Probable Derivation of the Name. 3 



All Cannings belonged to the abbey in the days of Edward the 

 Confessor, but for how long previously it is impossible to say. 



Many and various have been the conjectures as to the meaning 

 and derivation of the name of this parish. If our suggestion be 

 true, and it certainly has the air of probability about it, that the 

 portion granted to the Bishops of Wiltshire was the first severed 

 from the extensive estate known by the name of Caninges, the 

 remainder as part of the original manor might well have been 

 described as £"«/(/- Caninges (that is, O^c?- Caninges), and easily in 

 the course of years corrupted into ^/^Cannings. In Sir Thomas 

 Phillips' Wiltshire Institutions, under the year 1492, however, we 

 meet with the entry "Ecclesia Cannyngs Omnium Sanctorum" (i.e. 

 Cannings All- Saints) ; as though it derived its specific name from 

 the dedication of the church, — All Saints' -Cannings, abbreviated 

 at last to ^//-Cannings. Beyond this single entry, we have as 

 yet no evidence that the church was so dedicated. It is said now 

 to be dedicated to St. Anne, but this opinion is based simply on 

 vague tradition, or on a theory which, as we shall endeavour to 

 shew, has but little really to support it. And even if it be true 

 that the church is now dedicated to St. Anne, it by no means 

 proves that such was the case originally. Churches, in olden 

 times, were not unfrequently re-dedicated, especially after any 

 kind of desecration. Moreover the patron saint of a chantry chapel 

 connected with a church, was without doubt sometimes substituted 

 for that of the church itself. 



Those who are curious in such matters, may read in the late 

 Archdeacon Macdonald's Memoir of Bishops Cannings, the various 

 conjectures that have been made as to the derivation of the name 

 " Cannings." ^ Without doubt, the most probable derivation is the 

 one indirectly suggested by the late J. M. Kemble in his Saxons 

 in England.^ He has collected together, in an appendix to his first 

 volume, a large number of names of places similarly formed, which 

 he clearly shews to be patronymics ; the former portion of the 

 word containing in an abbreviated, and often very corrupt, form, 



' Wilts Magazine, vi., 121. 

 '^Saxons in England, i., 456. 



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