The origin and meaning of
Essex Place Names was the subject given by Paul Mardon, Publicity Officer of
the Essex Place Names Project, to the High Country History Group recently. The Project is said to be unique to the
county and began in 1995 with volunteers recording towns, parishes, villages
and moors; farms, houses, buildings and roads; and, fields, rivers, streams,
woods and hills. Its coordinator is Dr
James Kemble.
Volunteers transcribe names on
the Tithe Maps of the 1830s and 1840s; estate maps and manor court rolls. They scour sales and auction catalogues,
leases and rental records. To date 325
parishes in Essex have been completed with the results published on an online
database linked to the Essex Society for Archaeology and Essex, and hosted by
the University of Essex.
Paul Mardon said that most of
our place names date before 1500, with many evolving over time often with a
variety of spellings.
Rivers such as the Lea and
Thames are early British names. The River Roding flows through the centre of
the county past the Roding villages and on through Ilford – it was originally
called the River Il. The Romans are
renowned for their straight roads and fortified places.
The Anglo-Saxons have attached
names to many places in northern Europe: ‘Walden’, as in Saffron Walden, is the
place of the Britons.
There is a Viking influence in
north east Essex where Danelaw was prevalent.
The Normans and Anglo-Normans
gave names to places such as Pleshey – “a living hedge” – where old English
words have evolved into Middle English.
Most of our modern place names
are an amalgamation of periods: the Tolleshunt villages near Maldon is derived
from ‘toll’ meaning chieftain and ‘funta’, meaning spring.
Suffixes for place names such
as ‘ham’ and ‘ton’ have an original meaning of a farm or homestead; ‘ing’ or
‘ingas’ means territory; ‘sted’ means place; ‘wic’ means a dairy farm. In the landscape, ‘dun’ or ‘don’ means a flat
topped upland; ‘hyrst’ is a wooded hill; ‘naess’ is a promontory; and ‘eg’ or
‘ieg’ is an island. There are many more.
Field names form an important
part of the research of the Essex Place Names Project. Field names are given by size, such as
‘twenty acre marsh’ and ‘hoppit’ being a very Essex name for a small field. Some denote ownership such as ‘Browns Field’
or ‘Blacksmith Field’ while others are named according to their natural
features, ‘Pond Field’ or ‘Oak Field’ are examples. There are a number of fields named according
to their shape: ‘Leg of Mutton Field’ or ‘Shoulder of Mutton Field’. In nearby Navestock there is one called
‘Swans Neck Field’. Then there are
others which tell how productive a field might be: ‘Great Gains’, ‘Stoney
Field’. Finally a category shows how the
field might have been ploughed: ‘Rainbow Field’, or ‘Gridiron Field’ in Great
Wakering. ‘Botany Bay Field’ might be
the furthest away field on a farm: Botany Bay was the place to where convicts
were transported.
Further reading
To find out more about place
names and their origin, Paul Marsden recommends the following books:
Ekwall, Eilert. The Concise
Dictionary of English Place-names. 4th edition (Oxford, 1960)
Reaney, P.H. The Place-Names
of Essex, EPNS 12 (Cambridge, 1935)
Kemble, James. Essex Place-Names. Places, Streets and
People. (Historical Publications, 2007)
The Essex Places Names Project
database can be consulted by following this link: http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/esah/essexplacenames/index.asp
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