By Geoff Littlejohns, gesith
Whilst walking in the Derbyshire countryside, I was surprised by the number of villages through which I was passing whose names ended with the suffix ‘-ley’. Place-name scholars, such as Margaret Gelling, insist that our place-names do have meaning and significance. So there must be some reason behind the abundance of such village names in this part of the East Midlands.
Place-name scholars have explained ‘-ley’ names (‘-leah‘ in the original documents) in two ways, as indicating either a wood or a clearing in a wood. Yet a wood and a clearing are surely different! This contradiction has spawned a long-lasting argument among place-name specialists. I wondered about the names of these Derbyshire settlements. They provide evidence that could support both interpretations. Mapperley, for instance, could indicate a wood of maples and Trusley a wood of brushwood. The bulk of the villages, however, seem to indicate clearings rather than woods. Morley, ‘mōr lēah’, makes sense as a ‘clearing that has become a moor’, whereas a ‘wood that is a moor’ would not. Similarly Horsley must refer to a clearing where horses grazed, Shipley one where sheep grazed, Butterley one with good grazing for dairy cattle and Stanley a clearing that proved stoney when put under arable cultivation.
Della Hooke has raised a third interpretation. She in 2008 suggested that ‘-lēah‘ might be described as a patch of open woodland used for wood pasture. So ‘-lēah‘ names might indicate woods but thinly-wooded ones where animals could be put to graze. Many ecologists believe now that the original wildwood that covered our landscape after the end of the last Ice Age rarely became dense. Large herbivores, such as bison, ponies or aurochsen would have eaten, damaged or pushed over many shrubs and young trees. The agricultural economy of the early Anglo-Saxon period would have been primarily pastoral, with large flocks of swine and sheep along with herds of cattle let loose in the woodland. These herbivores would have had a similar impact on young trees as bison and aurochsen. So Della Hooke’s interpetation of ‘-lēah’ as wood pasture seems plausible.
Sarah Wager (2017) has widened Della Hooke’s definition by stressing the dynamic way that people have managed woodland. Woods can be cleared, the land cultivated, the exhausted soil abandoned and then trees can reappear as secondary woods. People used different techniques of woodcraft, felling for timber, coppicing regenerating shrubs for poles, cutting back overgrowth for firewood, rotating the heavy grazing through the glades. The real difference between a wood and a clearing may not have been so marked as modern minds assume.
The Englisc term ‘-lēah‘ can be sourced back to ‘-lauh‘ in the Primitive Germanic tongue which archaeolinguists have reconstructed and then further back to thereconstructed Proto Indo-European ‘louko-s’. Both ‘-lauh‘ and ‘louko-s’ refer to ‘light‘ and ‘shining’. This would imply that the early sense of ‘-lēah‘ in Englisc would not have been appropriate for a heavily shaded, closed canopy woodland. Some species of native trees, oaks in particular, flourish best when growing widely-spaced and so it is reasonable to assume that this is how they would have been growing in Anglo-Saxon times.
The Englisc term ‘-lēah‘ can be sourced back to ‘-lauh‘ in the Primitive Germanictongue which archaeolinguists have reconstructed and then further back to thereconstructed Proto Indo-European ‘louko-s’. Both ‘-lauh‘ and ‘louko-s’ refer to ‘light‘ and ‘shining’. This would imply that the early sense of ‘-lēah‘ in Englisc would not have been appropriate for a heavily shaded, closed canopy woodland. Some species of native trees, oaks in particular, flourish best when growing widely-spaced and so it is reasonable to assume that this is how they would have been growing in Anglo-Saxon times.
I wondered whether we have been too much concerned with finding a precise topographical definition of ‘-lēah‘ and that perhaps what we are seeing in these village names are the vestiges of a moment in time, the moment of a wave of woodland clearance. These personal names are not Scandinavian and so are likely to originate in a period before the 9th & 10th century Viking settlement. The heart of the early kingdom of Mierce (Mercia in Latin) was sited among the Tomsæte who lived around Tamworth and Litchfield. Bede tells us that there were two parts of Mierce, North and South, divided by the river Trent. At some point in the sixth or seventh centuries, there may have been a wave of Tomsæten moving over the Trent from South Mercia into what could have been a belt of sparsely-populated woodland between the Erewash and the Derwent, creating North Mercia as they did so. This can only be speculation.
It became deeply unfashionable in the 1960s to envisage the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England as characterised by pioneer families opening up the wildwood. How, then, do we explain so many personal names of clearings? The woodland cleared by Mercian settlers would not have been primeval wildwood but secondary woodland, regrown in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman agricultural economy – but the old Victorian image of pioneering Anglo-Saxons, at least in this stretch of the Midlands, may not after all be so wrong.