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

Plymouth Exile,

“One has to be cautious about ascribing an Old English origin to ‘combe’ place-names.”

My reservations about ‘combe’ stem from the many incidences of it in areas where, otherwise, there are very few, if any, Brythonic place names.

One example is Sussex, and the area around Brighton. A quick look at a map of this area reveals Pyecombe, Coombes, Moulsecoomb, Telscombe and Barcombe. These may have Celtic roots but the problem here is that all the other place names in the area seem to be of Old English origin.

I cannot see, if ‘combe’ indicates only Celtic speakers and did not go into Old English, why only the ‘combe’ element would have survived in this part of Sussex, while other Celtic place name elements seem to have disappeared. Why would ‘combe’ have been so persistent as opposed to other Celtic words?


Transmarinus,

Regarding the Pennycomequick question, I can see your point, it does not seem to be proper Cornish. But as Plymouth Exile says, anglicised corruptions of place names are quite common even in well-preserved Celtic areas like west Cornwall.

Or perhaps these ‘penny’ names are just very old and comes from a time when the language was more like Welsh. Given that the Celtic language was spoken in Devon hundreds of years before even the Romans came, it is not unlikely that older forms of the language have become embedded in place names. The same applies to Cornwall too.

You may be interested to know that, hundreds of miles to the north in Yorkshire, a pen-y formation survives intact in Pen-y-Gent or Penygent, the name of a mountain in the Yorkshire Dales. This is far from Wales, and suggests that this ‘Welsh’ pen-y combination may once have been prevalent across the country in ancient British speech.

Plymouth Exile’s discovery that the Dartmoor version of this name was ‘Pennycombe Crik’ in a map of 1809 certainly challenges the idea that it is only some end of made-up English nonsense word, and goes quite well with the proposed Celtic words.

I am happy that my musings on the origin of ‘combe’ shed some light on your Celtic saints mystery!

ExeValleyBoy,

I am not saying that the word ‘combe’ did not enter the Old English language, as there is overwhelming evidence that it did, but that does not imply that the Britons who continued to live, as the majority population in the areas where ‘combe’ names are common, ceased using the word just because the Saxons started using it. If the Saxons had effectively replaced the Britons in these areas, then it might be reasonable to suppose that any ‘combe’ names found in these areas would have been Saxon in origin, using ‘combe’ as a Brythonic loan word. However, as the Britons outnumbered the Saxons by about three to one in the South, it would seem absurd to suppose that the use of ‘combe’ in place-names was a Saxon preserve and that the Britons gave up using their own word.

Margaret Gelling tells us that many ‘combe’ names were simplex names until the Norman Conquest, and only acquired prefixes or suffixes after that date. In most cases (especially in central southern England, where the Bythonic language died out early) these later prefixes and suffixes were English words, but this is no proof that the original settlements were English in origin. Gelling also tells us that the usage of ‘combe’ in Devon was different from anywhere else in the South, where ‘combe’ names abound. In most counties, ‘combe’ names describe only ‘bowl’ shaped valleys, but in Devon ‘combe’ names apply to almost any type of valley (apart from gorges) as is also the case for ‘cwm’ names in Wales. This could indicate that most of the Devon ‘combe’ names were formulated by Brythonic speakers.

Another point to add to the Celtic placenames is that the pre-Saxon Celts of Dumnonia had few known large centres of population. The only big place, Exeter (Isca or Keresk), being of course in Devon. Outside of Exeter they appear to have been a mainly agrarian people living widely scattered in very small groups. This reality is represented in the Celtic placenames that survive in Devon today. The good farmland in Devon and lack of natural barriers made Devon far more susceptible to Saxon settlement than Cornwall. With Cornwall, the Tamar and the rugged interior acted as a natural brake to further settlement by the English, as did of course, William the Conqueror’s invasion! By that point the capital of Cornwall was at the Saxon town of Launceston, in the east of the county, where it remained for centuries afterwards.

Devon, in contrast, has a much greater number of Saxon-era and early medieval settlements, which like their contemporaries in Cornwall—Helston and Launceston—bear either English or anglicised names. Also settlements in Devon often bear hybrid names, made up of both British and English words, but the bias of placename research always gives the English component predominance. Even clearly anglicised Celtic names are attributed solely to English when, as in the Pennycombe-Penycwm example cited by Plymouth Exile, or in Cwmbran-Branscombe, the former being a Welsh town, the latter a village in east Devon, the original root is far more likely to have been the British language. Some say cwm-combe is an English word, later borrowed into Welsh and other Brythonic languages, but the other components of both of these names are the same in Devon as they are in Wales. The Saxons had their own word Hop, why would they stop using Hop in favour of Combe?.

devoncranwood,

Although I agree with almost all that you have said, there are a couple of points that perhaps require some further discussion. The Welsh place-name ‘Cwmbran’ undoubtedly means ‘valley of the crows’, and ‘Branscombe’ in East Devon could also have the same meaning, but this is less certain. Some contend that the ‘Brans’ element refers to the Celtic Saint Brannoc, whose name is definitely found in the North Devon place-name ‘Braunton’, although it does seem a bit odd that a North Devon Celtic saint’s name should be found in a Southeast Devon village name.

I don’t think that the Welsh term ‘cwm’ was thought to have originally been a borrowing from English. However, the later English usage of the word, to mean a glacier formed dish shaped valley found in mountain sides, was undoubtedly borrowed back into Welsh.

Yes , I agree it does seem odd about Saint Brannoc.
There is a tradition that Branscombe is the last resting-place of Saint Branwallader, also known as Saint Brannoc, a fourth century Celtic martyr. It has been suggested that Branscombe derived its name from this saint. His body was supposed to have been enshrined at Branscombe. There is an ancient stone coffin standing near the south porch to this day. But earlier, more contemporary, documents say that only the saint's arm was enshrined at Branscombe, and even this was removed to Milton, Dorset, by order of King Athelstan in 933 AD. A mid-nineteenth century sexton, John Parrett, said the stone coffin near the porch was brought from Otterton by one of the Peyton family.

The location of the church is worth considering. It is built on a leveled area to the north of one of Branscombe's three streams, high enough to avoid any possibility of flooding or standing water, but still essentially in the bottom of the valley. It has the normal west-east alignment.

This brings us to the dedication of the church to Saint Winifred, who was described as `a north Welsh saint'.
The dedication seems as old as the church itself. Most experts accept that the Saint referred to is Winifred, the Saxonised form of Gwenfrewi, which means in Celtic a beautiful calm. She was supposedly martyred in Clwyd, on the 24th of June, 650 AD.

Plymouth Exile and Devoncranwood,

For your information, incidently, the term "Bran" is not rare in Breton place-names. As in Welsh or in Cornish, it can refer to the "crow": my grand-mother's mother came from the village of Neiz-Vran, i.e. Crow Nest... (here, initial B mutates into V).But more generally, Bran is either an old form or a local form for Bren(n), akin to the Welsh "bryn", a hill. If you look at diachronic sequences, the same Breton place-name could have been a "Bran", then a "Bre" or a "Bren" (sometimes "Brin") and even "Bron" , "bron" being a woman's breast, some hills look like a breast, a tit... (just remember the "paps of Ana" in Gaelic speaking areas). In the present situation, I don't know if this remark is worth considering: could the "bran" of "Branscombe" stand for a hillock? Saying so, I only want to pinpoint that, sometimes, the dedication to a patron saint is a secondary phenomenon, a kind of play on words using the homophony between the name of a holy person and a preexisting prosaic place-name.

Plymouth Exile,

The Sussex ‘combe’ examples are quite interesting as this is an area with few known Brythonic place names and an early English settlement area.

There is little doubt that the word is of ancient Celtic origin, as it does not seem to exist in Germanic speaking countries. The settlers almost certainly did not bring it with them.

“However, as the Britons outnumbered the Saxons by about three to one in the South, it would seem absurd to suppose that the use of ‘combe’ in place-names was a Saxon preserve and that the Britons gave up using their own word.”

I do not think that they did. More likely both groups used it at the same time. The question is why this Brythonic word survived the transition to English and others did not.

As I have said before, ‘combe’ seems to be very ancient, and variations of it are found in France and Italy. Like in England, it is an old word still found in places where non-Celtic languages eventually took over.

In Devon, I agree, it is more likely to have been used by actual Brythonic speakers. But this is because Devon contains a variety of other Celtic place names, and because, most probably, after Cornwall, it was the last area of southern England to speak a Celtic language.

In areas like Sussex I am inclined to believe ‘combe’ survived because it had been adopted into Roman-era Latin speech. In the south east and midlands, the sparse pre-English place name survivals that exist are overwhelmingly Latin, or Celtic-Latin combinations. The best other adopted-into-English example being the Latin-based caster, chester, or cester suffix that appears all over England, despite the English having had the comparable burh.

If there was one example in England of a city, town or village outside the far north, the Welsh borders or the West Country, that even vaguely resembled a place name in Welsh or Cornish, the kind of language supposedly spoken throughout England before the Saxons, I could believe that a Brythonic language had survived the Romans in England. But they are all Latin or Anglo-Saxon. The Brythonic place names are missing. If pre-English places like Eccles or Lincoln had been named in a language like Welsh, rather than Latin, then an idea of post-Roman Brythonic survival in most of England would gain some credibility.

There is little in most of what became England that resembles any kind of unambiguous indigenous Celtic place name, aside from topographical features, and these occur elsewhere with the same frequency, and similar forms, in places like Germany, France and Italy that lost their Celtic languages, in all but a few areas, back in Classical times.

Transmarinus,

I don’t know of any ‘bran’ names in Devon that are definitely associated with hills, but that does not mean that there aren’t any. However, ‘bren’ and ‘brin’ names do occur and definitely refer to hills. Probably the best example is ‘Brentor’, which is a small (but prominent) conical hill on the western edge of Dartmoor. The etymology is almost certainly ‘brin-torr’ (Welsh, ‘bryn-twr’), meaning ‘the hill of the rock tower’. This is a perfect description of the tor, as it consists of an extinct volcanic plug. Close to Brentor there is an old farm called ‘Brinsabach’, which looks suspiciously like a corruption of ‘brin-bacc’ (Welsh, ‘bryn-bach’), meaning ‘small hill’, referring to the nearby tor.

>>If there was one example in England of a city, town or village outside the far north, the Welsh borders or the West Country, that even vaguely resembled a place name in Welsh or Cornish, the kind of language supposedly spoken throughout England before the Saxons, I could believe that a Brythonic language had survived the Romans in England. But they are all Latin or Anglo-Saxon. The Brythonic place names are missing. If pre-English places like Eccles or Lincoln had been named in a language like Welsh, rather than Latin, then an idea of post-Roman Brythonic survival in most of England would gain some credibility.<<

My theory, as I've stated elsewhere, is that many noblemen and traders among the Germanic peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons, could speak Latin. So they could readily communicate in that language to the people in the Roman and former Roman territories, and therefore would have no reason to learn any local languages.

Even if the Britons were still using Latin as a second language and had not discarded their native Brythonic, it stands to reason, assuming my hypothesis, that the names of towns would come into English via Latin, and therefore the Latin form would survive, rather than the Brythonic.

The fact that such places still had Brythonic names even as late as the 9th century is indicated in Asser's life of Alfred, and Welsh sources. An example is the isle of Thanet (Latin Tanatus, presumably derived from Celtic ultimately), which is given as "Ruym", and incidentally, these indicate that not only did the British language survive through the Roman conquest, but that the "Lloegrians" (to use the word again) retained it for a number of centuries after the Saxon conquest.

And yet there are plenty of Brythonic placenames in England - if one includes rivers and major topographical features.

How and why would these have survived in such large numbers whilst town and village names are so much rarer.

Following on from the thoughts above it could be that the river and topographical names were adopted from local Brythonic at the time the Romans arrived in England.

However the Romans were responsible for much town and villa building of course - and they would have likely used Latin (or Latinised Brythonic) to name these places. The towns and villas would have been dramatically different from the previous developments, and in such circumstances new names may have been an obvious choice.

As Latin became the language of writing and hence of record from this point in time until the late middle ages it makes sense that even where the Brythonic speakers remained, and called a place by an alternate name, that over time the Latinised form might come to dominate.

In Devon (as in Wales) the Romans made less of an impact with only a few forts and an occaisional road to mark their passing (outside of Exeter) and a very noteable absence of villas which were so plentiful even in neighbouring (eastern) Somerset.

Therefore, whilst Latin still came to become the written language, in Devon Brythonic placenames would have had a greater chance of surviving.

Ozzie Exile,
"In Devon (as in Wales) the Romans made less of an impact with only a few forts"
"in Devon, Brythonic placenames would have had a greater chance of surviving."
Well, I don't really agree with the first statement. Don't forget that those Dark Ages "Britons" from today's Cornwall, Devon or, to a lesser extent, Wales, when they crossed the Channel, turning into "Bretons" (a "Brito cismarinus" simply became a "Brito transmarinus"), presented themselves to continental rulers (we have texts mentionning this fact) as the "Ultimi Romani", the "Last Romans"... given that they had been Roman citizens since Caracalla. They thought of themselves as "Romans" even if they mainly spoke the "britannica lingua" (which was to become "brezhoneg", the Breton language on the continent) and, arriving onto the continent -before the conversion of the Frank Clovis to Catholicism- they were eager to defend what remained of the Roman world, at least in W Gaul, against the attacks of Germanic tribes and of the Huns.
"less of an impact with only a few forts"... What about the important amount of Latin words borrowed by Britons and found in today's Welsh or Breton. A few examples mixing both languages for fun: pont; ffin/fin; poan; feunteun/ffynon; mezeg; bouzell; etc.
Then, sometimes, those so-called "Brythonic placenames" of Devon seem to show words borrowed from the Latin, even in the wilds... I just had a quick glance at OS maps of Devon. My eye caught several "Venton" places. All of them at the head of a valley (sorry, of a "combe"), all of them marked with a blue S (for "spring") or a blue W (for "well"). Easy to see through those "ventons" my "feunteun", i.e. a spring, a well. I looked afterwards in a list of Cornish words. They have "venton" too, meaning a spring, a well. "Venton" is a "Brythonic" word borrowed from Latin (fons, fontis ; cf. French "fontaine" which gave English "fountain").

Transmarinus

I only know of a place which could match the Bran description, it is near Sourton on Dartmoor, Branscombe's Loaf it overlooks the West Okement River, from the top you can see High Willays and Yes Tor.

Ozzie Exile


Many of the major old towns of England, most notably its present day capital, retain Latin or Romano-British derived placenames, that correspond, as they do in the rest of what was the Roman empire, to the towns and cities that were central to the Roman administration.

In terms of Devon, and its present day position, I believe we inherited a Roman rather than an Anglo-Saxon arrangement. Exeter or Excester or Isca, was the only significant Roman town in the far west, and the only part of Dumnonia that belonged to the ‘mainstream’ of Britannia and the subsequent Anglo-Saxon English state that was based on the Roman province.
Beyond Exeter, the Romans made little incursion into Dumnonia, and like Wales, the area remained outside Roman control and continued with its own language and customs long after the start of the Saxon settlements. This is why I think, by the late Saxon period, the already Latinised Saxons found the West foreign and were writing so distinctively about ‘Wealcyn’.

Devoncranwood,

"The area remained outside Roman control" (your last post). I don't agree, see my post (nr 51). We definitely can't believe that the Romans, during at least four centuries, would have paid no attention to rich tin or iron mining areas or that they would have omitted to control major trading routes going through the SW peninsula(routes which were to be the "Saints' ways" joining S Wales to Brittany via Dumnonia in later times)... I think that we have to consider both linguistic proofs (see post nr 21; see SW "Brythonic"/Roman surnames like March/Marcus, etc.) and archeological proofs. For instance, regarding Tintagel,here are to quotations: "While there is no evidence for pre-Roman occupation, there is reason to believe that Tintagel was a reasonably important place in the Roman period. Two inscribed Roman milestones have been found in the Tintagel neighbourhood and it seems likely that they represent a late Roman (trading?) route passing near Tintagel. In addition Charles Thomas has suggested that Tintagel was the *Durocornovio ('fort of the Cornovii') of the Ravenna Cosmography and all this seems to be supported by finds of Roman coins (Tetricus I (270-3) to Constantius II (337-61)) and both commercial and locally made pottery of the third and fourth centuries." (http://www.arthuriana.co.uk/n&q/artharch.htm)
"The Arthur stone -found at Tintagel-(also) shows that the inhabitants of Tintagel carried on living a Romanised life, and read and wrote Latin, long after the Romans left England in 410 AD." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/146511.stm )
See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/outdoors/moors/exmoor_iron.shtml about Roman mining in Devon ("Solid blocks of slag weighing up to 20 kilos have been found, along with pottery fragments, which show much of the iron production took place between the second and third centuries AD. A number of furnaces have also been found").

Let us say that SW Britons from rural and moor areas could have been less romanised in their speech, husbandry and crafts. But anyway they were citizens of the Roman Empire.

Einion,

“My theory, as I've stated elsewhere, is that many noblemen and traders among the Germanic peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons, could speak Latin. So they could readily communicate in that language to the people in the Roman and former Roman territories, and therefore would have no reason to learn any local languages.”

There were also Germanic people in Britain long before the Roman empire ended. The Roman army in Britain had been increasingly reliant on German mercenaries from the 2nd century onwards. At the end of their service, which lasted 20 years, some Roman soldiers were entitled to a grant of land in the country they were based in, plus a pension, and the right to get married.

So it is quite likely that there were substantial numbers of Germanic ex-servicemen living in Roman Britain who were reasonably well-off and may have played an important role in the local economy. These retired soldiers would probably have been Latin speakers, or at very least, they had basic Latin. So those arriving in the 4th and 5th centuries from northern Europe may have encountered a number of people already speaking a Germanic language they could understand who could also teach them Latin and translate for them.

Nobody knows how many Germanic soldiers were in Britain by the end of the Roman Empire because, until the very end of Roman rule, they were issued standard Roman equipment. So those who died and were buried on active duty would have indistinguishable from ‘real’ Roman soldiers. Archaeologists start to pick up traces of these people when, following the economic problems of the late empire, they were allowed to use their own equipment and it is found in burials.

I have read that, by the latter stages of Roman rule, Germanic mercenaries formed the majority of the Roman army in Britain. That is a large number of people, many of whom were legally entitled to settle in Britain when they retired.

One important point is the status of these retired soldiers. They would have been far richer and influential than most of the Brythonic peasantry living outside the Roman cities and towns. It is these people who could have been the Latin-speaking Germanic “noblemen and traders” that you proposed.

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Ozzie Exile,

“Following on from the thoughts above it could be that the river and topographical names were adopted from local Brythonic at the time the Romans arrived in England.”

As I said before, I think this is one very likely explanation for why Celtic topographical names survived. The Romans did not tend to rename these features, and many survive not only in Britain but in France and even in Italy.

“However the Romans were responsible for much town and villa building of course - and they would have likely used Latin (or Latinised Brythonic) to name these places. The towns and villas would have been dramatically different from the previous developments, and in such circumstances new names may have been an obvious choice.”

The evidence suggests the Romans used both. At York, they just Latinised the original British name for the town Eborac, into Eboracum. At Bath, they named their new city Aquae Sulis after the local Celtic divinity Sulis. At Lincoln, they appeared to start from scratch with their own name Lindum Colonia. This became abbreviated to Lincoln, probably by the Anglo-Saxons. In Germany the name of Cologne came from the Roman Colonia, but the Latin ending must have been a bit unnatural for German speakers, and now in German the city is Koln, the same as in Lincoln.

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Transmarinus,

There is definitely a profound difference between the level of Roman development in Cornwall and Devon and the neighbouring south-west and south-eastern areas. See any map of villa sites and the distribution thins out abruptly in the area of Devon’s contemporary borders with Somerset and Dorset. The main Roman road network terminates at Exeter, where interestingly the present M5 motorway and A30 (the old Roman road to Dorchester and London) still end today. Some would say the separateness of the region, culturally and now economically, is still effected by the patterns of Roman infrastructure from 2,000 years ago.

But, as you say, as with Wales, there was a strong Roman influence on the area which is apparent in the large number of Latin loans in the Welsh and Cornish languages, and in place name elements. Pons being an example, meaning bridge, and found in the village name Ponsworthy in Devon—you see the ‘pons’ immediately when you go into the village, it is ancient and tortuously narrow for modern traffic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponsworthy

‘Pons’ is Cornish and very close to Latin ‘pont’. Also a common word of Celtic origin in Cornwall and Devon is the use of the word ‘parc’ or ‘park’ to describe a field. This is different to the English ‘park’ meaning an estate or ornamental garden which is from French. But all of them, including the English paddock—also meaning field—arise from ‘parricus’ in Latin, meaning enclosure.

It seems that Cornwall and Devon, as Dumnonia, was allowed to exist as a semi-autonomous client state during Roman rule. It is only my guess, but I think the Romans were very happy for the vital supplies of tin, copper and other valuable materials, and said to themselves “these people are good at this, have been doing it thousands of years before we turned up, so leave them to it.” In contrast other parts of what is now England seem to have had no similar established industries in ancient times and what did appear was developed later by the Romans.

The Romans seem to have been content with their city and military base in Exeter to ‘keep an eye’ on what was going on, and you find the odd villas and encampments right down into the west of Cornwall, but intensive Romanisation of the landscape, as in central and southern Britannia, did not occur.

“Let us say that SW Britons from rural and moor areas could have been less romanised in their speech, husbandry and crafts. But anyway they were citizens of the Roman Empire.”

Yes, people there did embrace the culture of Rome. Excellent quality Latin inscriptions in Cornwall, Devon, south western Scotland and Wales show that enthusiasm for Latin culture and learning was very strong even outside the mainstream of the Roman province’s territory. I think that there may have been more enthusiasm for Rome because, in these parts, the administration was more remote and less invasive, the good things it offered outweighed the bad. I may be projecting the present onto the past, but Roman rule was probably far more pleasant in north Devon or Tintagel, than in London or York with their political intrigues, connection to the frequent brutal political mayhem of the mainland empire, and direct submission to the Roman central bureaucratic authorities.

Regarding the tin and copper industry in Devon and Cornwall, there is no doubt it goes back 4,000 years, before even Rome itself existed. A sunken ship carrying tin ingots was found in the estuary of the River Erme in Devon and was dated to 3,500 years old, and ancient Greek coins have been found in Devon.

I was very pleased to see that this history was recognised last month, when UNESCO awarded the mining landscape of Cornwall and West Devon World Heritage status.

http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART38617.html

>>So those arriving in the 4th and 5th centuries from northern Europe may have encountered a number of people already speaking a Germanic language they could understand who could also teach them Latin and translate for them.<<

ExeValleyBoy,

I think this is a good point about translating and teaching Latin. I guess it could have been a combination of the above situation and also the fact that many who served in the Roman army returned to their native land. And either way, there was extensive contact between the Saxon homeland and the Roman world, through trade and raiding as well.

So I think there's a high probability that such people brought a knowledge of the language back home, and that even in their homelands, learning Latin was a common part of a young nobleman's education. But even if it wasn't, then as you say, there still must have been Saxons who could speak Latin, so on arrival in Britain, those needing to communicate with locals would have learnt Latin from their countrymen who could speak that lingua franca (but they probably couldn't speak the native Brythonic of the locals; it'd be unnecessary).

hi there sorry its 6 years too late but I have the answer!
recca quarry was opened in 1834 by mr benjamin recca.