132
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. XL FKB. is, im.
of the brook or of the land whence or through
which it flows. But " de Tyburne " (not
" Tyburna' ' ) appears to be genitive, not ablative
(the e being for ce), and therefore to be read
of Tyburn, not from Tyburn. Saunders
has it thus : " the water of Tyburn running
to [or into] the Thames."* There is not
much in the difference, though the ejection
of from would weaken Tyburn as the name
of land in this instance which is COL. PBI-
DEAUX'S suggestion.
For the present, waiting further light as to the primary meaning of Teoburna, and if allowed to read teo as double, I would stretch it a little to mean divided, and then interpret Tyburn as originally the general name for the many streams that issued from the Hampstead springs. In the far- off Saxon days when " Teoburna " was invented, we can imagine a great tract of forest and swamp percolated by these numerous and undistinguishable rivulets, which the natives on their small clearances knew only as " the divided burn." Thus the two principal branches, though far apart, are given the same name in the Abbey delimitations of two periods widely sepa- rated. Both streams far from their sources are described as Tyburn, not in the manor of that name, but in that of Ese or Eia, for any previous name of which land there is no evidence.
The above remarks on the word Teoburna were hazarded previous to the communica- tion of PBOF. SKEAT (ante, p. 31), who has probably demolished the " between " theory. His suggestion that Ty in Tyburn may have its simplest equivalent in tye a word in use for an enclosure, or even for its anti- thesis, a common, and thus a tract has a reasonable aspect ; and when we are led to a root - verb teohan, we seem to have the evolution from Teoburna to Tyburn. May we then " rest and be thankful " in the solution, the tye-burn, or " the burn of the tye " ? And thus have we not the name of the burn rather than the name of the tye ? W. L. BUTTON.
PBOF. SKEAT'S statement that the w in tw cannot be lost unless the sound of o or follows, is, of course, conclusive, and it is therefore hardly worth while to discuss the pronunciation of the word Tyburn. But I apprehend that when the Domesday scribes wrote it down " Tiburne," they endeavoured
- As example of de with the genitive my
dictionary quotes from Cicero " De istius," &c.
to represent the sound " Teebourne," and
it seems to me probable that this pronuncia-
tion prevailed till quite recent times, not-
withstanding the fact that at a later period the
spelling was changed to Tyburn. Stow spells
the word " Teyborne," and the combination
ey is pronounced ee in certain English words
such as " key," the proper names Seymour
and Leyland (Leland), and the place-name
Heythrop. It must be remembered that
Tyburn is only a book-word, and that it fell
out of common speech with the last execu-
tion there, considerably more than a hundred
years ago. Modern people probably call it
" Taiburn " because y in modern English
is usually pronounced ai ; but I doubt if
Shakespeare gave it this pronunciation.
If Pall Mall were utterly wiped out
from our speech for a hundred years,
how many of our descendants would call
it " Pell Mell " when they read about it in
books ?
The pronunciation of place-names is constantly changing. When, fifteen years ago, I took up my abode at Shrewsbury, I was told by old inhabitants to call it Shrewsbury (Scrobbes-byrig) ; but not- withstanding usage and phonetic laws, I fancy the old pronunciation has nearly died out. The same changes are taking place in Cirencester, Leominster, and many other towns, to say nothing of words with er, such as Berkshire and Derby.
PBOF. SKEAT, in suggesting the derivation from A.-S. tlgan, does not explicitly say that the earliest spelling of the word that we know of, namely, " Teoburna," is another form for " Tig-burna " ; but I presume that that is his meaning. Of course, if the compound could signify a " tye," or piece of land enclosed between two burns, it would suit my main hypothesis as well as the deriva- tion I originally suggested. The peculiarity of the word " bourne," or of words ending with " bourne," is that they generally denominate, not brooks or streams, but villages ; cf. Bourne, Eastbourne, West- bourne, Northbourne, Southbourne, Winter- bourne, &c.
With reference to the REV. JOHN PICK- FOBD'S remarks, I may say that Tyburn as a place of execution lay outside the scope of my note. The York Tyburn was of course named after the London one. This aspect of the question was very fully discussed in these columns by MB. W. L. RTJTTON, F.S.A., several years ago, and has recently formed the subject of an able monograph by Mr. Alfred Marks.
W. F. PBIDEAUX.
