82 NAMES OF PLACES 



Norman-French languages having passed clean away, and 

 English literature and speech having become common to 

 all ranks of the people, clerks wrote it Durham, in mis- 

 leading analogy to other English names. 



Touching this suffix -ha/m, it is not quite so simple as 

 it appears at first sight. It conveys another warning that 

 the real meaning of a name must be sought in the earliest 

 extant documents. In nine cases out of ten it represents 

 the Anglo-Saxon hd/m, a house, the place where a man 

 is 'at home,' and is employed in the same sense as 

 the German suffix -heim, in names like Rudesheim and 

 Mannheim. It is, in fact, that peculiarly Teutonic term 

 'home,' for which there is no equivalent in the Latin 

 languages, and which must be expressed in French by 

 periphrasis. Canon Taylor, however, was the first to 

 draw attention to the existence of another Anglo-Saxon 

 word which assumed as a suffix the same shape as hdm, 

 but with a different meaning — to wit, ham, an enclosure. 

 Between these two monosyllables distinction can only be 

 drawn by consulting documents written before people 

 had dropped the troublesome habit of declining nouns. 

 In such ancient writings place-names usually occur in 

 the dative or locative case, inasmuch as a place is 

 seldom mentioned except in the sense of at or to. 

 The declension in the singular of these two words was 

 as follows : — 



Nom. Hdm, a home. Ham, an enclosure. 

 Gen. Hdmes. Hammes. 



Locative. HAme. Hamme. 



Therefore when you find Farnham written as ' at Fearn- 

 hamme ' and Cheltenham as ' Celtenhomme,' it is pretty 



