The casual occurrence of the Engles leaving their name to this land has bestowed on our country a foreign designation; and—for the contingency was nearly occurring—had the kingdom of Northumbria preserved its ascendancy in the octarchy, the seat of dominion had been altered. In that case, the Lowlands of Scotland would have formed a portion of England; York would have stood forth as the metropolis of Britain, and London had been but a remote mart for her port and her commerce. Another idiom, perhaps, too, other manners, had changed the whole face of the country. We had been Northmen, not Southerns; our neighbourhood had not proved so troublesome to France. But the kingdom of Wessex prevailed, and became the sole monarchy of England, Such local contingencies have decided the character of a whole people.[4]
The history of LOCAL NAMES is one of the most capricious and fortuitous in the history of man; the etymologist must not be implicitly trusted, for it is necessary to be acquainted with the history of a people as much as the history of languages, to be certain of local derivations. We have recently been cautioned by a sojourner in the most ancient of kingdoms,[5] not too confidently to rely on etymology, or to assign too positively any reason for the origin of LOCAL NAMES. No etymologist could have accounted for the name of our nation had he not had recourse to our annals. Sir Walter Raleigh, from his observations in the New World, has confirmed this observation by circumstances which probably remain unknown to the present inhabitants. The actual names given to those places in America which they still retain, are nothing more than the blunders of the first Europeans, demanding by signs and catching at words by which neither party were intelligible to one another.[6]
[1] “Britannia after the Romans,” 62, 4to.
[2] It is a singular circumstance that our neighbours have preserved the name of our country more perfectly than we have done by our mutilated term of England, for they write it with antiquarian precision, Angle-terre—the land of the Angles. Our counties bear the vestiges of these Saxons expelling or exterminating the native Britons, as our pious Camden ejaculates, “by God’s wonderful providence.”
[3] The diligent investigator of the history of our Anglo-Saxons concludes that this unauthorised tale of the coronation and the decree of Egbert is unworthy of credence.
Camden, in his first edition, had fixed the date of the change of the name as occurring in the year 810; in his second edition he corrected it to 800. Holinshed says about 800. Speed gives a much later date, 819. It is evident that these disagreeing dates are all hazarded conjectures.
[4] Mitford’s “Harmony of Language,” 429. I might have placed this possible circumstance in the article “A History of Events which have not happened,” in “Curiosities of Literature.”
[5] Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in the curious volume of his recondite discoveries in the land of the Pyramids.
[6] “History of the World,” 167, fol. 1666. We have also a curious account of the ancient manner of naming persons and places among our own nation in venerable Lambarde’s “Perambulations of Kent,” 349, 453.