garrison towns, where the officials probably spoke nothing but French, their mispronunciations have persisted. It is probably owing to this cause that we say Exeter instead of Exchester, and that we write Leicester, Worcester, and Gloucester, and pronounce Lester, Wooster, and Gloster. The old name of Cambridge was Grantebrycg, meaning the bridge over the river Grante.[1] The Normans could have pronounced this right if they had tried; but they were careless, and the name became Cantebrugge (as it is written by Chaucer). This was afterwards softened into Cambridge, and the map-makers turned the name of the river into Cam in order to make it fit the modern name of the town. The change of the Old English Snotingahām into Nottingham is probably due to the inability of the Normans to pronounce sn. It may be surmised that the people of Nottingham will bear them no ill-will on this account. The Normans also turned the name of Dūnholm into Duresme, which we now write Durham. There were some other English place-names which the Normans mispronounced, but which still remain uncorrupted. We have not adopted their Nicole for Lincoln, and their Londres for London survives only in France.
While the chief result of Norman influence on the local nomenclature of England consisted in the alteration of the existing place-names, the Normans also introduced some new names of their own. Many of them belong to monasteries, and it is interesting to note how often they have meanings referring to the beauty of the site, as in Beauvale, Beaulieu, Belvoir, Beauchief—a notion which seldom or never appears in names of earlier origin. Other French names of monasteries are Roche (Abbatia de Rupe), Jorvaulx ('the vale of the river Yore'), Rievaulx ('the vale of the Rie'), Grosmont ('great mount'). Richmond ('rich mount'),
- ↑ This is a British name, perhaps identical with that of the Gaulish river Gerontona. Compare the Old English Treante, Trent, from the ancient British Trisantona.
