Of Candian or Cretan god-names only two are tentatively known, to wit—Velchanos and Apheia: Apheia may be connoted with Hephaestus, the Greek title of Vulcan or Vulcanus, and the connection between Hephaestus and Velchanos is clearly indicated by the inscribed figure of Velchanos which appears upon the coins of the Candian town of Phaestus. That the falcon was an emblem of the Volcae is obvious from the bird on Fig. 248, and the older forms of the English place-name Folkestone, i.e., Folcanstan, Folcstane, Fulchestan supposed to mean “stone of a man Folca,” more probably imply a Folk Stone, or Falcon Stone, or Vulcan Stone. The Saxon gentleman named Folca is in all probability pure imagination.
The more British title of Wayland or Voland, the Vulcan or Blacksmith of Uffington, and doubtless also of the Blacksmith of Walland’s Park, Offham, is Govannon. One may trace Govan, the British Hammersmith, from St. Govans at Fairfield near Glasgow, or from St. Govan’s Head in South Wales, to St. Govan’s Well, opposite De Vere Gardens in Kensington. In Welsh govan was a generic term for smith; one of the triune aspects of St. Bride was that of a metal worker, and it is reasonable to equate the Lady Godiva of Coventry, with Coventina or Coven of the Tyne, whose images from Coventina’s Well in Northumberland are here reproduced. As will be seen she figures as Una or the One holding an olive branch, and as Three holding a phial or vial, a fire, and a what-not too obscure for specification. “The founding of the Temple of Coventina,” says Clayton, “must be ascribed to the Roman officers of the Batavian Cohort, who had left a country where the sun shines every day and where in pagan times springs and running waters were objects of adoration.”[451] But is there really no other possible alternative? Mr. Hope describes the goddess represented in Fig. 256 as floating on the leaf of a water-lily; the legend of the patron saint of St. Ives in Cornwall is to the effect that this maiden came floating over the waves upon a leaf, and it thus seems likely that Coventry, the home of Lady Godiva, derived its name from being the tre, tree, or trou of Coven, or St. Govan.
Fig. 256.—From The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England (Hope, R. C.).
Fig. 257.—From The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England (Hope, R. C.).
In his account of a great and triumphant jousting held in London on May Day, 1540, on which occasion all the horses were trapped in white velvet, Stow several times alludes to an Ivy Bridge by St. Martin’s in the Fields, and this Ivy Bridge must have been closely adjacent to what is now Coventry Street and Cranbrook Street. Crene is Greek for brook,[452] the Hippocrene or the horse brook was the fountain struck by the hoof of the divine Pegasus: Cranbrook Street is a continuation of Coventry Street, and I rather suspect that the neighbouring Covent Garden is not, as popularly supposed, a corruption of Convent Garden, but was from time immemorial a grove or garden of Good Coven. The Maiden Lane here situated probably derived its title from a sign or tablet of the Maiden similar to the Coventina pictures, and it is not improbable that Coven or Goodiva once reigned from Covent Garden via Coventry Street to St. Govan’s Well in Kensington. Near Ripon is an earthwork abri known seemingly as Givendale,[453] and on Hambleton Hill in this neighbourhood used to be a White Horse carved on the down side.[454] The primal Coventrys were not improbably a tribal oak or other sacred tree, such as the Braintree in Essex near Bradwell,[455] and the Picktree previously noted.
At Coveney, in Cambridgeshire—query, Coven ea or Coven’s island?—bronze bucklers have been found which in design “bear a close resemblance to the ribbon pattern seen on several Mycenæan works of art, and the inference is that even as far north as Britain, the Mycenæan civilisation found its way, the intermediaries being possibly Phœnician traders”.[456] But the Phœnicians having now been evicted from the court it is manifestly needful to find some other explanation.
Coveney is not many miles from St. Ives, Huntingdon, named supposedly after Ivo, a Persian bishop, who wandered through Europe in the seventh century. Possibly this same episcopal Persian founded Effingham near Bookham and Boxhill, for at the foot of the Buckland Hills is Givon’s Grove, once forming part of a Manor named Pachevesham. On the downs above is Epsom, which certainly for some centuries has been Ep’s home,[457] and the Pacheve of Pachevesham was possibly the same Big Hipha: there is second Evesham in the same neighbourhood. Speaking of the British inscription Eppilos, Sir John Rhys observes that it is very probably a derivation from epo, a horse; and of the town of Epeiacon, now Ebchester, the same authority states: “The name seems to signify a place for horses or cavalry”.[458] Near Pachevesham, below Epsom, is an old inn named “The Running Mare”.