Dear Keith, Dear
All,
Gavin Smith's assumption
that -ensis refers specifically to religious communities is just an
echo of his confident assertion that -ingas refers to religious
communities. I wish I was one-half as certain about anything as he is
about everything.
One aspect of this
certainty seems to have gone without comment - the idea that the -ingas
names we happen to know about represent a more or less complete set of
these names as they were in the seventh-century, and that they
were not produced in the ordinary course of language like other names, but
instead were deliberate top-down coinages for settlements or
districts. He's quite explicit about this - 'names were inspired (or allocated)
by a higher power external to the immediate local community' (p73), and it is
clear that 'external' here doesn't mean 'in the bailiff's hall down the
road', as it does in the case of Suttons or Prestons: the inspiration or
allocation is supposed to have taken place at the level of kingdoms or dioceses.
In other words, Frithuwald sat one day in a tent by the
Thames saying 'So we'll call this one Dorcingas, and this one Godhelmingas,
and this one Getingas - does that give us a full set of fourteen? -
good man. Now send a messenger to these wretched peasants,
wherever they are, and tell them that's what they're going to
call themselves in the future, on pain of my displeasure.
OK?'.
I find it hard to
believe. Is there evidence for kings or bishops elsewhere in the
Middle Ages choosing place-names on this scale?
Jeremy
Harte
On page 85 of Nomina 31 (2008), Gavin Smith writes:
... ecclesiastical Latin -(i)ensis, `religious
community'/`congregation', as used of early Church communities. Thus we
find Malmsbury [sic] Abbey recorded as Mailbubiensis aecclesia
...
Isn't -iensis a general way of forming an adjective of location, with nothing
particularly churchy about it?
Keith
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