Chapter XII

), Buckland, Cleveland, etc. The name Lander or Launder is unconnected with these (see p.186). Flack is Mid. Eng. flagge, turf. Snape is a dialect word for boggy ground, and Wong means a meadow.

A rather uncouth-looking set of names, which occur chiefly on the border of Cheshire and Lancashire, are compounded from bottom or botham, a wide shallow valley suited for agriculture. Hotspur, dissatisfied with his fellow-conspirators' map-drawing, expresses his intention of damming the Trent so that

"It shall not wind with such a deep indent To rob me of so rich a bottom here."

(1 Henry IV, iii. 1.)

Familiar compounds are Higginbottom, Rowbotham, Sidebottom. The first element of Shufflebotham is, in the Lancashire Assize Rolls (1176-1285), spelt Schyppewalle- and Schyppewelle-, where schyppe is for sheep, still so pronounced in dialect. Tarbottom, earlier Tarbutton, is corrupted from Tarbolton (Ayrshire).

WATER AND WATERSIDE

RIVERS

Very few surnames are taken, in any language, from the names of rivers. This is quite natural, for just as the man who lived on a hill became known as Hill, Peake, etc., and not as Skiddaw or Wrekin, so the man who lived by the waterside would be known as Bywater, Rivers, etc. No Londoner talks of going on the Thames, and the country-dweller also usually refers to his local stream as the river or the water, and not by its geographical name. Another reason for the absence of such surnames is probably to be found in the fact that our river (and mountain) names are almost exclusively Celtic, and had no connotation for the English population. We have many apparent river names, but most of them are susceptible of another explanation. Dee may be for Day as Deakin is for Dakin, i.e. David, Derwent looks like Darwin ( Chapter VII ) or the local Darwen with excrescent -t (