185 



Some Scotch Place-Names. By Miss Russell, Ashiesteel. 



I WAS not aware, till lately, that Jedburgh had not been 

 regarded all along as the representation of the Saxon 

 Juthanbyrig ; but the identification was only suggested by a 

 German scholar within this century, and it has been further 

 suggested, lately, that the place meant is Idbury, near Oxford. 

 The change in the spelling, and presumably in the pronuncia- 

 tion, is of the same kind in both names. 



There are known circumstances, however, which make it 

 likely that Jedburgh is the place meant. The only occasion, 

 as far as I know, on which the name is mentioned, is when 

 Edred, King of England, imprisoned the Archbishop of York 

 there, for grave and weighty causes, in 952. And he, Edred, 

 had, in or about 946, on succeeding to his brother Edmund, 

 received the homage of the Northumbrians at Tadwine's 

 Oliffe. 



Sharon Turner gives this name from a MS. in the British 

 Museum, without seeing that it must be an error for Edwine's 

 Cliff or the Eildon Hills ; the Saxon Chronicle has Edwine's 

 Cliff for the name of a battle in 761, where Simon of Durham 

 calls the place Eldun. And the old spelling of Lessudden, 

 a little to the eastward of the hills, is Lessedwyn, still 

 meaning Edwin's Court in Welsh. 



And as Edmund had, shortly before his death, overrun 

 Cumbria and made it over to the Scotch king, it is most 

 natural to find Edred asserting the boundaries between 

 Cumbrian and Northumbrian territory at the Leader. While 

 his having exercised kingly functions, personally, in the 

 neighbourhood, does very much increase the probability that 

 it was to Jedburgh that he sent the archbishop. I cannot 

 say what the exact bearings of Idbury are, but Jedburgh is 

 still an assize town, and it seems likely it was the stronger 

 and more sequestered of the two. 



Although it must have been in the archbishop's province, 

 ecclesiastically — the Archdeaconry of Teviotdale having remained 

 under Durham until David effected a sort of exchange, by 

 which it was reunited to the Bishopric of Glasgow, while he 

 placed his restored diocese of Galloway under York The 

 arrangement does not seem to have worked naturally, as the 

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