OLD FIELD NAMES. 163. 
some miles distant, as they are not known to nest in the imme- 
diate neighbourhood. 
All this to me, a septuagenarian naturalist, was most enjoy- 
able. What progress the extension of kindness to animals has 
made in my day ! When I was a child the newspapers had a 
column, with two birds fighting at the top, for advertisements 
for cock-fights, and accounts were given of dog-fights, badger- 
drawings, and bull-baitings. All these cruel sports, as they were 
called, are now illegal. I well recollect the outcry that was 
raised when two lions, Nero and Wallace, were baited by bull- 
dogs, so that even then the feeling of the public was increasing 
against such brutalities. 
There can be no doubt that our Society is materially helping 
on the good work, and that never in the history of this country 
has cruelty been more detested than at the present day. Let 
us all then by precept and example inculcate a spirit of kind- 
ness to animals, which does not end with them, but causes those 
who practise it to be more tender towards each other, and in 
the words of the Latin quotation, w'hich will be familiar to 
those who learned as I did through the old Eton grammar, 
Emollet mores nec sinit esse f eras. 
J. Jenner Weir. 
OLD FIELD NAMES.* 
Y general names I mean such as are more or less in use 
all over England ; words which we may call generic, 
applied to a vast number of fields, and marked off to 
special fields by some distinguishing adjunct. I 
mean such words as field, meadow, close, leaze, tyning, pad- 
dock, barton, hayes, etc. These all sound very simple words, 
not worth dwelling upon, but they are all old English words, 
each with its own history, and each worth stopping with for a 
short time. 
Field is of course the largest of all. It is a genuine old 
Saxon word, found in all the northern nations of Europe in the 
different forms of field, feld, veld, velt, etc. It is generally 
joined with some word showing the size or shape, as ten-acre 
field, six-acre field, long field, broad field (corrupted as a place- 
name to Bradfield), three-cornered field, etc. 
Meadow, or mead, is another very old English word. It occurs 
in several of our oldest authors, and in the different vocabu- 
The following notes on field names are taken from a very interesting paper 
by the Rev. Canon Ellacombe, one of our members, recently read at a meeting of 
the Bath Field Club. The paper deals especially with the names found in Canon 
Ellacombe’s parish of Bitton, but we have selected only those passages which refer 
to names in general use. — E d. N.N. 
