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What's in a name? |
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Contemporary
Bearpark is a corruption of the Norman-French Beau Repaire, meaning beautfiul retreat |
The Normans were the last people to invade Britain, but place-names did not stop changing with them. Migrants within Britain have also influenced how its towns and villages are referred to. In Wear, the industrialists who developed the coal mines and associated industries gave us such names as Easington Lane, to describe the colliery village that straddles the road to Easington, and Colliery Row.
Researching the origins of place-names can give any one of us a reasonable grasp of the history of an area, and local research undertaken on this topic has supported other wider historical findings in many cases.
Dalton means farm in the dale |
As H R Lyon, the British Historian, remarked in his book, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, "A whole generation of modern local historians has sprung up whose regional surveys give the general historian his clearest insight into the tangle of the problems surrounding this matter of intensification of settlement".
Without this place-name evidence we would struggle to know who, and how many people came with each invading group to a place like Wearside, however, it is important not to rely on this evidence alone to give a complete picture of the history of an area.
Words: Ian Robinson
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