70
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. v. JAN. 27, im
All this confusion of thought has arisen
through MR. SHORE'S assuming that the 955
boundaries represent the Hundred of Hormer
and not, as they purport to do, the land at
Abingdon. He assumes that Ceadwealla
granted this hundred to the abbey. Now it
has never been proved that private jurisdic-
tion in England is as old as 955, to say
nothing of the time of Ceadwealla. As a
matter of fact the abbot's jurisdiction over
the hundred dated only from a grant of
Edward the Confessor (' Chartulary,' i. 465),
and not from Ceadwealla.
The point is not whether the boundaries between the abbot's land and Oxford followed the modern county boundary, but whether that line is the one described in the chartulary as the boundary of the Abingdon estate. MR. SHORE assumes the identity of the two, and then uses the identity as a proof that his assumption is true. By a similar logical con- fusion he tells me that "Nature is against me" when I say that Geafling lacu cannot mean "fork-shaped channel." The evidence of Nature merelv consists in this, that there is now a fork-shaped channel in the place where MR. SHORE locates this lacu. That is, he wrongly interprets Geafling lacu as " fork- shaped channel," he finds such a channel, and adduces it as a roof by Nature herself that his explanation is correct. If the identifica- tion were correct, the argument would be much like claiming that London Bridge means, despite philology, "s because there is a stone bridge known as London Bridge.
After this it is not surprising to find MR. SHORE saying that he will "not traverse any argument based on charters centuries later that are not immediately concerned with these issues." The charter referred to is one year later only in date, and, as 1 showed in my last letter, goes over the same line as the imaginary Ceadwealla boundaries be- tween Kennington and Abingdon.
That the Abingdon forgers did not consider the Ceadwealla boundaries to include the land between Kennington and Oxford and Binsey is proved by the fact that they deemed it necessary to provide a charter, dated not later than four years after the one upon which MR. SHORE relies, granting to them this land (' Cart. Sax.,' iii. 200). There are also other charters dealing with this district. It is noteworthy that the charter just cited does not mention Eoccenford and the other features that MR. SHORE holds were on the eastern border of this land.
MR. SHORE is wrong in stating that indicated the thirteenth century as the date
"stone bridge,"
at the place
of the fabrication of these charters. That
I gave as the date of the MSS. of the chartu-
lary. The charters were, no doubt, forged
about the year 1100, the period when most of
the forgeries of O.E. charters were made.
MR. SHORE'S difficulties about the com-
position of their boundaries in O.E. have,
therefore, no existence. The opinion of
Joseph Stevenson as to the authenticity of
these charters is not likely to have much
weight with either philologists or students of
O.E. diplomatics.
MR. SHORE expresses a conviction that if there had been a school of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in the thirteenth century " we should not now be discussing whether the late Anglo-Saxon name Oxeneford or Oxenaford
was derived from men or oxen." I cannot
answer for the thirteenth century, but the much more important evidence of the pre- ceding century does not support MR. SHORE. The famous Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1129 witnessed a deed relating to Osney Abbey, and was therefore resident in or very near Oxford. This city is represented in his ' Historia Britoiium,' x. 4, by a Boso, consul (earl) de Vado Bourn*
It is more to the point to remember that there is here now an efficient English school, in which the older language is scientifically studied. But this and the similar teaching in Cambridge, London, Victoria University, and other places do not protect us from the publication of theories that are incompatible with an elementary knowledge of English philology. No one with such a knowledge would seriously entertain MR. SHORE'S notion that Oxenaford and Osanig are derived from Eocce(n). Still less could he believe that JEocce means "increased ken or kindred," MR. SHORE'S latest etymology.
This brings me to the latter part of MR. SHORE'S reply, in which arguments against me are, apparently, derive^ from the repre- sentation of West-Saxon ?/ (or, to speak accu- rately, the i-umlaut of West-Germanic u) by e in Kentish. It is obvious that if MR. SHORE were right in assuming that the ken of Eocce(n) represented such a Kentish e, this would afford no evidence whatever that Eoccen-ford was not on this river at Abing-
- I rather suspect that Geoffrey has, more suo,
evolved Boso from the name of Boar's Hill, so well known to Oxonians. I have not been able to trace the name back to his time, but it was still in the early part of the last century called Bose Hill (see Hearne, ' Liber Niger Scaccarii,' pp. 563, 566). This looks like a derivation of the O.E. personal name Bosa, the Norman-French (Frankish) form of which was Boson (O.H.G. Bono, which is also its Latinized form).
