Book provides the crucial key to unlock the history hidden in our place names

WE British may sometimes boast that we have not been successfully invaded since 1066, but we were invaded pretty frequently before that date. From AD43 onwards, four great waves of invaders swarmed our shores, getting their feet under the table of Britannia, as the Romans named our island.

Each brought its own language, culture and habits, with some of the interlopers mingling and marrying with the natives and naming or renaming the places they settled in. As each conquering force withdrew their mark was left indelibly behind them along with some of their people.

Deciphering our place names reveals the story of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Norman conquerors, right up to the Industrial Revolution and showing how generations of our ancestors lived, worked, travelled and worshipped, influencing the shape of our landscape today. A guide to how places were named would be very handy indeed.

And who has put together just such a user-friendly book on how the names we see on signposts, maps and addresses came to be? Yes, it’s that Caroline Taggart, the Sheffield University-educated writer and publisher who has carved out a niche for herself in user-friendly, wittily-written factual books which capture the imagination and quickly find their way to the top of bestseller lists.

Her range of “things we ought to know” books includes I Used To Know That (a neat guide to all the geography, history, English literature and science that we learned at school but have since “mislaid”), My Grammar And I (Or Should That Be Me?) and Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English.

Her mission is, she says, “to educate and amuse... the honest truth is that I just love ‘stuff’. I’m a snapper-up of trifles, and my entire family is the same. My parents and all three of the children, we were great ones for crosswords and quizzes, and of course I grew up watching University Challenge.

“One of the things that started me down the track of the factual books I’ve written was watching the students versus dons version of the programme, and realising how much faster on the buzzer the students were. It wasn’t that the dons didn’t know lots of stuff, but they didn’t have the same powers of instant recall for things they learned years ago. Brushing up on those items you learned when young but have left unused in the back of a mental filing cabinet for years, brings them back to the front of the brain and seemed a worthwhile and interesting thing to do.

“I also aimed to make the books a good read, not something worthy but tedious that you put down after ten pages and never revisit. I think people also enjoy the element of nostalgia about them, remembering how it was to learn these things first time around. Some readers may, of course, be learning for the first time – which is also great.”

One of the influences on her decision to write about the derivation of English place names was the memory of family holidays in the country as a child, when “every village sounded like a character from a novel by PG Wodehouse.” When she came to do the research, it emerged that some of the most interesting-sounding names often had a history that was less than scintillating, but the opposite was also true.

More often than not, a place name will tell us why people chose to settle in that particular spot rather than some other place down the road. “Perhaps there was a ford (bridge, as in Stratford “straight bridge”) at A; perhaps B was a farmable valley in a mountainous area and C, a hilltop site that was easy to defend. In most primitive cultures, place names are basic: if you never move far from home it’s enough to call your local river “the river” because it is the only one or the only one that matters. As civilisation develops, however, place names need to be more sophisticated. Once you start trading with neighbouring villages, you need to be able to tell them apart, even if you do nothing more inventive than name them North Village, Middle Village and South Village. That’s where all those Nortons, Middeltons and Suttons come from.”

Taggart says some English place names date back two thousand years, a few were created for new towns in the 19th century but based on older names (Welwyn Garden City, for example, had been Welwyn – “place where the willow trees grow” for 1,000 years) and there are thousands in between. Some places have names whose history is clear; others are not clearly explained at all, and all sorts of legends have grown up around many.

Pontefract originates from the Latin for “broken bridge”. It was not recorded in the Domesday Book, but was noted as Pontefracto in 1090, four years after the Domesday Survey. Puzzlingly, there is no large river in the town, but there is a theory that the bridge crossed Wash Burn, a small stream on the north-eastern edge of Pontefract, alongside what is now Bondgate.

Robin Hood’s Bay appears to be self-explanatory, and one tale has it that the hero of Sherwood Forest kept a boat there in case he needed to flee the country quickly. However the coast of North Yorkshire was not by any means his nearest point of embarcation. Another story claims that Robin was invited there by the Abbot of Whitby to fight off Danish invaders, but this tale isn’t consistent with when it’s believed Robin Hood lived – in fact it’s around 300 years wide of the mark. “Alternatively, it may be that the Robin Hood of Robin Hood’s Bay isn’t the ‘rob from the rich, give to the poor’ guy at all, but a sprite similar to Robin Goodfellow (the Puck of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream),” says Taggart. “In which case he has magic powers and can do what he likes where he likes and when he likes.”

One place name that has always baffled me is Scotch Corner, so named (as recently as 1860) according to the book very simply because from that point onwards all roads lead to Scotland. The explanation is rather a let-down, far less romantic and interesting than the story that Whitby is probably named after a Viking called Hviti or Yarm comes from the Old English for “fishing weir” or “fish trap”. Tadcaster was a staging post on the London-York road, and the Roman settlement there wasn’t a large one. It’s not know who Tata or Tada was, but the “caster” ending denotes Roman settlement (as does “- chester”) deriving from the Latin word “castra” for “camp”.

Taggart doesn’t claim that her book is comprehensive. “Basically, it’s about what I found most interesting. Originally I tried to be more comprehensive but found that the explanations became repetitive, so I stuck to what I thought was fascinating.” She does intend to revisit place names, possibly with detailed regionalised volumes.

A town with some of the most colourful array of explanations of its name and religious/historical connections is Halifax. One possible meaning is “area of coarse crass in a nook of land”, and “Haliflex”, used back in the 13th century, suggests a connection with flax. It has been posited that the name comes from “holy flax”, and an earlier idea that it meant “holy locks” or “holy head of hair” was based on the fact that the town had had a church dedicated to St John the Baptist since the 12th century. It might refer to an early image of the saint’s severed head, and there is even a rumour that the head was brought to Halifax for burial.

However colourful the stories, though, the dates don’t fit and modern scholars haven’t really gone for these explanations.

So little time and so many plans to inform and entertain us. Next on Caroline Taggart’s “to do” list is Pushing the Envelope, an examination of how business jargon has evolved, what common phrases such as “thinking outside the box” and “blue sky thinking” are supposed to mean, and their their journey into common useage.

“I’m trying not to take the view ‘isn’t it all ghastly?’ but rather examine the whole process. It’s amazing how quickly some expressions pass into the language. I find everything to do with English fascinating, and try to pass on that enthusiasm.”

* The Book of English Place Names – How Our Towns And Villages Got Their Names by Caroline Taggart, is published by Ebury Press. To order a copy for £9.99 plus postage, call 0800 0153232 or to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk.

STORIES BEHIND THE NAMES

* HOLMFIRTH: ‘Firth’ from the Old English for ‘sparse woodland’, therefore ‘sparse woodland near a place called Holme.’

* LEEDS: The Venerable Bede mentioned Loidis, a vast forest covering most of what is now West Yorkshire, in the 8th century. Leeds is from Landensis, meaning ‘people living by the strong flowing river.’

* HEBDEN BRIDGE: ‘Bridge in the valley where rosehips or wild brambles grow’.

* ASKERN: Many place names in the north begin with ‘Ask’, the Old Scandinavian for Ash...hence Askham Bryan and Askham Richard – Bryan and Richard being 13th century lords of the manor. The ‘-ern’ ending means house.

* HARROGATE: In Old Scandinavian ‘harro’ is a heap of stones, and ‘gate’ is a gate or gap...so the town is ‘place at the road leading to the cairn’

* RIEVAULX: The old French word ‘vaulx’ (valley) was tacked onto the old Celtic river name, hence ‘valley of the Rye.’ No record of the name exists before the building of the Abbey.