296 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April may) belong to the language of a pre- Aryan people. It is, however, always desirable to have these names in their earliest accessible forms, in order to preclude erroneous etymological conjectures, and sometimes to establish or disprove the identity of a particular river-name with one in another district or country. For example, Ptolemy's name for the Alne, "AAawos, is etymologically obscure, but it is of some interest to know that it is by phonetic law the antecedent of the modern Welsh river-name Alun. On the other hand, Alne is not identical with the names of two other Northum- brian rivers, Allen and Alwen, which were originally Alwent. A further reason why every study of the place-names of a county should include the river-names is that very often the name of an inhabited place is derived from an early form of the name of the stream on which it stands, or from an ancient name of it which has not survived. Thus Jesmond (in 1242 Jesemuth) derives its name from its position at the mouth of the river now called Ouseburn, but (as is duly pointed out in this book) mentioned in a document of 1292 as Yese. Mr. Mawer seems now and then too ready to conclude that a name is pre-English merely because its etymology is obscure. He is very likely right with regard to Auckland ; the eleventh- and twelfth- century forms Alclit, Alcle(a)t certainly have a very British look. And the twelfth-century name Hidewine, Hiddewin (now Heddon) seems so hopeless of explanation from Germanic sources that it is perhaps allowable to take refuge in the unlimited possibilities of an unknown tongue. But for Hebburn (in the twelfth-century Heabyrm — probably an error for Heabyrin — and Heabyrine) I see no objection to the interpretation heah-byrgen, ' high tumulus '. Perhaps for Hebron the same explanation is more probable than the author's heah-burna, ' high brook '. Again, Mr. Mawer thinks that the name of the river Hextild must either be a figment invented to account for the name of Hexham (formerly Hextildesham) or else a pre-English name, and he inclines rather doubtfully to the latter view. The earliest forms of the name of Hexham, which apparently contain the OE. word hagosteald or hcegsteald, * a bachelor ', he suggests may be due to popular etymology. Now I believe that the river-name is neither spurious nor pre-English. I would suggest the following explana- tion. A landowner bearing the cognomen of Hagosteald had running through his estate a stream which people knew as Hagostealdes-ea, ' Hagos- tald's river '. On the banks of this a church was built, the site of which was described as cet Hagostealdes ea. Baeda calls it Hagostaldensis ecclesia ; the OE. translation of his work gives Hagostealdes-ea as the name, not of the river, but of the place. Afterwards the name Hagostealdeshdm, which may originally have belonged to the lord's own abode, was transferred to the monastic settlement in the neighbourhood. The name of the river survives in the shortened form of Hextild. The introduction to the book is in general excellent, but the excursus on the suffix -ing is far from satisfactory. In the first place, no notice is taken of the use of this suffix to form derivatives from names of places, as in Catmceringas, the people of Catmere, Centingas, the people of Kent. It is important not to forget the existence of this class of formations, for it throws a useful light on the function of the suffix in forming what are
