CADBURYS AND THE PERSONAL NAME BAD(D)A

Liddington Castle (Badbury)

Badda of the Badbury/Baddanbyrig hill forts is an attested English name that is also found spelled Bada. It is the spelling with a single /d/ that should interest us the most.

I was thinking about the several Badburys and recalled that a similar pattern of hill fort names exists further to the west in England, in territory that remained much longer in control of the British.  I'm referring, of course, to the Cadbury forts.  There are four of these:

Cadbury Camp in North Somerset
Cadbury Castle in Devon
Cadbury Castle in Somerset
Cadbury Hill in North Somerset

To these we may compare -

Badbury Rings in Dorset
Badbury in Wiltshire
Badbury Hill in Berkshire
Badbury in Northants.
Baumber in Lincolnshire (Badeburg in the Domesday Book; Bada's or Badda's burg, according to                                                 Ekwall)

It is fashionable in older books (even Mills!) to find the first component of this place-name as a hypothetical OE personal name *Cada.  But more recent scholars (like noted English place-name expert Dr. Richard Coates) agree with me that the known Brythonic name (found in an Ar-thurian context!) Cadwy/Cato/Cado/Cattw, etc., more likely explains Cad-.  According to Dr. Simon Rodway of The University of Wales -

"The -wy of Cadwy (from various Celtic suffixes) is a very common ending in personal names.  It's not anything to do with hypocoristic -(i)o.  The first element is probably from *catu- 'battle.'  Unlikely that this is Roman Cato."  

The Welsh word cad as listed in the GPC:

cad1

[Crn. cas, Gwydd. cath, Gal. Caturīges; fel elf. mewn e. fel catberth, caterwen, catffwl ac enw nant fel Cadnant golyga ‘cryf, nerthol, mawr’]

eb. ll. cadau, cadoedd.

a  Brwydr, ymladdfa, rhyfel, ymryson, ymdrech, helynt:

battle, conflict, war, strife, struggle, trouble. 

In other words, the Cadbury hill forts are elevated defensive earthworks that were deemed sacred to a sort of divine personification of battle.

I would suggest that the same is true of the Badbury forts - and, indeed, that this and only this can explain why here are several such forts all bearing the same name.

From the Anglo-Saxon dictionary of Bosworth and Toller:

BEADO, beadu; g. d. beadowe, beadwe, bea-duwe; f. Battle, war, slaughter, cruelty; pugna, strages :-- Gúþ-Geáta leód, beadwe heard the War-Goths' prince, brave in battle, Beo. Th. 3082; B. 1539. Wit ðære beadwo begen ne onþungan we both prospered not in the war, Exon. 129b; Th. 497, 2; Rä. 85, 23. Beorn bea-duwe heard a man brave in battle, Andr. Kmbl. 1963; An. 984. Ðú þeóde bealdest to beadowe thou encouragest the people to slaughter, Andr. Kmbl. 2373; An. 1188. [O. H. Ger. badu-, pato-: O. Nrs. böð, f. a battle: Sansk. badh to kill.]

So on the model of the Cadbury forts, I propose that Bada or Badda is merely a spelling variant of a beado-derived name.

When I passed this idea along to Dr. Richard Coates, the eminent English place-name specialist who himself had written an article on the meaning of Bad(d)a ("Middle English badde and Related Puzzles", NOWELE 11, 1988, 91-104), he commented, "Well, to my mind this is ingenious."