Clent is the name of the place, a wood according to the Golden Legend. Bach, or Bache, is a word that had long escaped the glossarists, with the exception of Dr. Whitaker, who says it is "a Mereno-Saxon word, signifying a bottom, and that it enters into the composition of several local names in the midland counties."
The passage in Piers Ploughman, upon which this is a gloss, occurs at p. 119. of Whitaker's edition:
"Ac ther was weye non so wys (that the way thider couthe
Bote blostred forth as bestes) over baches and bulles."
The word occurs several times in Layamon, and on two occasions the later text reads slade; in one passage we have it thus:
"Of dalen and of dunen
The cognate languages would have led us to a different interpretation of Bache. In Suevo-Gothic, Backe is "an ascent or descent, extremitas montes, alias crepido vel ora." Wachter has Backe; collis, tumulus; of which Bühel, collis clivus, is the diminutive still in use. In Swedish Backe, and in Danish Bakke, is a hill or rising ground; and Ray, in his Travels, has "a baich, or languet of land." There has probably been some confusion here, as well as in the two similar words dune and dene, for hill and valley.
S. W. SINGER.
The legend of the sainted King Kenelm is related at great length, and with very precise references to the various chroniclers in which it is to be found, in the 1st vol. (pp. 721-4.) of MacCabe's Catholic History of England. The Saxon couplet in which his death was announced at Rome is very neatly rendered in Butler's Lives of the Saints:—