clature telling us the history of the people and the country;—in Hengistbury Head, on the south-west, reminding us of the white horse—the Hengest of the High-German,[1] and Calshot at the east, spelt as we know in Edward I.'s time, Kalkesore; on the north-west in Charford—the old Cerdices-ford of The Chronicle; on the south in Darrat (Danes-rout) and Danestream, whose waters, the peasant maintains, still run red with the blood of the conquered.
Everywhere we meet similar compounds,—in Needshore, which the Ordnance map spells Needs-oar, and thus loses the etymology, which, like the Needle Rocks, means simply the under (German nieder) shore; in the various Galley Hills, corrupted into Gallows Hills, which have nothing to do with the later but the older instrument, which contained the signal-fires, and are connected with the words "galley," to frighten, and "galleybaggar," a scarecrow, still heard every day, from the Old-English gælan.[2]
We find the same impress in Lyndhurst, Brockenhurst, Ashurst, and, as we have before said, in various other hursts,[3] in the different Holmsleys, Netleys,[4] Beckleys, Bentleys, Bratleys,
- ↑ In the charter of confirmation of Baldwin de Redvers to the Conventual House of Christchurch, quoted in Dugdale's Monasticon Anglicanum, vol. iii., part i., p. 304, and by Warner, vol. ii.. Appendix, p. 47, it is called Hedenes Buria, which may suggest that the word is only a corruption. I do not for one moment wish to insist on the personal reality of Hengest, but simply to notice the fact of the High-German word for a horse being prominent in the topography of a people whose ancestors used so many High-German words. See Donaldson, Cambridge Essays, 1856, pp. 45-48.
- ↑ On this word see Transactions of the Philological Society, part i., 1858, pp. 123, 124.
- ↑ See ch. iii., p. 33.
- ↑ In the parish of Eling we have Netley Down and Netley Down-field, the Nutlei of Domesday. Upon this word—which we find, also, in the
