Occasionally, you get appealing juxtapositions, so that Ham and Sandwich are neighboring towns in Kent (and Rye is just down the road). A couple of years ago a local newspaper in Hertfordshire was able to record the marriage of two inhabitants from nearby villages with the memorable headline “Nasty man marries Ugley woman.”
However odd and striking the names, there is invariably a prosaic explanation buried deep in their linguistic past. Strangeways, for instance, has nothing to do with the habits of the people who live there, more’s the pity, but it is merely an adaptation of the Old English Strangwaesc, or “strong floods,” a phenomenon that was once a feature of the area. The famous Cotswold villages of Upper and Lower Slaughter have no connection with bloody carnage. Slaughter here comes from the Old English Slah-Treow, of sloe-tree, which grew in abundance there in former times.
A curious fact is that almost nothing of importance ever happens in these oddly named places. Battles, coronations, and other events that rebound through history are wisely scheduled for venues with more sober sounding names like Hastings and Culloden and Bosworth Field—names that won’t look ridiculous in the history books.
P.H. Reaney, author of the classic Origin of English Place Names, would probably say that this is also mere coincidence, but I’m convinced that there is more to it than that. Instinctively the English know where to draw the line. Consider the case of John Shakespeare. In 1564, just before the birth of his son, Will, he abruptly left his native village and moved his family to Stratford-upon-Avon. The history books don’t tell us why he did this, but I know: he was driven by instinct. Had the senior Shakespeare not taken this prudent and necessary step we would now be venerating the Bard of Snitterfield. And that just wouldn’t do.
