Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/281

Rh Dullingharn is for Dyllinga hām, "the home of the Dyllings"; and here again the genitive suffix -a has disappeared. Not only so, but even the -s is not unfrequently dropped; the A.-S. form Lulles worth, i.e., "Lull's farm," is now Lolworth. Thurkell-low can hardly be said to register "a family or tribal name"; it registers merely the name of an individual. Thurkell, better Thurkill, is so common a name that nearly a score of them are on record. It clearly means "Thurkill's low," and the reason why the s has disappeared is simply that the second syllable is entirely unaccented. Indeed, there can be no doubt that Thurkill is merely short for Thurcytel.

When we are told that "the principle of the accidental addition or elimination of a letter is applicable to all periods," I think we may fairly demur to a statement so astonishing. The elimination of a letter is easy enough and regular enough, but the addition of one (excepting, of course, d after u and similar well-known insertions due to phonetic causes) is quite another matter. Is it possible to produce half a dozen examples of modern place-names containing unoriginal letters that represent real additions? I doubt it very much, and I think that a search for them would soon demonstrate the enormous difficulty of the task of finding them.

Another point is that we must not trust the spellings of Domesday Book over much. After all, the scribes were Normans, and they often made a sad hash of Anglo-Saxon. The modern sound of a name may sometimes be a better guide. It is notorious that they often wrote orde under the impression that they were expressing the English suffix worth; and they wrote torp for thorp, and ulf for toulf; and they dropped or wrongly inserted the initial h. I do not know what is meant by saying that "A.-S. surnames are commonly composed of two syllables." It is probably meant that they are of the type Guth-mund, and that such names take a genitive in -es. But there are thousands of names in -a, such as Winta, with a genitive in -an, and such names usually give but one syllable in modern English, with no visible genitive sign. It is quite absurd to found any argument upon such a fact as this; for "Winta's worth" has become Wentworth.

Then the inference is drawn that of 253 "lows" noted in a certain list only 25 contain the genitive sign. No one can be expected to accept this; the chances are that there was a genitive sign once in at least 200 of them, though some may be descriptive of their position. But, of course, no one can tell the true results until we have the A.-S. form of the name in every case, or can safely infer it. One would like to know how many cases are safe. Are there no examples of genitives in -an amongst all this vast number?

There are three "lows" in Cambridgeshire. None of them exhibits an s, yet two of them represent personal names. Tadlow is "Tāda's low"; Triplow is (probably) "Trippa's low," though Domesday Book has Trepeslau, with an s, which is almost certainly wrong; and Bartlow, formerly Berklow, simply means "barrow-barrow," the low explaining the berk.

In the 'Rotuli Hundredorum,' anno 1274, Tideswell is written Tidiswelle, Tudiswelle, and Tyddeswelle. These forms being consistent with the Domesday Tidesuuelle, it is useless to suggest "the possibility of Tidewell having been the original designation." The first element, both in Tideswell and Tideslow, is the A.-S. man's name Tidi, and this occurs, in the fourteenth century, in the compound Tiddeman or Tydeman (Bardsley's 'English Surnames,' 1875, p. 23). So Addyman, in 'The Returns of the Poll Tax for the West Riding of Yorkshire' in 1379, contains the A.-S. man's name Addi or Æddi.

We are told: "That the suffix -well denotes a spring of water, and does not represent, in 's opinion, 'a field or paddock,' is clearly shown by to be erroneous." did not discuss this point at all, but contented himself with saying that the O.N. völlr would be wall in English. Now one of the things which I tried to prove was that it is so represented. I showed that Tideswell was Tiddswall in 1610, and I referred to New Wall Nook, Swinden Walls, Semary Walls, &c. And, as regards the earlier suffix -welle, I said that the dat. sing, of völlr is velli. Place-names are often in the dative, the preposition æt being either prefixed or understood. In the parcels of a modern deed relating to land in Brinsworth, near Rotherham, I find some fields called Blind Wells. Both in A.-S. and O.N. blind has the meaning of "dark," so that the name may stand for O.N. *blind-vellir, i.e., dark, or sunless, fields. Our ancestors were clever enough to appreciate the difference in value between the sunny and the dark side of a hill. Again, take such a local name as Cromwell or Crumbwell. Here the first element is the A.-S. crumb, crooked. There was a Crooked-Croft in Sheffield in 1817 (Brownell's 'Directory of Sheffield ' for that year, p. 26), and Cromwell means the same thing. Perhaps somebody will tell us what are the old forms of