MEANING OF VENVILLE.
(Vol. iii., pp. 152. 310.)
I observe, in p. 310. of the present volume, that two correspondents, P. and K., have contributed conjectures as to the meaning and origin of the term venville, noticed and explained antè, p. 152. The origin of the word is of course to some extent open to conjecture; but they may rest assured that the meaning of it is not, nor ever has been, within the domain of mere conjecture with those who have had any opportunities of inquiry in the proper quarter. The term has not the slightest reference to the ceremony of delivering possession, which P. has evidently witnessed in the case of his father, and which lawyers call livery of seisin; nor is there on Dartmoor any such word as ven signifying peat, or as fail, signifying turf. No doubt a fen on the moor would probably contain "black earth or peat," like most other mountain bogs; and if (as K. says) fail means a "turf or flat clod" in Scotland, I think it probable that a Scotchman on Dartmoor might now and then so far forget himself as to call peat or turf by a name which would certainly not be understood by an aboriginal Devonian. The local name of the peat or other turf cut for fuel is vaggs, and this has perhaps been confounded in the recollection of K.'s informant with ven. At all events, I can assure both P. and K. (who, I presume, are not familiar with the district) that the tenants of venville lands have no functions to perform, as such, in any degree connected with either turf-cutting, or "fenging fields," and that they do not necessarily, or generally, occupy peat districts, or rejoice in
"All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats," &c.;
but, on the contrary, they are the owners of some of the most valuable, salubrious, and picturesque purlieus of the forest. With regard to the name "fengfield," although I am pretty familiar with the records of the forest extant for the last five hundred years past, I do not remember that it is ever so named or spelt in the muniments of the manor or forest. It is so written by Risdon, and in some few other documents entitled to little weight, and from which no safe inference can be drawn. Whatever be the etymological origin of the term, it should be assumed as indisputable by any one who may hereafter exercise his ingenuity or his fancy upon it, that the four most prominent
incidents to the tenure are—1. payment of fines; 2. situation in an ancient vill; 3. attendance on the lord's court; 4. enjoyment of certain rights of common. It may be that neither the fine nor the vill forms a component part of the name; but K. need have no scruple in believing that an abbreviated Latin or "legal term" (invented, of course, by the stewards or bailiffs of the lord) may have become naturalised among those of the inhabitants of the Moor whom it concerns. The tenants or retainers of a manor have no alternative but to submit to any generic name by which the steward may please to distinguish them. Thus the "priors" and "censors" of Dartmoor forest are content to be called by those names, because they were designated as "prehurdarii" and "censarii" in the court rolls some hundred years ago. The tenants of a certain lordship in Cornwall know and convey their tenements by the name of landams to this day, merely because the stewards two hundred years ago, when the court rolls were in Latin, well knowing that landa was the Latin for land, and that transitive verbs in that language require an accusative case, recorded each tenant as having taken of the lord "unam landam, vocatam Tregollup," &c. Indeed so easily does a clipt exotic take root and become acclimated among the peasantry of the Moor, whose powers of appropriation are so much disparaged by the sceptical doubts of K., that since the establishment of local courts the terms fifa and casa have become familiar to them as household words and the name and uses of that article of abbreviated Latinity called a 'bus are, as I am credibly informed, not unknown to them.
E. Smirke.