ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 3122 http://www.s-gabriel.org/3122 ************************************ 6 Aug 2006 From: Femke de Roas Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether the feminine name would be historically accurate at some point within the period 1100-1400, describing as 'the Old English variation' of the name and mentioning that the site where you found said that it was from Old English and was for 'a man living near a spring or stream (watercress)'. The name is not itself Old English, but it comes from the Old English feminine name . The Old English name was apparently not very common: only one certain pre-Conquest example is known, and we've found only five examples of the Middle English name descended from it. In chronological order these are: Byrhtwynne 10th or 11th c. [1] Brithwen 1066 [2] Brictwen 1148 [2] Brichtwen 1148 [2] Brichtwenne 1222 [3] Brigthtwyna 1257 [4] These Middle English spellings, especially , may be a bit misleading to the modern eye, so a word of explanation is in order. Oversimplifying a bit, Old English originally represented a pronunciation very roughly like \bairkht\; in late Old English this changed, first to something like \bu"rkht\, and then to something like \brikht\. (Here \u"\ stands for the sound of u-umlaut in German 'to fill'.) These were customarily written and , respectively. [5] The pronunciation \brikht\ persisted throughout your period, but the \kht\ combination was spelled in a variety of ways in Middle English, not just in this name, but in general; , and later and , are among the most common, but and are also occasionally found in early Middle English, and there are other possibilities as well. [6, 7] In particular, the spellings , , , and above all represent the pronunciation \brikht\ or \bricht\, where \ch\ stands for the soft sound of in German and . (The odd of is probably the result of scribal error, the scribe having inadvertently written an extra .) The vowel of the second syllable, \u"\ in Old English, remained unchanged or developed into \ih\ or \eh\, depending on dialect. [8] Our examples are all of the last two types: the first four Middle English examples above represent roughly \BRIKHT-wen\ or \BRICHT-wen\, while the last represents \BRIKHT-win\ or \BRICHT-win\. [9] A few Old English names have surviving modern descendants, but the great majority died out by about 1300, and the available evidence suggests that is typical in this respect. Thus, we cannot recommend it as good historical re-creation after the later 13th century. From 1100 through the late 1200s, however, it's a fine choice. The spelling is a reasonable one throughout that period and is likelier than the others to suggest approximately the right pronunciation. Turning to the byname, we have not seen the precise form , but very similar forms are quite common. As you thought, the name originally referred to a location near a spring where watercress grew, from Old English 'cress-spring'. This compound and dialect variants of it were the source of a large number of place-names. Here are some of the forms of these names that we found in your period: [10, 11, 12, 13] Kersewella 1165x1189 [14] Kressewella 1176 Cressewella 1190 Cressewell 1231, 1256 Kereswell 1234 Kercewell 1255 Crassewalle 1255 Cressewyle 1273 Cressewel 1256 Kressewelle 13th century Cresswell 13th century Creswell 13th century Crassewell 13th century would be a fine 13th century documentary form; in the English of that period the byname would have been , pronounced roughly \ohf KRES-s@-wel\, where \@\ stands for the sound of in and . Most of the other forms listed above are also suitable for the 13th century. The only exceptions are the first three: the termination in <-a> is a relic of Old English that is rarely seen after the 12th century. During the period in which the given name is known to have been in use, bynames based on place-names usually appear in the written record with the preposition. There are exceptions, however, at least by the later 13th century; indeed, we found 1273. [11] Thus, is also possible. Finally, it is possible that in some cases the modern surname goes back not to an actual place-name, but to a byname indicating simply that the bearer lived near a spring where cress grew. So-called topographical bynames of this type were typically constructed with the prepositional contraction 'at the' (e.g., 1274 'at the spring', 1235 'at the nook'). [15] Although we found no examples of this type, is a perfectly plausible 13th century name for someone living by a spring distinguished by its wealth of watercress. We hope that this letter has been useful to you and that you won't hesitate to write us again if any part was unclear or if you have further questions. Research and commentary on this letter was provided by Talan Gwynek, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, and Mari neyn Brian. For the Academy, Femke de Roas August 6, 2006 _____________________________________________________________ REFERENCES [1] Old English charter Sawyer 1539. is an inflected form, in the dative case; the nominative case -- the one used for the subject of a sentence, for instance -- is . http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=seek&query=S+1539 [2] Von Feilitzen, Olof. 'The Personal Names and Bynames of the Winton Domesday', in Martin Biddle, ed., _Winchester in the Early Middle Ages_, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 151. [3] Reaney, P. H., & R. M. Wilson, _A Dictionary of English Surnames_ (London: Routledge, 1991; Oxford University Press, 1995), s.n. . [4] Selte/n, Bo, _The Anglo-Saxon Heritage in Middle English Personal Names_, Volumes 1 & 2. (Lund, Sweden: Royal Society of Letters at Lund, 1979), vol. II, p. 45. [5] Von Feilitzen, Olof. 'The Personal Names and Bynames of the Winton Domesday', op. cit., pp. 61-3. [6] Moore, Samuel, rev. by Albert H. Marckwardt, _Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections (Ann Arbor: George Wahr Publishing Co., 1964), p. 78. [7] Von Feilitzen, Olof. 'The Personal Names and Bynames of the Winton Domesday', op. cit., p. 121. [8] Mosse/, Ferdinand, _A Handbook of Middle English_, trans. James A. Walker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 23. [9] The final <-a> of is a Latin grammatical ending artificially added to the Middle English name to accommodate the Latin context in which it occurs. The final <-e> of may also be a Latin grammatical ending; our source does not provide enough context for us to tell. [10] _Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society_, Edited by Victor Watts, Edited in association with John Insley, Margaret Gelling (Cambridge University Press: January 2004), s.nn. , . [11] Bardsley, Charles, _A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames_ (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1980), s.n. . [12] In addition to 'cress', Old English had the variants and , where <{ae}> stands for the a-e-ligature formed by squashing together an and an so that they share a common upright; these account for the spellings. [13] Aryanhwy merch Catmael (Sara L. Uckelman), "Names from 13th Century Northumberland," (WWW: privately published, 2005). http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/english/northumberland.html [14] '1165x1189' is a standard convention for 'some unknown date between 1165 and 1189'. [15] Reaney, P. H., & R. M. Wilson, _A Dictionary of English Surnames_, op. cit., s.nn. , .