APPROACH TO CRICKLADE.
But old writers who flourished before the science of place-names had come into existence generally guessed at the meaning of the names of those places of which they wrote; and extremely bad guesses they almost always made. Their way with “Cricklade” is a shocking example of a “reach-me-down” ready-made meaning, supplying a barbarous misfit. Cricklade, if you please, is, according to these seekers after truth who are content to pick up the first obvious lie that rests in their path, or to seize the first absurdity that suggests itself, is “Greeklade,” the site of a forgotten Greek university established here even before the coming of the Romans. Forgotten! yes: that university is easily forgotten which had never any existence; but this derivation served its day, and was generally accepted. Thus we find the poet Drayton content to write in his Polyolbion:
Greeklade, whose great name yet vaunts that learned tongue,
Where to Great Britain first the sacred muses sung.
But Drayton erred only where others had erred for some seven or eight hundred years; for indeed the absurd legend derives from the name of “Greek-islade,” given to the town in the time of Alfred the Great.
St. Sampson’s, the chief church of Cricklade, stands by the road as you enter from the direction of Ashton Keynes; its tall, curiously-panelled tower framed beautifully in the view by a noble group of hedgerow elms. This odd dedication puzzles most people, and in truth St. Sampson, or “Samson,” without the “p,” is a remote and obscure personage who flourished in the sixth century, and is thought to have died A.D. 560. He appears to have been a Breton who fled his country, and in after-years returned to Brittany and became Bishop of Dôl. Two other churches are dedicated to him: South Hill, by Launceston, and Golant, near Lostwithiel, in Cornwall; while the island of Samson, in the Scilly Isles, owes its name to this source. Milton Abbey, in Dorsetshire, was formerly quadruply dedicated to SS. Mary, Michael, Samson, and Bradwalladr; while there still exists a St. Sampson’s church in the City of York. But that owes its name to another fellow—an early Archbishop of York; so early, indeed, that he is not generally included among the primates. He, strangely enough, appears to have been contemporary with, and a friend of, the other Sampson.
