lately the home of a well-known manufacturer of safety matches, and now advertised for sale by public auction. The present house is of eighteenth century date, and presents no features of interest. In the grounds, however, is to be seen a remnant of the old manor house. This is in the true Elizabethan style, with tall chimneys of quaint design and many curious gables. It was here that Lord Chief Justice Coke had his residence and entertained the Virgin Queen, as the old records tell us, "sumptiously and befittingly.' It was here, too, that Coke wrote his famous treatise "upon Littleton," and other legal works. The old house is likewise connected with Charles I, who in 1647 was imprisoned here for a short time on his way to London to be tried. Gray refers to the house on several occasions in his "Long Story." It is empty to-day, but permission to inspect it may be obtained. The surroundings of Stoke Poges are among the most beautiful to be found anywhere around London. The nearest railway station is Slough, two and a half miles away, and it is a very pleasant walk, once the town is left behind. By road, the favourite route is along the Bath Road, turning to the right immediately after leaving Slough. Finger posts denote the way, so that mistake is impossible. THE PLACE-NAMES OF NORTHWOOD L AND DISTRICT. BY M. J. C. MEIKLEJOHN. [Continued from p. 110.] A ND here it would be well to throw out a caution against sup posing the derivation of a place-name to be what on the face of it it seems. "Things are not what they seem," is a very safe maxim in dealing with local names. Hall End is not what it seems, Waterford in Ireland does not mean the ford over the water (one is not commonly able to "ford" an arm of the sea), but it is a corruption of the Norse Vedra fiord, the fiord of rams. Nor does Durham mean, as might fairly be supposed, "the home on the Dur" or water (dur is another Celtic word denoting water). The Bishop of Durham to-day signs himself Dunelm, which is a slight change from the correct form, as found in the Saxon Chronicle, Dunholme, i.e., the dun, or hill, by the holm, or river island. Bridgewater, again, does not mean the bridge over the water," but is a corruption of Burgh Walter, the castle of one Walter of Douay who came over with William the Conqueror. One should always remember, in this connection, that among unlettered and imperfectly civilized nations phonetic alterations and corruptions of this kind are extremely likely to arise. For two reasons: First, most people are in a hurry about pronunciation, and they are apt to try to get rid of a difficult word by corrupting it into an easier form (it is much easier to say Gloster than Gloucester, or Cisester than Cirencester). The great tendency is to contraction; "letters," as has been said, "like soldiers, being very apt to desert and drop off in a long march," and particularly is this the case with words in the march of centuries. In the next place, people are fond of pronouncing a word which is strange to them like some other word or name with which they are familiar. This trait is especially common among sailors, who make curious hashes of the names of the ships in the Royal Navy. Thus, at different times, H.M.S. Bellerophon has been known as the "Billy Ruffian," the Andromache as "Andrew Mackay," the Courageux as the "Currant Juice," the Herondelle as the "Iron Devil," and to-day our sailors call H.M.S. Sutlej the "Subtle-jay." These are instances of the kind of corruption that is common enough in place-names too. There is, for example, in Hull a spot called the "Land o' Green Ginger," a puzzle that would be hopeless of interpretation were it not known that it was originally the residence of a Dutchman called Landegren, who styled his place Landegren's Gange, or Landegren's farm, and hence our present Land o' Green Ginger. To get at the true meaning of a placename, then, the only safe rule is either to discover the earliest documentary form of it, or, failing that, to interpret it on the analogy of similar names, whose origin is already known, paying at the same time and in every case due regard to geographical surroundings. Guessing at a name is an abomination that lands us in the kind of extravagance of a certain word-hunter, who was trying to explain the meaning of Lambeth, which probably means "the landing place for lambs." But he said he thought it might come from lama, the Tibetan word for a priest, and beth, a Semitic word for house; and therefore interpreted Lambeth to mean "the house of the chief priest," because the Archbishop of Canterbury lived there! Now to come to the physical character of the North Middlesex district and the adjacent countryside. If we walk up to the top of almost any little hill round Northwood and let our eye travel over the landscape, it rests in nearly every direction on an almost un 1 Horne Tooke. broken stretch of woodland, and in the days of our Saxon fathers that woodland must have been not almost, but altogether unbroken --so unbroken that, even at a much later date, tall wooden crosses to guide the traveller through the mazes of the forest had to be put up on the church towers. There is one of these forest-crosses still to be seen on Pinner Church. The great Middlesex forest stretched from the dreary fen of Moorfields in London northward, away for miles and miles. Of the existence of this forest (or, at all events, of woodland that has taken its place) we have, as has been said, visible evidence now, and we have also philological evidence in the English words chart, holt, hurst, and weald. All of these mean woodland. On the road between Chesham and Wendover stands a Chartridge, the wood on the ridge; near Beaconsfield lies Holtspur, the wooded spur; and a little to the east of Burnham Beeches is Brockhurst Wood, a redundant name, for Brockhurst by itself means "the wood of the brock or badger"-an animal, by the way, that is still much commoner than many people suppose. The word hatch, too, as in Hatch End near Pinner, and in Colney Hatch, where the lunatic asylum stands, is also associated with woodland; it is derived from the hitch gate, which kept cattle from straying out of the forest. Lastly there is Harrow Weald, low hills covered with a weald, which is the English form of the German wald, a forest. 2 Throughout this thickly forest-clad country there were, however, some openings. There were, to start with, the leys, "the lying places"-"the open forest glades where the cattle loved to lie"; plenty of them, like Wembley, Ashley, Hedgesley, and Croxley near Rickmansworth, the last a manor held by a family called Croke, hence its name, Crokeslee or Croxley. Then there were fields, not small enclosures like our present fields (the Saxons called those accers or acres, as in Fernacre near Denham), but "little patches of 'felled' or cleared land in the midst of the surrounding forest." As in Harefield, which, whatever it does mean, does not mean "the field of hares," for the spelling in old documents is Hertfield; in Beaconsfield and in Enfield, which is apparently a mutilated form of Enedfield, the field of ducks. Round Enfield, by the way, there still exists part of the old Middlesex Forest, known as Enfield Chase, which as late as the seventeenth century was described by the diarist Evelyn, "as a solitarie desert, stored with 3,000 deer.' But the commonest ending in every wooded district of southern England is den. It means a deep wooded valley, which was par excellence a swine pasture. Examples are very numerous: Flaunden, Taylor, "Words and Places." 1 Cussans, "History of Herts." 3 Taylor, op. cit. |