Dear Keith, Dear All,

I remember that large bird – isn’t it the one in the Life of St. Oswald by Reginald of Durham, 1165, who tells how, when St. Oswald died in the battle of Maserfeld, his right arm was cut off, and a great bird like a raven flew away with this to its nest in a withered ash tree, which grew green again, and when the arm dropped out from this tree a crystal spring broke out of the flinty ground and healed many. It’s curious how the author of the Oswald Life goes to some length to describe a raven without saying that it is a raven – perhaps wanting to down-pedal the ominous associations of the bird; the Witch of Berkeley had a tame crow or raven, and this was not an encouraging precedent for a saint’s life. Anyway, there’s an unlocated Cambridgeshire Raueneswelle 1349 (EPNS Cambs p351), a Raweneswell 1327 in Ludham (EPNS Norolf 2 p118), a Ravenswell Farm on the OS at Withington (EPNS Glos 1 p189), a Raven Well on North Bierley TM (EPNS W Riding 3 p13); and a Ravenswell, technically in Somerset, that rises under the Three Lamps roundabout on the Brislington road leading out of Bristol Temple Meads Station.

I’ve a note, though I never read it, of P.G. Moore, ‘Ravens (Corvus corax corax L.) in the British landscape: a thousand years of ecological biogeography in place-names’, J. of Biogeography 29 (2002) pp1039–54. I fear that his approach may be a bit too narrowly ecological.

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of hearing Della Hooke talk on animals in OE charter boundaries at the annual UCL Anglo-Saxon weekend (John Baker was there too, but he was talking about weevils and chafers, or at all events wīfels and ceafers, not birds). Anyway, one of the elements she discussed was þorn, which is compounded with all sorts of bird names including swallow, and you never saw a swallow sitting on a thorn.

I don’t know what to make of it except to suggest that these bird names are often, perhaps usually, metonymic or allusive and it’s not just a matter of two Anglo-Saxons walking through the early medieval landscape and one of them saying ‘Good heavens, Ælf, isn’t there an ule sitting by that wella’, and the other one saying ‘Good heavens, Beorht, so it is, let’s call the place Ulwell’.

Jeremy Harte

Jeremy Harte wrote:

Ø  My eye was caught by the name Hawkwell  in a charter of 771x9, where it appears as on heafoc wyllan (S141, Bishops Cleeve, Glos). I thought I’d seen a name like this before somewhere, and indeed I had, in PN Glos 1 p136, 1 p228, 3 p64/67, and in PN Herts p54, and in PN Warks p44, and in PN N Riding p269, and in PN W Riding 1 p291, 2 p235, 4 p210, not to mention in Mawer’s PN Northumb. & Durham p106, Wallenberg’s PN Kent pp187, 419, Ekwall’s PN Lancs p214, Kökeritz’s PN Wight p167 and Horovitz’s PN Staffs pp305–6.

A large bird, associated with a well, occurs in the legend of St. Oswald (Oswald: Northumbrian king to European saint, ed. Stancliffe & Cambridge, Stamford 1995, pp. 2, 9, 10 etc.).

At Hauxwell in Yorkshire (PN YN 269), the church is dedicated to Oswald.

Keith