Introductory

More nonsense has been written on place-names than on any subject except, perhaps, that of surnames. Nor is this surprising. Names, whether of persons or places, are a perpetual source of interest but their interpretation demands a knowledge of languages, and of the sound-changes which took place in them, not possessed by the many. The modern spelling of a name is often a dangerous snare; its earliest forms may be difficult to find and, when found, must be explained in the light of the language spoken when the name was given. The man-in-the-street can hardly be blamed when he tells us that Barking got its name because there could be heard the barking of the dogs in the Isle of Dogs. He has no means of knowing that the name occurs in a Saxon charter of 695 as Berecingas, that there is another Barking far away in Suffolk, found in a charter of c1050 as Berchinges, and that this was originally the name of a community `dwellers by the birch trees’, later given to the place where they lived. 1 Tradition has it that after the defeat of the Armada, Queen Elizabeth I went down to Purfleet to watch her victorious fleet sail up the river. Overcome by the sight of torn sails, damaged rigging and other signs of conflict, she exclaimed, ‘Alas, my poor fleet!’ and so Purfleet got its name, a pretty fiction which will never die, in spite of the fact that the name existed at least 300 years earlier, in 1285, and was then spelled Purteflyete, which can certainly have no connexion with poor; the fleet was a creek and no assembly of warships. 1