Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/43

 or farm is now Garrowby; Geirmund's thorp is now Granthorpe; and Thormod's tūn is now Thrumpton. Then we find villages named from the trees that grew there. There are Danish Applebys as well as Old English Appletons; Askwith is Danish for ash wood, and Ayscough represents the Old Norse eikiskógr, oak wood.

In some of the districts settled by the Danes the counties are divided, not into hundreds, but into wapentakes. This is a Scandinavian word, meaning 'show of weapons', or military muster. In some places, however, the Danes retained the English term hundred. Several hundreds and wapentakes have Scandinavian 'landmark' names indicating the place of rendezvous for meetings, such as Osgoldcross (Asgaut's cross) in Yorkshire, Normancross in Huntingdonshire, and Aslacoe (Aslak's haugr or burial-mound) in Lincolnshire.

The parts of England in which names of Scandinavian origin are most abundant are Cumberland and Westmoreland, North Lancashire, the northern and especially the northeastern part of Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire. East Anglia, although it was long under Danish rule and has a great number of Scandinavian words in its dialect, has a larger proportion of native Anglian names than the districts just mentioned. In South Yorkshire, South Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Northamptonshire, Scandinavian names are numerous, and in some particular neighbourhoods are in the majority. It is only in the north-west that river-names of this origin are found. Greta and Rotha correspond to the Grjotá and Rauðá ('rock river' and 'red river') of Iceland; Brathay appears to be Breiðá, 'broad river.'

It is from the Danes that we have learnt to speak of the three divisions of Yorkshire as the North, West, and East Ridings. The word is properly thrithing (its original shape was thrithjungr), which means a third part, just as farthing