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.