158 



The Names of Places in Wiltshire. 



rule is for the most part reversed. Thus what in Welsh and Latin 

 would be called " Coit-mawr 33 and " Silva-magna/' in Anglo-Saxon 

 would be " Sel-wood 33 and in English " great- wood. ^ When we 

 meet with such a word as Breamore, the name of a hilly portion of the 

 south of Wilts, we can hardly doubt that it was originally from the 

 Celtic, and probably meant "great hill'" from the Welsh hryn, (Corn. 

 brea,) a hill, and mawr, great. The termination in the name Oswes- 

 Iry looks temptingly like the Welsh " tre 33 which means a village, 

 but its position in the word would make us look rather for a Teutonic 

 derivation. Such proves to be the case, for like Bishops-tfrow, which 

 is Biscopes-treow, i.e., Bishop Vtree (or cross), Oswes-try means 

 OswaldVtree (or cross), and is represented in Welsh by the name 

 Croes-Oswallt. 1 



Then further/ there are a number of words that we meet with in 

 the composition of local names which are common both to the 

 Celtic and Teutonic class of languages, and it is difficult to assign 

 the priority to either. The word ford, for example, by itself, or in 

 composition, is frequent in all countries and common both to Celtic 

 and Teutonic, though forcld in Welsh means a road or passage gene- 

 rally, and not simply one over a stream. Again the well known 

 word wick (the Greek olkos and the Latin vicus) appears also 

 as the Celtic gwic, — thus Dorchester, in Oxfordshire, the seat of 

 the original Bishopric of Wessex, was called Dorcicc, i.e., Dwr- 

 gwic (=village on the river). In these cases other considerations, 

 such, for instance, as the prevalence more or less of Celtic or Teu- 

 tonic names in the immediate neighbourhood, must be taken into 

 account before coming to a conclusion. The termination in Ber-m'dfc 

 is undoubtedly of the latter class, whilst the prefix in Which-hwvj 

 belongs most probably to the former. 



3. The " Names of Places 33 which we propose to deal with, and 

 which illustrate the earliest period of our history, may be classed 

 generally under one of three divisions. 



a. — Those which are purely Celtic in their origin. 



Such for example are Chute, and Coate, both of which seem forms 



1 See "Pedigree of the English People," by Nicholas, p. 459. 



