APRIL 81 



have the Scandinavian termination -by or -thorp. For 

 instance, the parish of Settrington in the East Riding 

 contains the separate townships of Settringfcm and 

 Scaggle^orpe ; the parish of Cayton contains three town- 

 ships Cayton, Killaby, and Osgodfo/ ; Brantingham 

 parish has the townships of Brantingham and Thorpe; 

 and so on, in innumerable cases. In these instances the 

 parish name seems to indicate the older Saxon colony, 

 while the township of Scandinavian designation shows 

 a later settlement of Danes, the two having maintained 

 themselves as separate communities, with independent 

 rating and local government powers. 



How vain is the attempt to interpret names from the 

 worn shapes to which ages of oral use have brought 

 them, and how essential it is to hunt up the oldest 

 written forms, a couple of instances must suffice to show. 

 Owesthorpe is the name of a Yorkshire manor: in the 

 fourteenth century this was written Ulvesthorpe, a cor- 

 ruption of the original form given in Domesday 

 Janulfstorp, the hamlet of Janulf. 



Again, the last syllable of Durham has nothing to do 

 with the suffix -ham, so common among Saxon place- 

 names. The precipitous peninsula chosen by Bishop 

 Ealdhune at the beginning of the eleventh century as 

 the site of his church was Dunholme, the holm or island 

 of the dun, so called by Saxon or Norse invaders, either 

 from the British fort they found there, or from the hill 

 itself, that being the primary meaning of dtin, which 

 came to mean a fortress because such was generally built 

 on a hill. Then came a Norman garrison to whom the 

 name conveyed no meaning, and who found it easier to 

 pronounce as Duresme. Lastly, the Celtic, Norse, and 

 F 



