270 



The Names of Places in Wiltshire. 



conclusions, in his remarkable paper " On the boundaries that separ- 

 ated the Welsh and English races during the 75 years after the 

 capture of Bath in A.D. 577/' I hesitate not to say that they derive 

 no little confirmation from the study of the local nomenclature of 

 Wilts. Let any one take a coloured pencil, and underline with it 

 names that evidently are, or seem to be, of Celtic origin, and he 

 will be surprised to find how they cluster in that " tongue of land n 

 which stretched from Cricklade and Malmesbury southwards some 

 fifty miles long and fourteen broad, and included the wooded valleys 

 of the Avon and Frome, and which, according to Dr. Guest, was 

 left still in the possession of the old inhabitants, though in the very 

 midst of what had become English territory. And most numerous 

 are such names along the border-line which he there indicates, or 

 within a few miles of it. Indeed by far the larger number of the 

 names explained in this paper are to be found in this district which 

 lie marks out so carefully, or in its immediate vicinity. 1 (See Arch, 

 Journ., 1859.) 



1 It may be of course accidental, but still it is interesting to observe that two 

 places, the one on the western, and the other on the eastern border of this 

 il tongue of land," are called Yat-ton (near Castle Combe) and Yates-bury 

 (near Calne). They are spelt respectively in Domesday Etone or Getone, and 

 Etesberie, The letter name occurs in the Taxat. Eccles. as Yattesbury, Yac- 

 tebury and Jetesbury, and in the Test, de Nev. as Zatesbur-y. Now Pryce in 

 his Cornish Yocabulary gives Yet as meaning " a gate, or door." (Compare the 

 Anglo-Saxon geat, which Kemble explains as meaning generally an opening 

 either in a fence, wall, or natural rise of the ground, an opening through which 

 cattle can move.) May it have the same signification then as Lidiard (already 

 explained § 26) and imply an " opening " or " entrance" into the retained dis- 

 trict? We have, in the name " Hampshire Gap," an analogous appellation. If 

 so the two Names would imply that one was " a village " and the other an " open 

 pasture land," (see above § 21 on the meaning of berie as a termination) 

 at ) the " opening " or on "the borders" of the two districts. All this is of 

 course simple conjecture, which must go for what it is worth. By the way, 

 Collinson tells us in his History of Somerset (iii., 616) that he considers Yatton 

 in that county equivalent to the town-port (janua oppidi), the place having in 

 early ages formed an entrance to the channel when the waters overspread the 

 valley. 



[Among "Wassenbergh's list of old Friesic personal names, some of which we 

 might fairly expect to find in our part of the country connected with local names, 

 is that of Ette ; so that after all, if we can trust to Domesday spelling, we may 

 baye in the name Yatesbury a memorial of some early Teutonic settler.] 



