Summary. Various explanations for the origin of Lichfield’s name have been given. The 7th-century church-cathedral site was named Licetfelda. By the 12th-century the prefix Lich sometimes appeared and by the 16th-century Lych was widely used. The name had been recast with a myth of a massacre. By the 17th-century Lichfield was established.
Three explanations for the early origin of the name of ‘Lichfield’ have been suggested. The name then went through a recasting sometime in the 12th-century. The derivations were reviewed by Greenslade.[1] The first two ideas are based on toponyms.[2]
1.
The colour of
trees
The name came from a
Celtic-Anglo-Saxon hybrid with Lich derived from the Celtic word Luitcoit meaning grey wood. The colour being
the predominant species or was it describing lichen-covered trees[3]. The
University of Nottingham ‘Key to English Place Names’ described Lichfield as a
grey wood using lēto as a British
prefix for grey and cē,d as primitive
Welsh for forest or wood coming together to give Lyccid.[4]
It was also suggested a grey wood description could be applied to Roman Letocetum
(Wall).[5]
Objections to this are:
·
Lichfield
was not a Welsh settlement in the mid-7th century[6]. It is
possible this etymological explanation applied to a settlement name before the
seventh century, but such a Celtic settlement has not been established.
·
Having the first part of the name meaning grey
wood and the second part being fields or pasture is odd.
·
The settlement was in a large open field
alongside a river and marsh and there was no wood. Around the flat valley could
have been a dense wood of probably pine trees on the sandy soil. Why was this a
grey area?
·
Lichfield started as an ecclesiastical centre in
a growing Mercian kingdom. Why refer to the natural colour of trees?
2.
A watery area
Antiquarians
emphasised the watery nature of the area; Litchfield in 1776 was
described as built in the middle of a bog.[7] They
connected Lich to the Old English words lǽce meaning leech,
lecce meaning water and lacu indicating a pool, pond or lake.[8]
Shaw[9]
claimed the cities name comes from its watery situation, and Saxon Liccian
signified water, or land with water.
Rawson, 1840,[10] emphasised the abundant pools and streams distinguishing Licetfeld and one of his drawings, dated 1300, shows this importance. 1 was named the upper pool, 2 was the middle pool and 3 Stowe pool, originally called Stowe Pool Waste Ground, 4 represented Stowe surrounded by a ditch. 5 was the Cathedral Close surrounded by a ditch. 6 was labelled St Marys and the Friary surrounded by water. 7 were pools in the bishop’s marsh.
Objections are:
·
Why have the first part of the name referring to
water and the second part referring to fields or pasture? Duignan thought
Lichfield meant a ‘boggy field’. Why name a settlement as a boggy field?
·
It is impossible to connect etymologically lǽce
to Lich. Sounding the same is not enough.
·
The early kings of Mercia would not want their
spiritual centre described as watery.
3.
An approved place to
build a cathedral-church.
King Wulfhere with Bishop Wilfrid
of Ripon fixed the site for a new church-cathedral on a sandstone bluff
overlooking a river and marshy area.[11] Bede
in his book on the history of the English people, 731, used an adjective to
describe the site, and that was Licitfelda, later spelt as Licetfelda.[12]
Licit, later Licet, meant approval for a Christian site in a field
to build a church-cathedral. It had
theological approval. See the posts, ‘Wulfhere and Wilfrid, and later Bede,
name Lichfield,’ also ‘Why Licitfelda was approved’, for a full
reasoning. From the 7th to the 11th-century Licetfelda was usually
Lichfield’s name. A charter in St Chad’s Gospels, S1462a, dated 1017-27 has
Bishop Leofgar with the older name Licitfelda.
The problem with this first
millennium explanation for the name does not accord for the change from Licet
to Lich. Licet is soft sounding whilst Lich is harsh.
Recast of the name
In the 1086 Domesday Book, Lichfield was spelt Lecefelle,
Licefelle and Licefeld,[13]
and clearly the name was still soft sounding, but going through some kind
of recasting.
Domesday spelling.
In William of Malmesbury’s ‘Gesta Pontificum Anglorum,’
written early in the 12th-century it was spelt Lichefeld (Lichefeldensis).
Matthew Paris, c. 1200–1259, a chronicler for St Albans Abbey wrote in a
margin of his copy of the ‘Book of St Albans’ the name of Lichefeld
and Lichfeld.[14]
Johnson[15]
stated, “Antiquarian speculation on the meaning of the name may even have been
partly responsible for the emergence in the 12th-century of the modern spelling
of the name.”
Recasting based on Lichfield’s
founding myth
Matthew Paris gave an explanation for the morphing of the
name. He conjectured a fabled battle
in the 3rd or 4th-century resulting in the death of a thousand Christians was
located at Lichfield. Lichfield was now taken by Paris as once being the
site of a field of corpses.[16]
Thus Liche, meaning a corpse, was linked to a folklore story of
slaughtered Christians somewhere in the area.
Book of St Albans marginalia. Hoc apud Lichefeld evenit. Inde Lichfeld dicitur quasi campus cadaverum. Lich enim Anglice cadaver sive corpus mortui dicitur.
A manuscript fragment dealing with the topography of
Lichfield survived among the cathedral muniments in the 17th-century but has
since been lost. It was almost certainly compiled in the mid or late 13th-century,
probably in Lichfield. It claimed the city was named in Latin Lichfeldensis
because once upon a time a battle had been fought there.[17]
The myth
The foundation story [18]
does not even start in Lichfield, but begins in St Albans and involved St Alban
and his priest-friend St Amphibalus. The story concerns how Alban protected his
priest friend Amphibalus from Roman persecution and was subsequently beheaded
instead. Miracles happened at the time of the execution.[19]
The martyrdom of Amphibalus from 'Life of St Alban' in Trinity College Dublin
Geoffrey of Monmouth, c.1095–1155, embellished the
story. Around 1136, he wrote History of
the kings of Britain and in this mix of fact and fantasy, he recreated
Amphibalus, connected him with the priest sheltering Alban and made him the
abbot of Winchester monastery. William, a monk at St Albans, then claimed
Amphibalus moved to the north whilst Alban was imprisoned for six months. After
Alban’s execution, a great light shone from his tomb which caused 1000
residents of St Albans to search for Amphibalus and seek an explanation.
Somehow, they found him in Wales preaching the Christian faith to a crowd and
upon listening were converted and baptised. Pagan residents in St Albans upset
by this mass conversion to a new faith set out to avenge what they thought was
heresy. On finding the 1000 new Christians, they killed all except one. John
Leland in his travels 1535 to 1543[20] placed this massacre at Caerleon. The pagans
returned to St Albans (some accounts have Rebourn 4 miles from St Albans) with
Amphibalus and had him martyred. Matthew Paris considered the site of the
massacre was at Lichfield and this was repeated at St
Albans in a late 14th-century document. John Lydgate, 1370–1451, monk and poet,
wrote about Alban and Amphibalus in 1439.[21] John Rous of Warwick, 1411 or 1420–1492, a
medieval historian and antiquary penned a local history of Warwickshire and
repeated the story. John Leland, d. 1552, preserved Rous's account and being an
antiquary helped to spread the story. It was referred to by John Stow, 1525–1605,
William Camden, 1551–1623, Michael Drayton 1563–1631 and Thomas Fuller 1608–1661.
The legend was now fully accepted. Ward, 1892, said the name of Lichfield can
be naturally derived from the field of dead. Fuller,1655, claimed Lichfield in
the ‘British’ tongue signified Golgotha, a place bestrewed with skulls. The Cathedral
Sacrist’s roll of 1345 included the dust of Amphibalus amongst its long list of
relics, but it was not listed in the incomplete roll of 1445. Shaw, 1798, said Amphibalus
was mere fiction founded on ignorance and
the whole story was ridiculous. There is no statue, image in glass or record of
Alban and Amphibalus in the current cathedral.
In
the 16th century, the legend was again reimagined and restored by
the townsfolk. The restoration of the myth began when Lichfield was granted its
Royal Charter and to mark the occasion a new seal was made in 1549. Previous
Guild seals had depicted Mary and child and another showed Chad. The new seal
depicted three dismembered males on a green background with two trees. The seal
was replaced in 1688 with a similar scene, but now in black and white, and it
is still used by Lichfield City Council.
Drawing of 1688 seal Heraldic escutcheon depicting ‘diverse
martyrs in several manners massacred’.
Emblem used on a 1720 map, with Borrowcop Hill, cathedral and bodies.
Plaque on the side of the railway bridge over Upper St. John Street,
showing three victims (more like soldiers). Upton (2012) said the depiction
appeared as part of the livery for the South Staffordshire Railway Company in
the 1840s.
Then
came curiosity to know where the massacre occurred. Local history with early
excavations became a quest for those beginning to dabble in science. In 1686,
Robert Plot wrote his second book, The
Natural History of Staffordshire, and
in it he gave an account of how Lichefeld started. He said Romans
in 286 from Verulam (St Albans) and Erocetum (Wall) found Christians in the exercise of their Religion. They
brought them to the place where Lichefeld
now is and he described this as Christianfield, near Stitchbrook. 1000 of
the Christians where martyred leaving
their bodies unburyed to be devowered by birds and beasts. Plot claimed the
place had the name of Lichefeld or Cadaverum
campus, the field of dead bodies. He took this event to be the utmost antiquity of the city and so believed Lichefeld
started in the year 286.
Portrait of Robert Plot in British Museum.
AI rendition of the Christian Fields north of Lichfield with the slain
Christians SK1146 1124.
This version was repeated by later antiquarians including: Thomas Cox,1738, John Jackson, 1805, John C, Woodhouse, 1811, T.G. Lomax, 1819, and John B. Stone, 1870.
Martyrs Wall in Beacon Park. A reconstructed sculpture originally on the front of the Guildhall in 1740s. It is said to show 3 dismembered kings who led the Christians into battle against the Romans. A lion, the cathedral and Borrowcop Hill, where the kings were supposedly buried, are depicted. Yet another twist to the story and can only be a source of confusion. Unsurprisingly it is in a very quiet corner of the park. The inclusion of the cathedral must have caused dismay.
It appears despite the association with a battle the uptake of Lich was not universal and immediate. According to Duignan[22] in the 12th-century, the variants of the name were Lechesfelde, Lichesfelde, Lichefelde and Licheffeld. The royal clerks preferred Liche, and the variants Lichesfeld and Licheffeld.[23] A grant from King Richard I to Bishop Muschamp dated 1202 has Lichefeld.[24] In the 13th-century it was Lychefelde and Lichefeld. A cartulary of Tutbury Priory, 1253, has the name abbreviated to Lich. In 1301, five citizens gave some land to obtain rent and pay for maintenance of a water conduit in Lychefeld. All the names could be harking to a corpse, but that is uncertain. In the Takamiya MS 62 of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, dated 1375‑1400,[25] the spellings of Lindfsi, Lindfelth and Lythfeld are handwritten in the margin, and this might still be a transitional time of spelling, or the writer was uncertain of the name.
Marginalia in the Takamiya MS
Throughout this time of spelling
Lichfield in various ways, its association with death and corpses persisted. It
appears to have become widely accepted by the 16th-century. In churchwarden’s accounts for 1544-7 the
prefix is Lych, as in Lychffeld, Lychffelde and Lychfeld.[26]
In the 16th-century editions of Foxe’s
‘Book of Martyrs’ the spellings were Lychefield, Lichefield and Lichfield.
Wiliiam Whitelocke’s 16th-century book, MS Ashmole 770, was titled Chronicon
Lichfeldensis ecclesiae. By the 17th and 18th-century the town’s name was
written Lichesfeld,[27]
Lichfeld,[28]
and Litchfield.[29],[30],[31] The
current spelling of the name was finally established in Samuel Johnson’s
dictionary, 1755. He defined Lichfield, as the field of the dead, a
city in Staffordshire, so named from martyred Christians.
Summary of the evolution of the name
[1]
M. W. Greenslade (ed.), 'Lichfield: The place and street names, population and
boundaries ', in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14,
Lichfield, (London, 1990), 37-42.
[2]
D. Johnson, 'Lichfield and St Amphibalus: the story of a legend', South
Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions 1986--1987,
(1988), XXVIII,1.
[3]
D. Horovitz, D. A survey and analysis of the place names of Staffordshire. Unpub.
PH.D. thesis University of Nottingham, (2003), 27. A grey-brown wood was first
suggested by A. L. F. Rivet and C. Smith, The place-names of Roman Britain (Princeton:
1979), 386–387.
[4]
V. Watts, Cambridge dictionary of English place-names (Cambridge: 2007), 372; R. Coates, A. Breeze and D. Horovitz, Celtic
voices. English places: Studies of the Celtic impact on place names in England (
Donington: 2000), 335; E. Ekwall, The concise Oxford dictionary of
English place-names (Oxford: 1960), 297: K. Cameron, A dictionary of Lincolnshire
place-names (Nottingham: English place-name Society:1998), 223, 275: A. D. Mills,
A dictionary of English place-names (Oxford: 1991), 298 and M. Gelling, Signposts
to the past (Bognor Regis: 2010), 57, 100–1.
[5]
J. Gould, 'Caer Lwytgoed: its significance in early medieval documents', Transactions
of South Staffordshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 1991-1992, (1993),
33, 7–8.
[6]
W. H. Duignan, Notes on Staffordshire Place Names (Oxford: 1902).91.
[7]
W. Stukeley, W, Itinerarium Curiosum: or an account of the antiquities and
remarkable curiosities in nature and art observed in travels through Great
Britain (London: 1776), 61.
[8]
T. Harwood, The history and antiquities of the church and city of Lichfield (London:
1806), 2.
[9]
S. Shaw, ‘The history and antiquities of Staffordshire. Compiled from the
manuscripts of Huntbach, Loxdale, Bishop Lyttelton. ‘(1798), vol. 1, 231.
[10]
J. Rawson, An Inquiry into the History And Influence of the Lichfield Waters
(Lichfield: 1840)
[11]
Described in the biography of Bishop Wilfrid written by a monk at Ripon called
Stephanus and published 712–3. Title was Victa Sancti Wilfridi I. Episcopi
Eboracensis. It has been translated by B. Colgrave The life of Bishop
Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus (Cambridge: 1985).
[12]
J. McClure and R. Collins, Bede. The Ecclesiastical history of the
English People, (Oxford, 2008). Book IV, Ch. 3, 174. The edition of McClure
and Collins is based on the translation by Bertram Colgrave for the Oxford
Medieval Texts first published in 1969. Bede listed
this work as Historiam ecclesiasticam nostræ insulæ ac gentis in libris V, which
translates to The ecclesiastical history of our island and nation in five
books.
[13]
Folio 247r Domesday Book, National Archives reference E 31/2/2/1932.
[14]
Matthew's interest in etymologies occurs on fol. 25v, digital image 57 of the
Book of St Albans in the library of Trinity College Dublin.
[15]
D. Johnson, (1988), 28, 1. See note 2.
[16]
See note 2, D. Johnson (1988),5.
[17]
Ibid D. Johnson, (1988), 28, 6. The fragment was
first printed, apparently from the original MS., by Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon
Anglicanum, iii (1673 ed.), 219. The transcript contains demonstrable errors
elsewhere and is evidently not by Dugdale.
[18]
D. Johnson (1988), 1–13. See note 2.
[19]
Traditionally, Alban’s
death was supposed to have occurred in 305, though Bede placed it in the reign
of Diocletian (286 – 303).
[20]
Leland left notes which were published later under the heading of Itinerary.
[21]
The Lives of Saint Albon and Saint Amphabel (1439) Manuscripts: The
poem exists in more or less complete form in five manuscripts; both standard
editions are based on Lansdowne MS. 699 (in the British Library).
[22]
W. H. Duignan, (1902), 91. See note 6.
[23]
Ibid D. Johnson (1988), 2. See note 2.
[24]
Magnum Registrum Album 223.
[25]
Kept in the Beinicke Library, Yale University. The name is on 48r page, digital
image 99.
[26]
Yoxall Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1541–55 Staffordshire Record Office, D. (W.)
1851/1/13/20.
[27]
H. Wharton, Anglia Sacra. Volume 1 (London: 1691).
[28]
R. Plot, The Natural History of Staffordshire (Oxford: 1686)
[29]
W. Dugdale, (1673). Volume 6, part 3, 1238. See note 17.
[30]
W. Stukeley, (1776), see note 7.
[31]
T. Cox, Survey of the ancient and present state of Great Britain. (London:
1738).