Page:Notes and Queries - Series 7 - Volume 5.djvu/19

7 S. V. 7, ’88.]

Then we have cases where the two forms exist side by side in the same county, although, apparently, referring to different villages. Such are the Derbyshire Normanes-tune and Norman-tune, Wales-tune and Wale-tune, the Yorkshire Ansgotes-bi and Ansgote-bi, and the Northamptonshire Wendles-berie and Wendle-berie. We cannot resist the conclusion that these two forms are identical in meaning, more especially when the two forms are applied to one village. As it is very unlikely that an unnecessary es would be inserted, and as we have seen that the genitival is the typical A.-S. form, we may safely conclude that in the above cases the form embodying the gen. is the original. Then, as Domesday frequently omits the gen. in cases where we know from its own evidence that it still formed part of the name, we may reasonably conclude that the gen. es existed in other local names that happen to be recorded in Domesday in only the later, non-genitival form. Hence I hold that Hun-ton is identical in meaning with Huns-ton, and that both are derived from A.-S. *Húnes-tún, which can only mean the town of a man bearing a name beginning with the name-stem Hún.

is not more fortunate with his arguments in support of his Bright=Bryt, Briton, theory. To prove that a Middle English gh does not invariably represent an original Teutonic guttural spirant, produces an instance dating from 1637, and he does not even then prove that the gh is not original. This sound was, as I have stated, “a distinct sound, not produced without an effort,” in Middle English, whereas in the seventeenth century the gh was almost as much an orthographical tradition as it is now. The early names of Bright-side do not support proposition, for it is not easy to derive these forms from Bright, and it is impossible to derive them from Bryt. His suggested Brittisc-eard is a most improbable name, which derives no support from the Brichisherd of 1181. The A.-S. eard is a very unlikely constituent of a local name, and there is, I believe, no instance on record of its being so used.

After he has shown us that he is capable of believing, on the evidence of the local name Frankish-well and the compellation “omnibus hominibus Francis et Anglis,” that settlements of Franks existed long after the Norman Conquest, and that he is prepared to introduce a Finnish settlement on the strength of an inadmissible explanation of Finch-well, it is scarcely surprising that should affirm, on the sole evidence of the local name Yrish Cross, that an Irish quarter existed in Sheffield in 1499. This is a very improbable assumption. It must be borne in mind, too, that the Iryssh of our older records were, as their names frequently prove, generally men from the English Pale. The Irish quarters of English towns are, I believe, of quite regént origin. Their existence in the days of the Tudors and Stuarts seems hardly compatible with the firm administration of the harsh laws against vagrancy, and the brutality with which the burgesses of the corporate town treated non-burgess settlers within their liberties. I cannot see that these parasitic Irish settlements, even if they had existed for so long a period as supposes, support the view that independent villages of Welshmen existed for centuries on English soil at great distances from the Welsh border. The population of an Irish quarter is, to a very large extent, a floating one, and there are forces operating for the maintenance of its Celtic character that must have been wanting in hypothetical Welsh villages. I refer more particularly to the frequent infusions of new blood from the Emerald Isle, and to the facilities of communication. In spite of the numerous forces working for the perpetuation of these Irish quarters, the older families frequently become denationalized, and their Irish origin becomes a family tradition. It is hardly possible that an Irish quarter could, if it were absolutely severed for four centuries from communication with Ireland, successfully resist absorption into the surrounding English population. Yet etymologies of such names as Wales-by presuppose that the Welsh inhabitants of such villages maintained their Celtic character unimpaired by four centuries of contact with the surrounding population. Such etymologies ask us “to admit that the human nature and the