h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Tivvyboy,

Coming from near you in the Exe Valley, I had wondered why there was a constellation of ‘verton’ place names around where I lived. There is Thorverton, Silverton and Tiverton, and just further north in Somerset, Dulverton. The names were, and still are, assumed to be Old English. But the Old English explanation falls short, when according to Devon local studies;

“In King Alfred's will (880-5) Tiverton is referred to as Tuyfyrde, i.e. “double ford,” the place being reached by a ford over each river.”

How did that change into Tiverton? Logically, you would suppose it would have became something like ‘Tyford’ or Twyford; a place that now actually exists, in Berkshire.

Also, if ‘Tuyfyrde’ became Tiverton, you would expect the same to apply to the other ‘verton’ names in the region. Dulverton in Somerset, in contrast. is supposed to mean ‘the secret place’ in Old English. What kind of a language was Old English, having so many different meanings for the same words, and then having changed, in four different places, to the same spelling and pronunciation of ‘verton’? To me the ‘verton’ element is clearly the same in all four place names in such a limited locality and must have meant the same thing, whether it be Anglo Saxon or Celtic.

A possible Celtic explanation is that ‘verton’ is a Anglicised corruption of ‘vethan’ or ‘vethyn’, a Cornish word meaning ‘meadow’, and that the prefixes refer to who owned it. Is this far-fetched? Say these words, especially ‘vethan’ in a Devon accent and the present day names make more sense.

Maybe ‘Saxon’ Tuyfyrde went back to its old name?

exevalleyboy,

What you say may be true, but an alternative suggestion is simply that a 'ton' was ended at the end. This way Tuyfyrde becomes Tuyfyrde-ton and you can see you are pretty close to Tiverton.

However the Celtic connection may not be lost even if the last syllable is a late saxon addition, because (as tivvyboy suggests) there is a celtic word 'ffordd', wich means 'road' or 'way' and is unrelated to the english word 'ford'.

If Tiverton was the junction of two roads (as it now is - the A396 and the A361) then Dwyffordd (two roads) could have been its origin and from there it could have easily become Dwyffordd-ton.

Which is correct I do not know. The B3391 (the old A396?) does cross two waterways close to the castle, but as one of these was the River Exe I am not sure whether a 'ford' would have been appropriate. The two roads theory also has some credence as Tivvy is a logical junction for the main east west road (the A396) and those going north-south up the exe valley.

I had always understood that the word "Welsh" derived from a Saxon word 'Walla' which meant foreigner, and hence the native British in Wales and 'West Wales' (Devon and Cornwall) were called foreigners in their own land.

Wikipedia (under the definition for Celt) gives an interesting suggestion on the origin of the word.

"The word "Welsh"
The word Welsh is a Germanic word, yet it may ultimately have a Celtic source. It may be the result of an early borrowing (in the 4th century BCE) of the Celtic tribal name Volcae ("Falcons" in Gaulish) into Primitive Germanic (becoming the Primitive Germanic *Walh-, "Foreigner" and the suffixed form *Walhisk-). The Volcae were one of the Celtic peoples that barred, for two centuries, the southward expansion of the German tribes in central Germany on the line of the Hartz mountains and into Saxony and Silesia.

In the middle ages certain districts of what is now Germany were known as "Welschland" as opposed to "Teutschland", and the word is cognate with Vlach and Walloon. During the early Germanic period, the terms seems to have been applied to the peasant population of the Roman Empire, most of whom were, in the areas immediately settled by the Germans, of ultimately Celtic origin"

If so the use of the word Welsh to the native British may have been rather more appropriate than I first thought (which was not a lot!)

Ozzie Exile,

I'm not sure why some linguists insist on defining 'Walh' as foreigner.
J. R. R. Tolkien said that it was never used by Germanic people to refer to anyone but Celts and Romans, while other non-Germanics were referred to by another word (which I currently cannot recall).
The words Gaul, Gael and Celt are apparently variations of the same original word, as the the transitional forms 'Galatia' and 'galicia' indicate. One can only guess that the ancestral Celts referred to themselves as something like 'gaelat' or 'caelat'.
Celtic languages (or at least British and Gaulish) seem to have had a tendency to substitute a 'g' where others would have a 'w' sound, for example the Votadini (pronounced 'wotadini') tribe were known as the Goutodin or Gododdin in Welsh.
As far as I can tell, the word 'Walh' is simply the Germanic variant of the word which the Celts called themselves.
So I think it does certainly appear to have been an appropriate word that the Saxons used for the native British Celts.

Dear Einion,

Another explanation for the name Wales is that it simply derives from the Latin word for valley, which was vallis. The letter ‘v’ in Latin was always pronounced as ‘w’.

A name describing valleys fits the physical reality of Wales very well, and also that of Devon.

According to the Celtic Devon website, Dyfneint is an old Celtic name for Devon and means ‘deep valley dwellers’. Maybe this is why ‘Wales’ and ‘Welsh’, if they are derived from ‘vallis’, were used to describe people in both Devon and Wales

Actually, they are derived from the Old English "wealas" which means both "foreigner" and "slave". That's why the Welsh prefer the name Cymru and the Cornish prefer Kernow, because they don't have the association with slavery (though it should be noted that slavery in the early middle ages was nowhere near as brutal as the West Africa-Britain-West Indies-US slave trade of later centuries, and even slaves enjoyed certain legal protections in early medieval societies).

I think that Ozzieexile is right by saying that "-ton" was added at the end to an existing place name. It is an Anglo Saxon word meaning settlement, which became "town", and there is evidence across England, Wales and Scotland that idiginous names had suffixes added to them. Or were simply translated. After all the river kept its name of Exe albeit mauled about a bit.

Regarding the other -verton and -ton names in the Exe Valley area I haven't been able to get a trusty translation on what they think that the names mean yet! In the case for example of Thorverton, they claim it is named for the norse god Thor, but by the time Wessex came to Devon, the West Saxons were Christian and would not have named a settlement for a pagan god.

Refering back to a previous thread, did anyone here see Dr Francis Pryor's "Britain AD" programme on Channel 4/S4C? He mentioned the survival of Latin infact after the end of the empire but is of the opinion that the Celtic languages were dominant. THere is evidence of LAtin language use in Britannia after the end of Roman rule in terms of grave monuments, public monuments etc, but it is in too perfect Latin. In France, Italy and Spain the same monuments have gramatical sloppyness or are using "vulgar" words, ie gatus for cat not the classical felis, likewise cavallus instead of equus for horse. In Britain the classical text is used. It gives the impression of the writer being fluent in Latin, but it is a learnt language. I can speak both Spanish and French, and a French speaking friend has said when I speak French that my French shows the typical signs of having been learnt ie I use more "correct" French, but struggle with contractions, with slang, and will use a French word when the French use an English one. In the Romance countries all the signs are that Latin was spoken on a daily basis as the mother tongue, but was beginning the changes which would make it Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan etc. In England and Wales it was showing all the signs of a learnt language, perfect in meter, perfect in grammar, perfect in declention. It wasn't being spoken on the street even if it was understood there.

He made another point which I thought was pertinant to this thread, but can't remember it. I think it is time to go to the bookshop and take notes again!

Linking to another comment on here, the word "Welsh" is of West Germanic origin. The Flemish, who speak one of our closet related languages, call the French speaking population of Belgium "Waelsch", giving the word Wallon in French and Walonia the region it's name.

Hope this all makes sense,

tb

This is another explanation for the use of "-ton",but contrary in other respects.
http://www.bamptonoxon.co.uk/history.htm

tivvyboy,

I agree that many of the Devon place names consist of old Brythonic names with a Saxon prefix or suffix (such as ‘ton’) added later, as for instance in ‘Dunterton’. I believe that this practice was also common with the numerous ‘combe’ names in Devon. When the name ‘Combe’ was first given to a farmstead or hamlet by the Brythonic inhabitants of Devon, it was a geographic description of the place, i.e. ‘a valley’. At the time, there would have been no need to add a descriptor to the name in most cases, because people rarely travelled more than a few miles from home in those days, so there would have been little risk of confusing their ‘Combe’ with another one, say ten miles away. However in later centuries when people needed to differentiate between the many ‘Combes’, descriptors would have been added as prefixes or suffixes in the language of the time, which in most cases would have been English by then. Thus we have such names as ‘Combe Martin’ and ‘Widecombe’. However, there are still large numbers of farms in Devon, which are still named ‘Coombe’, with no prefix or suffix.

Regarding the conversation about Germanic-Celtic hybrid placenames, I am also interested in the idea that some Celtic place names may have been given English pronunciations and spellings which conceal an alternative origin and meaning; like the construction “penny” present in Devon place names that may derive instead from “pen-y-” that has been mentioned before in this discussion, as in Pennymoor or Pennycomequick. Also the ‘land’ element in names like Landkea and Landcross, which is almost certainly, in the case of Landkea, a Celtic word for the church as in Welsh Llan, ie. Llanfair (Mary Church).

The earlier point I raised, regarding the Beer, Bere, Beare, Beara place names in Devon, and their possible, in some cases, likely Celtic ancestry reinforces the idea that many place name researchers have only been looking for exclusively English place name explanations in Devon.

If hybrid and anglicised place name spellings are considered for once valid, the amount of Celtic or Anglo-Celtic place names in Devon vastly increases, way beyond the ridiculous ‘one percent’ figure quoted in the past for such names in Devon.

Tivvyboy, regarding your points about the origins of English, it is likely that classical Latin would have been used in documents and monumental inscriptions, and have carried on in use a long time after the Roman departure. But there would most certainly have been another, less formal kind of Latin used in Roman towns for everyday business. Archaeology has established that a prosperous Roman economy existed in southern England, and Lincoln (Lindum Colonia) was a major city in the northern parts of Britannia. A population speaking only either Brythonic or stilted classical Latin would be been unable to sustain this level of urban sophistication amongst itself in the context of Roman rule and its dominant language for so long. Also there is the unanswered question of why Latin, after 400 years of occupation, did not ‘catch on’, while the Germanic language effectively supplanted Brythonic in most of what is now England, and is assumed to have become the everyday language of the English by the 7th century. What did the Romans do wrong? What did the Germanic invaders offer or compel the British to do that the Romans could not, that drove the Britons to change their entire language and alter most of their settlements’ names?

Given that genetic evidence no longer supports a Celtic genocide, a mass dislocation of Celtic people in southern Britain, or indeed a huge influx of Germanic immigrants, what can answer the above question?

One possibility lies in the Saxon mercenaries argument I made earlier in this thread. Basically that Germanic people, through the Roman military system, had been settling in Britain since the 2nd or 3rd centuries. There was little genetic impact because they had been settling in small numbers for a long time, intermarrying, and building up their wealth and influence through money they had earned from serving in Rome’s military. Seen this way, the Germanic language arrived in what is now England 200 years before the end of Roman rule and developed here in its own way, possibly growing in influence owing to the generous grants of money and land these mercenaries were given in return for military service. The Germanic language may have grown in importance beside Latin in the British urban centres and in prosperous country districts, with Brythonic only being spoken in the poorer and more isolated parts of the countryside. With this version of events, Germanic, already well established in prosperous pockets across Britain, became the ‘state language’ after the Saxon military overthrew the post-Roman British rulers in a coup d’etat—as opposed to the now questioned Germanic invasion—of the 5th century. Ordinary Latin speakers were forced out into peripheral areas and eventually, excluding an elite (using formal Latin) who worked in the surviving Roman public institutions and monasteries that the new rulers respected and depended upon, lost their original status.

From the website of the parish of Shirwell, in North Devon, comes an interesting clue, regarding information from the Domesday Book;

“The previous land-holders were Wulfwaerd, holding Shirwell manor itself, Beortmaer, a wealthy man who also held land in Loxhore, and Vitalis, with one small farm. Vitalis, interestingly, is a Roman name. Could he have been a descendant of the Romano-British farmers who worked the land for St Brannoc's monastery, four hundred years before?”

http://www.shirwell.org.uk/history1.html

EVB,

Whilst English may have been introduced into Britain by Saxon mercenaries as you suggest, it would be incorrect to assume that Latin ceased being used entirely around this time. Many scientific works were still written in Latin up until Victorian times.

Whilst I escaped this torture, my mother (like many of her generation) were forced to learn Latin at school.

In Plymouth during WW2, when the Guildhall was bombed the sign that appeared overnight that reinvigorated the people was Latin ("Resurgam").

Latin has been rather more tenacious than you would think - although in all of recent times it was never spoken 'in the street'.

ExeValleyBoy,

Devon place names containing ‘Penny’ certainly seem to be contentious among the ‘so called’ place name experts. For instance, Oliver Padel claims that the name ‘Pennycomequick’ has no meaning in Cornish, and explains it away as a ‘joke’ name referring to a farm where the owners are hoping to ‘get rich quick’. He doesn’t explain how ‘Pennycombe’ South West of Exeter got its name, or where the equivalent Welsh name ‘Penycwm’ near St. Davids (Dyfed) came from. If the latter is a valid Welsh (Celtic) name, then why not the other two?

There don’t appear to be any contentious issues regarding ‘Landkea’ or ‘Landcross’, as Richard Coates in “Celtic Voices English Places” accepts that both of these names contain the Brittonic element ‘lann’ (‘churchyard’).

You are quite right about researchers only looking for English derivations for place names. Again Coates states that the present default assumption is that problematic names should be considered to be English or Scandinavian in derivation unless there is overwhelming evidence for them being Brittonic. Also, whenever he sees a word (such as ‘combe’) that he regards as a Brittonic word, which has been borrowed into English, he henceforth considers it to be a purely English word.

There have been countless ‘threads of doom’ in other forums concerning the apparently irreconcilable conflict between geneticists and (most) archaeologists on the one side, and linguists on the other, about how the English language could have taken over from Brythonic so completely and perfectly, when all of the genetic, and most of the archaeological, evidence points to a very high survival rate among the native (Celtic) Britons. I believe that your theory about the part played by the Saxon mercenaries is almost certainly a valid one. However, I believe that there is a possible model to explain the Anglo-Saxon invasion/settlement, which fits all the evidence, whether it is historical, archaeological, genetic or linguistic. I have termed it the ‘Snowball’ model, and I have outlined it below. I would be interested in any comments/criticisms.


THE ‘SNOWBALL’ MODEL OF ANGLO_SAXON MIGRATION

The main problem in determining what really happened in the Dark Ages lies in the apparent contradiction between the archaeological and genetic evidence on the one hand, and the linguistic evidence on the other. Any satisfactory explanation is going to have to account for the archaeological evidence of few major conflicts between the Britons and the Germanic invaders/settlers, the genetic evidence showing a large-scale survival of native Britons in what is now England, and the linguistic evidence of complete language change from Brythonic to Old English with very few Brythonic loan words.

For a start, we can quickly rule out the theory of ‘elite dominance’ by just a few powerful Anglo-Saxon immigrants, as we can be fairly sure from the genetic evidence that the Anglo-Saxons invaded/settled in fairly substantial numbers, i.e. enough to form somewhere between 20% and 40% of the overall population of what is now England. The actual percentage depends on what percentage the later arriving Danes constituted. If we take a mean figure of say 30% Anglo-Saxons, it would appear at first glance that the Anglo-Saxons were heavily outnumbered, so it would seem to be unlikely that they would have been able to force anything on the Britons (including their language). This scenario assumes a 70% native British population facing a 30% Germanic invader population, and in such circumstances it would seem unlikely that the newcomers would have gained the upper hand.

However, if we consider that the Britons were probably fairly evenly distributed throughout the future land of England, and were by no means a single nation, but divided into a large number of smaller tribal petty kingdoms, then the large number of Angles, Saxons and Jutes arriving on the East coast would definitely have constituted a powerful majority in the sparsely populated region where they landed. If we also consider that the initial newcomers would have been mostly men of warrior age, and would have been confronted by simple farming folk, it doesn’t require much stretch of the imagination to realise that the newcomers would certainly have had the upper hand. They could easily have absorbed the native Britons of that district into their cultural and linguistic power-base within a couple of generations, by which time these genetic Britons would have become cultural and linguistic Anglo-Saxons.

Having absorbed the Britons of the eastern-most petty kingdoms, the Anglo-Saxon power-base would have increased beyond their ‘genetic’ numbers, and they would have then been capable of advancing westward into neighbouring tribal areas. The whole thing would have been like an Anglo-Saxon ‘snowball’, gradually increasing in size as it gathered more and more British ‘snow’ on its way. Those who remained in the Eastern lands would have formed their own regional divisions (or kingdoms). As the ‘snowball’ rolled slowly but inexorably westward, its genetic Germanic proportion would have reduced. Eventually, the roll westward would have slowed down as the ‘snowball’ subdivided and faced the less agriculturally productive highland regions, where we know that a number of the old Iron Age hill forts were re-occupied at about this time. Here the cultural and linguistic advance would have slowed to a trickle, and the old British culture and language would have survived for a few more centuries, but would have eventually declined as it was gradually overwhelmed by the new (by now numerically dominant) Anglo-Saxon culture.

What would have been the outcome of such a scenario? Firstly, the East of what became England would appear to be culturally solidly English, with Brythonic loan words being almost non-existent. Further West, the number of Brythonic words would gradually increase in place names, until they become very frequent in the far West (e.g. Devon has more ‘combe’ place names than the rest of England combined). The people of this area were still referred to as ‘wealcynn’ in the 10th century, so they must have still been regarded as culturally and linguistically British at that time.

Along comes 21st century man and does a genetic survey of Britain. What does he find? A marginal majority of genetic Britons, a substantial minority of genetic Germanic peoples (reinforced by the later arrival of Danes), with the Germanic genetic type being more numerous in the East than in the West (especially in the region of the Danelaw). What would the linguists find today? An English-speaking people throughout England, with Celtic languages confined to a minority of people in Wales and Scotland.

There is no conflict between today’s observations and the proposed scenario. It would also explain why the Anglo-Saxon take-over of England took at least two centuries to achieve, even in the lowland region. I would suggest that this ‘Snowball’ model correlates well with the archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence, and fits the known timescales.

ExeValleyBoy,

I think Tivvyboy has made a good point about the purity of Latin in Roman Britain. This is certainly a feature of languages which are not spoken as native tongues.

I've been thinking for some time now that the relative "Germanic purity" of Old English is probably due to the same reason as the purity of Latin in Britain; i.e. most of the Britons spoke Old English only as a second language at least up until the time it became a written language; and once the written form became established, it probably changed very little (which was very common in ancient languages, for example Ancient Egyptian) compared to the spoken form, so that for example, the spoken language of 1000 A.D. may well have been far more Celtic influenced than we would guess by looking at the writings from that era.

So I don't think it is at all safe to assume that English was the everyday language of most people in England by the seventh century; quite the contrary, I think the purely Germanic character of the Anglo-Saxon language is good evidence that that was not the case. The Romans did not do anything wrong (in that respect).

J.N.L. Myres in a footnote to 'The English Settlements' (1986) talks about the placenames of Devon. He concedes that Celtic input may have been higher than previously thought, but gives an interesting parallel to the process by which they became Anglicised, pointing the way that British troops in World War 1 gave Anglicised names to French villages. That could explain how Pen-y-combe-gwyk became Pennycomequick, for example. The same thing doesn't seem to have happened in Cornwall, or not to the same extent.

Nick,

That is exactly how Pen-y-combe-gwyk became Pennycomequick, but similar Anglicisations were also very common in Cornwall. The small hamlet, which grew to become Falmouth was also called Pennycomequick.. Others include:-
Come to Good, from ‘combe-ty-coid’ (house in the wooded valley); Camborne, from ‘cam-bron’ (crooked hill); Redruth, from ‘rhyd-rudh’ (red ford); Man of War, from ‘men-veor’ (large rock); Nine Maidens, from ‘ni-men’ (sacred stones); Comfort, from ‘cam-fordh’ (crooked road); Good Grace, from ‘coid-cres’ (middle wood); Kissing Close, from ‘kesan-clos’ (turf enclosure); Pericles, from ‘per-eglos’ (bay of the church); Well Man, from ‘gwel-men’ (field of the stone); Hallworthy, from ‘hal-wartha’ (upper moor); Hallgarden, from ‘hal-garan’ (moor of the cranes); Lizard, from ‘lis-ard’ (high court); Chiverton, from ‘chy-war-ton’ (house on the meadow).

These are just a few. There are many more.

Methinks we need a detailed survey showing percentages and distribution of Brythonic, Anglicised Brythonic* and Old English place names and place name elements across Southern England and Cornwall. This could give valuable insight into settlement patterns. The English Place Names Society volumes are old (1931 in the case of Devon) and incomplete, and probably underestimate the British input. To be fair, most academics seem to recognise the latter point now, even if they don't go as far as people on this forum who, for ideological reasons, tend to adopt a "Celtic until proven English" attitude.

*= e.g. Pennycomequick and the Combe names; not so sure about Tor, since the Brythonic and Old English words both come from a common Latin root, torr, so the word need not have come into English via Brythonic.

Further to my last post, I have just been to the EPNS website and found out about a book I was previously either unaware of or had forgotten about (my wife calls me "the absent-minded professor", so I don't want to say for sure that I'd never heard of the book, only to be told that I had mentioned it in a previous post!):

"Cornish Place-Name Elements, by O. J. Padel. First published in 1985, this dictionary of all the Cornish-language elements (totalling nearly 800) so far known to occur in the place-names of the county is the first such work to be attempted for any Celtic language. Over 4,000 Cornish place-names are cited and indexed, but the volume has a range extending beyond the limits of Cornwall, and will be of use to those studying Celtic place-names in other areas. There are also indexes of places outside Cornwall, and of Welsh and Breton cognates of the Cornish elements."

Has anybody read this book and is this where the information about Celtic place names in Devon and Somerset comes from?

Nick,

Richard Coates, in his paper: “Invisible Britons: the view from linguistics” (2004), states that Eilert Ekwall in 1920 “advised that students would do well to try as far as possible to explain (English) place names with the help of Germanic material” (very much an “English until proven Celtic” attitude, I think you would have to agree). According to Coates, Ekwall formulated this tenet because he believed that the Anglo-Saxon mass migration in England was virtually complete. This it seems is one of the basic tenets that linguists still adhere to (despite the increasing evidence of large-scale British survival), but with a few exceptions these days. I agree with you entirely that the whole topic needs a fresh look at it, as much of the data is hopelessly out of date and incomplete. As you say, the Devon volume of the EPNS dates back to 1931 and contains major names only. For instance, Margaret Gelling, in her book “The Landscape of Place-Names” (Revised edition, 2003), states that only a very limited number of ‘cumb’ (or combe) names are included.

What we have tried to do is to look at many of the names again to see whether other explanations make better sense. For instance, Oliver Padel even maintains that the name ‘Pennycomequick’, as found in both Devon and Cornwall, has no meaning in Cornish, and is some kind of joke name for a farm where the owner wished that he could get rich quick. To say that it has no meaning in Cornish is absurd, and ignores the existence of other similar names, such as ‘Pennycombe’ (Devon) and the identically named ‘Penycwm’ (Dyfed). Is he trying to tell us that the latter name has no meaning in Welsh. Any Welshman would tell you that ‘pen-y-cwm’ means ‘head of the valley’. Perhaps Padel is playing safe because the meaning of the ‘quick’ part is uncertain. However, there are a couple of very appropriate possibilities, i.e. ‘gwyk’ (a nucleated settlement or village), or ‘gwig’ (wooded). Either ‘village at the head of the valley’ or ‘head of the wooded valley’ would describe both of the Devon instances of the name and the Cornish one precisely. Surely, Padel is taking the Ekwall tenet much too far.

Concerning both of the ‘so called’ loan words ‘combe’ and ‘tor’, there are problems ascribing the Devon names containing either of these to loan words into English. Gelling notes that in most of the South and West where ‘combe’ names are found, the name is given to ‘cup’ shaped valleys, as the word ‘combe’ when borrowed into English came to mean. She also notes that the exception is Devon, where ‘combe’ names apply to any shape of valley. This is more in line with the Welsh word ‘cwm’, which is also not restricted to ‘cup’ shaped valleys. The word ‘tor’, as borrowed into English (either via Brythonic or direct from Latin), means a pointed hill. This description fits such hills as Glastonbury Tor (Somerset) or Mam Tor (Derbyshire) perfectly, but the tor names of Devon and Cornwall do not mean hills (pointed or otherwise), but the granite rock tower formations. While most of these are located at the summits of hills, the names do not refer to the hills themselves, but only to the granite towers (some of which aren’t even on hills, but in valleys, e.g. Vixen Tor). As the word ‘twr’ in Welsh means ‘tower’, and the Gaelic word ‘torr’ is used to name similar granite tower formations in Scotland, e.g. on the island of Mull, it would seem ridiculous to ascribe the Welsh and Scottish usages to Celtic derivations, but the Devon and Cornwall usages to inappropriate English derivations, just because they are in England and therefore fall under Ekwall’s strict tenet.

We do not indulge in ascribing Celtic derivations to place names willy-nilly, as we look to see if any proposed derivation describes the geographical location of the place. There are far too many instances where linguists are so intent on adhering to the Ekwall tenet that they are forced into inventing possible personal names to go with words such as ‘combe’, even though there are alternative Brythonic derivations, which describe the location perfectly. For instance, I have seen Drizzlecombe on Dartmoor being derived from ‘thrush-combe’, meaning the valley of thrushes, because it was thought that in the Devon dialect, the word ‘thrush’ might sound a bit like ‘drizzle’. There is absolutely no need for such a contrived derivation, because the Brythonic words ‘dour-isel-combe’ means ‘shallow water valley’, which is an exact description of the location.

I have not read the Padel book that you have referred to, but I do have his book: “A Popular Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names”. The vast majority of the information about the Celtic place names of Devon and Somerset comes from “Celtic Voices English Places – studies of the Celtic impact on place-names in England” by Richard Coates (University of Sussex) and Andrew Breeze (University of Navarre), (2000).

My view on Devonian placenames has been that many English interpretations have been imposed for decades by people only looking for what they expect to see. The same accusation could be levelled at people looking for Celtic explanations, but there is an argument that given the Anglo-Saxon bias in this field for so long, at this stage, Celtic explanations should be given a little extra room. While this does not guarantee academic rigour, it gets a long overdue discussion under way. It is a discussion questioning interpretations long presented as ‘obvious’ or as academic fact. Some new pro-Celtic conclusions may be completely wrong, but uncertainty does not mean we should be afraid of proposing them.

The ‘Drizzlecombe’ example cited by Plymouth Exile above is a good example of why. Devon abounds with lazy, conventional English explanations for its placenames that often make very little topographical or cultural sense.

This is not an attempt to make every placename in Devon a Celtic one. To do so would be absurd. Rather it is about considering new possibilities and highlighting inconsistencies. For example, in a recent post, Plymouth Exile revealed that the Cornish placename ‘Chiverton’ is believed to be of Cornish origin; from ‘Chy-war-ton’. I looked this up, and in Cornwall this is genuinely believed to be the case. I had raised the question of the Devon (Exe Valley and surroundings) ‘verton’ names beforehand, and was concerned my suggestion they had a Brythonic component was rather far-fetched. It was just a suggestion, I’m not saying it is the truth, either in Cornwall or Devon, but the point is worth discussing because it shows the different criteria applied to the interpretation of similar placenames in Devon and Cornwall.

In Cornish placenames a Brythonic, or a hybrid Brythonic-English explanation, is generally accepted as the rule; as in Cornish interpretations of Helston, Launceston and, indeed, Chiverton.

In contrast, regarding Devon;

“Trewyn [Black Torrington Hundred] is Trewen 1311, la Treawen 1312, Cantaria atte Trewen juxta Hallisworthy 1337, Capelle atte Trewe 1438 Exon. This is not a Celtic name, but English, the meaning being simply ‘at the trees’ with the weak plural form trewen.” (Gover et al 1932 Vol 1 p 261)

Whereas in Cornwall and Wales, where Trewyn is also a placename, it is assumed to be Celtic. In Cornish, apparently; “Trewen, Trewin, Trewyn, Treween, translated as ‘tre-gwyn’, white or fair homestead.”

ExeValleyBoy,

I am not in the least surprised that “The Place-Names of Devon” gives the derivation of ‘Trewyn’ as being English, as one of the co-authors was Sir Frank Stenton, who was a firm believer in the old Victorian view of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, i.e. that the native Britons were either exterminated or banished to Wales or Cornwall. He would have been even keener than Ekwall to assign Germanic derivations to place-names East of the Tamar. In my opinion, ‘Trewyn’ is so obviously Brythonic that such a tortuous derivation as an English form meaning ‘at the trees’ is farcical.