CHAPTER II

. A MEDIEVAL ROLL

"Quelque diversité d'herbes qu'il y alt, tout s'enveloppe sous le nom de salade; de mesme, sous la considération des noms, je m'en voys faire icy une galimafree de divers articles." (Montaigne, Essais, i. 46.)

Just as, in studying a new language, the linguist finds it most helpful to take a simple text and hammer out in detail every word and grammatical form it contains, so the student of name-lore cannot do better than tackle a medieval roll and try to connect every name in it with those of the present day. I give here two lists of names from the Hundred Rolls of 1273. The first contains the names of London and Middlesex jurymen, most of them, especially the Londoners, men of substance and position. The second is a list of cottagers resident in the village of Steeple Claydon in Bucks. Even a cursory perusal of these lists should Suffice to dispel all recollection of the nightmare "philology" which has been so much employed to obscure what is perfectly simple and obvious; while a very slight knowledge of Latin and French is all that is required to connect these names of men who were dead and buried before the Battle of Crecy with those to be found in any modern directory. The brief indications supplied under each name will be found in a fuller form in the various chapters of the book to which references are given.

For simplicity I have given the modern English form of each Christian name and expanded the abbreviations used by the official compilers. It will be noticed that English, Latin, and Anglo-French are used indifferently, that le is usually, though not always, put before the trade-name or nickname, that de is put before place-names and at before spots which have no proper name. The names in the right-hand column are only specimens of the, often very numerous, modern equivalents.

LONDON JURYMEN

Hundred Rolls

Modern Form

William Dibel.

Dibble (Theobald).

Initial t- and d- alternate (Dialectic Variants, Chapter III ) according to locality. In Tennyson, for Denison, son of Denis, we have the opposite change. The forms assumed by Theobald are very numerous (