When a language is not pure, but the result of the intermingling and interaction of several tongues as distinct as Celtic, Saxon and Norman; and when, by the wear and tear of daily use through centuries, place-names have altered in detail of spelling and pronunciation; and when for a long time spelling and reading were arts known but to a small minority of the population, it is plainly inevitable that the original form and real meaning of a place-name should often be difficult to trace. But always in an enquiring mind there was the insistent WHY? which is a characteristic and a glory of man as a reasoning animal, and hence often a meaning was given to a word that is simply a sort of pun, an endeavour to explain a word by what it looks like in current speech or dialect when there was not the knowledge of earlier times and older tongues which elevates mere guessing into the science of etymology.

Some Kentish examples of this source of error may be useful. Thus, when we trace Maidstone back into the earliest records we find that it has nothing to do with either Maid or Stone, but comes through many variations from the Celto-Saxon Medwegston, or town on the Medway. Yet though Lambard knew and quoted this in 1570 he suggested also a meaning of “mighty stone, a name given for the quarry of hard stone there!” So, too, Hasted thinks Loose is so called because the stream loses itself underground (like the Mole in Surrey) for some eight hundred yards at Brishing! He might as well have ascribed the name to Loose and Detling having been long only Chapelries of Maidstone, but at last having been cut loose and made into separate parishes in Elizabethan times!

Tenterden is named, says an old Kentish writer, as “some vulgar fancies conjecture, from the tenderness of its soil”; Feversham, says another old Kentish writer, Phillipott, useful as an historian, useless to etymologists, “is an unhealthy town, and carries the tokens of it in its name.” Id. est., the home of fevers! Harbledown, says Black, is so-called “in allusion to its grassy downs and hills,” as if grassiness were not a characteristic of any and every down and hill in Kent. Gadshill, we are solemnly told, is named from “gads,” clubs used by footpads who were not unknown there (or anywhere else) on Watling Street. We should smile less if the name was Padshill.

And one of the most ancient, and indeed prehistoric, names in Kent is Penypot, a hill opposite Chilham. “Here once,” one old rustic would say, “they dug up a pot full of pennies.” “Nay,” another would respond, “it was where they used to sell ale for a penny a pot in the good old days!” To such vile meanings may descend the venerable Celtic Pen y wlh—the Head of the Mound.

One of the earliest Roman geographers heard of Thanet under its earliest name of Tanet, and because he knew a Greek word Thanatos, which means death, he so interpreted Thanet. On this absurdity he based a baseless legend which Lambarde in 1570 thus describes: “There be no snakes in Tanet (saith he), and the earth that is brought from thence will kill them.” (Why death to snakes any more than to sheep or shepherds? Why not go further and make Thanatos a lifeless place like the Dead Sea?) “But whether he wrote this of any sure understanding that he had of the quality of the soil, or only by conjecture at the woord Thanatos, which in Greeke signifieth death, I wote not.” This is as strong an example of conjectural derivation, with nothing but a superficial resemblance to support it, as we could find. But Lambarde himself, great as he is in many ways, gives derivations almost as baseless, e.g., Blackheath, “called of the colour of the soil!” Wrotham, “given for the great plentie of woorts or good hearbs that growe there.” Farley, “interpreted the place of the Boares, or Bulles” (which? and why?). Sittingbourne, “one interprets it Seethingbourne, Rivus Fervens aut Hulliens” (i.e., the boiling or bubbling river—in that flat country!). This is too much even for him and his times, and so he adds, “but how likely let others see.”