Old Names & their Meanings

As mentioned earlier, the oldest name for our region is Celtic and still in use, though not locally. (The Ardennes have the same name, but there the landscape has retained its 'steep woodland' character, as Arden has not.) No other Ancient British names have survived hereabout, unless corrupted beyond recognition. Such is the fate of most place-names; changes recorded in documents since Domesday Book are often drastic, and we may assume at least as much alteration in the centuries before they were first written down. Slovenly speech is not solely a modern failing !.

With this in mind, we shall be wary of seeking to translate ancient names. Anglo-Saxon endings indicate types of settlement and the landscape about them, but the prefixes are pitfalls. Whether they were originally proper names, those of the founders perhaps, or referred to peculiarities of the sites, or even commemorated a former settlement elsewhere, can rarely be determined now, but the endings tell us much that we could not otherwise know.

The ingham part of our City's name describes the initial settlement and tells us that it was a fairly early one for the region. This homestead of a small family group may indeed have been the first Anglian settlement hereabout : it certainly pre-dated our Saxon parent manor, Yardley. The ley ending denotes a farm in a woodland clearing, while hurst and wood testify to sylvan scenery. Only after all the easily cleared land was taken were settlements made in such places, where great labour would be needed to extend the cultivated area.

Hay means an enclosure, ploughland fenced against animals, and ton indicates a single farm - whatever developed later. Moor or more was boggy land, hole was originally holm, a flood-meadow, green was pasture, unenclosed rough grazing, and heath was uncultivated poor land. Field should mean a large fenced acreage, cleared and farmed communally in strips, and croft was any small enclosed piece.

With the above terms and the map from 'Medieval Yardley' by Skip we can reveal the pattern of local settlement and the look of the landscape many centuries ago. Yardley, Billesley and Tyseley are identified as communities in small natural clearings which were enlarged by the efforts of many generations; only the first of these was certainly a group settlement, a scatter of huts at the edges of open fields three miles north of Hall Green. Other field-systems were Sparkhill/Greet and Stockfield/Acocks Green, but all the dwelling sites in our area seem to have been founded by individuals.

Greethurst (Moseley Golf Course) and Swanshurst are perhaps exceptions in being completely translatable, as Gravel Wood and not, despite the swans which fly over the pool at dawn and dusk Swans Wood - Swains or Peasants Wood. It was a common pasture, jealously maintained as such by the Yardleians, in early medieval times. The pastures called Hawe (later Hall) Green and Tibbetts Green were named after local families. and the Foxes added their name to Hollies four centuries after it was first recorded. Sarehole was the name of a farm and a mill, both liable to inundation when the Cole rose.

Shaftmoor lay above the strip of morass that bordered the Hall Green/Tyseley Brook, Radmore was on the clay beside Shirley Brook, below Sandy Hill, and Bushmore was on the ill-drained plateau level. A croft west of Six Ways (Robin Hood island) was called Conygre, meaning coney (rabbit) warren.

The soil thereabout, as Sandy Hill reminds us, is ideal for burrowing, Baldwins Field (south of Scribers Lane) and Steelfield (about Pembroke Croft) are apparently misnomers for there was no community near to enclose and farm land together. Field may have here the meaning of felled, indicating the clearance of woods, just as Reddings Lane commemorates a ridding of trees. The apparent hall ending of Broomhall and Finchalls is a corruption of hale, meaning heath, as both were on sandy stony soils.