Mind your language | 5 June 2010

I was interested to see in the Daily Telegraph a suggestion, in an article marking the 60th anniversary of The Archers, that the original name of the river that runs through Ambridge was the Ambra. Today it is called the Am, but, like the Cam in Cambridge, that is a back-formation from the name of the town. There is a river Amber in Derbyshire, and ambra is a pre-Saxon Celtic word meaning ‘water’. It is related to the Latin imber, meaning ‘rain’ — or ‘showers’ as the Book of Common Prayer translates it in the Benedicite.

There are some puzzles in the place-names of Borsetshire, a county deriving its name from the tribe known to the Romans as the Bornovaria. After the Saxons came, the territory was known as Born-saete, where saete means ‘people’. Borsetshire is not mentioned in Domesday Book, but a 12th-century manuscript calls it Borsaetescir.

Borchester bears witness to the presence of a Roman city, connected by road to Droitwich, or Salinae Dobunnorum as it was known. There is a Romano-British site at Ambridge to the south-west of Lakey Hill. (Lakey Hill has nothing to do with a lake, for the Old English word lacu could mean ‘a stream’, and -ey represents Old English eg, ‘an island’. The same applies to Lakey Green, on the other side of Ambridge.)

The cathedral of Borsetshire is not at Borchester but at Felpersham, which was not much of a place till the High Middle Ages. The name is of three Old English elements: fealh, ‘fallow’; persc, ‘osier-beds’; and ham, ‘a settlement’, here specifically dry ground among marshes.

With Lower Loxley and Loxley Barrett, we must be careful, for it would be easy to assume that they have a similar origin to Loxley in neighbouring Warwickshire — the wood or clearing (ley) of someone called Locc.