On the Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench (primary phonics txt) 📗

that this 'England' means 'Angle-land,' or that in the names 'Essex,' 'Sussex,' and 'Middlesex,' we preserve a record of East Saxons, South Saxons, and Middle Saxons, who occupied those several portions of the land; or that 'Norfolk' and 'Suffolk' are two broad divisions of 'northern' and 'southern folk,' into which the East Anglian kingdom was divided. 'Cornwall' does not bear its origin quite so plainly upon its front, or tell its story so that every one who runs may read. At the same time its secret is not hard to attain to. As the Teutonic immigrants advanced, such of the British population as were not either destroyed or absorbed by them retreated, as we all have learned, into Wales and Cornwall, that is, till they could retreat no further. The fact is evidently preserved in the name of 'Wales', which means properly 'The foreigners,'—the nations of Teutonic blood calling all bordering tribes by this name. But though not quite so apparent on the surface, this fact is also preserved in 'Cornwall', written formerly 'Cornwales', or the land inhabited by the Welsh of the Corn or Horn. The chroniclers uniformly speak of North Wales and Corn-Wales. [Footnote: See Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, year 997, where mention is made of the Cornwealas, the Cornish people.] These Angles, Saxons, and Britons or Welshmen, about whom our pupils may be reading, will be to them more like actual men of flesh and blood, who indeed trod this same soil which we are treading now, when we can thus point to traces surviving to the present day, which they have left behind them, and which England, as long as it is England, will retain.

The Danes too have left their marks on the land. We all probably, more or less, are aware how much Danish blood runs in English veins; what large colonies from Scandinavia (for as many may have come from Norway as from modern Denmark), settled in some parts of this island. It will be interesting to show that the limits of this Danish settlement and occupation may even now be confidently traced by the constant recurrence in all such districts of the names of towns and villages ending in 'by,' which signified in their language a dwelling or single village; as Nether_by_, Apple_by_, Der_by_, Whit_by_, Rug_by_. Thus if you examine closely a map of Lincolnshire, one of the chief seats of the Danish settlement, you will find one hundred, or well nigh a fourth part, of the towns and villages to have this ending, the whole coast being studded with them—they lie nearly as close to one another as in Sleswick itself; [Footnote: Pott, Etym. Forsch. vol. ii. pt. 2, p.1172] while here in Hampshire 'by' as such a termination, is utterly unknown. Or again, draw a line transversely through England from Canterbury by London to Chester, the line, that is, of the great Roman road, called Watling Street, and north of this six hundred instances of the occurrence of the same termination may be found, while to the south there are almost none. 'Thorpe,' equivalent to the German 'dorf' as Bishops_thorpe_, Al_thorp_, tells the same tale of a Norse occupation of the soil; and the terminations, somewhat rarer, of 'thwaite,' 'haugh,' 'garth,' 'ness,' do the same no less. On the other hand, where, as in this south of England, the 'hams' abound (the word is identical with our 'home'), as Bucking_ham_, Eg_ham_, Shore_ham_, there you may be sure that not Norsemen but West Germans took possession of the soil. 'Worth,' or 'worthy,' tells the same story, as Bos_worth_, Kings_worthy_; [Footnote: See Sweet's Oldest English Texts (index).] the 'stokes' in like manner, as Basing_stoke_, Itchen_stoke_, are Saxon, being (as some suppose) places _stock_aded, with stocks or piles for defence. You are yourselves learning, or hereafter you may be teaching others, the names and number of the English counties or shires. What a dull routine task for them and for you this may be, supplying no food for the intellect, no points of attachment for any of its higher powers to take hold of! And yet in these two little words, 'shire' and 'county,' if you would make them render up even a small part of their treasure, what lessons of English history are contained! One who knows the origin of these names, and how we come to possess such a double nomenclature, looks far into the social condition of England in that period when the strong foundations of all that has since made England glorious and great were being laid; by aid of these words may detect links which bind its present to its remotest past; for of lands as of persons it may be said, 'the child is father of the man,' 'Shire' is connected with 'shear,' 'share,' and is properly a portion 'shered' or 'shorn' off. [Footnote: It must be confessed that there are insuperable difficulties in the way of connecting Anglo-Saxon scir with the verb sceron, to shear, and of explaining it as equivalent to 'shorn off.' The derivation of 'shire' has not yet been ascertained.] When a Saxon king would create an earl, it did not lie in men's thoughts, accustomed as they were to deal with realities, that such could be a merely titular creation, or exist without territorial jurisdiction; and a 'share' or 'shire' was assigned him to govern, which also gave him his title. But at the Conquest this Saxon officer was displaced by a Norman, the 'earl' by the 'count'—this title of 'count,' borrowed from the later Roman empire, meaning originally 'companion' (comes), one who had the honour of being closest companion to his leader; and the 'shire' was now the 'county' (comitatus), as governed by this 'comes.' In that singular and inexplicable fortune of words, which causes some to disappear and die out under the circumstances apparently most favourable for life, others to hold their ground when all seemed against them, 'count' has disappeared from the titles of English nobility, while 'earl' has recovered its place; although in evidence of the essential identity of the two titles, or offices rather, the wife of the earl is entitled a 'countess'; and in further memorial of these great changes that so long ago came over our land, the two names 'shire' and 'county' equally survive as in the main interchangeable words in our mouths.

A large part of England, all that portion of it which the Saxons occupied, is divided into 'hundreds'. Have you ever asked yourselves what this division means, for something it must mean? The 'hundred' is supposed to have been originally a group or settlement of one hundred free families of Saxon incomers. If this was so, we have at once an explanation of the strange disproportion between the area of the 'hundred' in the southern and in the more northern counties—the average number of square miles in a 'hundred' of Sussex or Kent being about four and twenty; of Lancashire more than three hundred. The Saxon population would naturally be far the densest in the earlier settlements of the east and south, while more to west and north their tenure would be one rather of conquest than of colonization, and the free families much fewer and more scattered. [Footnote: Kemble, The Saxons in England, vol. i. p. 420; Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, p. 98.] But further you have noticed, I dare say, the exceptional fact that the county of Sussex, besides the division into hundreds, is divided also into six 'rapes'; thus the 'rape' of Bramber and so on. [This 'rape' is connected by Lappenberg, ii. 405 (1881), with the Icel. hreppr, which according to the Grágás was a district in which twenty or more peasants maintained one poor person].

Let us a little consider, in conclusion, how we may usefully bring our etymologies and other notices of words to bear on the religious teaching which we would impart in our schools. To do this with much profit we must often deal with words as the Queen does with the gold and silver coin of the realm. When this has been current long, and by often passing from man to man, with perhaps occasional clipping in dishonest hands, has lost not only the clear brightness, the well- defined sharpness of outline, but much of the weight and intrinsic value which it had when first issued from the royal mint, it is the sovereign's prerogative to recall it, and issue it anew, with the royal image stamped on it afresh, bright and sharp, weighty and full, as at first. Now to a process such as this the true mint-masters of language, and all of us may be such, will often submit the words which they use. Where use and custom have worn away their significance, we too may recall and issue them afresh. With how many it has thus fared!—for example, with one which will be often in your mouths. You speak of the 'lessons' of the day; but what is 'lessons' here for most of us save a lazy synonym for the morning and evening chapters appointed to be read in church? But realize what the Church intended in calling these chapters by this name; namely, that they should be the daily instruction of her children; listen to them yourselves as such; lead your scholars to regard them as such, and in this use of 'lessons' what a lesson for every one of us there may be! [Footnote: [Still etymologically lessons mean simply 'readings, the word representing French leçons = Latin lectiones.]] 'Bible' itself, while we not irreverently use it, may yet be no more to us than the verbal sign by which we designate the written Word of God. Keep in mind that it properly means 'the book' and nothing more; that once it could be employed of any book (in Chaucer it is so), and what matter of thought and reflection lies in this our present restriction of 'bible' to one book, to the exclusion of all others! So strong has been the sense of Holy Scripture being 'the Book,' the worthiest and best, that book which explains all other books, standing up in their midst,—like Joseph's kingly sheaf, to which all the other sheaves did obeisance,— that this name of 'Bible' or 'Book' has been restrained to it alone: just as 'Scripture' means no more than 'writing'; but this inspired Writing has been acknowledged so far above all other writings, that this name also it has obtained as exclusively its own.

Again, something may be learned from knowing that the 'surname,' as distinguished from the 'Christian' name, is the name over and above, not 'sire'-name, or name received from the father, as some explain, but 'sur'-name (super nomen). There was never, that is, a time when every baptized man had not a Christian name, the recognition of his personal standing before God; while the surname, the name expressing his relation, not to the kingdom of God, but to a worldly society, is of much later growth, super-added to the other, as the word itself declares. What a lesson at once in the growing up of a human society, and in the contrast between it and the heavenly Society of the Church, might be appended to this explanation! There was a period when only a few had surnames; had, that is, any significance in the order of things temporal; while the Christian name from the first was the possession of every baptized man. All this might be brought usefully to bear on your exposition of the first words in the Catechism.

There are long words from the Latin which, desire as we may to use all plainness of speech, we cannot do without, nor find their adequate substitutes in homelier parts of our language; words which must always remain the vehicles of much of that truth whereby we live. Now in explaining these, make it your rule always to start, where you can, from the derivation, and to return to that as often as you can. Thus you wish to explain 'revelation.' How much will be gained if you can attach some distinct image to the word, one to which your scholars, as often as they hear it, may mentally recur. Nor is this difficult. God's 'revelation' of Himself is a drawing back of the veil or curtain which concealed Him from men; not man finding out God, but God discovering Himself to man; all which is contained in the word. Or you wish to explain 'absolution.' Many will know that it has something to do with the pardon of sins; but how much more accurately will they know this, when they know that 'to absolve' means 'to loosen from': God's 'absolution' of men being his releasing of them from the bands of those sins with which they were bound. Here every one will connect a distinct image with the word, such as will always come to his help when he would realize what its precise meaning may be. That which was done for Lazarus naturally, the Lord