BRYTHONIC PLACE-NAME EXPERT ALAN JAMES AGREES WITH MY PROPOSED ETYMOLOGY FOR SAMLESBURY

Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire

What follows is Alan James' statement regarding my proposed etymology for the place-name Samlesbury near Ribchester in Lancashire.  Mr. James is the third leading toponymist to subscribe to my theory.  I'm currently working with Professor John Insley, the English Place-Name Society editor for Lancashire, on getting the traditional etymology for Samlesbury officially changed to 'Samel's fort.'

I remain convinced that Samlesbury is named for Sawyl Benisel, aka Uther Pendragon, father of Arthur.  

***

"Checking LHEB p415 confirms that the medial consonant in Proto/Old Welsh *Saμuil would have remained audibly nasal through the 6th – 9^th centuries, and could have been adopted into OE as *Samɪl or *Samel, and that name could very well be the specific in Samlesbury.

However, we need to be clear that *(æt) Samelesbyrig is an English p-n formation, not a Celtic one, formed with anglicised *Samel, not *Saμuil, and certainly not Middle-Modern Welsh Sawyl. The fact that the specific is an anglicised version of a Brittonic-influenced latinate form of a Hebrew name is no more evidence of Celtic survival than it is of Hebrew survival. The eponymous *Samel need not have known a single word of Welsh. It only tells us that there had been some transmission of personal names from Brittonic to OE, presumably by bilinguals (probably mothers?) at some point during the period of anglicisation, and there’s plenty of evidence to support the judgement that, in what became Lancashire, that was quite a long and gradual process.

You're probably right in your suggestions that Samel could have originated as an anglicised, Old English, form of proto-Welsh *Saμuil, but as *(æt) Samelesbyrig is an English p-n formation, not a Celtic one, we can't assume that Samel of Samlesbury was, or spoke, Welsh (Brittonic, Cumbric). By the time the place was named, Samel could have become current as a personal name among monolingual Old English speakers. So Samel of Samlesbury can't be identified with any certainty with anyone named Sawyl.

As for Samlesbury being an anglicized version of a place originally named for a 5th century Sawyl, I wouldn't rule that out, but it would mean Sawyl had been adopted into OE not only a personal name but as a figure of local legend. I'm always doubtful about place-names being 'translated', it does happen, but it's not normal. But if Sawyl > Samel featured in folklore among English speakers, they might have associated the site with him and given it that name.

When it comes to the family of Sawyl being placed as you have suggested, I would agree that some kind of 'legendary mapping' went on in the central middle ages, maybe starting during the time of the Cumbrian kingdom in the 10th century and continuing through the 11th and into the 12th, where figures in local folklore and poetry were associated with particular places, though whether any of those identifications relate to what really happened half a millennium earlier is, at best, unproveable."