The Book of English Place Names by Caroline Taggart

Author:Caroline Taggart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Houghton Conquest

There are many places in England called Houghton and they mean ‘farmstead on a ridge or hill spur’ – the Old English hōh also meant ‘heel’ and indirectly produced the modern ‘hock’. I include this one because it ought to be more interesting than it is: ‘Conquest’ here refers not to the Norman Conquest, but to the family who lived here in the thirteenth century.

Leighton Buzzard

Unlike many names containing leigh, this is connected not with woodland but with leeks – the Old English is lēac. The word evolved to mean vegetables generally, so the distinguishing feature of the original settlement was a vegetable or herb garden. Presumably the Normans didn’t know this – in the Domesday Book the name is recorded as Leston. One of the town’s websites makes the proud boast that over the centuries Leighton has been subject to sixty different spellings, ‘depending on the fancy of the writer’. In the thirteenth century – when it is found as Letton – a man named Theobold de Busar was an important local clergyman and left his mark on the town’s name (the same website tells us that over the years a mere forty variations in the spelling of Buzzard have been found).

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