according to Ferguson,1 is applied to rude enclosures formed with large stones, after the mode styled druidical, which were the places of worship of the heathen Angles. Mr. Halliwell ('Dictionary of Archaic Words,') says that 'kirocks are the same as cairns : rude heaps of stones generally found on hills, and supposed to be funeral monuments.' It seems to me that the word kirruck or kirock is merely an Anglian corruption of carreg (Brit.) a rock, and that the Angles adopted both the places of worship and the name. The transition from carreg to kirruck, and thence to ciric and cyrc, which last word was Danified into kirk, is quite natural. A parallel case is afforded in the mutation of carreg into craig and carrick in the Anglian districts north of the Tweed, which now form part of Scotland. I have shown ante that the British word llan, after meaning any enclosure, came to designate first a heathen sacred enclosure, and afterwards a Christian place of worship; and in the same way the heathen ciric seems to have become the Christian kirk, a word which was probably carried into the middle and southern parts of England by the Anglian missionaries from Northumbria who preached to the heathen Saxons and Jutes in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. (See Bede, Eccl. Hist.). The etymology of kirk from Kupiov oikos is a mere fancy, unsupported by history or analogy.

1 Ferguson's Northmen.

NAMES WHICH

VIII.

INDICATE THE SEVERAL IMMI

GRATIONS TO THIS COUNTRY, AND THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY OCCURRED.

THAT the Britons were the earliest of existing races in their arrival in this country, which they styled. Ynys- Prydain, is shown by the frequent recurrence of short names belonging to their language, either pure or as the nuclei around which other names have been formed. Even in a district so early wrested from them as was Kent, the word Dover (dwfwr) attests that Britons once dwelt there by the water. In the word Thames, too, as already remarked, we recognise the British Tam or Taf, a river-cognate with the root of the Greek Tо-таμós-which is preserved more purely in Teme and Taff, the names of streams over whose banks the Briton ruled until times much later than those which saw him driven from the valley of the Thames.1

As the rule, it may be laid down that the principal rivers and hills in any country retain the names given to them by the Aborigines, while less conspicuous elevations and smaller streams either lose their

1 See my essay on Etymology of Names in Herefordshire, published 1849.

original names or are not named until, by subsequent immigrations, the country has become more densely settled. In England and Wales, all the rivers of first and second magnitude are still known by British names; and the same remark applies to all the mountains and most conspicuous hills, Snowdon alone excepted. In this case, the Saxon 'Snawdon,' the snowy hill, has supplanted the more poetical but less easily pronounceable British name, 'Creigiau yr Eryri,' the eagle's rocks. The British names are retained, more or less modified, by Skiddaw, Helvelyn, Mam Tor, Carnedd Dafydd, the Wrekin, and Malvern; while the list of rivers in England includes only two of any magnitude, Ouse and Trent, which bear appellations conferred by Teutons or Norsemen. One of these excepted words is in itself doubtful. The word Trent is derived by Bosworth from 'Drouent,' a flexu sive ambitu sui cursus; but he does not state, nor can I guess, to what language 'Drouent' belongs. About the word Ouse there is no difficulty; it represents the fact that the rivers so named wind their sluggish way through alluvial soil. We still speak of water which percolates as oozing, and of the mud of rivers as ooze, which are different forms of the word applied by the Old English to the river.

We have seen that the names of the mountains do not bear out the theory of the existence of a Celtic population anterior to the Britons; and that theory is equally unsupported by an examination of the names of the rivers. Where these are not explicable by help of the Saxon tongue, they reveal their meaning when treated as British words. The Saxonised or doubtful names disappear, too, as we pass into

H

the districts which remained British after the Saxon conquest. In Yorkshire, Cumberland, Lancashire, Derbyshire, the Welsh Marches, and Wales, the river-names are all explicable as British appellations.

The confluence of the Yorkshire Ouse with the Trent and the Don forms a gathering of waters which still bears the British name of Humber, a slight corruption of Hymyr, 'the place which is worthy to be called seas.' So, too, the impetuous stream which descends from Plinlimmon, and rushes wildly through the rocky passes of Radnorshire and Breconshire until, having reached the rich vale of Herefordshire, it becomes a majestic river, justifies by its magnitude its British title, Wye, 'the water.' In the earlier part of its course, the resemblance to the scenery of Derbyshire—the most British part of England— is sufficient to account for the application of the same word Wye to the chief river of the Peak. The Severn is little changed in name since the Britons called it Hafren; while a dozen rivers retain as their proper name the word Avon (afon), the common British word for a river.

In the marches of Wales, all the rivers-with the doubtful exception of the Leddon, which may be only the British lyd, country, with the Saxon don, a hill, added-retain their British names. The turbid river which flows past Chester, for instance, is still called Dee (from dû-wy, dark water), and the meadow between its bank and the city wall is still the Roodee (rhos-dú-wy), the moist plain by the dark water. So again the Tam is visible in the modern Teme; the turbulent Arrow is still garw, rough and headstrong; the Lugg is still lug, bright; and the rapid stream which parts Herefordshire and Monmouthshire is

still known as the Munnow, a contraction of mynyddwy, the mountain water.

The word wy, water, seems to be a primitive word belonging to the Celtic family of languages, and its presence in Holland-where it is the name of a river sometimes grotesquely represented on maps by the letter Y-is one of the traces of the Celtic race. Intensely Teutonic as the whole of the west coast of Europe is now, it was once Celtic.

This word wy forms part of the name of the river in twenty-nine out of the fifty river-names of Wales ; whereas the word ysc or use, which some writers suppose to be the original Celtic word, occurs in only two cases- -the Usk and the Yscir. The last is a tributary of the Usk, and its name would seem to be a derivative from that of its principal. The absence of the word ysc or use from all the other Welsh rivernames seems to be fatal either to the theory of a preBritish population, or to the doctrine that ysc is Celtic as distinguished from British.

Among the Welsh river-names of which wy forms part, two sets answer to each other, viz. :—

Conway, i.e. cyn-wy, principal water.

Elwy, secondary water.

Olwy, back or hinder water, in allusion to the Usk, of which it is a tributary.

The rivers named from the colour of their waters

are:

Dee, dû-wy, dark water.

Ddu-onw, ddû onn wy, dark water of the ash-trees.

Honddu, afon ddu wy, dark water river.

Rhondda, yr afon dda, the strong river.

Cothi, cethin wy, black or coal-hued river,