{68a}
URICONIUM : ARICONIUM : ARCHENFIELD (cxlvii. 408, 477; cxlviii. 29).—The pains, and let me add, the courage, displayed by Mr. Alfred Watkins confidently suggesting errors to the D.S. Scribe and to Camden, in order to convenience his unfortunate guess at the origin of Archenfield, may have perhaps appeared commendable. But, in fact, his Urchin (i.e., hedgehog) does not help matters at all, nor will even the old family of Abrahall and their coat of arms, with urchins in it. If, instead of hunting the Registers of the Bishops of Hereford he had given but one more look into the English Dictionaries evidently at his command, he would have been saved all this expenditure; and, to what a different conclusion he would have come as to the age of the first or Celtic (?) portion of this interesting and enigmatical place-name! He would, at once have detected for the first time that {68b} Urchin is not, as he declares it to be, O.E. for the hedge-hog (igil), but only a Norman French introduction of circa XIII century, when it came to us as Ireçon, eriçon (from L. ericius); and it is to-day represented by Fr. hérisson. Hence it can have had nothing whatever to do with Iercingafeld of A.S. Chron. 915; with D.S. Arcenefeld, nor with A.D. 1101 Ierchenfeld, nor with the probably far earlier Hereging (of the MS. Liber Abb. Feversham) and Ercing; nor, of course, finally, with Ariconium; with which last Prof. Napier, Dr. H. Bradley, and the late Mr. W. R. Stevenson, all three, connected Archenfield phonetically. Consequently Mr. Watkins’s assumption that the unoffending “people of the Welsh Colony in Irchenfield were given the nick-name” of brats (i.e., urchins), and his rebuke of Camden, the antiquary, are equally uncalled for and beside the mark.
What is, of course, true (and it should be made clear to your readers), is that the site of Ariconium (Weston-u-Penyard), east of the Wye, is not within the twelfth century Deanery of Archenfield (constituted c. 1100), once a cantred of the Principality of Morganwy, and, for long after that date, an intensely Celtic district (as its place-names fully declare). The latter region extends, say, from Ganarew, N.W. to Kenderchurch, and N. so as to include Ballingham and Baysham. But the main contention (owing, both to the close phonetic relation of the name Archenfield with Ariconium, and to the fact that the district bears the same metalliferous character, abounding still with ‘smithys’) is that Archenfield, this district name with its many queer variants (always a suspiciously interesting feature), means and originally (long before there was formed a Deanery so-called) denoted the “clearing” or “feld” about Ariconium: the ore-producing pre-Roman centre.
That the same name Archenfield, or Urchingfield, became attached and adheres still, to a mere vill far
away to the west, nr. Hay, is at present difficult to explain: but so are Leptis minor and Leptis major far apart: for
we have not yet the key to the apparent mystery. Of one thing, however, we may be quite certain, and it is that such
delicate matters as the origins of racial place-names are not to be furthered by inorganic guessing or by attributing
the employment of Norman-French words to the Mercians and West-Saxons fighting beyond the Wye in the tenth century!
St. Clair Baddeley.
{69a}
Surely Mr. Alfred Watkins’s evidence of Anglo-Saxon identification
with the urchin of their tongue does not overthrow the reasonableness of a Celtic or pre-Celtic root being the
real beginning. The Anglo-Saxons caught up the old name and gave it a popular derivation of their own, as has so often
been done in other and later instances. The Normans, to whom this popular derivation was nothing, naturally spelt as,
they best could, the actual pronunciation—with Arcen. But I agree that to drag in Viroconium is likely to confuse
the issue.
P.M.
Source info: MS note by AW “N & Q Jan 24 1925”; checked in library.