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Place-names of Somerset,
Ringing down time,
Queer, quaint and musical –
Hark to their chime.
Combe Florey, Montacute,
Hatch Beauchamp, Mells,
Huish Episcopi,
Milverton, Wells
What desert gypsy
of Queen Camel thought?
By Norton Fitzwarren
whose mind was first caught?
Is Monksilver haunted
by arboreal friars?
And what means Stogumber
Wiveliscombe, Ash Priors?
Did sanctified footsteps
Go thoughtfully through
Stoke St Gregory village,
St Audries, too,
and of course, Bishop's Lydeard?
What far summer hour
Made fragrant the meadows
of Huish Champflower?
Did they always at Crowcombe
indulge in rook pie?
And up to Roadwater
Are the floods often high?
The place names of Somerset
They cry and they call
Provocative, pleasant,
I'm in love with them all!
I have at least two things in common with Teresa Hooley, the author of that poem (published in 1945): I was not born or raised in Somerset, but, having moved there as an adult, one of the things I readily fell in love with is the diverse array of charming place names. Whimsical, quirky, poetic, they're sometimes unreasonably satisfying to say. In this video I'm going to dig into some etymology and see how history blessed us with these delightful names. I only hope that by explaining some of the many recurring features and patterns of etymology behind these names, I am not metaphorically dissecting a frog.
The very first name in her poem, Combe Florey, could hardly be a better example of what I mean by recurring features and patterns, as it embodies at least two of them.
The first word, Combe, means valley, deriving from Old English - cognate to Welsh cwm, with common roots back to Brythonic. This is a very common place name element in England generally, but is particularly common in the south west. Somerset alone is overflowing with examples.
Combe Hay, Combe Throop, Combe Down,
Beercrocrombe, Abbas Combe, Batcombe, Butcombe,
Chaffcombe, Croscombe, Crowcombe, Cutcombe,
Englishcombe, Templecombe, Timberscombe, Nettlecombe...
At this point I should probably interrupt myself to add a disclaimer. Local pronunciations are often not what you might think from the spelling, and since I don't have local knowledge of each and every place in this video, I'm bound to be saying a lot of them wrong.
Back to Combe Florey though, and the second word of the name is a textbook example of another one of the biggest patterns in these delicious Somerset placenames. Florey is a corruption of the name of Hugh de Fleuri, who was lord of the manor here around 1166.
This is an extremely common explanation for Somerset's two word village names - Hardington Mandeville, Chilton Cantelo, Huish Champflower, Orchard Portman, Hazelbury Plucknett, Hinton Blewett.
You wonder, who's Hinton, and where did it all go wrong? But actually Blewett is from Bluet - because, as in many cases this noble’s family name is 'French', or perhaps more accurately Norman, whereas the first word of the village name tends to be derived from an older linguistic presence, either Anglo-Saxon or sometimes Celtic. Usually this element is somewhat generic and geographical: Hinton, for example, simply means 'high settlement'; combe, as we saw, means valley, whereas Shepton is the Anglo-Saxon for sheep farm; and the Cary in Cary Fitzpaine is the name of the local river, of uncertain Celtic or pre-Celtic origin.
Likewise, Compton Pauncefoot, Norton Fitzwarren, Charlton Mackrell and many others used the manorial family name to distinguish between umpteen other Comptons and Nortons and Charltons, these being extremely basic Anglo-Saxon place names.
The French -slash- Norman names are often somewhat disguised by centuries-old Anglicisation. For example, Shepton Beauchamp is 'beecham', not bo-shom. Shepton Mallet, meanwhile, was named after the Malet family, which, by modern French standards I might guess was actually pronounced Mal-ay. Anyway William Malet was one of William the Conqueror's senior associates at the Battle of Hastings. Somewhere along the line it turned into Mallet and another 'l' got added to the spelling in the 16th century.
There's also a Sutton Mallet and a Curry Mallet, the latter being near Curry Rivel. It's the same old story - Rivel comes from the family name of its 12th century landlord. The Curry part, although unusual as a village name, is, in a sense, again quite generic, in that it derives from a generic geographical word from a pre-Norman tongue - a Celtic word [crwy] meaning boundary.
Huish is another one of these unusual-but-also-ultimately-generic first words: it derives from hiwisc, Saxon for homestead. Even amongst such a crowded field of excellent names Huish Episcopi has got to stand as one of my absolute favourites.
Episcopi relates to 'episcopal', that is, pertaining to a bishop, because it was owned by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Religious explanations account for an awful lot of these names, actually. Something-saint-something is a very common pattern. Teresa Hooley called out Stoke St Gregory as her example, but there's also Barton St David, Buckland St Mary, Seavington St Michael, Hinton St George, Peasedown St John, and so many more. The general explanation for these is quite simple - the village church is dedicated to that saint.
Just like the noble family names were affixed to very generic Anglo-Saxon village names, there is a major element of disambiguation to this naming convention. The Stoke in Stoke St Gregory, for example, is possibly one of the most common place name elements in England, deriving from the old English 'stoc' which was originally about as vague as 'place'. Even in Somerset there's a Stoke-sub-Hamdon, Stoke Trister, Stoke St Michael, Rodney Stoke and more besides. Likewise, there are dozens if not hundreds of Bartons and Kingstons in England, but only one Barton St David and Kingston St Mary.
Chilton Trinity offers a very minor variation on this theme, with its parish church of the Holy Trinity, rather than a particular saint, while Hooley also mention's Bishops Lydeard, as distinct from nearby Lydeard St Lawrence. Much like the Episcopi villages, the Bishop in question was the Bishop of Wells.
To mop up some of the other names from Hooley's poem: Montacute is somewhat unclear. It may come from the Latin Mons Acutus, referring to the conical hill it sits beneath, but that's hardly a mountain, and it may instead come from the de Montagu family who once again were chums of William the Conqueror and ended up lords of the manor in these parts. They originated from Montaigu-les-Bois in modern day France, whose name was recorded as Monte Acuto in around 1040, because it also has steep hills. So my best guess is that the French village was named after the Latin description of the mountains, and then the family were named after that village, then the Somerset village was named after that family, but nobody on the internet seems terribly certain what order it came in, and what was named after what.
Queen Camel relates not to deserts or desert-adapted animals. Wikipedia says the Camel is a corruption of "Cantmael", which in turn may have been from the Celtic words canto "district" and mael "bare hill", and that "the 'Queen' in the village's name is probably Queen Eleanor, the wife of Henry III, who owned land in the area in the 13th century."
A few other favourites of my own that Hooley did not feature in her verse. Temple Cloud: the Temple is likely from the Knights Templar holding the manor here around 1200AD, and the Cloud part is either derived from a personal name [Cloda] or the Old English for rocky outcrop ['clud']. Nearby Clutton has the same etymology, apparently.
Dowlish Wake follows roughly the same pattern I've been harping on about - Wake from the family name of medieval landowners, and Dowlish from a geographical feature, the Dowlish brook, which in turn is apparently from the Celtic for 'dark stream'.
I have no idea how Hooley resisted including Nempnett Thrubwell, because honestly... Nempnett Thrubwell? What an incredible name, but the etymology seems very unclear. Wikipedia says emnet was Old English for 'level ground' and Thrubwell is unclear but might mean gushing stream. But another source I found says it's from "Celtic words nemett meaning grove, and the Old English wiell, meaning well", so frankly... who knows.
I guess that's enough frog dissection for now, as we're getting into either repetitive explanations or "I don't know", so I'll wrap up the place names here. I was going to throw in a bonus mini-biography of Teresa Hooley, who was a rather interesting woman, but I've got no footage to pad it out with visually, so I'll just recommend you look her up.
Special thanks to the internet friend who found the full poem for me. The internet failed me, Bristol libraries failed me, I even registered at the British Library and went all the way to London to look at their Hooley anthologies, to no avail, but this guy went out of his way to dig it out of the Bodleian... I'm very much obliged.
Anyway that's all for this video. Cheers.
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