Onomastic Evidence of The Origin and Identity of the Hwicce: Resolving the Conflict Between Place-Name Dictionaries and Place-Name Tracing

By Thomas H. Wickenden II, Ph.D.  

Abstract The Hwicce were a tribal group who developed a medieval kingdom in the Western Midlands of Britain. Although there are many conjectures as to the identity and origin of this tribe, none of them are supported by sufficient evidence. A new theory of the Hwicce has been proposed based upon onomastic evidence developed through the techniques of Place-name Tracing. This evidence reveals that an Anglian group named Wicingas migrated from the Continent to become the Hwicce and to establish a territorially-based, poly-ethnic kingdom in post-Roman Britain. However, although early attestations of multiple place-names support this theory, the etymologies provided by national place-name dictionaries and searchable databases based upon these dictionaries do not. This conflict is addressed through an analysis of these dictionaries, which demonstrates that they gradually replaced Wicingas with Hwicce, an example of reverse etymological reinterpretation. Without knowledge of the Wicingas, historians have been unaware of the origin, the migration, and the role of this tribal group in constructing the kingdom of the Hwicce. The relevant etymologies based on Place-Name Tracing are thus more accurate than those published in place-name dictionaries and databases, a conclusion which resolves the conflict and supports the validity of the new theory. 

Key Words: Socioonomastics, Toponym, Migration Theory, Early Medieval History, Hwicce  

Introduction  Little is known about the 5^th and 6^th centuries in Britain. Guy Halsall has summarized the most recent view that available sources are so unreliable as to provide “no idea what happened in British history between 410 and 597” (2013, 216). This assessment is not new, for thirty-five years ago, in his history of the English settlements, J.N.L. Myres wrote that the period of some two centuries which lie between the collapse of the Roman government and the arrival of St. Augustine in 597 C.E. has long been recognized as the most difficult and obscure in the history of this country. Between Roman Britain and Christian England there is indeed a great gulf fixed, a void of confusion which remains a standing challenge to historical inquiry (1988, 1). Scholars have ruminated upon the reasons for this “void of confusion” and the mystery regarding the activities of Anglo-Saxon tribes in south-central Britain. For example, Patrick Sims-Williams has stated that “the Anglo-Saxons of this area are now almost forgotten, because, unlike their Northumbrian counterparts, they have left us no narrative history nor early saints’ lives.” He adds that, “neither Bede in Northumbria nor his Kentish and West Saxon informants seem to know much about the settlement of Central England; neither do the Welsh sources nor the early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” (1990, 1, 16). In her book about one Anglo-Saxon tribal group, the Hwicce, Della Hooke supports this assessment, writing that the period in which the Hwiccan kingdom was established “remains one of the least understood in British history” (2009, 3). The existence of a people known as the Hwicce is amply documented by references in Latin and Old English texts dating from, or purporting to date from, before the year 1000. Many of these texts along with specific Latin and Old English references to the tribe are listed by Richard Coates in his discussion of the name of the Hwicce. However, as he remarks, “the name of this well-known people of the south-west Midlands in the Anglo-Saxon period has received no uncontroversial or widely accepted explanation” (2013, 1). Coates provides his own conjecture, but he describes it as “a shot in the mist,” only slightly better than a shot in the dark (2013, 10). There are now over a dozen different explanations of the identity of the Hwicce and more than half a dozen different theories of their origin. The causes for this confusion have been described as problems of history, problems of evidence, problems of linguistics, and problems of technique. Nevertheless, a plausible new theory about the origin and identity of the Hwicce has recently been proposed (Wickenden 2022). 

A New Theory of the Hwicce  By utilizing a dynamic paradigm, the latest computer applications, new research techniques, and innovative analytical methods, it is possible to overcome the problems, obstacles, and limitations that have continued to constrain the ability of historians to solve the mystery of the Hwicce. Instead of research whose focus is individual, locational and stationary, the focus of this new theory is relational, migrational and dynamic. The data include a set of place-names, all of which were most likely derived from the Wicingas, a tribal group from which the Hwicce emerged. New tools and methods have been developed to trace the routes of the tribal group and to track their social development as they migrated from one location to another. The Wicingas are first identified on the Continent in the Old English poem Widsith. There are also many place-names that document the migration of this tribal group around the Continent and across the Strait of Dover to the Isle of Thanet in Kent. As shown on the map in Figure 1, the subsequent migration of the Wicingas in Britain can described in three legs of several strands: the first leg goes up to East Anglia, the second through the land of the Middle Angles to the frontier of the Eastern Midlands, and the third over to the Western Midlands. Situated in strategic locations, the Wicingas worked with Iclingas allies to colonize the territory and create the kingdoms of Hwiccia to the south and Mercia to the north. [Please insert Figure 1 near here.]

Figure 1. Migration of the Wicingas across Britain

            Source: Wickenden using Google Maps 

The political ambitions of the Wicingas were initially frustrated by the confusion and conflict caused by a homophonic clash between Wic, the root of their name and wic, an element in the names of many small post-Roman settlements. As Walter Pohl has pointed out, the names of tribes and territories were especially important as salient strategies of distinction, first for identifying those in control and then for unification of disparate tribal elements behind their new leaders (1998, 6). A homophonic clash such as this could result in a variety of changes, as noted by R. M. Hogg in his lecture describing phonological influences on English vocabulary (1983, 88-103). In this case, the Wicingas were highly motivated to disambiguate their tribal name which, in an oral culture, meant changing the way in which it was pronounced. Any notable change in pronunciation, such as devoicing the initial consonant, would have been indicated in Old English by a corresponding change in spelling, in this case from a <W> to an <Hw>. In this way, the Wicingas became the Hwicingas. However, the tribal group went on to create a demonym by substituted for <ingas> the suffix <e>, similar to the use of that suffix in Mierce ‘Mercians’, Seaxe, ‘Saxons’, and Engle ‘English’.[i] The process of sociogenesis undertaken by the Wicingas thus resulted in the construction of a poly-ethnic, civic entity which, by the end of the 6^th century, had become known throughout Britain as the kingdom of the Hwicce.  

The Conflict between Place-Name Dictionaries and Place-Name Tracing   The evidence on which this new theory of the Hwicce is based consists of the names of places associated with the name of the Wicingas and aligned with their migrations. The early attestations of these place-names appear to derive from the name of the tribal group. The Wicingas eventually became the Hwicce at the end of their migrations. As a result, the name of the Hwicce was applied not to additional settlements or to the existing communities but rather to aspects of the new territorially-based polity, such as territorial landmarks, boundaries, areas, polities, and the peoples who populated the new kingdom. There is a conflict, however, between the evidence provided by place-names derived from the Wicingas and the etymologies for these same place-names provided by the published dictionaries and searchable databases of British place-names. While a few of these etymologies support the new theory, most of them describe the derivation of these same names not from the Wicingas but either from the name of the Hwicce or from one of the homophones of Wic. This conflict between place-name tracing and place-name dictionaries must be explained and resolved in order to verify the validity of the new theory. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conflict, to analyze when and why it occurred, and to determine whether it undermines or underscores the validity of the theory. 

Methodology This conflict will be explored by analyzing the specific etymologies provided by a series of place-name dictionaries and databases. They will show that prior to the new theory, the initial etymology of the Wicingas was reinterpreted and, as a result, the origins and migrations of the Wicingas were left unexplored, the connections between settlements of the Wicingas were never unexplained, and the destinations of the Wicingas in the Western Midlands where they became the Hwicce remained unexamined. There are a few place-names derived from the Wicingas that are confirmed by entries in the early place-name dictionaries. One of these places is Whissendine in the Eastern Midlands, which is now the county of Rutland. This was one of the three contiguous settlements established by the Wicingas in the Eastern Midlands, after a carefully coordinated migration from East Anglia and prior to crossing the frontier of the Middle Angles to establish settlements in strategic locations around the Western Midlands. So, it is useful to review the series of etymologies provided for this particular toponym to see why dictionary editors did not proceed to analyze the pivotal role of this location in the settlement of Britain and to connect it with the places in East Anglia from which the Wicingas had migrated, with the places on the Eastern Midland frontier which were also settled by the Wicingas, and with the places in the west to which the Wicingas subsequently migrated. These etymologies begin with those published by Eilert Ekwall in 1936, followed by dictionaries edited by A.D. Mills in 1992, Barrie Cox in 1994, and Victor Watts with co-editors John Insley and Margaret Gelling in 2004. These publications were followed by two websites containing searchable databases, both created and edited by the research team at the Institute for Name Studies (INS) at the University of Nottingham together with their partner institutions. They include the Key to English Place-Names (KEPN), initially developed in 2004-2005 and relaunched with an interactive Google Maps interface in 2012, and the Survey of British Place-Names (SEPN), initially developed in 2013-2018 on the basis of more than 90 county-wide surveys conducted since 1925 and still under development. The results of this review will be compared to the onomastic evidence provided by early attestations of the relevant place-names in order to analyze the reasons behind the conflict, to assess the validity of the new theory, and to suggest a process for resolving the conflict. 

Results 

Etymologies of Whissendine Eilert Ekwall - After several studies of English place-names, Ekwall published his Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names in 1936, with new editions in 1940, 1947/51 and 1960. In his Dictionary he includes an entry for three place-names derived from a tribal group named Wicingas: Whissendine, Whissonsett, and Witchingham. The first place is located in the Eastern Midland county of Rutland and the other two are in the county of Norfolk, to the east: Whissendine Ru [Wichingedene DB, Wissen-dena 1176 P, -den 1203 Ass], Whissonsett Nf [Witcingkeseta DB, Wichingseta 1191 P, Wicingesete 1196 FF]. ‘Valley and fold of the Wicingas’; see denu, (ge)set. Wicingas is probably a tribal name derived from pers. ns. in Wic as in Wicbeorht. Whissonsett is possibly ‘the fold of the people of Witchingham’. The change of ch to ss is due to Norman influence (1960, s.v. “Whissenden”). Ekwall believed Whissonsett and Witchingham were connected and that all three place-names derived from the Wicingas: Witchingham Nf [Wicinghaham, Witcinge-ham DB, Wichingheham 1106-9 Fr, Wich-ingeham 1130 P]. ‘HAM of the Wicingas’ (1960, s.v. “Witchingham”). In the “Introduction” to the Dictionary, Ekwall explains that a small group of place-names is formed by words that were originally names of the inhabitants of the places — what are generally called “folk-names.” While it is a common phenomenon that tribal names often come to denote the district inhabited by the tribe, Ekwall notes that names of villages have sometimes arisen in the same way, and he points out that in England the most important group of names belonging here, the group that includes all three of the names derived from Wicingas, is formed by names in -ing, representing Old English -ingas (Ekwall, 1960, xi). Ekwall thus found that the tribal group named Wicingas was the source of the names of two villages in Norfolk and one in Rutland.   

A.D. Mills - In his Dictionary of English Place-Names (1991), Mills provides the following etymology for Whissendine: Wichingedene 1086 (DB). ‘Valley of the family or followers of a man called *Wic’. OE pers. Name + -inga- + denu. Alternatively the first element of this and the following name may be OE wicinga ‘of the pirates’ (1991, s.v. “Whissendine”). Mills notes that the medial element is -inga- but instead of mentioning the tribal group of Wicingas, he interprets it together with the prefix as denoting ‘the family or followers of a man called *Wic.’ By deriving the prefixal element from the personal name of a man called Wic, Mills reduced the size of the population and the social structure implied by this element from an ethnonym, denoting a tribe or ethnic group, to that of a patronym, denoting an extended family or kinship group. Mills then gives the genitive wicinga as an alternative, but he defines it not as a collective name but as a plural noun meaning ‘of the pirates.’ So, Mills begins to obscure the origin and identity of the Wicingas by suggesting, first, that the name was a patronymic name of a kinship group rather than the ethnonymic name of a tribal group. Second, he provides as an alternative to the personal name Wic a common noun wicinga. Third, he interprets this noun as a designation meaning ‘of the pirates’. The term “pirate” became a synonym for the term “Viking,” but that most likely occurred around the advent of the Viking Age, at least two centuries after the Wicing first crossed the Baltic to northern Germany and Poland and then ventured out across the Continent. According to Eldar Heide, the original meaning of wicing was ‘sailor/seafarer’ (2008, 27). So Mills reduces the source of the place-name from a tribal group to a kinship group, and he no longer refers to the Wicingas, suggesting instead that the word is a noun, designating a heterogeneous group of Scandinavians that became infamous centuries later.   

Barrie Cox – Cox conducted an extensive county-wide study, published in 1994 as The Place-Names of Rutland. In this dictionary there is an entry for Whissendine, for which Cox provides multiple attestations and a lengthy etymology: Wichingedene        1086 DB Wy-, Wissingden(e) 1265 Pat, 1297 Ass et passim to 1343 CL, Wisingheden 1266 For Wy-, Wissenden(e) 1203, 1212, 1214 Cur et passim to 1297 … This place-name is based on OE Hwicce, but whether Hwicce here is the well-known major folk-name or an unrecorded personal name derived from it is uncertain. If the DB form of the p.n. is significant, then we have as the prototheme a minor folk-name *Hwiccingas ‘the people of a man called Hwicce’. But surviving spellings also allow a likelier original *Hwiccena-denu ‘valley of the Hwicce’. The name Hwicce, be it the folk-name or a pers.n. appears to survive elsewhere in the parish in the last recorded Wichley Ley, v. f.ns. (a) infra. Hwicce occurs also in the name of the early Rutland Hundred of Witchley (v. Witchley Warren) and in nearby Whiston Nth, some twenty miles to the south. These p.ns., situated in such close proximity, whether based on a pers.n. or on the folk-name Hwicce, suggest that the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, later centered in Worchestershire, had an early presence in the Rutland region, v. GL 4 42 ff. (1994, s.v. “Whissendine”). Cox is clearly responsible for an etymological reinterpretation of Whissendine in which the name Hwicce is substituted for the name Wicingas.[ii] It is likely that Cox decided to revise the etymology provided earlier by Ekwall and Mills because the Wicingas were such an obscure group compared to the well-known Hwicce and because, as will be explained below, he was explicitly criticized by Watts, et. al. for mentioning the Wicingas in an earlier edition of his study.  However, the first six early attestations of Whissendine begin with the single consonant <w>, which is far more likely to reflect a name like Wicingas than Hwicce. Also, although the orthographic form beginning with <wh> has been carried through to the contemporary spelling of the place-name, it was not until the end of the fifteenth century, more than one thousand years after the Wicingas established these settlements in the Eastern Midlands, that scribes introduced an initial <wh>, known to be a modification of <hw>, as in <Hwicce>, which began to appear when the /w/ was unvoiced across the Middle English lexicon. In addition to Whissendine, Cox identifies many other names in Rutland hypothetically related to Hwicce. Although he notes that these names are unrecorded and unusual, his references to the Hwicce further obfuscate the role of the Wicingas in the settlement of the British midlands.   

Victor Watts – With the assistance of John Insley and Margaret Gelling, Watts edited The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names in 2004, based on the archives of the English Place-Name Society and including names as represented in the Ordnance Survey Road Atlas of Great Britain, published in 1983. Watts begins the etymology for Whissendine with the reinterpretation provided ten years earlier by Cox, calling it ‘The valley of the Hwiccingas, the people called after Hwicca, or of the Hwicce’ (2004, s.v. “Whissendine”). Watts then lists nine historical spellings, although once again the first four of these begin with <Wi> or <Wy>, suggesting that the name did not derive from Hwicce with its initial <Hw>. The digraph <Wh>, which has continued in use until the present, did not appear until 1491, a millennium after the arrival of the Wicingas in Britain, and more than four hundred years after the place-name was first attested in the Domesday Book without the <h>. Watts then gives several unrecorded possibilities for elements of the name, including the hypothetical OE folk-name *Hwiccingas. Watts suggests that alternatively the prefix might be the OE folk-name Hwicce, the genitive plural of Hwiccena. He then adds that the tribe once occupied the larger territory by noting that “evidence of a possible presence of the Hwicce in Rutland is supplied by the hundred n. Witchley, Hwiccleslea [before 1075]12^th, Wice(s)lea 1086. ‘Hwicci’ or ‘the Hwicce’s woodland’, OE pers.n. Hwicci genitive sing. Hwicces, or folk-n. Hwicce, genitive pl. Hwicca + leah” (2004, s.v. “Whissendine”). Watts completes the reverse reinterpretation in which the Hwicce are substituted for the Wicingas by ending the entry for Whissendine with an explicit criticism of references to the Wicingas. Citing in a footnote specific pages from Cox’ dictionary for place-names of Rutland, Watts states that   Earlier explanations of the specific from [sic] OE wicinga, genitive pl. of wicing ‘a pirate’, or *Wicinga, genitive pl. of *Wicingas ‘the people after Wic’, OE pers.n. *Wic, are unsatisfactory. R 221-2 (2004, s.v. “Whissendine”). This personal, public criticism seems most unusual, especially since Watts does not explain why these explanations are unsatisfactory, since he does not provide any new evidence regarding the Hwicce, and since the explanation which he cites does not appear in the 1994 edition of Cox’s dictionary. However, Cox may have mentioned the Wicingas in an earlier edition and must have responded by removing any mention of the Wicingas in the later edition. This is thus a specific example of how the initial etymology of a place-name which was originally described as having derived from the Wicingas has been explicitly reinterpreted as having derived from a different group which emerged somewhat later, the Hwicce. This criticism may have been influenced or written by co-editor Margaret Gelling. In the introduction to the first edition of her own book about place-names as “signposts to the past,”  she counsels all non-specialists to avoid the analysis of place-names which can result in what she describes as “catastrophic misunderstandings” and “extreme embarrassment” (1978, “Introduction to the First Edition”). She adheres in her own research to the analysis of early spellings, but her focus is on topographical rather than habitative denotations, and she takes pains, as she says, “to free place-name studies from the notion that many of the people … commemorated in these place-names were the founders of new English settlements” (1997, “Introduction to the Third Edition”). 

Key to English Place-Names – The Key is a searchable database launched in 2012 and maintained by the Institute for Name Studies at the University of Nottingham. It draws upon the work of the English Place-Name Society and lists Ekwall, Mills, Cox and Watts as references. The Key describes Whissendine as meaning “either, 'Hwicce's valley' or 'valley of Hwicci's people’. Alternatively, perhaps 'pirates' valley'.”  The site also notes the word elements and their meanings as follows:

• wīcing (Old English) A pirate.
• Hwicce (Old English) A tribe which settled mostly in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.
• pers.n. (Old English) pers.n. Personal name
• -ingas (Old English) The people of . . .; the people called after . . .
• denu (Old English) A valley

Survey Of English Place-Names – The Survey is another interactive website based upon a great many county-wide surveys of the linguistic origins of England’s place-names. Survey editors include Mills, Cox, Watts, Gelling and many others associated with the English Place-Name Society. The etymology for Whissendine provided by the Survey (2023. s.v. “Whissendine”) is identical to the one provided by Cox in his dictionary (see quotations above). This most recent resource thus continues the reverse reinterpretation of Ekwall’s original etymology, with the complete erasure of the Wicingas and the substitution of unrecorded references to the Hwicce in denotations of all related place-names. The early attestations of the names of the other places aligned with the migration routes described in Figure 1, together with many places situated in areas of expansion, provide support for the new theory, just as did the attestations for Whissendine, Whissonsett and Witchingham. Nevertheless, the etymologies of the other names in the more recent dictionaries and searchable databases conflict with this interpretation. The theory and the databases are thus in complete opposition with respect to the sources of all these place-names. 

Discussion   It is clear that Cox’s reverse reinterpretation of Ekwall’s original etymology for Whissendine was repeated by Watts and in both the Key and Survey. Watt’s public critique of Cox’s initial focus on the Wicingas, along with Gelling’s warnings about attempts to associate the names of the earliest settlements with the names of those who may have established them, appear to have had a chilling effect, steering scholars away from any serious, sustained effort to identify and analyze the settlements of these Germanic immigrants. As a result, until the development of the new theory, there has been no extensive exploration of the origin of the Wicingas who settled Whissendine, the connection between Whissendine and other Wicingas settlements in the Eastern Midlands, and the migration of these Wicingas to the Western Midlands where they established the kingdom of the Hwicce. Since the tracing of Wicingas migration routes has only recently been accomplished through the use of new digital tools, it is likely that most historians are simply not aware of the presence of the tribe. Thus they may not realize that when aligned with a logical migration route, a place-name including a plural form of Wic or some simplicial or compound variant thereof, is more likely derived from the name of the Wicingas than from one of its more common homophones. In summary, the difference between the etymologies of these place-names provided by British place-name dictionaries and related digital databases, on the one hand, and the etymologies based on onomastic evidence provided by recent place-name tracing and mapping techniques, on the other hand, is due to a fundamental difference in knowledge about the tribal group and its migration routes. Since the etymologies provided by the dictionaries and databases for place-names aligned with the migration of the Wicingas are uninformed by this knowledge, they should be considered incomplete, inaccurate and unreliable.

Conclusion Although previously published toponymic etymologies may, on occasion, raise a reasonable doubt about the derivation of one or another early attestation of a place-name believed to be explained by the new theory of the origin and identity of the Hwicce, there is now a preponderance of proof demonstrating that this theory is not only plausible but is also probably valid. The path toward an evidence-based explanation of the identity and origin of the Hwicce can thus be cleared and the conflict between place-name tracing and place-name dictionaries can be resolved by ignoring etymologies provided by British place-name dictionaries and related digital databases that are uninformed by knowledge of the Wicingas. The early attestations of the place-names used in tracing the migration of the Wicingas, together with the detailed descriptions of the motivation and methodology for how the Wicingas modified their name, provide strong support for the new theory of the origin and identity of the Hwicce. This theory has a high probability of being more accurate than the comparable place-name denotations provided by the published sources. Moreover, the validity of this new theory also suggests that the research paradigm, analytical methods, and technical tools described here are reliable and could be used to trace the migrations of other tribal groups. New onomastic information regarding the connections between place-names that are found through such research to be in alignment with migration routes and related areas of expansion could be added to current dictionaries and searchable databases. In this manner, the results of such research might provide evidence-based details to fill in what J.N.L. Myres called the current “void of confusion” about this significant period of history (1988, 1). 

Notes on Contributor   Thomas H. Wickenden II has a B.A. and C. Phil. in English Literature, an M.P.A. in public finance, and a Ph.D. in Communications. His research interests include Onomastics and Early Medieval History. In a previous publication cited below, he described the results of place-name tracing two tribal groups, the Iclingas and the Wicingas, who established the kingdoms of Mercia and Hwiccia, respectively. 

Correspondence to: Thomas Wickenden, 6252 E. Mountain Oaks Dr., Flagstaff, AZ 86004. thwconsultingllc@gmail.com                   

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