elements that are not personal names. There are, for example, two Busbys and two
Busbies, which would all seem to be of the same origin as Busby in the North Riding
of Yorkshire, namely buski ‘shrub, bush’, while two Sorbies have several parallels in
England, including four Sowerbys in Yorkshire and two in Lancashire. It seems likely
that the names in both Dumfriesshire and central Scotland were formed on analogy with
names in the Danelaw, probably as the result of the arrival of new settlers from areas of
Scandinavian settlement in England. They would seem to have followed a similar route
into Scotland in the second quarter of the tenth century as the type of monument known
as hogbacks, whose development originated in northern Yorkshire around Brompton,
which is not far from Busby. The popularity of the hogbacks spread from there along the
Tees valley via the Stainmoor pass to the Eden valley and the Carlisle plain, from where
the hogbacks continued on north to central Scotland. A stylistic analysis of the hogbacks
in Scotland shows them to be later than, and derivative from, the English ones, and the
same can probably be said of the Scottish place names ending in -bý. In a recent paper
Simon Taylor has argued that bý-names in central Scotland tend to be situated on royal
land or in baronies held directly by the Crown and that the Scottish kings may well have
been encouraging limited Anglo-Scandinavian settlement within their kingdom in the
tenth century (Taylor 2004 : 130 – 8 ).
In addition to the names ending in -bý in Dumfriesshire there are also a number of
names there in -thveit, a word denoting ‘clearing’, and to judge from the distribution
pattern of these names, they would also seem to reflect Danelaw influence. Like many
related names in Yorkshire the thveits seem to be younger than most of the names
recorded in Domesday Book. Many of the names in Dumfriesshire have forms with
early spellings resembling those in Yorkshire, for example the Dumfriesshire names
Brakanepheit, Thorniethwaite, Langesweit, Litelsweit, Blindethuayt and Holthwayt from
Howthat, which probably reflect Danish influence (Nicolaisen 1982 : 113 ). Some of the
forms in Dumfriesshire, for example Cowthat and Howthat, however, reflect the usual
Scottish spelling of the name-element, as do the few examples of names in -thveit in
Orkney and Shetland, where these names in Twatt reflect Norse influence.
Other place names ending in -bý which can be assumed ultimately to reflect Danelaw
influence are four place names in southern Wales, where three of the four: Colby, Homri
and Womanby, have exact parallels in the Danelaw: several Colbys and Hornbys and
Hunmanby. It seems likely that the four names were all imported from the Danelaw in
the post-Viking period as analogical formations.
In the Isle of Man there are some names which belong to the period when Norse
settlers arrived directly from Norway or indirectly via the Norse colonies in Scotland
and the Isles, probably in the tenth or eleventh century, to which names I shall return
later. The Manx names ending in -bý, however, would all seem to have been coined by
settlers of Danish or Danelaw origin and there are several possible explanations for their
presence (Fellows-Jensen 2004 : 139 – 52 ). Some settlers came from the Danelaw in the
course of the tenth century, while others, who may have been recruited there by Godred
Crovan, were granted large farms in the fertile south of the island after his victory in
1079. Finally, there was a documented immigration to Man from northern England in
the early fifteenth century.
A few of the names in Man, for example Jurby (from djúrabý ‘deer farm’) and
Sulby (from súlabý ‘farm in or by a cleft or fork’), show from their early recordings and
their linguistic development that they must have been subject to Gaelic influence in the
–– chapter 28 : Scandinavian place names in the British Isles––