268 Broughton Gifford. 
Water being a prime necessary of life, dwellings by brooks, or 
Broughtons, are plentiful enough in England. In the time of the 
Conqueror there were thirty-four manors so called. There are now 
twenty distinct Parishes, besides hamlets and different localities, 
which bear the name, eleven with, nine without any distinguishing 
affix: three in Lancashire; Lincolnshire, Leicester, and Oxford 
have two each; the West Riding, Derby, Notts, Salop, Worcester, 
Stafford, Northampton, Huntingdon, Berks, Wilts, and Hants 
have one a-piece. I cannot say, for I have never seen, whether 
they are all by brooks. My etymology does not require that they 
should be. If we trace to its root the word brook, we shall see the 
propriety of the application even where there is no water. Brook 
(the old orthography of which, as Horne Tooke! has shown, was 
broke) is broken water, being those lesser streams which break out 
of the ground, and are the broken parts, or brooks, of the main 
river. Horne Tooke has aptly quoted from Beaumont and 
Fletcher’s ‘Faithful Shepherdess,’— 
‘‘Underneath the ground, 
In a long hollow, the clear spring is bound; 
Till on yon side, where the morn’s sun doth look, 
The struggling water breaks out in a brook.” 
IT will add from 2 Samuel v. 20. ‘The Lord hath broken forth upon 
my enemies before me, as the break of waters.” But brook may 
be broken land, as well as broken waters, indeed broken any- 
thing. The same Saxon word dbroe (from which comes our past 
participle, broke) means brook (broken water), newly broken up 
land (ager novalis), broke (our past tense, originally written, 
brack), broken or tangled wood, brock or badger (an animal 
which breaks the ground for its habitation and in search of food), 
a draught horse of an inferior description (an animal broken into 
harness or a broken down horse), and lastly trouble, or that by 
which the heart of man is broken. So that Broc-ton, or Brog-ton 
(the change of ¢ is strictly euphonic) may mean either the dwel- 
ling by the brook, or by newly broken ground, or by the thicket 
or where badgers, draught horses, or troubles are. Nor is the 
series thus exhausted. Broughton may be brocket-ton, the haunt of 
1 Diversions of Purley. Abstraction. 
