54 



JOURNAL OF THE TLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 



(in the eastern part of the county Park is almost always put last) 

 is foot-bridge [clam) close ; Park and Hall = Park an hal, the moor 

 close, or else Park an Tol, hole {tol) field; Park and Nothings 

 Park an eithen, furze close. In some cases the surveyor, having 

 heard so many strange-sounding outlandish words without a meaning, 

 seems to have mistaken English words badly pronounced for Celtic 

 ones, and thus we get such names as Sopid (? = sawpit) meadow ; 

 Half figure (? = half acre). 



Such corruptions, made in our own days, enable us to see what 

 corruptions would be made in olden times, by strangers who had 

 to write down names they knew nothing about, and which perhaps 

 never before had been written or spelled. With the exception of 

 occasional references to the county in Welsh and Anglo-Saxon 

 writers, the oldest source of personal names I have met is the 

 Eecord of Manumissions of Cornish serfs by Saxon lords in the 

 Podmin Gospels, now in the British Museum ; and that of local 

 names is the Domesday Survey; the former written by Anglo-Saxon, 

 and the latter by Norman, scribes. "We have after this a series of 

 charters, deeds, and other documents, in which we find the same 

 names spelled in no end of ways, varying even in the same docu- 

 ment, showing that the scribes had no idea of the true orthography 

 or of the meaning of the words. As a consequence the translating 

 of the names of many of our towns, villages, manors, &c., is very 

 uncertain : we cannot do, as may be done with Anglo-Saxon, 

 Welsh, and Irish names, refer to records, histories, poems, &c., 

 written more than a thousand years ago by natives in their 

 vernacular, preserving the true orthography of the names, and so 

 enabling the student to fix with a great deal of certainty the 

 derivation and original meaning. All that we can do is to take the 

 names as they stand, or with such, conjectural amendments as the 

 various spelling of the name, analogy of other names, and know- 

 ledge of the locality — its history, traditions, &c. enable us to make, 

 and so fix the probable meaning the names bore to Cornishmen when 

 they spoke the Cornish language. 



In the glossary of Cornish names, now publishing in parts, I 

 have been charged with giving too many meanings of the same 

 name. But I have done this in order that others may from these 

 various meanings be able to discover the true one, always making 

 it a point to give the Cornish or other words whence I suppose the 

 name to have been derived. Where any recognized authority has 



