In most countries we have to deal not with one people or language alone but with successive settlements by peoples using different languages. If the new race is only a powerful minority, as for example the Normans in England or the English in Ire land, its influence on place-names may be very small. In the case of the Romans in Celtic Britain it was almost negligible. If the invasion or settlement was a mass one, there may be very extensive renaming of the places, as was the case with the English in most parts of England, the Vikings in certain parts of the Danelaw and in Normandy, and the Celtic refugees who settled in Brittany. In England the dominant race and speech since the beginning of the 6th century has been English and, ex cept in Cornwall, Monmouthshire and Herefordshire, the nomen clature of the counties of England is predominantly English or Scandinavian. The only exception to this general statement is to be found in a good number of the names of natural features, such as rivers and mountains. Here, and in other countries also, the old names were usually kept. Tie rivers ran through wide tracts of country and were not the property of any single settler, while the mountains had no attractions for settlers in search of good pasture or arable land. Thus it is that Wear, Tyne, Avon, Cheviot, Eildon, Malvern, Mendip, are Celtic names, though English ones are not entirely wanting, as, for example, Blyth, Loud, Clent. Many river and hill-names cannot be explained even upon a Celtic basis and may have been taken over by the Celts from still earlier peoples. We must also note that some names which now look con vincingly English may really be folk-etymological perversions of earlier Celtic names. The Celtic name has in a few cases sur vived to prove it, as in the case of O.E. in Eoforwic, Searoburh our York and Salisbury, which mean in Old English "boar-dwell ing" and "trickery-fort" respectively but are really anglicisings of the old Romano-Celtic names Eburacum and Sorbiodunum.
How many similar cases there may be in which the evidence for it has not chanced to survive it is impossible to say.
The Romans seldom renamed the British towns, and beyond one or two somewhat doubtful examples, such as Speen and Chester (earlier Lega-ceaster) and Lincoln from the Latin spinae, (urbs) legionis and Lindum colonia, they left little to be handed on to the English. The latter had picked up a certain number of Latin words both in their old Continental homes and in England through the channels of war and trade and Christianity, such as castra, (via) strata, monasterium. These became ceaster, Strat and myn ster in their own language and have given rise to groups of names in -chester, -tester, -caster, in Street-, Stret-, Strat-, Streat- and in -minster. The first of these elements is very commonly found in the names of the old Romano-British fortified towns, but it should be noted that the first element in such names (e.g., Gloucester, Cirencester, W ?meter, Exeter) is Celtic and not Roman, the old names being Glevum, Corinium, Uriconium and I sca.
The English Conquest involved widespread renaming of the countryside. The comparative frequency of place-names in -ing and -ingham in the eastern and south-eastern counties and their comparative rarity elsewhere suggests the importance of the great leader and his followers in the early stages of the invasion, for in O.E. the suffix ing(as) was added to personal name to denote that man and his family, followers, etc. Thus Basing denotes the "followers of Basa" and W hittingham is the "home of the follow ers of Hwita." The elements ham and stede, "site," "place," later ste(a)d, were freely used in the early days of the invasion. The suffix ton, from O.E. tun "enclosure" becomes relatively much more frequent as we travel westwards to the districts latest con quered and this suffix remained a living one till long of ter the Norman Conquest. Worth, worthy and wardine all denote small enclosures but the first soon ceased to be a living suffix. Port was used for a town (a loan-word from Lat. porta), and burp (dat. sing. byrig) is the source of many names in bury and a few in borough, burgh. It denotes a fortified place, of whatever age, and has none of the constitutional associations of the common word borough. Large areas of land were still covered with forest ; as these were brought under cultivation names in -ley and -field arose, from the O.E. words leak, "clearing in woodland," and feld, "open country." Land dedicated to the service of religion was often called stow, hence Halstow, "holy place," Bridstow, "St. Bride's land," corresponding to the Welsh Llan san Bregit. Many other elements of a purely topographical character are found in place-names. Here and in other countries we find early peoples very sensitive to slight differences of terrain and a place might be called a cliff, e.g., Egglescliffe, or hangra (i.e., "hanging wood," as in Shelfanger), where we should only note a slight slope. The personal names found in these place-names, especially in eastern and south-eastern England, are often of an exceedingly archaic type, suggesting that soon after the settlement there were rapid changes in the nomenclature among our forefathers.