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Look at a map of England and you’ll see a land of curious contradictions. It’s a place where you can find a Wetwang in Yorkshire, a Great Snoring in Norfolk, and a Shitterton in Dorset. You might stumble upon a village called Pity Me near Durham or find yourself in Beer, Devon, which has nothing to do with the pub.
Where on earth did these names come from? The answer is not just a historical footnote; it is the story of England itself, written across the very landscape.
The map of England is a kind of historical document, a palimpsest where centuries of language have been layered one on top of another.
Each name is a linguistic fossil, a clue to the people who lived there, the gods they worshipped, the battles they fought, and the world they saw around them.
To understand these names is to become a linguistic geologist, digging through the strata of language left by successive waves of invaders and settlers.
It’s a journey that takes us from the mysterious echoes of prehistory, through the descriptive world of the Celts, the orderly grid of the Romans, the foundational vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons, the fierce pragmatism of the Vikings, and finally to the aristocratic stamp of the Normans.
This exploration is not always straightforward. Many of the original words have been “badly mangled by centuries of inept pronunciation and inconsistent spelling”.
Yet this process of change, this linguistic weathering, is what gives the names their charm and their mystery. It transforms a simple journey across the country into a detective story, a quest to uncover the original meaning hidden beneath the modern form.
So, let us begin our excavation, peeling back the layers of the map to reveal the hidden histories beneath.
Echoes from Before the Beginning: Pre-Celtic and Celtic Tongues
The Deepest Layer: Pre-Celtic Whispers
Before we can speak of Celts or Romans, we must listen for the faintest of linguistic ghosts. The very oldest place names in England predate even the Celtic tribes who arrived around the 4th century BC.
These are names that may date back to the Neolithic era, belonging to an unknown, early Indo-European language spoken by the island’s first inhabitants.
Unsurprisingly, these ancient names are almost exclusively attached to rivers—the most permanent and powerful features of any landscape.
Scholars theorize the existence of an ‘Old European hydronymy’, a shared, pre-Celtic language that named many of Europe’s great waterways. In England, this ancient stratum includes some of the most famous rivers: the Humber, Severn, Thames, Colne, and Wey are all thought to be pre-Celtic names. Their exact meanings are lost to the mists of time, making them the true, mysterious bedrock of our linguistic map.
For instance Severn could be from ancient Hafren. Or it may be from the Roman Latinisation of this, Sabrina.
Thames could be from ancient Celtic – Tamessa (meaning Dark Water). Romans made it Tamesis, Old English made it Temes. Middle English added a silent ‘h’ beleiving it came from an old Greek source.
The Language of the Landscape: Brittonic Celtic
The first major linguistic layer we can clearly identify belongs to the Iron Age Celts. Their language, known as Brittonic, was the ancestor of modern Welsh and Cornish and was spoken across the whole of what is now England.
Celtic place names are overwhelmingly topographical; they describe the land itself—the rivers, hills, valleys, and forests—suggesting a people with a deep and descriptive connection to the natural world.
This is most obvious in their names for rivers. The classic example is Avon, which appears all over England. It comes directly from the Brittonic word afon, which simply means ‘river’.
This has led to the wonderfully redundant modern name “River Avon,” which translates literally as ‘River River’.
Other rivers tell a similar story: the Derwent means ‘river where oak trees are common’, the Tamar and Thames may come from a word meaning ‘dark one’, and the rivers Axe, Exe, Esk, and Usk all derive from the Brittonic word isca, meaning ‘water’ or ‘abounding in fish’.
The Celts also named the high ground. The element pen, meaning ‘hill’ or ‘headland’, survives in places like Penge in London, Pendleton in Lancashire, and Penrith in Cumbria.
In the southwest, the word cwm for ‘valley’ became the common English place name element coombe, giving us picturesque villages like Ilfracombe and Castle Combe. Similarly, bryn (‘hill’) appears in names like Brill in Buckinghamshire.
The geographical distribution of these names is a story in itself. Celtic names are relatively rare in the south and east of England but become dramatically more frequent as one moves west and north, toward the modern Celtic heartlands of Wales and Cornwall.
This pattern is a direct map of the gradual advance of the Anglo-Saxons, who pushed the Brittonic-speaking peoples westward over several centuries.
The very survival of Celtic names for major natural features, while most settlement names were replaced by Anglo-Saxon ones, tells a fascinating story of cultural interaction.
It demonstrates that the incoming Anglo-Saxons did not enter an empty, unnamed land. It was far easier for a newcomer to ask a native Briton, “What do you call this great river?” than to invent a new name from scratch.
Thus, they adopted the existing Celtic names for the big, unchangeable things like rivers and hills. When they built their own new farm or village, however, they gave it a name in their own language.
This process of interaction is perfectly preserved in hybrid names—linguistic fossils of the moment two cultures met. Manchester, for instance, combines the original Celtic hill-fort name Mamucion (‘breast-shaped hill’) with the Old English word ceaster (‘Roman fort‘).
Lichfield joins the Celtic Letocetum (‘grey wood’) with the Old English feld (‘open land’). These names are the audible proof of a period of coexistence long enough for language to be exchanged and blended.
| Celtic Element | Original Meaning | Modern Examples |
| Afon | River | Avon, Stratford-upon-Avon |
| Isca / Esk | Water, abounding in fish | River Exe, River Esk, Exeter |
| Dour / Dubr- | Waters | Dover, River Dour |
| Derwent | Oak-tree river | River Derwent |
| Pen | Hill, headland | Penge, Penrith, Pendleton |
| Coombe / Cwm | Valley | Ilfracombe, Castle Combe |
| Bryn | Hill | Brill, Bryn |
| Caer | Fort | Carlisle, Caerwent |
| Crick / Crug | Hill, mound | Cricklade, Crewkerne |
The Eagle’s Imprint: Roman Latin
The Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD began four centuries of occupation, yet it left a surprisingly light direct footprint on the map.
Latin became the official language of government, the army, and administration, but the vast majority of people in the countryside continued to speak Brittonic.
As a result, many so-called “Roman” names are simply Latinised versions of existing Celtic ones. The Romans recorded London as
Londinium, York as Eboracum, and Bath as Aquae Sulis (‘the waters of the goddess Sulis’), adapting local names rather than replacing them wholesale.
The Enduring Legacy of the Camp: Castra
The Romans’ single most significant and lasting contribution to English place names comes from one word: castra, meaning ‘a military camp’ or ‘fort’. This Latin term was borrowed into Old English as ceaster and became the ancestor of the ubiquitous suffixes that mark the English landscape today: -chester, -caster, and -cester. A town with one of these endings is almost certainly built on or near the site of a Roman fort.
The examples are legion: Manchester, Winchester, Chester, Lancaster, Doncaster, Tadcaster, Leicester, Gloucester, and Cirencester all bear this Roman military stamp.
Over the centuries, pronunciation has often worn these names down into comfortable, clipped forms, leading to some of England’s most notorious spellings.
Leicester is famously pronounced ‘Lester’, Worcester is ‘Wuster’, Gloucester is ‘Gloster’, and, most wonderfully of all, Godmanchester is often shortened to ‘Gomster’.
Paving the Way: Strata
The other key Roman contribution was infrastructure. The Romans were master road-builders, and their network of paved highways connected their forts across the province.
The Latin term for such a road was via strata (‘paved way’), which gave Old English its word stræt, the ancestor of our modern ‘street’. Consequently, places with Strat- or Stret- in their name are nearly always located on the course of a Roman road.
Stratford means ‘ford on a Roman road’, Stretton is ‘settlement on a Roman road’, and Chester-le-Street in County Durham is a perfect triple-decker name meaning ‘the Roman fort on the Roman road’.
The Roman place names that survive are not random; they precisely map the skeleton of Roman imperial power in Britain.
They pinpoint the military installations (castra) and the logistical network of roads (strata) that connected and supplied them.
The conspicuous absence of Roman names for farms, fields, or small villages reinforces the historical reality that the Roman presence was a strategic, military, and administrative occupation, not a deep-rooted cultural colonization of the entire island.
The toponymic evidence reveals the fundamental difference between the Roman and later Anglo-Saxon presences. The Romans built an empire; the Anglo-Saxons built a home.
| Latin Element (via OE) | Original Meaning | Modern Forms | Examples |
| Castra (via OE ceaster) | Military camp, fort | -chester, -caster, -cester | Manchester, Lancaster, Leicester, Gloucester |
| Strata (via OE stræt) | Paved road | Strat-, Stret- | Stratford-upon-Avon, Stretton, Chester-le-Street |
| Colonia | Colony (for retired soldiers) | -coln | Lincoln |
| Portus | Harbour, port | -port | Portchester |
| Ecclesia (via Brittonic ecles) | Church | Eccles- | Eccles, Ecclesfield |
The Making of England: The Age of Old English
If the Romans left a skeleton, it was the Anglo-Saxons who put flesh on the bones of the English landscape. The arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the 5th century onwards triggered what one historian calls a “major disruption in English placename nomenclature”.
This was the great renaming. The vast majority of English towns, villages, and hamlets have names of Old English origin, for this was not just an invasion; it was the linguistic birth of England itself.
Anglo-Saxon names can be broadly divided into three types: those named for a people, those named for a dwelling, and those named for a feature of the landscape.
“The People Of…”: Folk Names
The earliest Anglo-Saxon names often identified a place with a specific tribe or kin-group. The key linguistic marker for this is the suffix -ingas, meaning ‘the descendants, followers, or people of’ a particular leader.
This suffix, now usually shortened to -ing or -ings, points to the very first phase of settlement. Hastings was the settlement of ‘Haesta’s people’, and Reading was home to ‘Reada’s people’.
On a grander scale, the names of the great tribal kingdoms survive in our modern counties:
Essex, Sussex, and Wessex were the lands of the East, South, and West Saxons, while Norfolk and Suffolk were home to the ‘North Folk’ and ‘South Folk’ of the Angles.
“A Place to Live”: Habitative Names
This is by far the largest category, containing the building blocks of the English village map. These names describe the settlements themselves.
This is where the name of the place I was born and bred. Oldham.
-ham: One of the earliest and most common elements, from the Old English hām, meaning ‘homestead, village, manor, or estate’. It is the root of our modern word ‘home’. Examples are everywhere, from Birmingham (‘homestead of Beorma’s people’) to Fulham and Nottingham.
-ton: From the Old English tūn, this is the single most common place name element in England. It originally meant a ‘fenced enclosure’ or ‘farmstead’. Over time, its meaning evolved to ‘estate’ or ‘village’, and it eventually gave us our modern word ‘town’. Examples include Southampton, Wolverhampton, and Preston. The distribution of these first two elements tells a story of settlement: -ham is more frequent in the southeast, where the Anglo-Saxons first landed, while the later and more prolific -ton is more common further north and west.
-bury: From burh, meaning a ‘fortified place’. Many of these burhs were constructed by kings like Alfred the Great as a defence against Viking raiders. This element gives us the modern endings -bury, -borough, and -burgh, as in Canterbury (‘the stronghold of the Kentish people’), Peterborough, and Salisbury.
-worth: An ‘enclosure’ or ‘homestead’, often associated with a specific person, as in Tamworth (‘enclosure on the River Tame’) or Isleworth (‘Gislhere’s enclosure’).
-stow: A ‘place’, but often one with special significance, such as a holy place or a meeting place. Felixstowe was the ‘holy place of St. Felix’, while Bristol was originally Brycgstow, ‘the meeting place at the bridge’.
“What Do We See?”: Topographical Names
Like the Celts before them, the Anglo-Saxons also named many places for the landscape features that defined them.
-ley: From lēah, a ‘clearing in a wood’ or ‘meadow’. This is one of the most common topographical elements, painting a picture of an England being carved out of dense forest. Crawley was a ‘clearing frequented by crows’, while Ashley was an ‘ash-tree clearing’.
-ford: A ‘river crossing’. The most famous example is Oxford, which means exactly what it says: a ‘ford for oxen’.
-den: From denu, a ‘valley’. Rottingdean in Sussex was the ‘valley of Rota’s people’.
-burn or -bourne: From burna, a ‘brook’ or ‘stream’. This gives us Blackburn (‘dark-coloured stream’) and Bournemouth (‘mouth of the Bourne stream’).
The evolution of these Old English place name elements reveals the evolution of Anglo-Saxon society itself. The sequence of dominant name-types mirrors a shift from a migration-era society to a settled, organized kingdom.
The earliest names, the kin-based -ingas folk names, reflect the primary concerns of the first settlers: “Who are we?” and “Where is our group?”
The next wave of simple settlement names like -ham answers the question, “Where is our home?”
Finally, the later dominance of the element -tūn, with its evolving meaning from a simple ‘farmstead’ to an ‘estate’ or an ‘administrative unit of an estate’, signals a more complex society.
A tūn was not just a farm; it was an economic unit within a structured kingdom. The changing vocabulary of the map provides direct linguistic evidence for the increasing social, political, and economic organization of Anglo-Saxon England.
| Category | OE Element | Meaning | Examples |
| Folk | -ingas | The people of… | Hastings, Reading, Ealing |
| Habitative | -ham | Homestead, village | Birmingham, Nottingham, Fulham |
| -tūn | Enclosure, farmstead, estate | Southampton, Preston, Wolverhampton | |
| -burh | Fortified place | Canterbury, Salisbury, Peterborough | |
| -stōw | (Holy) meeting place | Bristol, Felixstowe, Padstow | |
| -wīc | Specialised farm (e.g., dairy) | Norwich, Ipswich, Chiswick | |
| -worth | Enclosure, homestead | Tamworth, Isleworth, Denchworth | |
| Topographical | -lēah | Woodland clearing, meadow | Crawley, Dudley, Ashley |
| -ford | River crossing | Oxford, Bradford, Watford | |
| -denu | Valley | Rottingdean, Tenterden | |
| -burna | Stream, brook | Blackburn, Bournemouth | |
| -dūn | Hill | Swindon, Huntingdon | |
| -feld | Open land, field | Sheffield, Huddersfield |
Fury from the North: The Viking Influence
Beginning in the late 8th century, a new wave of Germanic speakers arrived: the Vikings. Their raids and invasions culminated in the establishment of the Danelaw—a vast territory in northern and eastern England that was subject to Danish law and customs.
This political division created a clear linguistic frontier that is still visible on the map today. South and west of the old Roman road of Watling Street, Old English names dominate.
To the north and east, in a region administered from the “Five Boroughs” of Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, and Stamford, a dense concentration of Old Norse names appears.
The Scandinavian Signature
Although Old Norse and Old English were related languages, allowing for some mutual intelligibility, the Viking settlers brought their own distinctive vocabulary for naming places.
-by: This is the quintessential Viking suffix, from the Old Norse býr, meaning ‘farmstead’ or ‘village’. It is incredibly common throughout the former Danelaw and is a sure sign of Scandinavian settlement. Grimsby was ‘Grim’s village’, Whitby was the ‘white village’, and Derby was the ‘deer village’.
-thorpe: From the Old Norse þorp, this meant an ‘outlying farmstead’ or a ‘secondary settlement’. This suggests a growing and expanding population, establishing a main village ( -by) and then smaller satellite farms (-thorpe). Examples include Scunthorpe and Mablethorpe.
-thwaite: From þveit, meaning a ‘clearing’, ‘paddock’, or ‘meadow’. This is especially common in the more wooded, hilly parts of the Danelaw, such as Cumbria and Yorkshire, in names like Slaithwaite and Bassenthwaite.
-toft: A ‘homestead’ or the ‘site of a house’ , as seen in Lowestoft.
-kirk: From the Old Norse kirkja, meaning ‘church’, giving us names like Ormskirk (‘Orm’s church’).
Norse Makeovers
The Vikings didn’t just create new names; they also altered existing English ones to make them easier to pronounce. The soft Old English sc sound (like ‘sh’) often became a hard Norse sk, and the soft c (‘ch’) became a hard k.
Thus, the English settlement of Shipton (‘sheep farm’) became the Scandinavian-inflected Skipton.
Most famously, the Anglo-Saxon capital of Northumbria, Eoforwic (‘wild boar settlement’), proved too much of a mouthful for its new Norse rulers. They simplified it to Jorvik, which, over the centuries, has smoothed into the name we know today: York.
The sheer density and agricultural nature of these Scandinavian place names tell a crucial story. The prevalence of words like -by (‘farmstead’) and -thorpe (‘secondary farmstead’) suggests that the Viking settlement was not merely a military conquest by a warrior elite.
It points to a significant and large-scale migration of farmers and families who established thousands of new agricultural communities.
The existence of -thorpe names is particularly telling, as it implies a multi-generational process of expansion from primary settlements.
The toponymic evidence strongly supports the historical model of the Viking armies transitioning from raiding to colonization, putting down deep roots and fundamentally reshaping the demographic and linguistic landscape of northern and eastern England.
| Old Norse Element | Meaning | Examples |
| -by | Farmstead, village | Grimsby, Derby, Whitby, Rugby |
| -thorpe | Secondary settlement, outlying farm | Scunthorpe, Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe |
| -thwaite | Clearing, paddock, meadow | Slaithwaite, Braithwaite, Huthwaite |
| -toft | Homestead, building site | Lowestoft, Langtoft |
| -keld | Spring | Threlkeld |
| -kirk | Church | Ormskirk, Selkirk |
| -ness | Headland, promontory | Skegness |
The Conquerors’ Stamp: Norman French
The Norman Conquest of 1066 was a seismic event that permanently altered English society, government, and language.
It flooded the English vocabulary with thousands of French words. Yet, its impact on place names was surprisingly limited and of a very particular kind.
By 1066, most of England’s towns and villages already had well-established names. The Norman influence was therefore not one of creation, but of modification—a top-down linguistic stamp reflecting a new French-speaking aristocracy taking control of an existing Anglo-Scandinavian landscape.
The Manorial Affix: “This Place is MINE”
The most common and distinctive form of Norman influence is the manorial affix. After the conquest, William I seized all the land in England and redistributed it to his loyal Norman barons.
To signify their new ownership, these lords often simply added their family name to the existing English name of their manor, frequently using a French preposition like de, de la, or sur.
This practice has given England some of its most wonderfully aristocratic and lengthy place names. Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire is the old English town of Ashby (‘ash-tree farm’) that passed into the hands of the la Zouch family.
Other classic examples include Stoke Mandeville, Leighton Buzzard (once belonging to the Busard family), and Sutton Courtenay.
This trend also extended to land owned by the church or crown, giving us names like Abbots Leigh, Bishop’s Stortford, King’s Lynn, and Princes Risborough.
Norman Sensibilities: Renaming and Beautifying
On occasion, the new Norman lords did rename places entirely, either to reflect the beauty of a location or, more amusingly, to correct an English name they found crude.
Descriptive Names: The French word for ‘beautiful’, beau, appears in several names. Beaulieu in Hampshire means ‘beautiful place’, and Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire means ‘beautiful view’—though today it is stubbornly pronounced ‘Beever’ by locals.
Richmond in Yorkshire was named by a Norman lord after his home estate of Richemont in Normandy. The town of Battle in Sussex was named simply to commemorate the great clash of 1066.
“Gentrification”: The Normans were not impressed by the Anglo-Saxon name for Nottingham: Snotingeham, meaning the ‘homestead of Snot’s people’.
Finding the ‘sn’ sound difficult to pronounce and the meaning distasteful, they simply dropped the ‘S’, giving us Nottingham. In an even more dramatic makeover, they encountered a place in Essex called Fulanpettae, Old English for ‘foul pit’, and promptly renamed it Beaumont, ‘beautiful hill’.
The nature of this Norman French influence—overwhelmingly characterized by these manorial affixes—is a direct linguistic reflection of the Feudal System imposed on England after 1066.
The names do not signify new settlements founded by French migrants. Instead, they signify a change of ownership and the creation of a stark social divide between a French-speaking aristocracy and an English-speaking peasantry.
A name like Ashby-de-la-Zouch is a sentence frozen in time. It literally says: “Here is the old English place, Ashby, which now belongs to the new Norman lord, de la Zouch.”
This linguistic act of affixation is the verbal equivalent of building a castle on a hill overlooking a village. It is a statement of power, ownership, and foreign domination imposed upon the existing social and physical landscape. The map itself becomes a Domesday Book in miniature.
| Type of Influence | Description | Examples |
| Manorial Affix | Adding the name of the new Norman feudal lord to an existing English place name. | Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leighton Buzzard, Stoke Mandeville, Kingston Lacy |
| Descriptive Name | A new French name given to a place, often describing its beauty. | Beaulieu (‘beautiful place’), Belvoir (‘beautiful view’), Richmond, Battle |
| “Gentrification” | Altering an existing English name that the Normans found crude or difficult to pronounce. | Snotingeham -> Nottingham, Fulanpettae (‘foul pit’) -> Beaumont |
| Ecclesiastical Affix | Adding a term to denote ownership by the Church or Crown. | Abbots Leigh, Bishop’s Stortford, King’s Lynn, Princes Risborough |
Examples In The World of Hiking
I have hiked many a hill, mountain and landscape but when you look closely at the names for them you can see how it was influenced by our history of peoples over time.
In my Pendle Hill Walk I showed how its name means ‘hill hill hill’. Layers added at each period in time. Pen is Celtic for hill, Hul is Old English for hill and we added hill to it all to make sense in modern language.
Malvern Hills comes from ‘Moel Bryn’ Old Celtic for ‘Bare Hill’.
Valley comes from Old English ‘fal’ meaning Low Lying Land. A descriptive name example for a valley is Wharfedale in Yorkshire. Wharfe comes from ‘Varp’ which is Old Norse for ‘Throw Away’ indicating a long winding river.
The name “Cragg” in Lancashire comes from the Old Norse word “kragr,” meaning “rocky hill”, highlighting the rugged terrain of the area.
Weald in Kent and Sussex derives from the Old English word “weald,” meaning “wooded country,” indicating the presence of dense forests in the region.
Your Local Map, A Personal Museum
Our journey through the linguistic strata of England is complete. We have travelled from the ancient, unknowable river-whispers of pre-history, through the hills and valleys of the Celts, along the paved roads of the Romans, into the homesteads and clearings of the Anglo-Saxons, across the farmlands of the Danelaw, and finally into the manors of the Norman aristocracy.
The map is not a static object; it is a living document, a geological chart of history where each name is a fossil waiting to be identified.
The true adventure, however, begins now. Armed with these decoder keys, you can embark on your own explorations. Look at the map of your local area. Find the river that runs through it—is its name a Celtic echo?
Look for the tell-tale -chester or -caster that signals a Roman legion’s camp. Tally up the Anglo-Saxon -hams, -tons, and -leys that speak of ancient farms and forest clearings. If you live in the north or east, can you spot the Viking frontier marked by a cluster of villages ending in -by or -thorpe?
Can you find a local manor that still bears the name of its Norman lord?
The history of England is not locked away in dusty archives or behind museum glass. It is written on every road sign, every Ordnance Survey map, every village green. By learning to read the names on the land, we learn to see the ghosts of the peoples who came before us.
We can stand in a place and hear the faint echoes of the languages they spoke, recognizing the indelible footprints they left on the landscape for us to find, a thousand years later.
Now to answer the questions to the places named at the beginning of this article:
Wetwang: This Yorkshire village name most likely comes from the Old Norse vaett-vangr, which translates to a “field for the trial of a legal action” or a “field of witness”. An alternative theory suggests it simply meant “wet field,” in contrast to the nearby town of Driffield.
Great Snoring: This Norfolk village has nothing to do with sleeping. Its name is Anglo-Saxon and derives from a settlement belonging to a leader named Snear. It means “the place of Snear’s people”. The “Great” was added to distinguish it from the neighboring village of Little Snoring.
Shitterton: This Dorset hamlet’s name is quite literal and dates back over 1,000 years. It is an Anglo-Saxon name meaning “farmstead on the stream used as an open sewer”. The stream that runs through the hamlet was apparently once called the “Shiter”.
Pity Me: The origin of this name near Durham is not definitively known. The most widely accepted theory is that it was a “whimsical name” given in the 19th century to a location that was considered desolate, exposed, or difficult to farm.
Beer: The name of this coastal village in Devon has no connection to the alcoholic beverage. It comes from the Old English word bearu, which means “grove” or “woodland,” referring to the forests that once surrounded the area.
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