Author: Editor

BDLHS talk by David Parsons, 8^th October 2025

Languages are organised into:

Modern English                          French                         Welsh

Middle English                            Norse                           British

Old English                                    Latin  

British equates to post Roman Welsh ( also known as Brythonic DH note)

Languages used before British i.e. pre-Celtic are not known.

Romans adopted some existing British names e.g.. Branogenium (Leintwardine) comes from British Branogenos.

Lene  – damp as in Leominster.

Maund comes from Magonsaete

Archenfield from Ergyng

Parts of Herefordshire between the Wye and the Monnow were Welsh speaking until the C11 and some until the C18.

Middleton is Miceltune in 1086 (Domesday).

Rivers have always been significant so their names tend to be old and a source of lost languages which have passed between cultures. Welsh (British)names for rivers were adopted by the Anglo-Saxons .

Teme, Tamar, Thames, Tame etc all have related etymology  – unceryain but very old.

Humber  – lost

Arrow  –  Alio??

Wye  – unknown origin

Frome- from Welsh ffraw  meaning lively/brisk

Lugg  – from llug meaning bright

Leadon – from llydan meaning broad

Hope and Hop = secluded valley

Nash = at the ash

Noakes = at the oak

Both Nash and Noakes use a fossilised dative/prepositional case ending.

Venn = fen

Vern = fern

Queest , as in Queest Moor is a dialect word for pigeon.

Bylett = island in flood.

French

French has not had much direct influence on English place names .

Belmont has no French origin – name given to hotel and Abbey in 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Belgate Farm near Byton was connected to Wigmore Abbey which had a French mother house so this probably is French in origin.

Lots of instances of Waterloo used from 1830s .

Acton Beauchamp has a Norman surname added to an English place name.

Use of ‘Court’ is French in origin.

Thruxton is from Norse Thorkell  – Norse was fashionable in 8th-9th centuries  – unlikely to have been a Viking in Herefordshire.

Golden Valley /  Vallée d’Or is from dor, the Welsh for water, not French.  In 1128 it was known as Istratour. 

Dinmore  ( which has a Time Team episode devoted to it) probably means big fort – compared with Denbigh which means small fort.

Use of ‘Street’ is a borrowing from Latin into Early English.

Bury ,  as in Oldbury, Risbury,  Thornbury is from burg meaning fortifications  and meant a stronghold before it came to mean a borough.

Anglo-Saxon

Marcle combines 2 words for boundary and wood in the area between the Hwicce and the Magonsaete.

Comberton is a settlement of the Welsh (Cymru).

Aylestone Hill  = Aegelmetes  Stane (stone) which would have been the moot place for the county.

‘Thing’ is a meeting place.

Wormelow Tump = river worm,  a Welsh river name – low and Tump both mean a mound so is an example of the same word in different languages put together.

Worm is Anglo-Saxon for dragon but comes from pre Anglo-Saxon Welsh.

Corn = heron or crane

Ham = bend in the river

Cloud = mass /cloud shaped rock

Staple = bar or post in Early English

Hand = a finger post sign

Wall = well or spring

Burgh = fortifiable place with a wall around it

Keep = cooper /barrels/ baskets

Flaggoner is from Plegel, a person’s name

Landynod = the biblical  Land of Nod where Cain was sent after murdering his brother

Wick = specialised farm  from vicus

Field names are another topic and a separate talk.

Sapey = the name of a stream

Ocle Pichard = oak wood plus a surname

Plaistow = playing place or arena

Stow = meeting place

Cowarne = cowshed

Day House = dairy house

Arthur’s Stone is C13 usage

Lyonshall – Lenehalle in1086  from lene meaning wet

Harewood = grey or damp wood,  nothing to do with hares

From notes taken (in the dark) by Debbie Hughes

About The English Place Name Society

The English Place-Name Society (EPNS) was established in 1923 to conduct a county-by-county survey of the place-names of England. The Survey is used by researchers, academics, and those interested in the origins, meaning, and significance of English place-names.

The Survey is arranged by historic counties: the first volume, covering Buckinghamshire, appeared in 1925; the most recent, volume 96 dealing with part of Shropshire, appeared in 2020. Almost all English counties have been surveyed at least in part and work to complete the Survey is ongoing. This work has been supported by the British Academy since its inception, and by membership subscriptions to the Society, as well as one-off contributions from generous individuals or charitable organisations.

The main resource needed for research and writing of the Survey volumes is time, and time costs money. While substantial research projects for less complete counties will, we hope, be supported by larger funding bodies, we are also in a position to make significant progress on various other counties for which research or draft material exists but needs dedicated time and attention to bring to completion. Our current focus is on The Place-Names of Herefordshire, for which the late John Freeman, the county editor, had produced a draft of the first volume, which will deal with major names (i.e. the names of settlements). A researcher started work on this volume in June 2025, and although the EPNS is in a position to part-fund completion of the volume, we aim to raise additional funds from interested individuals and groups in order to bring it to publication.

The English Place Name Society has a just giving page if anyone would like to make a donation.

By Louise Manning, originally published in the society journal, 2011

The United Brethren were a breakaway sect of the Wesleyan Methodists . After John Wesley’s death the movement broke up into factions.

•Religious revival throughout the country with groups looking for a new way of worshipping together.

•Social awareness often linked to this religious revival

•Individual houses or chapels were licenced for preaching for new churches

BENBOW, John (1800-1874), born at Grendon-Warren, Herefordshire, England –10th of 11 children. His family lived in what is now Winslow, Bromyard. In his early years he worked for Squire Jenks at the Tan Yard in Bromyard and on his farm.

John and Jane Benbow
John married Jane Holmes on the 16thOctober 1826 St Nicholas, Worcester. She was born in January in 1792, Ashperton. They were childless but had adopted John’s niece and nephew Ellen (1825) and Thomas Benbow (1823) on the death of their father.
Jane’s family owned The Hill, as well as much property in the local area.

Wilford Woodruff –born March 1807, Farmington, New England –formerly educated until eighteen. In his twenties he searched for the “right” faith in an equivalent religious revival in the US. There were a number of groups being established all looking for what
they described as the true way. In 1833, Mormon missionaries came to speak in his town and several of his family members converted. He was baptised on December 31, 1833.

Between 1831 and 1833 Mormon community in the Independence, Missouri area grew to around 1200 people. They were then forced out of the area. The main body of the Mormon church was in Kirkland, Ohio. Wilford became a Mormon missionary travelling throughout the US from 1834 –1839.
The Mormons believed that they would collect to form “Zion”. In 1838, they thought this was “Far West” in Missouri. Persecutions meant that the main body of Mormons then moved to Illinois. They moved to swamp land in Nauvoo and started to try to reclaim the land and form a community. Disease was rife in including malaria.

The Journals of Wilford Woodruff
Wilford was literate and wrote daily in his journals throughout his missions in the US and England. They describe his mission but also a great insight into life at the time.

Travelling to Herefordshire
Wilford Woodruff met William Benbow a grocer in Hanley, Staffordshire who had already converted to the Mormon faith. William suggested that he should travel with him to Herefordshire to meet his brother,John. They took a coach to Worcester and then walked to Castle Frome.

United Brethren
Members of the United Brethren were living in Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucestershire and had formed into two conferences (preaching circuits), centred at 31 Froome’s Hill and Gadfield Elm. They were influenced by John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, early Puritan work
•Left the Primitive Methodists in 1832 to form their own group
•They had the habit of daily prayer and focused on community and family life.
•They would often have agape feasts as a form of worship.

Excerpt from Wilford’s journal
I found Mr. Benbow to be a wealthy farmer, cultivating three hundred acres of land, occupying a good mansion, and having plenty of means. His wife, Jane, had no children. I presented myself to him as a missionary from America, an elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who had been sent to him by the commandment of God as a messenger of salvation, to preach the gospel of life to him and his household and the inhabitants of the land. (4th March 1840)

He and his wife received me with glad hearts and thanksgiving. After receiving refreshments we sat down together, and conversed until two o’clock in the morning. I also rejoiced greatly at the news Mr. Benbow gave me, that there was a company of men and women—over six hundred in number—who had broken off from the Wesleyan Methodists, and taken the name of United Brethren.
They had forty-five preachers among them, and for religious services had chapels and many houses that were licensed according to the law of the land. This body of United Brethren were searching for light and truth, but had gone as far as they could, and were calling upon the Lord continually to open the way before them and send them light and knowledge, that they might know the true way to be saved. Mr Benbow…had in his mansion a large hall which was licensed for preaching, and he sent word through the neighbourhood that an American missionary would preach at his house that evening (5th March).

As the time drew nigh, many of the neighbours came in, and I preached my first gospel sermon in the house. I also preached at the same place on the following evening, and baptized six persons, including Mr. John Benbow, his wife, and four preachers of the United Brethren. “I spent most of the following day in cleaning out a pool of water, and preparing it for baptizing in, as I saw many to be baptized there. I afterwards baptized six hundred in that pool of water”. (6th March 1840)

On Sunday, the 8th, I preached at Frome’s Hill in the morning, at Standley Hill in the afternoon, and at John Benbow’s, Hill Farm, in the evening. The parish church that stood in the neighborhood of Brother Benbow’s, presided over by the Rector of the parish, was attended during the day by only fifteen persons, while I had a large congregation, estimated to number a thousand, attend my meetings through the day and evening. A Constable was sent to arrest him for preaching without a license –he listened to the
meeting and then put himself forward to be converted.

Ministers and Rectors of the south of England called a convention and sent a petition to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to request Parliament to pass a law prohibiting the mormons from preaching in the British dominions.

Thomas Kington 1794 -1879
He was one of the most important converts among the United Brethren. He was the superintendent of the group from its beginnings in 1832. He was born in Bodenham Herefordshire and by 1828 was a lay preacher for the Primitive Methodists in Alvechurch, Worcestershire. Between 1833 and 1840 he obtained licences for 29 homes and was the most active non-conformist preacher in the Three Counties. He lived at Hill Farm and worked for John Benbow from 1832 until 1839. Hill Farm was the headquarters of the society. In 1839, at the age of 45 he married Hannah Pitt and moved to Dymock. On the 15th March Wilford Woodruff asked to meet Thomas and on the 21st March he and his wife were baptised.

The first forty-one emigrants left Britain on the “Britannia” which sailed from Liverpool in June 1840.
On 8th September 1840, John and Jane Benbow emigrated to America with fifty (some sources say 200) others from Liverpool on the ship “North America” The Benbows paid the passage for forty members of the United Brethren. They arrived in New York City, October 11th, 1840.
All the emigrants were housed on one desk. Their rations were mainly biscuits and oatmeal.The total journey of over 5000 miles took the Benbow family John, Jane, Thomas and Ellen just over eleven weeks! They initially settled on the prairie in Illinois near Nauvoo where they had a 160 acre farm along with many of the people who had emigrated with them.
When they arrived in Nauvoo in the early 1840’s it was an undeveloped settlement with a rural life-style and no industry.
The 1841-1842 winter was very cold and the new arrivals had to live with existing families in their houses or else camp outside on plots of land that they had secured. Many of the British who arrived were unable to work because they had come from industrial cities in Britain. It was a distinct advantage at the beginning to come from an agricultural background.

Excerpt from Wilford’s Journal
This was the first time I had visited him [John Benbow] since my return home…. His farm looked like the Garden of Eden. I have never seen so much work done in one year on a prairie farm… He had surrounded it and crossed it with heavy ditches and planted thorn hedges. His dwelling, barns, sheds, garden, yards and orchards were all beautifully arranged. The farm very must resembled the farms of old England. January 1842

In the autumn of 1845, many of the Mormons were driven from their homes in Nauvoo and were forced to move west. They were forced out into the snow and they lived in tents and hastily built wooden “cabins” at temperatures of minus 40°F
Jane Benbow died on 27 Nov 1846, at Winter Quarters, Douglas, Nebraska

By Debbie Hughes

On our way to the ferry port at Harwich we stopped in Colchester – tucked away down side streets we found the C12 remains of St Botolph’s Priory, an imposing Victorian water tower and the remains of a Roman Gateway into the city.

In Oslo the Viking Ship Museum was closed while they construct a new building to house it but we visited the Folk Museum with reconstructed buildings including C17-C18 farm buildings and a wooden stave church dating to 1200s. Not many original stave churches survive due the the fire risk of wooden construction.

The Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo houses the actual Kon-Tiki balsa wood raft sailed across the Pacific Ocean by Thor Heyerdal and also the Ra II  built from papyrus / reeds which Thor Heyerdal sailed from Morocco to Barbados so disproving the long held belief that Columbus was the first to sail across the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas.

Next door to the Kon-Tiki is Fram – the Polar Exploration Museum – the Fram being the ship used by Roald Amundsen on his Antartic Expedition of 1910-1912.  The Fram’s hull, modified after earlier expeditions, was massively thick to enable it to withstand the pressure of the polar ice.

Oslo Fortress (Akershus Festning) is also home to the Resistance Museum which tells the story of Norwegian Resistance and the hardship suffered by Norwegians in World War II.

Heading north from Oslo we, of course, stopped at the Arctic Circle Visitor Centre – snowy scenery in an unseasonal temperature of 26°.

In Stockholm we went to the Vasa Museum where the amazingly intact, preserved 17^th century warship, the Vasa, is housed. In 1625 the Swedish King, Gustav II Adolf, commissioned the Vasa which was to be the most powerful warship in the Baltic. Despite earlier concerns about its seaworthiness, the Vasa set off for its maiden voyage on 10^th August 1628. Still within sight of the shipyard a gust of wind caused it to heel over, water flooded into the open gun ports and it sank. It sat, preserved in the mud at the bottom of the harbour, until it was finally lifted in 1961and, after years of preservation work, it was finally on display in a purpose built museum in June 1990. 98% of its structure survives so it is an amazingly intact piece of C17 history.

In Gothenburg there was motoring history at the World of Volvo.

We crossed the Oresund from Sweden to Denmark by ferry and arrived in Helsingor where Kronborg Castle is the original Elsinore in Hamlet and provides opportunity to dress up and play at Kings and Queens! 

Still in Helsingor the Church of St Mary and Monastery of Our Lady were built in the late C15 – lack of stone and availability of clay meant that brick was used in these parts of northern Europe in these early buildings, making them seem deceptively modern.

Another ferry took us back to Germany and the Hanseatic League town of Lubeck founded in 1143 as the first port on the Baltic Sea and lots more examples of modern looking mediaeval brick.

                            

And so back through Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and France to Calais and home.  4,611 miles in total and we had a fantastic trip, saw lots of fascinating and historic places but there were plenty we couldn’t fit in and scope for another trip, though maybe not quite so far north next time.

Debbie Hughes September 2025

This article, by Barry Lawrence, first appeared ine the 2010 society Journal

Since coming to live in this area fifteen years ago I have been intrigued by the occasional reference in speech or print to the wartime visits to Bromyard by the children of the Michael
Redgrave/ Rachel Kempson acting family. What were they doing here? Whom were they visiting? What connections did they have with this area? These were questions I hoped I could answer by some diligent searching. Various theories were put to me as to the reason for the visits but nobody seemed to have any positive information.

By Jean Hopkinson. This article was first published in the 2011 society Journal.

A strong wind rolled dark brown ‘golf balls’ down the bank at the end of the Bromyard underpass in August and I remember resolving to find out which conifer had borne the cones. I then forgot about them until reading through a file of Phyllis Williams’s
working papers in the History Centre I came across the following invoice dated Christmas 1890 amongst others relating to Mr James Jenks’s business at the Tan Yard in Pump Street:

A.Marshall, High St., Bromyard, Green Grocer, Fruiterer, Florist etc.
1 Wellingtonia 10s 0d
1 Irish Yew 4 0
1 Cupresus 5 0
Men getting up and planting tree 1 0
2 men ¾day each, 1¼ days 4 6
1 laurel tinns 2 6
1 Cupresus Erecta 4 0
Purple beech tree 5 0

From the Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1884 it appears that there was no garden next to the Tan House, however it does show that the present Nunwell Surgery, on the opposite side of the road, stands on a sizeable plot marked Tannery that may have
filled this role. The area, which by 1845 had already been cleared of the burgage plots developed by the bishop of Hereford in the 12th century, was an orchard and extended from the boundary with Nunwell House to include all the land at present occupied by the surgery, the width of the bypass and the ground up to the row of
cottages that stand on the west of Tower Hill. It fronted onto Pump Street, and on the west was bounded by a footpath which still stretches from Highwell Lane to the top of Little Hereford Street, passing a kissing-gate now beached forlornly at Old Ditch
Cottage. When the surgery was still in Nunwell House this land was a paddock where Dr King-Lewis kept a pony for his trap before he acquired a Daimler.

By Hugh Langrishe.

This article first appeared in the 2010 society Journal.

The Rev. Prebendary Henry George Morgan was a keen motorist owning several motor cars before 1910. They were serviced and repaired by A&E Pettifer in their Rowberry Street garage, as were the early cars of his son Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan also known as Harry Morgan or HFS. Albert Pettifer was a keen motorist and one of 35 drivers to tackle the first Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb in 1905. HFS also gained a taste of competitive motoring when he entered the Shelsley Walsh Hill Climb on 13 July 1907. He also competed in the 1906 Fromes Hill, hill climb.

It was not until 1910, approximately five years after Pettifer’s new garage was built replacing the old one which had burnt down, that Mr. Pettifer was commissioned to build the first body and chassis for HFS’s final prototype single-seater three wheeler “Runabout”. This was the final development of the first car to be fitted with a Peugeot Vee-twin engine.

The 1910 car was shown at the 1910 Olympia Motor Show. It attracted much favourable comment but few orders. Those that were built were bodied by Pettifer. For the 1911 Motor Show the car was re-bodied as a two seater, again by Pettifer, and attracted many orders.

HFS accepted an offer by Harrods for an exclusive agency which lasted for about a year although there were at least two other agencies. All chassis were delivered to London and Harrods arranged all body building. By August 1912 construction of bodies for the Morgan Runabout ceased in Bromyard as distance from Malvern and increasing demand for the car was beyond the ability of Albert Pettifer to provide successfully. Instead HFS used the resources of William Clare Coach Builders, ½ mile from the Morgan Co. Works.

The panels for Pettifer bodies were shaped in his tinsmith’s shop which occupied the upper floor of the small detached building in Tin Pan Alley, between Broad and Rowberry streets. They were assembled on the chassis in the garage. The wooden patterns for the body patterns were cut in the upper floor of the building across the yard. In those early years of the motor car, manufacturers did not build their own bodies and supplied the chassis “bare”. It is possible that Pettifer used his experience from building the Morgan bodies to offer a body-building service to other car owners in the area.

Connection between HFS/Malvern College/Pettifers/Stoke Lacy and the Morgan Prototype
HFS was also a keen cyclist and would cycle from Malvern to Stoke Lacy. He tried a motor cycle but after a short while turned his thoughts to a ‘cyclecar’ which would be light and flexible to accommodate hills and poor roads around the area. In Malvern, his friend was William J. Stephenson-Peach, engineering master at Malvern College. HFS was an engineer but his true talent lay in his ability to merge the best features of contemporary design to create the simplest yet most efficient vehicle of its type adding his own additions like independent suspension, better weight distribution and reduced weight in the braised chassis. Items were
bought from local suppliers and the body framework was made of wood in the carpenter’s shop. The 3-wheel prototype was tested on his frequent visits to his family in Stoke Lacy during 1909 and the stables would have been used also as temporary workshop as modifications were made en route. Finally the crude model was entrusted to A.E. Pettifer of Bromyard where his workmen’s expert skills could produce high quality brazing to create the supports, chassis and body parts in his tinsmith’s shop and garage on Rowberry Street.

Hugh Langrishe 2010