Wednesday, August 19, 2020

on ilkley moor sans chapeau

One thing that has always intrigued me, and almost certainly no-one else in recorded history, and which I was reminded of while we were up in Yorkshire a couple of weeks ago: the prevalence in the north of England of place names which have a French bit in them, usually the word "le" embedded between two English words, sometimes spliced together with hyphens, but equally sometimes not.

I was actually reminded of this not so much by our activities during the week - we stayed at the Crow's Nest campsite up on the clifftops between Filey and Scarborough - but by reminiscing about our trip to the nearby North York Moors between attending two weddings (in Hull and Middlesbrough respectively) waaaay back in the glory glory days of 2007, before my spirit was crushed by a mortgage, three kids and male pattern baldness. While map-reading during a walk from the Spiers House campsite where we stayed during that trip I recall sniggering at there being a nearby village called Hutton-le-Hole - there is also one a couple of miles away called Appleton-le-Moors. 

In this as in all things it's worth validating your own assumptions, so in addition to the obvious question - what's this English/French mashup naming convention all about, then - I asked myself another one: is it actually the case that this type of place-name is more prevalent in the north of England?

All you need to come up with an answer to that question is a bit of persistence and a list of place-names, ideally segregated by what county they're in. Wikipedia has one of these, and there is also the Gazetteer of British Place Names which seems to have a few smaller settlements listed that Wikipedia omits. Search for any place name with "le" or "la" embedded in it, whether hyphen-spliced or not, and here's what you end up with:

County

Occurrences

Settlement(s)

Bedfordshire

1

Barton-le-Clay

Cheshire

1

Thornton-le-Moors

Derbyshire

2

Alsop en le Dale
Chapel-en-le-Frith

Durham

8

Chester-le-Street
Dalton-le-Dale
Haughton-le-Skerne
Houghton-le-Side
Howden-le-Wear
Preston-le-Skerne
White-le-Head
Witton-le-Wear

East Riding of Yorkshire

1

Thorpe le Street

Essex

4

Kirby-le-Soken
Layer de la Haye
Stanford-le-Hope
Thorpe-le-Soken

Greater London

1

St Mary-le-Bow

Hampshire

1

Hamble-le-Rice

Kent

1

Capel-le-Ferne

Lancashire

7

Bolton-le-Sands
Clayton-le-Dale
Clayton-le-Moors
Clayton-le-Woods
Poulton-le-Fylde
Walton-le-Dale
Whittle-le-Woods

Leicestershire

5

Ashby-de-la-Zouch
Barkestone-le-Vale
Donington le Heath
Normanton le Heath
Stretton en le Field

Lincolnshire

23

Ashby de la Launde
Barnoldby le Beck
Barnetby le Wold
Burgh le Marsh
Burton-le-Coggles
Carlton-le-Moorland
Gayton le Marsh
Gayton le Wold
Holton le Clay
Holton le Moor
Kirkby la Thorpe
Kirmond le Mire
Maltby le Marsh
Mareham le Fen
Normanby le Wold
Stainton le Vale
Sutton le Marsh
Thornton le Fen
Thornton le Moor
Thorpe le Fallows
Thorpe le Vale
Welton le Marsh
Welton le Wold

Merseyside

2

Brighton le Sands
Newton-le-Willows

North Yorkshire

15

Appleton-le-Moors
Appleton-le-Street
Barton-le-Street
Barton-le-Willows
Chapel-le-Dale
Hutton-le-Hole
Laughton-en-le-Morthen
Marton-le-Moor
Newton-le-Willows
Norton-le-Clay
Thornton-le-Beans
Thornton-le-Clay
Thornton-le-Moor
Thornton-le-Street
Wharram le Street

Northamptonshire

1

Aston le Walls

Nottinghamshire

1

Sturton le Steeple

South Yorkshire

2

Adwick le Street
Brampton en le Morthen

Suffolk

1

Walsham le Willows

Tyne and Wear

2

Hetton-le-Hole
Houghton-le-Spring

Wiltshire

1

Fisherton de la Mere


Counties with zero occurrences (omitted from the table to save space) are Berkshire, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Northumberland, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Surrey, both Sussexes, Warwickshire, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Worcestershire.

So, as you can see, Lincolnshire is the clear winner here with 23, followed by North Yorkshire, Durham, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Essex (the major statistical outlier here), Derbyshire, Merseyside, South Yorkshire and Tyne and Wear, of those that have more than one occurrence. Essex is the only one of those that could unequivocally be said to be in the South. Looking at the data on a map will probably make it clearer.



So, as you can see, if we draw an arbitrary but not unreasonable north-south dividing line from the vicinity of King's Lynn across to mid-Wales, respecting county boundaries all the way across, what we find is that the numbers above the line total 70, whereas the numbers below total just 11. Not only that, but the five counties running consecutively from Lincolnshire up to Tyne and Wear up the east coast total 50, a whopping 62% of the total.

A closer look at the results also reveals that, of the 81 items, 5 have an "en" in front of the "le", while three of the four that have "la" instead of "le" have a "de" in front of the "la". Those with "en le" can reasonably be taken to convey "in the", and most of the "de la" items correspond to an old ruling family who had that as part of their name.

It's surprisingly difficult to find any non-crackpot theories as to what the rest (i.e. the ones with the single "le") are about. The most persuasive theory I've seen (which I'm pretty convinced is correct) is that this is a variant on the archaic French word lès (or occasionally lez), often used as a conjunction in place names and just meaning "near".

That's all terrific, but one obvious question remains - why, if this is a legacy of (presumably Norman) French influence, is the concentration skewed towards the north of England, since, all other things being equal, you'd expect there to be a sort of gradient from high to low depending how far from France you were, i.e. with the highest numbers on or near the south coast.

Note also that there are other French-flavoured place names which don't conform to the le/la structure, like Buckland-Tout-Saints and Stoke Mandeville - those two just acquired the names of the powerful Norman families who owned most of the land, but other etymological routes are probably available. There's also Hartlepool, which started out as "Hart-le-Pool" but then got squashed into its current form. That would be one more for Durham, but rules are rules.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To leave the les aside for a moment;

So what about Beaulieu then?

And Beauly (a lovely place I've stayed at once or twice) therefore.

Or Belvoir? (Pronounced 'beaver' as I'm sure you know).

Or...
Newcast-le?

Or even...
La-ncaster?

electrichalibut said...

not to mention Ay-les-bury and indeed Ad-les-trop. and Weston-super-merde.