The Hall of Waltheof/Chapter XXVI

"I deny the fact of 'corruption' in language except by way of forcible and intentional substitution, which only takes place when an attempt is made to give a thing a new sense.—Professor Skeat in Notes and Queries, 8th S. iii, 410."

F ever a place did not deserve its name one would say that Brightside did not deserve to be so called. But this smoke-clouded region, in which so much money is earned and so much squalor is found, wore a very different aspect once. The happy fields there sloped to the south, and because it lay on the sunny side of the hill the land was called "bright side." In common with others I once thought otherwise, but this is one of the many instances which prove that place-names are not "corrupt" in form. When we fail to understand a local name, or when we cannot enter into the thoughts of the men who gave it, it is an easy way out of the difficulty to say that the word is "corrupt," and that we cannot explain it unless we know how it was spelt in a charter more than a thousand years old. As Professor Skeat puts it "corruption" only arises from "forcible and intentional substitution," as when the ignorant make Salter lane into Psalter lane.

Owing to a mistake made by Hunter everybody seems to have gone wrong about this simple word. He identified Brightside with an adjacent place known in old documents as Brekesherth. But this is not the same place as Brightside, for in 1574 "lands in Brekesherth, Sheffield, and Bryghtsyde" are mentioned. Brightside then is not a "corruption" of something else; it is exactly what it pretends to be.

Our ancestors knew quite as well as we know what land got the most sunlight, and they knew that the bright side of a hill would produce earlier and better crops, and be a wholesomer place to live in, than the dark side. It is natural therefore that their field-names should here and there express this difference in the quality of the land. Let me take one or two examples of such names. I find a field called Sunning Wells at Bolsover in Derbyshire, and a field called Blind Wells at Brinsworth, near Rotherham. Now here the word "wells" is the Old Norse völlr, a field, so that Sunning Wells are the fields to the south, and Blind Wells are the dark or sunless fields, just as a "blind lane" formerly meant a dark lane. There is a field at Totley near Sheffield called Sunfield which slopes to the south, and a field in Holmesfield bore the same name. That the Norsemen sometimes chose their local names with reference to the sunlight may be seen in such a name as Sól-heimar, Sun-ham, Sunnyside, which is frequently used in the Landnáma Bók.

I think the same idea is expressed in such local names as Gold Hill and Silver Hill. Silver Hill at Ecclesall is merely the name of a tract of ground which slopes to the south and gets plenty of sun; it is not the name of a mountainous elevation. And the same may be said of Gold Hill and Gold Green at Fulwood. These local names will be found in many parts of England; for instance there is a Gold Hill in Nottinghamshire. It will be found, I believe, that all these places slope to the south. In the vivid imagination of our forefathers lands which faced the sun may well have been compared to gold and silver, and what happier or more fitting description could there be? It has occasionally been wrongly guessed that these names have arisen from the discovery of gold or silver coins. This was the case at Halton Chesters, a station or camp on the Roman Wall. "The part of the station," says Dr. Bruce, "which is to the south of the road has a gentle slope and a fair exposure to the sun. It is known by the name of the Chesters; in Horsley's day it had the additional designation of Silverhill, no doubt from the discovery, on some occasion, of a number of denarii in it." It was "exposure to the sun," and not the discovery of silver coins, which gave rise to the name.