‘Oh, no!’ cried my husband from the other room in the tones of one who has upset the goldfish bowl on to a rare book. I rushed in, despite previous experience, and found the problem was that the BBC had just referred to ‘Princess Catherine’.
To take his mind off it, I told him about Bedfordshire putting its foot down on the spelling of one of its villages. In future, when a road sign needs replacing, it will refer to Yelden – not Yielden or even Yieldon.
There had been an attempt to resolve the uncertainty in 1998 when villagers were asked what they thought the village was called. Thirty said it was ‘Yielden’, but 44 said ‘Yelden’. The Royal Mail used the spelling Yielden but the Victoria County History (1912) had no doubts about calling it Yelden.
I don’t suppose it mattered much which way it was spelt, just as in The Pickwick Papers, when Sam Weller was asked by a judge whether his name was spelt with a W or a V. ‘That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller,’ he replied. But satnav meant a decision must be made.
As a matter of history, Yelden took its name from the river that flows through it, and the river was called the Ivel or Gifle. Today the river is called the Til or Till, indeed running through Tilbrook. But at Kimbolton it takes the name of the river Kym. There is a river Ivel in quite a different part of Bedfordshire, which I find rather confusing.
We seem to be able to live with a certain amount of confusion of place names. In Lord of the Flies, Piggy correctly explains that Camberley, in Surrey, used to be called Cambridge Town, and its name was changed to stop post going awry. In 1877, the new name, invented by Edmund Atkinson, a local academic chemist, was agreed with the Post Office before the building of a railway station, which opened as Camberley and York Town. Confusion with York seemed not to be a problem. I hope the Yielden minority in Yelden do not feel hard done by.
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