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NOTES AND QUERIES. no s. XL JUNE 5, im.
ever asked a friend to walk down to the
Cam, in order to see the boats start. In
such cases we always say " the river." In
this practice we follow in the footsteps of our
remote ancestors, . who as a general rule
bestowed only on the largest streams a specific
name. This fact accounts for the numerous
Axes and Exes, Dees, and Avons, that
occur in our river nomenclature. The smaller
streams were generally known as the bourn
or the brook, and in the majority of cases
had no distinctive name whatever. When
the poet wrote
We twa hae paidlit i' the burn, he did not weaken the force of the line by giving a name to the stream.
My next point is that the names of towns and villages are very rarely identical with the names of rivers. There is certainly a Thame, but the derivation of the word Thames or Thame is so obscure that no argument can be founded on it. We have no town called Severn or Medway, or Clyde or Tay. We have Plymouth, the town at the mouth of the Plym, and Plymp- ton, the tun on the Plym ; but we have no village of Plym. Why Bourne and Brook should be the names of places, while River and Stream* are not, I cannot say. There must be some exceptional reason for this apparent anomaly.
This brings me to the remark to which PKOF. SKEAT takes exception, and which he does not quite correctly quote. I did not say (ante, p. 132) that " names in bourne generally denominate, not brooks or streams, but villages," but " names ending in bourne." This excludes Bournemouth, Bourne End, and Burnside, which are given bv PROF. SKEAT, though of course they support my argument. Bournemouth is the village at the mouth of the bourne, Bourne End the one at the end of the bourne, and Burnside the one at the side of it. They obviously cannot them- selves be the names of rivers or streams. ( Apart from these three instances, PROF. bKEAT gives the names of sixty towns and villages ending in -bourn, bourne, or burn, of which twenty-seven will be found on the south of the Thames, and thirty-three on the north of that river. Some of these may also be the names of brooks or streams the majority certainly are not. On the other hand, PROF. SKEAT gives only three words ending in -bourne as the names of streams One of these is the Ravensbourne, and herein the Professor blesses me, as he
PnM f not n ? w enough about the border town of
Coldstream to be able to account for the name.
admits that it was never a village-name at
all, which is my contention. Nail-bourn
has not (so far as he knows) given rise to a
place-name. Another provincial word,
winter-bourn, has apparently done so.
How these village-names originated is easy to understand. Some one builds a mill by the side of the bourn ; a few houses follow, and the settlement is called after the mill at the bourn, which after a short time is whittled down to Milbourn. A pious benefactor builds a kirk in a similar position ; the same process ensues, and we have Kirkburn. A. few huts are erected round a large ash-tree, or under the shelter of a rock which overhangs a stream ; thence Ashbourne and Rockburn. Kilburn in Middlesex, Kilburn in Yorkshire, and Kil- bourne in Derbyshire, probably derived their names from an anchorite's cell which was built beside the brook. So far I agree with PROF. SKEAT. The villages derived their names from the bourne in a qualified form.
In later and more decadent times, when book-learning supplanted mother-wit a gift common in England in Chaucer's days, but now only to be found in remote country- sides -an artificial . innovation took place. Our simple ancestors, when they built a few cottages on the north or west bank of a stream, were content to call the hamlet Northbourne or Westbourne, as the case might be. Our more enlightened selves, whose notions of a book are confined to the printed page, and who know of no wisdom except that of the leading-article or the stump-oration, are loth to insert a nameless stream in a geography book, and therefore give the name of the village to the rivulet. Our forefathers generally called it the village " water."
A case in point is the village of Shalbourne in Wiltshire. Leland in his ' Itinerary ' (ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 130) thus speaks of it :
" Goyng oute of Chauburne village 3. miles from Hungreforde I passid over a litle streme caullyd Chauburne water, and it goith other ynto Bedwyne streme, or els by it self ynto Kenet ryver."
Other instances are given in a Hertford- shire passage (ib., p. 98) :
"Then cummeth Hempstede water doune into the More streame a quarter of a mile or more a this side Rikemansworth. Bereamstede broke metith with Hempstede water at Tway waters mille. Hemp- stede is a ix. milys from the More by northe : and a 3. miles above that at greate Gatesdene by northe is the hedde of this streame. And yn Richemans- worth self is a division of the great streame cum ming to his course agayne. Lowde water cummith into the great streame of More water a flite shot lower on the farther ripe then Gatesden water or ever the great cum to Richemansworthe."
