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terminating in the suffix " by " witness thereby to their Danish 

 origin. The word originally meant an abode or a single farm, 

 but in time, as other houses rose around the first established one, 

 it came rather to signify a village. A cow-byre is a place for 

 cows, and a bye-law a law made by the village or township. So 

 Easby, Battersby, Ingleby signify the houses or villages either 

 belonging to certain individuals whose names are disguised in the 

 first element of the place-name, or named after some local 

 feature. 



The second half of the name " Easby " appears to tell us that 

 the Danes made a small settlement there some eleven hundred 

 years ago. What then, does the first half of the name whisper 

 to us ? Truth to tell, the whisper is so faint that it is very 

 difficult to catch its accents. Easby is the "place" of something 

 or someone, the question is "of what or whom ? " Ingleby and 

 Battersby a'e'the places of two Danish farmers whose names have 

 been crystallized in those names. Poor serfs, they little dreamt 

 that their names would be in daily use century after century in 

 the " Cliffland " which they had so courageously invaded. It 

 is not at all improbable that the name of Easby may also be 

 derived from a personal name. The " s " in the centre of the 

 word suggest a possessive case. Some might be inclined to 

 derive it from one of the corruptions of the Celtic " uisge," 

 which, according to Isaac Taylor, gives us the first part of the 

 name of the River Eamont, which name, by the way, is a 

 corruption of "Eamot,"' derived from that most remarkable 

 " motte," or ancient place of assembly, Maybrough, " the fortifi- 

 cation on the boundary," near Penrith. The Celtic word 

 mention ed is certainly responsible for the names of Danby Wiske 

 and of Whiskey, but for a plausable explanation of the name 

 of Easby we do not want to stick a Danish affix on to a Celtic 

 prefix. Mongrel names do occur, such as Nunthorpe, but they 

 are usually open to suspicion. Graves, in " History of Cleve- 

 land," guesses that Easby signifies Eastby, and was so denomin- 

 ated because it was at the east end of the Parish of Stokesley. 

 This is a guess which is quite certainly wrong, and, though the 

 parochial system is said to have been introduced into England 

 some two centuries earlier, I am far from being certain that the 

 locality of Easby was at this date at the east end of a parish of 

 Stokesley, and if it were, the Stokesley people would hardly have 

 the honour of performing the functions of Godfathers and 

 Godmothers in the naming ceremony. If I remember rightly — 

 I am unable to make any reference — there was an Anglo-Saxon 

 word, which probably had also a Danish form, which signified, in 



