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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
Some years ago the present writer had occasion, at a social gathering, to mention the subject of place-name study, one of the foremost exponents of which happened to be one of the party. His remark was met with a blank stare, followed by the question ‘What is place-name study’? Such illiteracy has deep roots in the English cultural tradition which owes more to the dilettante than to the professor. The understanding of place-names demands some knowledge of the early languages spoken in this country (Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon—;or, as it is now called, old English); and that is acquired in universities rather than in country houses and parsonages. But it also demands a familiarity with topography such as can best be acquired by a native who is permanently resident and knows the lie of the land at first hand. The best results are obtained from a combination of both, of book-learning enlivened by field-work.
1 ANTIQUITY IV, 1930, 480–3.
2 It is, in my opinion, quite certain that it is this word baec, and not baece, bece, a stream, which enters into the name Burbage, Wilts (andlang burh beces, BCS.1067 ; with baeces [burhbeces, B.], BCS.1213. The boundary here follows the watershed between the Kennet-Thames and the Salisbury Avon, where it is geographically impossible for a stream to have existed : see my remarks in Wilts. Arch. Mag. XLI, 1921, 287.
I had collected many instances from the modern maps where ‘batch’ seems to denote a hill or ridge, and hoped one day to publish them, but they were destroyed in the war.
3 See ANTIQUITY V, 1931, 457.
4 ANTIQUITY I, 1927, 476.
5 An original burk is not absolutely excluded ; the two words were sometimes confused in Middle English.
6 BCS. 1, 392, A.D. 826, Arch. Journ. LXXVIII, 136 ff.
7 See my article in Arch. Journ. LXXVII, 1920, 145. Cunictune (Conington in Cambs., not Hants.) should be omitted.
8 Namn och Bygd : tidskrift for nordisk ortsnamusforskning, Vol. 30 (1942), häfte 3–4, pp. 150–58.
9 It is often forgotten that two Celtic languages are still spoken in Britain, and that two others (Cornish and Manx) are only recently extinct. The present writer has encountered people in North Wales and in the Outer Hebrides who neither spoke nor understood English.