Basic HTML Version
5
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
The Celts
The Northern European Iron Age tribes
known as the Celts arrived and settled in the north of
Britain in the 4
th
century BC. Celtic place names
include the words aber- for the mouth of a river as in
Aberdovey, penn- meaning a hill and often found in
Cornish place names such as Penrhyn but also Penn
in Buckinghamshire. The River Ouse is named for the
Celtic word for water and Lynn from the Celtic word
for lake.
The Romans
The Celts were conquered by the
Romans beginning with the invasion of Julius Caesar
in 43AD. From the Roman occupation, which ended
in 410AD, there are just 300 or so place names which
suggests that the Romans continued to use Celtic
names. Quizzers might be good at memorising the
Old English names that replaced many Roman names
Bath for Aquae Sulis, York for Ebaracum etc but
easier to remember are Magna (greater) and Parva
(smaller) and from the Latin castra for camp many
old Roman towns are easy to spot from the Anglo
Saxon version Ceaster which became –chester or
cester as in Winchester, Rochester and Cirencester.
The Anglo-Saxons
After the Romans retreated
back to Europe England was left vulnerable to attack
by seafaring pagan warriors.
Some 40 years after the
Romans left three west Germanic tribes from the
Dutch and German coasts and from Denmark, the
Angles, Saxons and Jutes began to invade. The Anglo
-Saxons called their new country
Engaland
which is,
by coincidence, the football crowd pronunciation of
England. It means land of the Angles. Their language
they called Englisc which academics know refer to as
Anglo-Saxon or Old English. The Angles settled in
the centre of the country (Mercia) and the east
(Anglia) with the Saxons putting down their roots in
the south and west.
Old English place names include-burna or –bourne
for a brook as in Sittingbourne and Holborn, -burh or
–bury for a fortified place or castle as in Tewkesbury,
coombe for a deep vlley like Ilfracombe and – ford
for a river crossing as at Dartford and Eynsford.
The Anglo-Saxons also used folk names where –ing
means the people of, Hastings, Wapping and
habitative names describing a homestead in an
enclosure as –worth (Knebworth).
The Vikings
The word Viking means "Pirate" or
“to raid” in Old Norse and is used to identify all the
people who lived in Denmark, Norway and Sweden
during the early Middle Ages. The first Viking raid
on this island occurred in 793 and after a hundred
years or so of smash and grab raids the Vikings began
to settle here alongside the Anglo-Saxons.
The Scandinavians didn’t have the same level of
impact as the Anglo-Saxons had done as they just
weren’t here long enough and Viking place names
are by and large restricted to the areas under Danelaw
to the north and east of Watling Street – East Anglia,
the East Midlands and up into the East and North
Ridings of Yorkshire, the Lake District and Cheshire.
The most common Scandinavian place name
termination is
–by
meaning village and this was often
tacked on to the end of an old English place name.
Utterby in Lincolnshire combines Scandinavian –by
with Old English uttera meaning remote.
Hengist the Jute lands at Ebbsfleet