make a leat. The water used to pitch on a great rock and spread out over the front of that, whereas it now goes down behind this rock, except in heavy storms or floods, and there is little to be seen.
The new maps mark the hills as Tors, not Torrs. In examining old documents I have hardly ever seen the word written with a single r unless there was a mark above the r̃ to show that it was double: and I have never seen it with a single r when there was final e—invariably Torre, not Tore. Everybody now writes ‘Haytor Rocks,’ but it is a pleonasm, as ‘tor’ means ‘rock.’ The older people said ‘Arter Rocks,’ and I fancy they meant ‘Arthur Rocks.’ There is the legend of King Arthur’s encounter with the Devil there, and he gave his name to other high places, such as Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh.
There is, of course, an etymology for Arthur’s Seat, showing that it has nothing to do with Arthur. There is also an etymology for Man-o’-War Rocks, showing that they have nothing to do with men-of-war. That group of rocks is on the north side of the Scillies—three rocks about 600 feet long and about 150 high—and from some points of view it looks uncommonly like a big three-masted ship with all sails set. The chances are against its having a Celtic name that could be corrupted into anything so suitable as Man-o’-War.
In dealing with the names of places, people are too fond of thinking that the etymology must be Celtic, if it is not Latin or Anglo-Saxon. Many of these names may go back to the times before the Celts arrived, and there was a population here whose language was probably akin to Basque. Of course, wild etymologists are not to be restrained by such considerations. One of them has gone to ancient Egyptian to get an etymology for Haytor, Reflections on names and places in Devonshire, p. 12, ed. 1845, “H’tor in the Phonetic Egyptian meant a house.” But this sort of thing is not confined to Devon. There is an exclamation ‘O popoi’ in Greek, answering to ‘Oh my’ in English. According to Lauth, Homer und Aegypten, p. 43, it is an invocation of Pepi, a king who reigned in Dynasty VI and built a Pyramid at Sakkarah.
Many places owe their present names to blunders. The Hebrides owe theirs to a misreading in Solinus, ‘hebrides’ for ‘hebudes’: they have no r in Pliny or in Mela or in Ptolemy. There is a bay called Morikambê in Ptolemy, geographia, II. 3. 2, on the western side of Britain; and on the strength of this the name of Morecambe was given to a place in Lancashire, although the place is only in the latitude of York, whereas Ptolemy puts Morikambê a whole degree further north. Until 1842, or thereabouts, the present Morecambe was called Poulton, or strictly Poulton-le-Sands to distinguish it from Poulton-le-Fylde, which is the present Poulton.
Teign Grace takes its second name from the Grace family, its owners six centuries ago; but people tell me that it really is Teignrace and takes its name from a race in the river Teign a little way below. There was no race there till 1863, when this branch line was begun. The railway blocked a wide curve in the river, and gave it the sharp twist that makes the race.
Kingswear is King’s Wear, yet I have heard it called King Swear; and I have also heard Kingskerswell called Kings Curse Well. (It is the part of Kerswell that was kept by the Crown, and Abbotskerswell is the part that was given to Torre Abbey.) But, apart from the pronunciation, the spelling may be misleading in such names as Kerswell, Ogwell, Loddiswell, etc. A well may often be the nucleus of a settlement in arid regions, but not in regions that are full of springs and streams; and in many of these Devonshire names the ‘well’ must stand for ‘vill,’ the ancient term for ‘village.’ As a matter of fact, the termination is spelled with an i in twenty-two cases out of twenty-seven in the Exeter manuscript of Domesday.
Domesday has nearly a hundred entries of places in Devon with names that end in ‘ford,’ but only two with names that end in ‘bridge.’ These are Tanebrige and Talebrige in the Exchequer manuscript, but the Exeter manuscript has Taignebrige and Talebrua; so the second name seems dubious. (The first, of course, in Teignbridge.) These terminations give a notion of the roads then, and sometimes also of the streams. A mile from here there is a place called Elsford, where there is not any ford nor anything to be forded. It is an old place, mentioned in Domesday as Eilauesford and at that time (twenty years after the Conquest) still in the possession of a Saxon thane. It stands on the edge of the table-land between the valleys of the Wrey and the Teign; and if there ever was a ford there, there must have been a little river running off the table-land and down into the Wrey along a gully in the hill-side, where there is hardly a trickle now.
There is a place called Yeo close by the Wrey, a Twinyeo at the confluence of the Wrey and Bovey, and another at the confluence of the Bovey and Teign; and both Twinyeos are Mesopotamias, being in between the streams. Yeo here means ‘stream’ or ‘water,’ as in Yeoford. But a yeoman is not a waterman—he is a land man; and there, I think, the ‘yeo’ is to be linked with ‘gau’ in German, not with ‘eau’ in French. There are traces of an Anglo-Saxon word like ‘gau’ for ‘place’ or ‘land’; and the g would easily become a y, as in ‘year’ and ‘day’ for ‘gear’ and ‘dæg.’
The old printers used a y to represent an obsolete th which was nearly of that shape, and people followed them in writing it, especially with ‘ye’ for ‘the.’ Parson Davy always did so; and his spirit, being summoned to a séance, discredited the medium by pronouncing ‘the’ as ‘ye’—a thing that no one did. We still use a z as an abbreviation in ‘viz’ for ‘videlicet.’ They use it in Dutch catalogues of bulbs, and one hears gardeners talking of Narcissus Poetz or Poetaz instead of Poetarum. But it may be better to pronounce the z than misinterpret it, like the people who made Barum and Sarum out of Bz and Sz, the abbreviated forms of Barnstaple and Salisbury. The z was also used in ‘lez’ for ‘legitur,’ a very useful term for anyone who had to put things down in Latin, and did not know the Latin names for them. Thus, on the Court Roll of Lydford Manor, 21 September 1586, “Humfridus Pitford queritur de Johanne Thorne et Maria uxore eius de placito transgressionis super casum. Attachiantur per quinque lez callacowe et hulland bandes tres lez handkerchefs et unum lez wollen wastecott. Et quia predicti,” etc.