Kent Place-Names Conference 2024
A report on the Kent Place Names Conference held at Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone on 19th October 2024.
Summaries of presentations
Paul Cullen - The Place-Names of Maidstone
The fundamental requirements of place-name research include a knowledge of the languages in which the names were created - Welsh/Celtic, Latin, Old English, Old Norse and Anglo-Norman - and a sufficient number of early spellings, reaching back as close as possible to the date of creation. The interpretation of some names in the Maidstone area is hampered by a lack of early spellings. The observation holds true of Chillington Manor (site of Maidstone Museum, earliest spelling 1535); Wrens Cross (1546); Knight Rider Street (1622). Other Maidstone names, happily, boast fuller runs of spellings, stretching from the end of the Anglo-Saxon period into the modern. For the name Maidstone itself there are plenty, from mægƥan stane, mædes stana c975, to Maydestane 1390 and Maydstone 1573, although in this case the wealth of spellings does not provide certainty. J. K. Wallenberg offered two suggestions. In Kentish Place-Names (1931), he posited a possible link to the name of the river that runs through Maidstone, the Medway, corrupted by association with Old English mægƥ, mægden, ‘maiden, girl’. Then in The Place-Names of Kent (1934) he put forward ‘the people’s stone’ (from OE mægƥ, ‘people’). Both are possible. The link with maidens is given credence by the work of Alan Everitt, a historian ‘very well respected by onomasts’. In Continuity and Colonisation: the evolution of Kentish settlement (1986), Everitt discusses how some names containing the element stone are connected with early religious sites. These sites in turn are often located near springs which had associations with female saints: St Ann’s Well at Springfield, for example. The original dedication of the church of All Saints Maidstone, before its rebuilding and rededication in the fourteenth century, was to St Mary. Among other Maidstone names with fuller spelling runs and capable of interpretation are Fant (OE fyrnƥ ‘ferny place’); Tovil (OE feld ‘open land with a very obscure first element possibly *Tubba a masculine personal name, or OE tōh ‘tough, sticky, hard’); and Week Street (OE wīc ‘trading centre’) whose earliest form appears in an 11th century charter describing the boundary between the dioceses of Rochester and Canterbury.
John Death – ‘Nettles, Gaps and Stumps: an Anglo-Saxon Estate in Meopham
In 939, King Aethelstan granted an estate of 12 hides (about 1440 acres/ 2.25 square miles) to his minister Eadwulf. The bounds of this estate were delineated, in old English, in the charter, and this tempted scholars such as the Wallenberg to try to identify the exact location of the estate. However, he ignored the precise, and relatively limited, size stated to posit a much larger estate, based broadly on the modern parish boundaries of Meopham, which cover an area of, perhaps, 39 hides. It is worth emphasising that there were no parishes in 939.
If the scale is wrong, then the size of named features and the distance between markers have to be exaggerated. With a 12-hide estate, a ridge (hrycg) need no longer be the North Downs escarpment and a gap (geat) can be a small coomb in a dry valley rather than a larger gash in the landscape.
Boundary markers in Anglo-Saxon charters were intended to be permanent descriptors, so that individual buildings in rural areas are largely ignored, since wooden gates, houses or churches would not last many generations. Instead, they made use of high and low ground markers, places familiar to local people either as settlements (such as Cobham and Luddesdown in this charter) or estates (eg. Hrethel’s place, Ecgulf’s estate).
Directions are usually clear in charters so, if the starting-point can be identified, it may be possible to trace the course of the bounds. In Meopham, a railway line running across the proposed estate and the course of roads developed in the past 1100 years mean that modern rights of way lead one outside or within the defined bounds, but the rough shape can be defined.
The likely starting-point is at Meopham Court by the current parish church in Meopham. running north to Nurstead and then following a ridge, gradually reaching the boundary of Cobham. From there the route goes east or south-east toward the hill then known as Hludes beorh, which eventually gave its name to the nearby hamlets of Upper and Lower Luddesdown. The estate boundary bisects the hill, now known as Henley Down, where a bank and ditch boundary feature follows the likely course south as far as an oran, a crest which then takes one westwards, back to the estate centre. The detailed reasoning for this cannot be explained here. Contact the author for more information.
The estate was of no special significance and did not remain in Ecgulf’s possession for long. Within a generation, it had been bequeathed by Aethelstan’s step-mother Aeldgifu, to the monks of Rochester, who held it until the Reformation. The estate may seem to be more significant than it really was, just because this charter survived. It may well be that the surrounding estates, whether at Cobham, Luddesdown or the estate to the south at one point belonging to Ecgulf were equally significant but of those no documentary evidence survives.
James Lloyd – The Devil in the English Countryside
The five lathes of east Kent are often seen as areas with an identifiable group of people, the dwellers of what had, at an earlier point, been called the ‘gē’. However, the term ‘lathe’ originally referred to a specific meeting-point, particularly for judicial functions.
The lathe known since the fourteenth century as Scray, which is to say, Sherwenhope lathe, took its name from a location around Chilham. The name, indicating the hollow or marsh isle of the shrew or shrews, is not extant and it may well have been a fairly small feature. It was probably not on Soakham Downs, the name of which implies that judicial meetings were held there. There is certainly a long barrow of the sort that was often chosen as a judgement site but the distance from Chilham makes this unlikely.
Denge Woods certainly preserves an Anglo-Saxon name (‘denu’ +’ge’) and is closer to Chilham. There are even some plausible earthworks in the woods with a ‘hóp’, which is ‘A piece of raised or enclosed land in the midst of fen, marsh, or waste land’. Unfortunately, however, the earthworks are probably the remains of a large medieval cattle pen.
The final possibility is Julliberrie’s Grave, a name probably derived from the barrow of *Cilla or Cille, which are the masculine and feminine forms of the personal name from which Chilham is derived. The ‘grave’ is a place with supernatural associations.
Sadly, though, there is no supporting evidence for any of these possibilities.
Abigail Lloyd - GIS, bergs and dūns: A new approach to Kentish hill-names in the national context
This was a very visual presentation using GIS information plotted on maps, photographic evidence, and LiDAR survey.
The three names for hills covered in the talk were Old English/Old Scandinavian berg (1,243 names), Old English dūn (1,741 names) and Old English/Brittonic crug (48 names). The research was investigating whether these names formed part of a uniform system of naming across most of England from Kent to Northumberland (Gelling and Cole 2000). In Kent, many of the names discussed were dūn-names.
Whilst earlier scholarship had seen landscape names as intrinsically trivial (Stenton 1924), the work of Gelling and Cole had shown how nuanced these names could be. If topographical features were of little importance, they would not have been used so frequently in naming by the Anglo-Saxons (Cullen 2013). The importance of field-work to understand what motivated historic naming was stressed. A new, powerful, research tool has been created for this study, which can be taken on site visits using a smart phone. This enables multiple digital datasets to be cross referenced on the ground alongside physical examination of the evidence.
In conclusion, the presentation recommended:
. The possibilities for GIS for name-research in Kent.
. The use of the national base line for the various meanings of berg-, crug- and dūn- names against which Kent could be assessed.
. The value of compound name analysis alongside topographical awareness, looking closely at what other nouns and adjectives, paired with these hill terms, can tell us about the nuance in these names. The importance of tracing how name-elements change in time.
Linda Taylor – Philip Symonson’s A New Description of Kent
This presentation examined Symonson’s 1596 map in the context of (1) the cartographer, (2) the context of other maps, and (3) the context of society at that time. Symonson’s earlier work as a producer of estate maps for Rochester Bridge Wardens was covered as was comparison of the Kent map with the work of Saxton, Norden, and Speed. Unlike other contemporary cartographers, Symonson’s map was of one single county, in greater detail and scale,yet was not known to be sponsored or to be prepared for the commercial market.
William Lambarde moved to Kent in 1570 and later became a Warden of Rochester Bridge. As Paymaster for the Bridge Symonson would have had contact with Lambarde. Also it is thought that Lambarde’s Beacon map of Kent was the work of Symonson.
The question of why this map produced then presents itself. One possible reason lies with William Lambarde. Lambarde had the approbation of Lord Burghley and was appointed his deputy as master of the alienations office of chancery. Burghley had a keen interest in maps both for strategic defence and taxation purposes, and it is most likely that A New Description of Kent was prepared for Burghley’s political needs.
Nigel Price - Huguenot Surnames in Canterbury
Nigel Price firstly described the genesis of his work based on Holvenden (1889) “The Register of the Walloon or Strangers Church of Canterbury” published by the Huguenot Society of London. This contains transcriptions (of what is thought to be the vast majority) of the records of Births, Marriages and Deaths for the Huguenot community in Canterbury during the late 16th and the 17th centuries. A list of the most commonly occurring surnames in these records was prepared. This was compared to a similar list for the Hautes de France Region of France (from where it is considered most Huguenot refugees derived) for the 17th century. There was no significant similarity between the two lists and suggestions for this were proposed. Some changes in orthography between surnames in Huguenot Canterbury and 17th century Hautes de France were described. Whilst some differences could be ascribed to a process of “linguistic assimilation” occurring in Canterbury others would seem to need further investigation, preferably in Protestant Church records in France itself.
Paul Cullen - Some more tricky Kent surnames
For his second presentation at the conference Paul Cullen addressed the possible origins and distributions of some previously submitted “surname requests”. Eleven names, seven of which had variant spellings, were considered, twenty-one names in total. Using the “British 19th Century Surnames Atlas” by Archer Software (based on the 1881 census) eleven of the surnames (and their variants) studied were shown to have over 75% of their national occurrence in Kent (and over 50% for a further four). Regarding the possible origins of the submitted surnames, and based on the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (2016) five of the eleven names would seem to derive from Middle English nicknames with three more being locatives (two of which are unidentified). Paul also demonstrated that the surname Picknell, originating in Sussex, derives not from Picknill Green in Bexhill in East Sussex (the standard explanation) but from Parkminster in Cowfold, West Sussex.
John Death – ‘Nettles, Gaps and Stumps: an Anglo-Saxon Estate in Meopham
In 939, King Aethelstan granted an estate of 12 hides (about 1440 acres/ 2.25 square miles) to his minister Eadwulf. The bounds of this estate were delineated, in old English, in the charter, and this tempted scholars such as the Wallenberg to try to identify the exact location of the estate. However, he ignored the precise, and relatively limited, size stated to posit a much larger estate, based broadly on the modern parish boundaries of Meopham, which cover an area of, perhaps, 39 hides. It is worth emphasising that there were no parishes in 939.
If the scale is wrong, then the size of named features and the distance between markers have to be exaggerated. With a 12-hide estate, a ridge (hrycg) need no longer be the North Downs escarpment and a gap (geat) can be a small coomb in a dry valley rather than a larger gash in the landscape.
Boundary markers in Anglo-Saxon charters were intended to be permanent descriptors, so that individual buildings in rural areas are largely ignored, since wooden gates, houses or churches would not last many generations. Instead, they made use of high and low ground markers, places familiar to local people either as settlements (such as Cobham and Luddesdown in this charter) or estates (eg. Hrethel’s place, Ecgulf’s estate).
Directions are usually clear in charters so, if the starting-point can be identified, it may be possible to trace the course of the bounds. In Meopham, a railway line running across the proposed estate and the course of roads developed in the past 1100 years mean that modern rights of way lead one outside or within the defined bounds, but the rough shape can be defined.
The likely starting-point is at Meopham Court by the current parish church in Meopham. running north to Nurstead and then following a ridge, gradually reaching the boundary of Cobham. From there the route goes east or south-east toward the hill then known as Hludes beorh, which eventually gave its name to the nearby hamlets of Upper and Lower Luddesdown. The estate boundary bisects the hill, now known as Henley Down, where a bank and ditch boundary feature follows the likely course south as far as an oran, a crest which then takes one westwards, back to the estate centre. The detailed reasoning for this cannot be explained here. Contact the author for more information.
The estate was of no special significance and did not remain in Ecgulf’s possession for long. Within a generation, it had been bequeathed by Aethelstan’s step-mother Aeldgifu, to the monks of Rochester, who held it until the Reformation. The estate may seem to be more significant than it really was, just because this charter survived. It may well be that the surrounding estates, whether at Cobham, Luddesdown or the estate to the south at one point belonging to Ecgulf were equally significant but of those no documentary evidence survives.
