Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/235

 10 s. xii. SEPT. 4, 1909.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

191

" The Cock " stood upon a portion of the site of the new Law Courts in the Strand. Pepys in his diary (1668) notes :

" Thence by water to the Temple, and there to the ' Cock ' alehouse, and drank, arid ate lobster, and sang, and was mightily merry."

Close to " The Cock " was " The Marigold." The spot where it stood is now occupied by Child's Bank. Its original sign is still preserved in that banking house.

Next door to " The Marigold " was an inn known as " The Devil." Its sign repre- sented St. Dunstan twisting his adversary by the nose with a pair of red-hot pincers. It was pulled down in 1787.

So numerous were London hostels in the seventeenth century that Sir Walter Scott asserted: "The signs of ale-houses and taverns indicated they were equal in number to all other houses put together."

HABBY HEMS.

Fair Park, Exeter.

[See the lists at 10 S. xi. 102, and the references there given. A list of Commonwealth inns will appear next week.]

"BOURNE" IN PLACE-NAMES (10 S. xi. 361, 449 ; xii. 130). This subject, as SIB HEBBEBT MAXWELL justly remarks, is certainly a large one, but its size might be kept within reasonable bounds if care were taken to avoid incorrect inferences. I am charged with a common fault of contro- versialists that of choosing such names as fit my argument. I am told that I leave out names which prove that towns were often named from rivers. As a matter of fact, I never said that towns were not named from rivers. On the contrary, I gave the names of Plymouth and Plymp- ton, which are named from the Plym ; and I omitted Tavistock, Exeter, &c., because I did not wish to occupy the space of ' N. & Q.' with the " almost innumerable " names of towns that were called after rivers. What I really said was that the " names of towns are very rarely identical with the names of rivers," and I instanced, among others, the Severn and the Medway. SIB HEBBEBT MAXWELL replies : " True about Severn, but as to Medway, the name Maid- stone was, I believe, Medwsegestun in Anglo- Saxon = Medway 's town." But, granted that it was so, Medway's town is surely not the same thing as Medway, any more than an armlet is the same thing as an arm, or an eyeglass the same thing as an eye. The fact that there is a town called Maidstone does not prove that there is a town called

Medway. Nor is Alcluith, the cliff on the Clyde, exactly identical with Clyde.

The story of the Gade, which was narrated once before by SIB HEBBEBT MAXWELL in a note of his upon the "West Bourne" controversy, bears out my remark that " it is not a habit with English people to call by its specific name the river or stream with which they are most familiar " ; but it does not prove anything more. The bailiff, after local inquiry, discovered the name of the stream, and it figures, of course, in every map of Hertfordshire. There is, however, a strong presumption that the river-name Gade, like the Cam and the Arun, is comparatively modern, and sug- gested by the place-name Gaddesden (see Skeat's ' Place - Names of Hertfordshire,' p. 21). It is not, therefore, a very happy instance to bring forward, as the peasantry might allowably be ignorant of what is more or less a "book-name."

SIB HEBBEBT MAXWELL does, however, give some names of streams that are identical with names of towns, such as Bladenoch, Annan, and Girvan. Although I have endeavoured to clarify my Devonian intellect by intermarriage with the Isle of Skye, I am unfortunately ignorant of Gaelic, and can offer no opinion on a matter of which I possess neither linguistic nor historical knowledge. To appreciate the full force of SIB H. MAXWELL'S statement, the early history of these towns would have to be investigated. But his remarks regarding the " wonderfully minute picture of primitive Britain presented by the specific names con- ferred automatically by Celtic and Saxon settlers " seem hardly consistent with the view of PBOF. SKEAT. That view, so far as I understand it, is that, during the many thousand years of its existence, a stream had no name until some Anglo-Saxon settler came along, built a mill or a church on its bank, and called it Milbourn or Kirkburn, as the case might be. Some time afterwards the name of the stream was applied to the village ; and when the villagers forgot the origin of the name of the stream, in con- sequence of its being applied to the village, they made a new compound, and added the word " water."

I have endeavoured to find some historical evidence that might confirm PBOF. SKEAT'S views, and have to some extent succeeded. PBOF. SKEAT refers to the village of Shal- bourne in Wiltshire, which he says means " shallow bourne." In a charter of King Edward the Elder, granting freedom to Taunton, and dated A.D. 904, there is men-