By the late F. A. Carrington, Esq. 51 



The name of the place, (as I am informed by my friend Mr. 

 Akerman, F.S.A. and Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries,) is 

 derived from two Anglo-Saxon words Uuoccing and Ham : the 

 Woccings being an Anglo-Saxon tribe, and Ham a meadow water- 

 bound, of which the Ham at Gloucester and the Ham at Tewkes- 

 bury, are instances. Ham is also a town. These however, should 

 not be confounded with the Anglo-Saxon word Ham, with a long 

 accent over the a (pronounced Hame), which means a home. 



The Place before the N'orman Conquest. 



That the place existed before the Norman Conquest, there seems 

 every reason to believe. "TJuoccingas," in a charter of Offa, King 

 of Mercia (A.D. 796),^ no doubt meant the territory of the 

 Wokings. 



By this charter, OfFa grants to his prefect Brorda, some liberties 

 of his church, " sita est in loco ubi dicitur Uuoccingas " (situate 

 in the place where it is called Uuoccingas). 



The late Mr. J. M. Kemble, another very high authority in 

 Anglo-Saxon antiquities, in his " Saxons in England," [App. A.] 

 treats the name "Uuoccingas" as meaning both Wokingham and 

 Woking; and Mr. Akerman suggests that probably the lands of 

 the Uuoccing tribe extended from Wokingham to Woking, in the 

 same way that the lands of the Hastings' tribe extended from the 

 present town of Hastings to a very considerable distance around. 

 Mr. Kemble also suggests that Uuoccingas formed what was termed 

 a " Mark," that is, a place where the landowners held the land in 

 common. It is highly improbable that a town if it were founded 

 in the Royal Forest of one of our Norman Kings, should have had 

 a name compounded of two Anglo-Saxon words ; after the Con- 

 quest everything was Norman, the proceedings in our Courts of 

 Justice were Norman, and children in our schools were taught in 

 the Norman language, till about the reign of Richard the Second. 



Ralph Higden, in his Polychronicon, translated about the year 

 1385,^ says that Englishmen had from the beginning "thre 

 ^ Codex Diplomaticus, vol. i. p. 168. 

 * Cited in the History of the English Language, prefixed to the Rev. H. J. 

 Todd's edition of Doctor Johnson's Dictionary. 



£2 



