's poem 'The High Tide on the Lincolnshire Coast.' He also hit upon the clever but preposterous notion that the name of the Nene originated in a scribal error for Avene; and accordingly he calls this river constantly the Avon, and explains Northampton as 'North-Avon-dune'. Leland may also be said to be the author of the name 'Isis' for the Thames at Oxford, though in this instance he merely