To such enquiries we may be stimulated by shame when we know that Kent is one of the counties without a work on its place names, and even more by the fact that Norway has been at work in this direction since 1896—the Church and the State collaborating and a State grant helping in the production of the nineteen volumes already published. So too, in Sweden, a committee was appointed by Royal authority in 1901, and one province has already been dealt with exhaustively. Denmark also from 1910, under the Ministry of Education, and with State grants, thus recognised the linguistic and historico-archæological importance of such studies.
And yet none of these enlightened and progressive kingdoms have anything like the advantage that England possesses in its Saxon Charters and its Domesday Book. More honour to them, more shame to us!
Let it be clearly understood, however, from the first that I am not writing as an expert on these matters, nor as having a direct knowledge of Celtic or of Saxon. All I have attempted has been simply to collect, for the benefit of those who shall be attracted to the study of our place-names as elucidating the ancient history of the County, information from many sources which will save them the time and labour of finding out for themselves whether a particular name is old enough to be found in Domesday Book, or in later Saxon charters and wills; and especially there has been in my mind the hope that a committee may be appointed to deal as well with Kent as other Counties have been, especially by the great Anglo-Saxon scholars, Professor Skeats, Professor Craigie, of Oxford, and Professor Mawer, of Newcastle. For such literary artizans and architects as I hope may shortly arise, I am more than content to have been but a day labourer, a collector of material which others may find worthy of scrutiny and perhaps of use.
PLACE NAMES IN KENT.
Place Names of Celtic Origin.
Men of Kent must not make too much of their county motto, Invicta. As a matter of fact, we have been conquered at various times, and sometimes before the rest of England succumbed to the invader. The aborigines, who were probably somewhat like the Esquimeaux, a small race, having only stone weapons and tools, lived on the fringe of the great glacier of the last Ice Age (perhaps 50,000 years ago), which enabled one (though doubtless no one tried) to walk from what is now Middlesex and Kent to the North Pole; even the present North Sea being part of the great sheet of ice which covered all our land down to the north bank of the Thames. When climatic conditions altered for the better, England (to call it by its much later name) became desirable to the great west-ward migration of the Celts, who had already over-run all North Europe. This was the first of the five great waves of peoples who from the East seized on Europe, each driving its predecessor westward. The Celtic is, at any rate, the first to be clearly traced. It was divisible into the Gadhelic and the Cymric (or Brythonic) element, from the former the Erse, Gaelic, and Manx languages being derived, and from the latter the Welsh and the Breton (Ancient British and Gaulish, the Cornish, and probably the Pictish).
The first branch is said to have passed into Britain about 800 B.C., and the second about 630 B.C. Thenceforward, but for a few place-names, chiefly of rivers and heights, and still fewer words which have survived in our tongue, we know little until the visit of Julius Cæsar in B.C. 54, from whose Gallic War we learn of some of the Celtic tribe-names and place-names. Otherwise we know little apart from the river roots which we find all over N. Europe (and hardly any in England are non-Celtic), especially the five main words for river or water—Afon—Dur—Esk—Rhe—and Don.
Kent itself in the earliest records is found as Ceant from the Celtic Cenn—a head or headland, which again appears on the other side of our land as the Mull of Cantire. We have also our Chevening, which, like Chevenage, embodies the Celtic Cefn—ridge (still Cefn in Welsh). And “Kits Coty House” on our neighbouring Down gives us Ked—a hollow, and Coit—a wood, i.e., the hollow dolmen in the wood. Mote Park sounds modern enough to some; but our “park” is the Celtic parwyg, an enclosed place, while the much later Anglo-Saxon Mote denotes a place of local assembly. Dun was their word for a hill-fort, and so we have Croydon (with a Saxon prefix) for the fortress on the chalk range, though most of the old British fortresses which preserved the name when occupied by Romans or Saxons are in other counties. Penshurst, on the other hand, has a Saxon suffix to the Celtic Pen, still unchanged in Welsh as meaning a head or hill, perhaps only a dialectic form of the Gaelic Ceann, or Ken, which we have already noted in “Kent.”