by Nick Corcos

The best general introduction to the whole subject of English place-names remains Gelling, M, 1997 (3rd edn.), Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England, Chichester: Phillimore. Gelling is an expert and sympathetic guide for non-specialists, and for archaeologists in particular, her Chapter 6, "Place-Names and the Archaeologist", should be compulsory reading. The application by English speakers of names in their own language, even if some elements were loan-words from Latin or other languages, should not be confused with the names for places in Britain which were in use actually during the Roman occupation, and many of which themselves depended on elements taken directly from the indigenous pre-Latin and pre-English languages. For this, the reader is referred to Rivet, A L F and Smith, C, 1979, The Place-Names of Roman Britain, London: Batsford. For English place-names, Gelling 1997 has chapters on both Latin and ‘Celtic' loan-words, and the latter is now usefully supplemented by Coates, R and Breeze, A, 2000, Celtic Voices, English Places: Studies of the Celtic Impact on Place-Names in England, Stamford: Shaun Tyas. Note that, in the specific case of the element 'ceaster', some expert opinion is now strongly of the view that, rather than coming into English directly from the Latin 'castrum', it was in fact derived from a Brittonic intermediary word borne out of the linguistic interface between speakers of Latin and of the various tongues used by the indigenous peoples of Roman Britain; see R. Coates, 2006, "Chesterblade, Somerset, with a reflection on the element chester", Journal of the English Place-Name Society 38, esp. at 6-9.

Return to Contents