to describe with sufficient rough accuracy | may be intended to cover the remains of for all practical purposes. But what is a dead man, in which case the man is said the meaning of a borough per se? What to be buried, and the mound under which is the borough, viewed widely, not as Par- he rests is called a barrow. Or it may liamentary, or municipal, or so forth, but surround a stockaded village or primitive simply and solely as a borough in the ab-hill-fort, in which case the work is comstract? That is a question in order to monly known by this present title of a answer which we shall have to have re- bury or borough. course to the etymology and derivation of the word borough, burgh, or bury.

It is from hill-forts of such an ancient and primitive kind that all our modern buries, burghs, and boroughs, however spelt, are lineally descended. In the old English tongue (I am afraid of calling it Anglo-Saxon, because I know if I were once to mention that awe-inspiring word you would at once leave off the perusal of this present article), a hill-fort, or a town fortified with earthworks, was called a burh, which fearsome combination of let

Now, etymology is notoriously a very slippery and deceptive subject. Voltaire said of it long ago, in a famous and oftquoted epigram, that it was a science in which the vowels counted for nothing and the consonants for very little. But since Voltaire's time we have altered all that by modern improvements, and the proper spelling and pronunciation of borough has now become a question of national importers was pronounced exactly as Scotch. tance, embarrassing even the scanty leisure of her Majesty's ministers at their places in the council of the nation. Only a very little time ago, Sir George Campbell, in Parliament assembled, askedas I learn from a daily paper-"whether the government would not consider the arrangement of a conference between English and Scotch members with the view of arriving at some compromise as to the spelling of the word 'borough,' and stop. ping the mispronunciation of the word burgh' by the English members." The putting of this plain and sensible question, 1 regret to say, was twice interrupted by unseemly laughter on the part of unsympathetic southern members; but it is clear that the difficulty as to the spelling and pronunciation of the word borough on either side the border, having thus been brought within measurable distance of practical politics, must sooner or later be met and answered; and it is in order to prevent any untimely repeal of the Act of Union, or any hasty appearance of Sir George Campbell in the part of a modern William Wallace, that this paper is hum bly offered as a contribution towards the partial solution of so momentous a national problem.

In its most primitive and fundamental acceptation, a borough is simply a fort or earth work. The word is one of a large family of words, all of which have for their common ancestor a verb meaning to dig or delve. The verb itself takes various forms, as, "to bury" and "to burrow;" but its prime sense is that of throwing up earth, whether for the purpose of making a hole like a rabbit, or for that of raising a mound or earthwork like a civilized hu man being. The earth thus thrown up

men still pronounce their native sound "burgh," and as Sir George Campbell will never persuade any modern English lips to pronounce it, even if he gets an act of Parliament for that special purpose. All the other spellings and pronunciations are simply attempts on the part of modern tongues to get as near as possible by violent efforts to this harsh and barbaric early monstrosity. In Germany the word has generally hardened down simply into burg, as in Marburg, Homburg, Hamburg, and Magdeburg. In Scotland, it has retained its original roughness of burgh, as in Edinburgh, Jedburgh, and Roxburgh. In northern England, it usually softens into borough, as in Gainsborough, Middlesborough, and Loughborough. And in the south and west, it finally weakens into the very mitigated form of bury, as in Salisbury, Shaftesbury, and Bury St. Edmunds. Once only, so far as I know, it assumes in a place-name its alternative form of barrow, the form which it almost always keeps when applied to an ancient tomb or tumulus, and that is in the case of Barrow-in-Furness. A still odder and more incongruous shape is Brough, in Yorkshire, a sort of irregular north-country compromise between the English borough and the Scotch burgh, as if to keep the peace between the two countries.

The case of that particular part of South London which is still distinctively called the Borough throws a flood of light on the origin and meaning of the whole group of words with which we are here cursorily dealing. Why the Borough in particular, one may naturally ask, when there are so many other undoubted boroughs all round it? What has this one individual borough done more than Finsbury, say, or Chelsea,

T

that it should inerit a definite article and time of war; while in intervals of peace
a capital letter above all the other assorted the tribe inhabited rather the unfortified
boroughs, Parliamentary or prescriptive, village of wattled huts conveniently situ
that spread about it in every direction?ated by the waterside below. Many of
The answer to this obvious question these old lingering buries occupy sites of
carries us far back into the history of Lon- famous antiquity, like Silbury, the most
don to the days when there was only gigantic of British barrows, and Abury,
one road across the river, by the primitive" a beautiful mushroom grown up at the
structure whose modern successor still expense of the Druidical circles in whose
bears the distinctive name of London midst it nestles." Very few, like Shaftes-
Bridge. To guard the southern end of bury, continue to be still inhabited on
that important highway against our dis- their airy heights. Others, like Salisbury,
agreeable thieving neighbors the Danes, once situated at Old Sarum, have come
the men of London built a burh or earth- down from the precincts of the original
work, a fortified tête de pont, in fact, on the earthwork to a more convenient position
Surrey side of the great river. The fort in the valley at its foot. This practica!
or bury thus erected was called indiscrim- "redistribution of seats " has affected
inately the south work-or, as we say almost all the hill-forts in southern En-
nowadays, Southwark - and the burh, or, gland; the village which bears the name
as we say nowadays, the Borough. The in bury generally standing below the
word in this sense means simply and earthwork to which it owes its existing
solely the fort, the tête de pont, and is a title.
good piece of archaic English surviving
(with all its original signification lost) into
the common speech of the nineteenth cen-
tury.

The buries that lie scattered all over the face of the good old west country also give one an excellent idea of the primitive hill-fort from which every modern borough is lineally descended. There are many villages in Wilts, Dorset, and Devon bearing such quaint, old-world names as Musbury, Membury, Modbury, and Silbury. Above every one of these bury-named hamlets the inquiring traveller will find (if he chooses to climb to it) an old earthwork now known by the curious name of Musbury Castle or Membury Castle, as the case may be; for castle in the west country is locally understood to mean, not a great, ivy-covered Norman ruin, but the bare ridges of a far more ancient and grass-grown Celtic stronghold. So far as I know, there is no bury anywhere in the five western counties that 'hasn't got immediately overlooking it just such a mouldering, old prehistoric earthwork. Originally, of course, the bury was the name of the earth work itself, which was only slowly transferred to the newer village that grew up in later ages around the little Christian church on the slope of the hillside. There are dozens upon dozens of such very ancient western boroughs, each once the fortress of some little forgotten Celtic tribe, and each capping its own steep hill above the fertile valley of some minor streamlet. They were mere stockades, these ancient buries, where those twin chattels, the women and the cows, might be driven for security in

Some strange changes have elsewhere come over sundry of the old buries and boroughs. Take, for example, the case of Canterbury by the side of Carisbrooke, in the Isle of Wight. In their clipped modern forms there seems to be very little connection indeed between these two fairly dissimilar names. But in their ori. gin they are strictly analogous to one another. The Cantware were the men of Kent, and the Wightware, or Wightgare (I modernize slightly for simplicity's sake), were the men of Wight. Thus Cantwarebury is the Kent-men's-bury, and Wightgaresbury is the Wight-men's-bury; the former form being still partially preserved in the archiepiscopal signature "Cantuar." But while the one word has gradually softened down into Canterbury, the other has incontinently lost its head and changed its tail, till it reappears in the incongruous and meaningless modern form of Carisbrooke.

Peterborough and Bury St. Edmunds are two other towns whose names have undergone almost equally curious vicissi tudes. The first was originally known as Medeshamstead; but after the foundation of the great abbey, with its accompanying protective works against the intrusive Danes, if came to be called simply Burh, like the Borough in South London, and Bury in Lancashire. Owing to the immense wealth of the monastery, however, the epithet of Golden was often added to the mere name of the fort; and the town was spoken of as the Golden Borough, so that it narrowly escaped being modernized into the alternative forms of Goldenbury or Guildborough.

But in the end the

and a borough came to be a very faint one for early minds. At the present day we have no difficulty at all in discriminating between Berlin and the Matterhorn, or between Paris and the Pic du Midi; but in more primitive times the hill and the hillfort, the town and the earthwork, merged mentally into one and the same picture. We can see how hard it was to discrimi nate the berg from the burg if we think of Heidelberg by the side of Wurtemburg, or of the alternative spellings so long in

name of the patron saint, St. Peter, got | causes the distinction between a mountain merged with the original simple Burh, and the town became accordingly Peterborough, the English equivalent of Peter the Great's St. Petersburgh, on the Neva. As to the Suffolk Bury, that took its name, of course, from St. Edmund of East Anglia, the canonized king killed by the Danish pirates; but its proper title of St. Ed. mundsbury or, reversed, Bury St. Edmunds, means, I need hardly say, nothing more than St. Edmund's town, the borough of St. Edmund. True, the shrine of the great East Anglian saint was pre-vogue of Nuremberg and Nuremburg. served there religiously, so that in that sense St. Edmund was there buried; but save in the remote etymological connection between the noun "borough" and the verb "to bury," there is no relation whatever between these two separate facts. In England itself there are not very Yet all Bury men religiously believe their many hills or mountains which bear the town to be so called because St. Edmund distinctive name of borough. But one the king was buried there. Even so in Yorkshire case at least is quite indubitathe west country local tradition accounts ble, to wit, Ingleborough. Ingle is good for the names of the villages already men-old English for a fire, and the word still tioned by saying that the Danes in a great survives as a poetical archaism in the battle were maimed at Membury, and their phrase "the ingle-nook; so that Inglecorpses carried to Musbury where they borough is just equivalent to our modern "must bury" them. Such charmingly name Beacon Hill, which is given to the childish etymological explanations are pretty little rocky tor beside the lightamply sufficient for the bucolic intelli-house at Ilfracombe. I mention this latgence.

To add to the pleasing confusion between the various buries, boroughs, and burghs, it must be further noted that there is another very dissimilar derivative from the same root, namely berg, a mountain. In modern English this word has almost entirely dropped out, save only in the familiar compound, iceberg; but in the older forms of the language it was very common, till slowly superseded by the Norman French equivalent, mountain. In German the two words retain their original close similarity, as burg, a town, and berg, a hill. At first sight, indeed, the modern reader may not perceive any very close resemblance between the two ideas thus somewhat arbitrarily brought to gether. But to earlier races the connection was indeed a very natural one. For to burrow or dig implies the throwing up at the place dug of a considerable heap, dyke, or barrow; and the barrow is itself a small hill so thrown up over the dead body of a fallen chieftain. Barrows generally cap the hilltops, and so also do prehistoric forts, buries, or boroughs. Moreover, the mountain or hill is, as it were, a pile or mound, probably thought of as originally thrown up by the definite act of some god or demon. Thus from a variety of

Perhaps one of the oddest among all these confused forms is the name of the town of Mons, in Belgium, which is only a quaintly Gallicized variant of its native Teutonic title, Bergen.

ter case with the greater confidence because researches into the visitors' book at the hotels of that Devonshire wateringplace, and scientific observation of the solitary couples dotted at intervals among the rocks and slopes close by, lead me to infer that almost every one in the whole of England has gone to Ilfracombe (not alone) on at least one important turningpoint in his personal history. Ingleborough has never returned a member to Parliament; though, to be sure, it has quite as good a right to do so as the deserted hilltop of Old Sarum ever had.

Crowborough Beacon, in Kent, is another instance of the very unparliamentary English borough. The hill so called is the highest point of the Forest Ridge of Surrey and Sussex, and the word borough, which enters into its composition, undoubtedly means here a hill only, not a town, bury, or earthwork. To be sure, there is now a hamlet of Crowborough close at hand, while the termination Beacon has been added to the hill-name; but the word is far older than the modern hamlet, and though Crowborough now means the village only, while the height is always spoken of as Crowborough Beacon, that is only part of the usual perversity of modern English speech, which

5

persists in reduplicating Windermere into | stronghold was surprised and captured.
Windermere Lake, and refusing to allow Hollingsbury Castle, again, on the downs
even Grasmere and Derwentwater to tell behind Brighton, is now no longer either
their own tale in their own pretty primi-a castle or a bury in the latter-day sense;
tive fashion. I have lived to see New- but when the name it still bears was first
haven Harbor and Cranbourne Brook. I bestowed upon it, bury designated a hill.
fully expect to see before I die, Mount fort alone, so that Hollingsbury meant
Snowdon, Loch Katrine Lake, and per- simply the camp of the Hollings. Later
haps even Manchester City. Flambor- on, the original meaning of the termina-
ough, now commonly called Flamborough tion became obscured, and, a newer word
Head, shows us the Beacon Hill in as being added to the whole, it came out as
early a form as Ingleborough itself. The Hollingsbury Castle. By-and-by, when
word of course means Flame-borough, even antiquaries have forgotten the old
that is to say, the Lighthouse Berg or application of the last element to a hill
promontory.
stronghold, we may expect that it will be
described by the trebly tautological name
of Hollingsbury Castle Fort. Bury Hill,
near Dorking, is a similar instance, where
the old berg has been supplemented by
the modern hill, just as we all talk about
the river Avon, the Bourne brook, and
the Pen head, in all which cases the sec-
ond half of the name is only a moderniza-
tion or translation of the now forgotten
and obsolete first.

Hillsborough, in Devonshire, is another very good example of a borough, abso. lutely bare and grassy since the beginning of all things. If it had ever been a town indeed, and not a mere hill, it would have been Hillsbury, not Hillsborough; for in the west country all the burghs are buries, while, on the contrary, all the bergs are perversely boroughs. That is a little topsy turvy peculiarity of the Devonian rustic: if a man's name is Pulsford, for instance, he calls him Spulford; but if his name is Sperling, he calls him Persling, just to make things even. Instead of running, the west-countryman urns; instead of asking, he axes; his ruddy robins are urdocks or urdbreasts; Crediton on his lips is Kurton, and furze is fuzz. Now Hillsborough stands close beside the village of Hele, and its meaning is simply Hele's Borough or Hele's Berg, that is to say, being interpreted, the hill of Hele. Thus the part of the name which says Hill means the village, but the part of it which says Borough means the hill, just out of pure contrariety. So a raisin in Devonshire is called a fig, while a fig is called a dough fig. Clotted cream is "cream," sans phrase, but cream itself is always "raw cream."

Sometimes these older borough names are absurdly paralleled by later modern ones. For example, there is Scarborough. Scar, as everybody doubtless knows, is northern English for a cliff; and the word must be familiar in this sense to all visitors to the lake district. Hence Scarborough is, in all probability, the exact equivalent of Clifton a name which has itself undergone a still more vile builder'sEnglish transformation into Cliftonville. But it is quite possible that the title of Scarborough dates further back than the existence of any village at all at the base of the hill, and that we ought rather to translate the name as Cliff Hill, like the Cleeve Hills near Cheltenham. A very similar overhanging cliff in the half-Danish Orkneys bears yet another variety of borough name, as the Brough of Birsa.

In England at large, on the other hand, Others among the old English boroughs the buries, even when the name belongs enclose for us still little fossil bits of forto a hill, are almost always relics of forts gotten history, often deeply interesting to or hill-villages. Cissbury Hill, near the local inquirer, and full of hints as to Worthing, for example, is now absolutely the real nature of our early social and douninhabited, but it is crowned along its mestic arrangements. Take as an excelsummit by a very fine prehistoric fort, lent instance of this historical type of within whose precincts an enterprising borough names the word Gainsborough. local archæologist has unearthed a genu- In very early English days, before our ine manufactory of flint implements the ancestors had even taken to spelling original cores with the flakes struck off badly, there was a little independent printhem, and the finished hatchets, or toma- cipality in Lincolnshire whose people hawks, in every degree of perfection, called themselves the Gainas, and even broken and unbroken, lying scattered as late as the time of good King Alfred about beneath the modern soil, exactly as (whom we reckon as quite a modern per the old stone-age artisans had left them sonage in these days of prehistoric archæ at the moment when their palisadedology) the prince of the Gainas was con

sidered to be a fitting match for the king's | Hanbury and Banbury, Cherbury and

own daughter. (Of course nowadays such Burbury, Scarborough and Warborough, an alliance would be quite infra dig.: we may be found scattered about all over the would marry our princess, instead, to a ordnance map of England in wild profuvery petty German grand duke with sion. I am not quite sure whether one about half the same extent of territory.) can completely box the compass with The prince in question had his capital at Norbury and Sudbury, Eastbury and Gainsborough that is to say, the bor- Westbury. The two first names and the ough or fortified village of the Gainas. last, indeed, are familiar to us all, but I In fact it was his Schloss. So, again, don't myself remember ever to have met Shrewsbury, now the county town of a with a case of Eastbury. However, I say flourishing shire, was originally Scrobbes- this under correction, and no doubt I shall bury or Scrubsbury, the borough in the get it. I am far too wise by this time to scrub, bush, or forest. It may be gener assert a negative. In a moment of weakally noted, indeed, that almost every hill-ness I once incautiously stated in this fort or very ancient town in England magazine that though Chadwick as a perbears a bury or borough name. Taking sonal name implied the former existence three or four western counties alone, one of a village so-called, there was no hamlet may instance among inhabited towns of Chadwick at present to be found by Malmesbury, Marlborough, Amesbury, diligent search in these kingdoms. By Salisbury, Heytesbury, Shaftesbury, Glas- the first post after I had committed myself tonbury, and Abbotsbury; while as to to that deadly error an obliging and wellearthworks and hills, too numerous to cata-informed correspondent sent me a list of logue, here are a few of the best-known thirteen distinct and separate villages of picknicking places Sidbury, Ogbury Chadwick, collected in various counties Camp, Yarnbury Castle, Battlesbury (over- of England and Wales. I may add that hanging Warminster), Scratchbury, Chis. I do not personally yearn and burn for elbury, Badbury Rings, El Barrow, the discovery of an Eastbury. Persons Thorncombe Barrow, Weatherbury Cas- having large numbers of Eastburies on tle, Bulbarrow, Rawlsbury, Trent Barrow, hand may keep them entirely in their own Winkelbury, Cadbury, Elbury, and Twin bosoms for their own private gratificaBarrows. Sometimes the orthography tion. shows a tendency to grow phonetic, which Burghs are far less common in Enmust take the bread out of the mouth of the gland than in Scotland, but they flourish spelling reformers - as in Preston Berry to some extent on the east coast, where Castle, the heather-grown hill-fort that their pronunciation would not by any overlooks the deep gorge of the Teign, means come up to Sir George Campbell's near Moreton Hampstead, and Masberry rigorous requirements. Aldeburgh, near Castle, the old British fortress in the ever- the mouth of the little river Alde, is prounconquered Mendips, beside the Roman nounced Alde-boro', while Happisburgh, Fosseway that leads across the uplands a growing watering-place and future rival from Bath to Shepton Mallet and Ilches- of its neighbor Cromer, is softened down ter. But these little orthographical vaga on local lips to Haze-boro'. And since I ries do not for a moment mislead the have made mention of these East Anglian practised archæologist; he knows at sight burghs, it would be an unpardonable slip that Oldborough, near Chippenham, is the not to add in this connection that Aldesame name as Oldbury, near Wilton, and burgh is the original of Crabbe's "Bor that Berry Pomeroy, not far from Tor-ough," a poem once much read and unduly quay, is identical in meaning with Bury admired, and now as much and unduly Hill among the Surrey outliers of the bare North Downs.

Oldbury, of course, implies Newbury, of which Berkshire supplies us with a well-known example. Many of the unparliamentary boroughs, indeed, are thus grouped together by natural contrast. If there is a Highbury in the Hampstead district, there is a Netherbury to match it near Beaminster, in Dorset. Kingsbury Episcopi answers indifferently well to Queenborough, the familiar port for Flushing, while unparliamentary pairs like

neglected. Burgh Castle, near Great Yarmouth -a Roman ruin of massive grandeur is similarly pronounced borough, and affords also another capital example of reduplicated place-names.

It might be supposed that the fairly extensive list I have here given pretty well exhausted the whole catalogue of buries and boroughs in the United Kingdom, as I have do doubt it has long since done the reader's patience. But that is very far indeed from being the case. Among large and well-known places, in