336 A Sketch of the Parish of Yaicsbary. 



open meadows extend on all sides of our village for a considerable 

 distance. But in regard to the first portion of our name, I must 

 own that there is no such ready solution to be offered, and so I can 

 but give the opinions of some who have interested themselves in the 

 enquiry. It is now more than twenty years since the late Mr. 

 Richard Falkner, of Devizes — who will long be remembered for his 

 philological and antiquarian research, as well as for the courtesy and 

 modesty with which he imparted the information he had gained- 

 corresponded with me on this question. He owned that he had 

 " not succeeded in finding any Anglo-Saxon word that would explain 

 the meaning of the first part of Etesberie, though he felt no doubt 

 that it had some signification characteristic of the place, which dis- 

 tinguished it from other beries or burys, such as Abury, Silbury, 

 Chidbury, the prefix of some of which is well understood/'' In a 

 subsequent letter Mr. Falkner observed that as the village of Yatton 

 (Etone or Getone in Domesday) became Gatton and Yatton, so 

 Etesberie had become Yatesbury, and Feat or Geat — for the letters 

 y and g in Anglo-Saxon are interchangeable 1 — may have constituted 

 the first portion of the word ; but then he disclaimed all signification 

 of gates in regard both to Yatton and to Yatesbury, and suggested 

 that possibly gat (goat) may be the origin of the name, perhaps 

 signifying that it was a place where those animals were kept in such 

 numbers as to give it the designation, as Goathurst and Goathill in 

 Somerset, and Goatacre, near Hilmarton, in this county. Mr. 

 Falkner afterwards suggested that our village may have derived its 

 name from the Geats, Ytas, or Jutes, who were the first to visit 

 the South of England, after the Romans had finally retired from it, 

 A.D. 449; and that one colony may have settled at Yatton and 

 another at Yatesbury. Others have maintained that geat, yeat } or 

 yate (the old pronunciation of our modern gate 2 ) is the true origin 

 of the name of our village, not at all however with the modern sense 



1 In English words directly formed from the Anglo-Saxon, g is often changed 

 into y, as gear=yQ&v : dceg=da,y : dagas=days : gea=ye& (yes) : gearn=ya,m : 

 gealew=^yoW.ow. 



2 Spenser wrote yate for gate : and yeates is the reading for gates in an old 

 document bearing date A. D. 1551, published in Magazine, vol. viii., p. 287. 



