On Words for London Wharves

Abstract

In this article, I review an assemblage of London wharf terms hithe, gate, wharf, bridge, stair, quay, dock, and pier, organised according to date. My purpose is to examine semantic change over time and to identify effects of multilingualism, as speakers of Middle Dutch across the North Sea used cognates hide, gat, werf, brug, steiger, kade, dok; riverside -bridge names shared semantic content with Old Norse bryggja ‘landing-stage, jetty’, and lane-names -gate shared semantic content with Old Norse gata ‘passageway, lane’. I suggest that Scandinavian speakers in London under Cnut’s reign could have interpreted gate in its Old Norse sense of ‘lane’, leading to analogical extension of Old English terms hithe, bridge, stair also becoming the names of both wharves and their lanes, even though these words had no intrinsic ‘lane’ meaning. By contrast, later terms quay, dock, and pier never developed the sense ‘lane’. The earliest reference to bridge ‘jetty’ (ad pontem Wulfuni) occurs 1231–1238. In Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla of c.1230, Lundúna bryggjur are pulled down, and the assemblage of later -bridge names, productive into the nineteenth century, adds weight to the arguments made by previous scholars that the meaning here is ‘jetties’ rather than ‘road spanning water’.

KEYWORDS:

• Thames
• wharf-names
• semantics
• early Scandinavian
• Old English
• Anglo-Norman
• Heimskringla

In 1955, the Deputy Keeper of the City Records at the Corporation of London, Philip E. Jones, published an excoriating review of Street-Names of the City of London by the great place-name specialist Eilert Ekwall, which had appeared the previous year:

Dr. Ekwall’s reputation as an authority on English place-names assured a warm welcome to his new book on the street-names of the City of London. Nevertheless many students of London will be disappointed. The book arose from material residual to his earlier studies and, apart from the Hundred Roll of 1279, is based on printed sources. On page 65 the author stresses the need for personal investigation, yet he failed to consult any of the medieval records at Guildhall … e.g. Husting deeds from 1252, London Bridge deeds from the late twelfth century, Iter rolls, 1244-6, 1321, Assize of Nuisance, from 1301, and Escheat, Novel Disseisin, and Mort d’Ancestor rolls from 1340. … Yet the use of the chronology of street names as a guide to the historical development of a district is a cogent approach. … The conception of the book is excellent.¹

Jones appreciated Ekwall’s methodology of placing street-names in date-order and considering their etymologies, but deplored his scant manuscript scrutiny. In this article, I consider a subset of Ekwall’s street-names—wharves—because since 1955 the London Record Society has published indexes to the records Jones mentions; Vanessa Harding has gazetteered the City waterfront with names gleaned from documents specified by Jones in her 1983 PhD thesis; and Tony Dyson has considered the positioning and dating of the City wharf names, marrying manuscript evidence with archaeological findings.² Would including their data and taking a multilingual approach lead to any new conclusions? The question about multilingualism is posed because City wharves were frequented by people speaking a variety of languages. From the middle of the eleventh century, specific wharves at Dowgate and Vintry were designated for German and French merchants, and words for wharves from various languages would have entered many times over, as speakers of local and distant languages repeatedly docked at London’s port.³ Early evidence for wharf terms from Brittonic (Celtic) and Latin as spoken in London is lacking, so this contribution begins with Old English, bearing in mind that early stages of English, Frisian, Low German, and Dutch share common West Germanic origins and are less readily distinguishable, so that differences between Old Norse, a North Germanic language, and Old English, are the main focus. Semantic change is the norm and does not of itself require a multilingual context. For example, Old English wharf, which originally meant ‘turning-around place’, seems in thirteen-century London legal documents to have simply meant ‘property with a boarded river frontage’, with no necessary implication for berthing ships, unloading cargoes, or sea-travel.⁴ This shift in meaning happened language-internally as people put their wharves to new use, or abandoned earlier ones. However, some wharf terms developed senses possessed by cognates in other languages, and in particular, I consider possible influence from early Scandinavian, spoken in London under Cnut’s reign 1016–1035, and perhaps continued for a while under his son’s.

Old English hȳð

Jürgen Udolph shows from place-name evidence that the Germanic tribes who invaded England during the fifth century are likely to have come from Northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Flanders.⁵ They crossed the Channel, sailed up the Thames, continued past the abandoned Roman city of Londinium with its forbidding river wall built AD 250–270 and left standing when the Romans withdrew around 409, until they reached the more approachable shelving foreshore at the Strand where they could draw up their boats.⁶ By around 600, these Germanic migrants had developed a trading settlement called Lundenwic, spreading north and westwards from the Strand into what is now Aldwych and Covent Garden.⁷ They or their descendants built landing-stages upstream and downstream, and their word for these landing-places was hȳð, a hithe. There are two reasons for regarding this term as early, one being that the hithe then gave rise to surrounding settlement names, such as Greenhithe and Erith in Kent, Lambeth, Rotherhithe, and Putney in Surrey, and Stepney and Chelsea in Middlesex. The second reason is that Old English hȳð has Middle Low German and Middle Dutch counterparts. Udolph plotted the distribution of place-names with second-element -hude such as Grönhude near Hamburg and Steinhude near Hannover, as well as single-element places named Hude, Hüde, Huden, Hode, Hyde, and Hide, across Lower Saxony, the Netherlands, and Flanders.⁸ On the Flemish coast, Michiel de Vaan lists le Hyde near Dunkirk (1318), Koksijde (1270), and Raversijde (1295); in Zeeland, Coxijde (1252), Coude Hide (1227), and Palvoetzide (1351); and in South Holland, die Hiide near Zwijndrecht (1331).⁹ Udolph’s distribution of hȳð in English placenames leads to an inference that early settlers speaking Continental Germanic travelled south-westwards from northern Germany to the western coast whence they sailed to southern England, settling either side of the Thames, and between the Great Ouse and Nene. The Old English spoken in London then developed from their dialects.¹⁰ Hithes in the vicinity of London, in order of first recorded date, are presented in Table 1.

TABLE 1 HITHES IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Hithe	Recorded Date	Notes
Lundentunes hyð	743–745 (eleventh-century manuscript)^11
Cælichyth	767	‘chalk-hithe’: Chelsea^12
Æðeredes hyd	898/899 (thirteenth-century manuscript)	‘Æthelred’s hithe’, later known as Queenhithe^13
Stybbanhyþe	c.1000	‘Stybba’s hithe’ or ‘stub-hythe’ (Old English stybb ‘tree-stump’): Stepney^14
Fischuthe	c.1006–1012	‘fish-hithe’^15
Lambehiðe	1062 (thirteenth-century manuscript)	‘lamb-hithe’: Lambeth^16
Putelei	1086	‘Putta’s hithe’: Putney^17
Puttenhuth(e)	1279–1332
Retherhith	1297	‘cattle-hithe’ (Old English hryðer ‘cattle’): Rotherhithe^18
Terram de Ænedetham	1158	‘duck-hithe’ (Old English ened ‘duck’): Endiff, between Charing Cross and Westminster Abbey; Endyve (1461), lane called le Endif (1499)^19
Ripa Regine anglice Quenhyth	1151–1152	also the name of a street: Quenehith (1546–1547)^20
la Tymberhethe	c.1206–1216	a street-name^21
Garlecheythe	1276	a church name^22
la Briggehuthe	1281	at the Bridge House in Southwark by St Olave^23
Lo(ng) Hethe	1324^24

Names with a first element still in use in the fourteenth century (lamb, queen, timber, garlic, long) retained second-element -hithe longest, whereas -hithe reduced to /if, i/ in names with a first element which did not outlast the Old English period (cælic, Stybba or stybb, ened, hryðer, and Putta). Hȳð does not seem to have been productive as a name-element into the Middle English period but its meaning remained transparent due to its coupling with the timber, garlic set.

Old English geat, Old Norse gata

In the mediaeval City of London, the Thames was fronted with wharves and numerous access lanes running down to the river. The public had a right of entry to the wharves of Queenhithe and Billingsgate, and also to designated common stairs down to the water. Some of the lanes were flanked with toilets, some public, some not.²⁵ There were disputes between citizens wanting to draw or discharge water, wash, use the toilets, and go up and down the common stairs to board boats, and owners wanting to load and unload cargoes at their wharves and carry them up and down the lanes. Some of these wharves were known as gates, presented above, from Old English geat ‘opening in a wall’. Gate-names are likely to have been transparent to speakers of early Scandinavian due to cognate Old Norse gata, ‘opening, passage, narrow path’.²⁶ Dating is taken from Dyson, mostly from charters, husting rolls, custumals, and letter-books, presented here in order of first date of record (I have not noted numerous spelling-variants).²⁷

TABLE 2 GATE-NAMES MEANING ‘WHARF’ IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Gate	Recorded Date	Notes
Billingesgate	c.1000	a landing-place and a lane (vicus de Billingesgate 1229). The personal name Billing occurs in both Old English and Old Norse.^28
Rederesgate	1108–1147	a landing-place and a lane (venella vocata Retheresgate 1343): Rothersgate, later Pudding Lane (OE hrȳðer ‘horned beast’)^29
Duuegate	1067 (c.1150 manuscript)	a landing-place and a lane (vicus Regius de Douegat 1244): Dowgate^30
Botulfigate	1190	Harding says the name ‘probably refers to the watergate at the end of the lane to the E. of the church, rather than to the property known as St. Botolph’s wharf in the 14th century’ because the wharf only came into the City’s possession in the late thirteenth century.^31 It is not clear whether Botulfigate in 1190 referred to a wharf or was an alternative name for Seyntbotulfeslane (1348–1349), the lane leading up from the wharf.
Ebbegate	1146–1167	a landing-place and a lane (venella vocata Ebbegate 1343): St Martin’s Lane^32
Oystregate	p.1197	a landing-place and a lane opposite St Magnus (venella vocata Oystergate 1343); the lane was also called Watergate^33
Watergate	1250–1260	la Watregate 1297, next to the dock at St Olave, Southwark, was a lane leading to Tooley Street (the same as Toolys Watergate below)^34
Daneborgate	1253	a lane from Thames Street to the Thames in the parish of St Mary Somerset; Ekwall assumes ‘No doubt the part next to the Thames was originally called Deneburꝫgate, the rest being Deneburꝫlane.’ He gives the etymology as ‘probably OE Deneburg, a woman’s name … rather than OE Denaburg “fort of the Danes”’; however, although ON borg meant ‘fortress, rampart, town’, OE byrig also meant ‘civic community, manor, estate’, so ‘lane of the Danish community’ or ‘lane of Danes’ residence’ is also feasible.^35
Kingesgate,	1246 > 1154–1189	Kingesgate (venella) 1274–1275, le Kynggeslane 1343, Kyngeslane alias Arouneslane 1449: Boss Lane^36
Kingeswatergate	1273
le Estwatergate	1258	Addle Street^37
Wolsiesgate	1259	Wolsislane 1307: Suffolk Lane^38
le Watergate	1281	porta vocata le Watergate at Berewardeslane^39
Aubreyswatꝰgate,	twelfth /thirteenth century	venellam qꝰuocat^2 Aubreyswatꝰgate 1273: St Dunstan’s Lane^40
Seint Dūstones watꝰgate	1274–1275^41
Stongate	1312	in the City^42
Watergate	1312	Castle Baynard, possibly the same as Westwatꝰgate below^43
Stangate	1322–1323	at Lambeth^44
Westwatꝰgate	1331	St Andrew’s Hill^45
le Watergate	1331	porta vocata le Watergate at Sporiereslane (this is þe watergatestrete anynst Berelane below)^46
le Watergate	1343	porta vocata le Watergate at Segrymeslane (this is pontem Wulfuni below)^47
Stielwharfgate	1384	possibly a gate opening into the Steelyard compound rather than a lane, but included here as ambiguous^48
þe watꝰgate atte wolkeye	1422
þe watergatestrete anynst Berelane	1422^49
Iron Gate	1682	a landing-stage by St Katherine’s Stairs^50
Toolys Watergate	1735	lane leading to Cox’s Wharf by the Bridge House, Southwark^51
Edlins Gate	1746	lane leading to Toolys Watergate, Southwark^52

Thus, both the Old English sense of ‘opening’ onto the foreshore and the Old Norse sense of gata ‘narrow passageway’, specifically the lane leading up from a wharf, pertained. The dating above gives the impression that the lane-names developed centuries later than the wharf-names but this may not have been the case. Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield say:

Ebbgate, first recorded in 1147–67 (Hodgett 1971, no. 394), is comparable in name and no doubt in function and general date with Rederesgate at the foot of Retheresgatelane or Pudding Lane, ‘Botolphsgate’ at the foot of Botolph Lane, and Billingsgate at the foot of St Mary’s Hill. The pattern suggests that the gates on the waterfront and the streets leading to them from the interior of the city were regarded as single entities in which both elements are likely to be of broadly 11th-century date.⁵³

This date coincides with Danish occupation; the name Billingsgate may be derived from a person with the Old English name Billing, an English placename-surname (Billing, Northants), or from a Danish personal name, Billingr.⁵⁴ Harben says ‘these “watergates,” whether lanes, quays or gates to the river were very numerous and often had no distinguishing prefix’.⁵⁵ Two observations can be made: firstly, that watergate refers to the lane as well as the landing-place as Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield specify; secondly, watergate seems to have been primarily a London word. This impression may simply reflect lack of published documentation, but a search of British History Online for ‘le watergate’ and ‘la watergate’ in a landing-place context elsewhere (that is, excluding ‘sluice, watermill’ and ‘entrance to a castle from a moat’ and the like, and excluding surnames and housenames) only reveals la watergate, a quay at Southampton (1411). The Middle English Dictionary sub water-gate n. (1) (c.) ‘in surnames and place names’ has various London attestations, such as an unspecified la Watergate from a husting roll of 1274 where Geoffrey de Chesewyk held houses in the parishes of St Dunstan towards the Tower, St Botolph near Billingesgate, St Magnus and St Olave de Suwerk, all parishes besprinkled with watergates; but no unambiguous wharf-context attestations anywhere else. The assemblage above suggests that the word watergate signified to Londoners ‘lane allowing common access to the water’; so that Seint Dūstones watꝰgate would have signified ‘lane in the parish of St Dunstan in the East allowing public access to the water’; þe watergate atte wolkeye meant ‘lane leading to the public part of Wool Quay’; le watergate by St Olave, Southwark meant ‘lane leading north from Tooley Street running alongside the dock next to the church allowing common access to the river’. Old English and Old Norse strond, strand ‘foreshore' is also relevant here, as shown in Table 3.

TABLE 3 STRAND-NAMES IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Strand	Recorded Date	Notes
Strande	951 × 959	Part of the Strand near St Clement Danes was known as vicus Dacorum (1222) and as Densemanestret (1233), that is, ‘street of the Danes’ and ‘Danish man’s street’^56
Strande	1086	Svdwrche  …  in strande ł in uico aque ‘Southwark … in strand or in waterfront street’^57
Stronde	1353	Strand on the Green, Middlesex^58
Depford stronde	1461–1462	Deptford Strand^59
Molestrand	1602	St Saviour, Southwark. This may be the strand of a person named Mole, as in Dictionary of Old Norse Prose personal-name compounds Galmas-strond, Hakarllastrond; or possibly Oxford English Dictionary mole, n.^2 2. ‘A massive structure, esp. of stone, serving as a pier, breakwater, or causeway. Also: the area of water bounded by or contained within such a structure, esp. forming a harbour or port < Middle French mole large stone’, although evidence of such a structure at this location is lacking.^60

Old English hwearf

The general Old English term for a landing-stage was hwearf. Variants include those given in Table 4.

TABLE 4 ETYMOLOGICAL VARIANTS OF OLD ENGLISH WHARF

Dictionary	Meaning
hwearf: Oxford English Dictionary wharf, n.^1	‘A substantial structure of timber, stone, etc., built along the water’s edge, so that ships may lie alongside for loading and unloading’
hwearf: Oxford English Dictionary wharf, n.^2	‘a crowd, assembly’
Dictionary of Old English ^1.hweorf	‘whorl, or small fly-wheel, of a spindle’
Dictionary of Old English ^1.hweorfa	various senses to do with spinning and weaving in sense 1. and to do with joints of the body in sense 2.
hweorfan: Oxford English Dictionary wharve, v.	cognate with Germanic verbs meaning ‘to turn, be active, be busy, return’
hwearfian: Oxford English Dictionary wharve, v.	cognate with Germanic verbs meaning ‘to wander, proceed, turn round’
hwierfan: Oxford English Dictionary wharve, v.	cognate with Germanic verbs meaning ‘to turn, change, roll, return, divert’

The Dictionary of Old English provides numerous examples under headword ^1.hweorfan with meanings of turning, moving, departing, and returning. The implication is that a hwearf was a place where goods and people came and went from river to land and land to river, so that wharf translates as ‘place of coming and going, a turn-around place’. The word was already in use in proto-Frisian before the Continental Germanic settlers arrived in Britain, as evidenced by coastal Frisian placenames in werf, warft.⁶¹ Unlike hȳð, hweorf did not give rise to London settlement names, suggesting that it arrived later, but it occurs frequently, often modified (as was hȳð) by the name of the commodity landed, the owner, the place, or a descriptive attribute. Oxford English Dictionary wharf, n.¹ cites an unnamed eleventh-century wharf (wearf) in Westminster and an unnamed eleventh-century wharf (hwearfo, warf) at the head of London Bridge. Early named wharves in the vicinity of London are shown in Table 5.

TABLE 5 WHARF-NAMES IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Wharf	Recorded Date	Notes
Wermanecher	1044 (thirteenth-century manuscript)	‘Wærman’s acre’, consisting of a number of tenements connected to a wharf.^62 Included here as although not a wharf name as such, it is indirect evidence that early wharves shared names with contiguous areas.
Heiwarft	1197	venella vocata la Heywharf 1343^63
Wudewarue	c.1215–1230	parish of St Benet^64
Fiswarfe	1244 × 1248	kayum qui vocat^2 ffiswarfe 1244 × 1248, le ffisshwharf apd le Hole 1400: St Magnus^65
Brokenewharf	1274	‘Broken Wharf, the open space or lane leading from Thames Street to the Thames […] may have served as a public landing-place. It was described as the way leading from Timberhithe to a wharf common to the City, called Broken Wharf, in 1328.’^66
Stokfiswarf	1278	held by Benet Stokfish: St Dunstan in the East^67
La Holirodewarf	1289	Billingsgate^68
Botulfh Warf	1298	St Botolph Billingsgate^69
Stonwarf	1303–1304	All Hallows Barking^70
Le ffihswarf	1306	at the end of Lambardeshill 1306, venella vocata Fysshwharfe 1343, Fisshyngwharf 1346, ‘whereas Fisshyngwharf lane leading to the Thames in the par. of St. Mary de Somersete used to be common … William Trig has obstructed it’: Trig Lane^71
Wynwharf	1316	by Herber Lane^72
Steueneswerf	1316	by Oystergate^73
Dibeleswarf	1317	Dibelswarf subtus castri Baynardi^74
Saltwharf	c.1321	apud le Quenehethe 1390^75
Wollewharf	1326–1327^76
Herberdes Wharf	1334	held by Herbert de Winton^77
Cosynesquarf	1336	held by Cosyn^78
Pauliswharf	1349–1356^79
Drynkewaterswarfe	1360	by St Magnus^80
Gladewyneswarf	1363	by Fishelane^81
ffresshfysshwwarf	1364	another name for Fishwharf, Trig Lane^82
Castelbaynardwarf	1366	vno kayo vocato Castelbaynardwarf^83
ffreshwharf	1367–1371	earlier Frosseswarf (no date), later Freshwharf, Rederesgate^84
Asselyniswharf	1371	also known as Pakemannys wharf 1384^85
Pesokeswharf	1377^86
Pykeswharf	1380^87
le Stielwharf	1384	the Steelyard wharf^88
Blaunchewharf	1400–1401	held by John Blaunche, vintner, between Peyntedtavernelane and Palmereslane alias Cookeslane^89
Trayersquarff	1404	St Mary at Hill^90
Dentoneswharf	1412^91
Venureswharf	1429	Venure’s/Vanner’s wharf^92
Le Risshewharf	1439	by Greenwich Lane^93
Malteswharf	1461–1462	Malt’s wharf next to Stevyns Lane^94
Brughous wharf	1461–1462	Bridge House wharf^95
Lymewharf	1498–1499^96

Old English brycg and Old Norse bryggja

London was attacked by Scandinavians from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, with much of the country eventually coming under their control. Ninth-century Londoners’ response was to leave Lundenwic and return to the City, with the foreshore used as a landing-place soon after 886. By 1016, the Danish king Cnut had become victorious, within a few years ruling an empire consisting of Denmark, Norway, England, and Scotland, so that ‘London was as much a part of the Scandinavian world as Upsala, Orkney or Dublin’.⁹⁷ Several churches and chantries in London were dedicated to the Norwegian saint Olaf, and further record of Danish presence is provided by church-names St Magnus, St Brides, St Nicholas Acon (Haakon), and St Clement Danes; plus the Danish counterpart to St Botolph Aldgate, St Botolph Aldersgate, St Botolph Bishopsgate and St Botolph Billingsgate in the Budolfi Kirke of Aalborg.⁹⁸ Bruce Dickens draws attention to ‘the rapidity with which the cult of the saint [Olaf] made progress, even among his mortal enemies the Danes, and this proves how freely ideas circulated in the Scandinavian world of the eleventh century’. Pamela Nightingale identifies the churches dedicated to St Olaf as centres for the Danish garrison: ‘London was chosen by Cnut and his successors as the chief naval base for their hired fleet of Scandinavian mercenaries … the city must have become an armed camp, unless, as seems likely, the naval force was based outside the walls at Westminster, Lambeth and Southwark, where they could beach their ships’.⁹⁹ In London there is evidence for both the Old English meaning of brycg ‘road spanning water’ (Oxford English Dictionary bridge, n.¹) and the Old Norse meaning of bryggja ‘landing-stage, quay, gangway’ (Dictionary of Old Norse Prose ¹bryggja sb. f.), a sense also occurring in Middle Dutch.¹⁰⁰ Table 6 gives the London Thames-side bridges, followed by the date of the earliest manuscript or map in which I have noted them. I translate bridge in this context as ‘pier at the end of a jetty’, because launderers washing clothes, butchers discarding offal, and privies voiding excrement all required a gangway extending out over the foreshore at low tide to reach the channel in order to rinse clothes or discharge matter to be washed away downstream, as well as for people to board and alight.

TABLE 6 BRIDGES MEANING ‘JETTY’ IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Bridge	Recorded Date	Notes
ad pontem Wulfuni	1231–1238	parish of St Dunstan in the East
vico de Weluedebriggꝰ	1239	no location specified
Olvendebrigge	1271–1272	St Dunstan by the Tower
Holuedebregge	c.1285	St Dunstan by the Tower^101
lauendresbrigge	p.1324	Timberhithe^102
Bochersbrigg	1369	Castle Baynard^103
Tempelbrygg	1373–1374	Temple Key, Rocque’s map 1746: St Dunstan’s Hill^104
The Queenes bridge	c.1561–1570	later known as Parliament Stairs^105
Preuy bridge	c.1561–1570	Whitehall^106
Yuie brydge	c.1561–1570	Ivy pier, the name of the lane to the west of the Savoy^107
Lambeth Bridge	1568^108
Old Pallace bridge	1593^109
Kinges bridge	1593	later known as Westminster Stairs^110
Whitehal bridge	1593^111
Westminster bridge	1593	by Westminster Hall^112
Strond bridge	1660–1666	on the east side of Somerset House^113
Battlebridge	1675	a bridge over the stream that enters the Thames by Mill Lane off Tooley Street, Southwark on the ‘Agas’ Map c.1561–1570 (‘road spanning water’), but on Hollar’s map of 1675 and on Morgan’s map of 1682 Battle Bridg is the name of the river-stairs in the Thames at the end of Mill Lane (‘landing-stage’)^114
Cuper’s Bridge	1721	jetty leading to Cuper’s Gardens pleasure-grounds in Lambeth^115
Dancing Bridge	1730	at Pickle Herring St, Horsleydown^116
Willow Bridge	1804	at the Isle of Dogs opposite the Royal Dockyard at Deptford^117
High Bridge	1819	at the end of East Lane, Greenwich, on Horwood’s map^118

The earliest sequence of these bridge-names derives from Old English Wulfwine, a name known to have been held by several people in mediaeval London including John Wolvyne 1328, and Wolvin Cote 1340.¹¹⁹ The written development of this name is shown in Table 7.¹²⁰

TABLE 7 BRIDGE-NAME WULFWINE, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Name	Recorded Date	Pronunciation	Notes
from Wulfwine to Wulfuni	1231–1238	[wʊlvən]	-i is a Latin genitive singular case-ending in the sequence ad pontem wulfuni
to Weluedebriggꝰ	1244	[wʊlvən]	with a missing macron over the <ed> sequence; the word-final [ən] has been interpreted as the morpheme -ende, a back-formation
to Olvendebrigge	1271–1272	[ʊlvən]	with word-initial w-deletion before a rounded vowel
to holuedebrigge	c.1285	[hʊlvən]	with word-initial h-addition; there may be a macron over the -ued- sequence (the microfilm is not clear)
John Olvyng	1382	[ʊlvən]	the word-final [ən] has been interpreted as the morpheme -ing (the late fourteenth-century reflex of -ende)

Despite orthographic appearances, the pronunciation of the bridge-name held steady, varying only with regard to the vowel-initial onset sequence in w/zero/h, well-attested in London speech.¹²¹ In 1382 John Olvyng was to buy Asselyniswharf, which Harding locates next door to Olvendebrigge:

The watergate was something of a landmark for several centuries. Located opposite the medieval lane or street known as Segerymeslane, later Harp Lane, running up from Thames Street to Tower Street, it may represent an early element in the street pattern, established between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Like other watergates, it was a point of public access to the Thames, and therefore of some concern to the City. In the late thirteenth century it was known as Olvendebrigge or Holvedebrigge, names that indicate the existence of a ‘bridge’—a jetty or stairs—to the Thames.

Harding specifies that watergates provided public access to the Thames, and Dyson suggests that there were ‘‘bridges’ (pontes) which extended into the river from the ends of several, perhaps all, of the public thoroughfares which led from Thames Street’.¹²²

Nightingale posited that the Danish naval force was based at Westminster, Lambeth, and Southwark, and indeed there is later evidence of jetties named -bridge at Westminster, Lambeth (where the Scandinavian Osgot clapa had a house), and at Southwark by St Olave Tooley St, as well as at a mooring used by the naval dockyard at Deptford in the 1520s.¹²³ The Oxford English Dictionary discusses the etymology of the ‘landing-stage’ sense under headword bridge, n.¹:

In use with reference to ships and ports … apparently partly after early Scandinavian … and probably partly also (especially with use in London: see sense 4a) after Middle Low German, where the sense ‘landing stage’ is also recorded (probably in turn after a Scandinavian language). In sense 4a attested earlier in the names of such landing stages in London, e.g. Lauendresbrigge (first half of the 14th cent.), Bochersbregge (a1369), Templebrigge (a1374), all now lost.

The Oxford English Dictionary introduces the route of entry into English via influence from Middle Low German subsequent to the influence of early Scandinavian; no doubt the ‘landing-stage’ sense was brought to London repeatedly over centuries by people speaking both languages.¹²⁴ Regarding early Scandinavian, Judith Jesch (following John Clark) observes that the Scandinavian ‘landing-stage’ sense of bridge is likely to be operative in the description of Olaf Haraldsson’s early eleventh-century attack pulling down Lundúna bryggjur in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla of c.1230, although it is usually understood as meaning the pulling down of London Bridge itself:¹²⁵

According to Fell (1981, 115), ‘the plural form here is used for the singular’ but she does not elucidate further. She also notes that ‘the meaning is evidently adopted from the OE cognate brycg’. The only other skaldic instance of bryggja with the meaning of ‘bridge’ (and also plural) is Ótt II,7, referring to the same event and probably derivative of Sigvatr. London seems to have had only one bridge crossing the Thames at this time (see the maps in Clark 1989 and Vince 1990), and the normal Old Norse meaning of bryggja ‘pier, wharf, landing-place, jetty’ should not be dismissed (Clark 1989, 24). As a great trading centre, London would have had many such and some from this period are known archaeologically. Thus while London Bridge can be traced to the early tenth century, there were wharves at Queenhithe (upriver of London Bridge) from the late ninth century onwards. The eleventh century seems to have been just when there was a spurt of new jetty-building (Vince 1990, 33–4, 153), although the ‘busy waterfront’ may have been mainly a feature of the middle of the century (Vince 1990, 37, 106). Thus, the first jetty and revetment at St Magnus House (immediately downriver of London Bridge) are c.1020, while the first revetment at Billingsgate Lorry Park is c.1039/40, and the major revetment at Billingsgate dates to c.1055 (I am grateful to Alan Vince for explaining these matters to me). Townend (1998, 52) translates literally (‘the bridges of Lundúnir’), but asserts (1998, 73) that the stanza records ‘Óláfr’s attack on London Bridge’.

Snorri Sturluson used the plural bryggjur instead of singular brú (‘road spanning water’), because bryggjur … Lundúna / Lundúna bryggjur were in his sources, two skaldic verses by Óttarr the Black and Sigvatr Þórðarson. The lines from Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla are:¹²⁶

Enn segir Sigvatr frá þessu / Rétt er at sókn hin sétta / snarr þengill bauð Englum / at þar Ólafr sótti / yggs Lundúna bryggjur

‘It is so that the sixth battle—the swift prince offered the English Yggr’s strife—was where Olaf attacked London’s bridges’

The lines from Óttarr the Black Höfuðlausn II, 7 are:

Enn brauzt éla kennir / Yggs gunnþórinn bryggjur / linns hefr lönd at vinna / Lundúna þér snúnat

‘Further, you broke bridges, battle-snake’s user, daring in Yggr’s storm, of London’

The lines from Sigvatr Þórðarson Víkingarvísur are:

Rétts at sókn in sétta / snarr þengill bauð Englum / at, þars Áleifr sótti / yggs Lundúna bryggjur

‘It is so that the sixth battle—the swift prince offered the English Yggr’s strife—was where Olaf attacked London’s bridges’

Finlay discusses an earlier account of the same event in the Legendary Saga of St Olaf, citing the same verse by Sigvatr Þórðarson, which describes the bryggjur as jetties: ‘But the bryggiurnar were designed so that they reached out into the river Thames, and there were props [stolpar] under them down into the river which held the bryggiurnar up’.¹²⁷ From archaeological evidence it is known that there was at least one jetty projecting out from the river frontage into the stream during Cnut’s reign. Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield discuss a jetty dug at New Fresh Wharf within 50 metres of the late Saxon London bridge, constructed sometime between the 970s and the early eleventh century—that is, the period when Danes were successfully attacking London. They infer from the depth of its supporting posts that it would have been substantial enough to bear the weight of carts, and was wide enough to have functioned as a temporary depot and market. The path extending landwards along its eastern edge was known as Rederesgate, continuing as Redereslane: ‘Lane and jetty are likely to have been complementary, the former providing access to the latter’.¹²⁸ The word in the Legendary Saga of St Olaf for the posts bearing the weight of the jetty was Old Norse stolpi, a word that became widespread in London.¹²⁹ According to context, stolp/stulp can be translated as ‘stake, post, pillar, bollard’, and there were buildings named atte Stoples (1310–1311, parish of St Michael on Cornhill), le Stoupeles (1369–1370, parish of St Mary Abchurch), le Stulpes (1397, parish of St Mary Aldermary), atte ij stolpes ny Baynerdescastell (1418–1430), giving rise to a surname: Steph(an)o atte Stoples (1319).¹³⁰ There were stulps at either end of London Bridge, attested from 1375.¹³¹ Stulps were used in building: ‘also be it inquired if any make pꝰprestures withynne the warde as in wallis palleys stalles stulpes doores of celiers accrochyng to hym the comune soile’; and ‘stulpys & jystes’ were paid for in the accounts of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1393; the Merchant Taylors’ Company paid to ‘clenser le hostell a lez stulpis’ in 1427; the church of St Mary at Hill paid for stolpes & Reylles in 1490–1491.¹³² Old Norse stulp became part of the London dialect, presumably brought to London by early Scandinavians and bolstered (stulped!) by Old Norse-influenced speakers from more northerly places under the Danelaw.

An alternative suggestion as to the meaning of Sigvatr Þórðarson’s bryggiurnar is provided by Andrew Reynolds, who also interprets them as ‘jetties’, but rather than positioning them extending from shore to stream, envisages them as ‘jetties joined one to the other over the river between the city and Southwark’; that is, as a brú.¹³³

Old English stǣger

Although stairs in the vicinity of London are mentioned relatively frequently in mediaeval documents to do with the riverside, such as certeins wharfes & esteyers sur le coste de Thamise (1417), they rarely occur with a modifier as in Table 8.¹³⁴

TABLE 8 STAIR-NAMES IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Stair	Recorded Date	Notes
Faukesteire	1279	the name of a venella in Vinetria, probably the stair belonging to Faukes.^135 Given the location of Vintry ward, this is likely to be a riverside stair.
Bathesteres Lane	1246–1247	Dowgate: Ekwall suggests either ‘bath-keeper’s lane’, with Old English suffix -estre, or ‘bathers’stairs’, meaning steps or landing-stage from which people could bathe^136
Newsteyre	1520	at the West Watergate^137

The most common descriptor was that of an adjoining wharf or the person who held the wharf, such as the Stayer called Maltys wharff, 1516–1517.¹³⁸ Norden’s map of Westminster of 1593 labels Temple stayres, Mylford stayres, Prevye stayres, Garden stayres on the north bank and Stanegate stayres, Lambeth stayres on the south. Rocque’s map of 1746 labels 103 stairs as opposed to 68 wharves, and probably the large number of stairs precluded their labelling in early documents and maps: the City of London Archaeological Society’s ‘Causeways, Riverstairs and Ferry Terminals’ project has recorded over 200 such features in documents or maps between Vauxhall and Greenwich.¹³⁹

Anglo-Norman keye

Like stairs, quay occurs relatively frequently in mediaeval documents to do with the riverside. (C- and k- spelling predominate in early London writing—for instance, Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ‘caium apud Westmonasterium’, 1180). Examples are inter kayum Henrici Combemartyn et kayum quondam Walteri le Melewarde, ‘between the quay of Henry Combemartyn and the quay that used to be Walter le Melewarde’s’; unum kayum de muro lapideo apud le Estwatergate, ‘a stone-walled quay at the East Watergate’ (1343–1344).¹⁴⁰ Quay was usually used as a common noun rather than with a modifier, but some exceptions are given in Table 9.

TABLE 9 QUAYS IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Quay	Recorded Date	Notes
kayum Jordani	early fourteenth-century^141
le Campete kaij	1333	at Oystergate or Stephenslane by St Magnus: the meaning is probably ‘the campshed quay’and the etymology is likely to be Old English camb ‘comb, crest, ridge’ + Old English scīd ‘piece of wood split off from timber, board, plank’, cognate with Old Norse kambr ‘comb, crest, ridge’ + Old Norse skíð ‘split wood’^142
Kaya Sancti Pauli	1306^143
kayus Sancti Botulphi	1343–1344^144
Wolkaye	1376–1377	earlier Wollewharf 1326–1327^145
Northwychiskey	1411^146
Merlowes Keye	1463–1464^147

Le Campete kaij is of interest as campshed (variants include campshead, campstead, campshot, kempshott, campsheeting, campsheathing, campshooting, campshutting) is a Thames-side word well-attested from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries for the facing of boarding fronting the river to resist the out-thrust of the embankment, an essential component of quays, wharves, and hithes. My phonological reconstruction is as follows: le Campete kaij is a spelling for ‘the campt key’, where <campt> represents the devoicing of ‘camped’, a back-formation from camp-shide, where shide was still transparent in meaning and so could be elided, giving a meaning of ‘the campshided quay’. The second element is likely to be Old English scīd ‘split wood, board, plank’, cognate with Old Norse skíð ‘split wood’. For the first element, the English Dialect Dictionary cam, sb. 1. has meanings attested in nineteenth-century Scotland, Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Yorkshire, and Lancashire of ‘ridge, earthen mound, earth thrown up form a ditch, rising ground’, which the Oxford English Dictionary cam, n.² derives from Old Norse kambr ‘comb, crest, ridge’. (The crest in question in the context of London quays would have been the top of the slope leading down to the foreshore as seen from the river.) Richard Coates makes the point that the phonology of Old English camb ‘comb’, if compounded with shide early enough, can account for the first element alone, so that there is no need to invoke northern cam. Indeed, Oxford English Dictionary comb, n. 6. c. also has meanings of ‘the crest or ridge of a bank of earth’, although not attested until the nineteenth century.

The English word would have received later reinforcement from Early Scandinavian in the sense of Dance and Pons-Sanz’s category Type C, where the meaning of a cognate word is ‘reminiscent of a Scandinavian word’ rather than a borrowing, fitting the category of navigation and shipping, which Dance and Pons-Sanz identify as a technolect particularly affected by Old Norse. According to this interpretation, the etymology would have been Old English camb + Old English scīd, but transparent to early Scandinavian speakers during Cnut’s reign due to cognate Old Norse kambr + Old Norse skíð. In terms of archaeology, there is evidence of attempts to construct a vertical-faced riverbank from as early as the seventh century. Douglas Killock reports a site at the Adelphi in the Mid Saxon town of Lundenwic excavated in 2014 which revealed earth-fast vertical stakes interwoven with wattle, no more than 1 m high, succeeded by a new campshed of more substantial earth-fast posts, possibly supporting horizontal planks. Gustav Milne reports a tenth-century timber campshed from a Saxon waterfront embankment at Three Cranes Wharf that had large earth-fast posts, horizontal planks made of cleft rather than sawn oak boards—presumably the kind known as shides—set edge to edge, not pegged. Gustav and Chrissie Milne report later campsheds of different dates at a site at Trig Lane. A thirteenth- or fourteenth-century one consisted of a baseplate with vertical posts backed by horizontal planks, set edge to edge, pegged into place and front braced, and a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century campshed consisted of a baseplate, slotted to take vertical planks or wide timbers, set edge to edge with tie-backs.¹⁴⁸

Before 1559, quay was a generic term applied to both wharves and hithes—for example, kayum vocatum le brokewharfe, ‘quay called the Brokenwharf’; kayus vocatus la Quenehethe, ‘quay called the Queenhithe’ (1343–1344).¹⁴⁹ Dyson concludes that by the thirteenth century, wharf and quay had become synonymous in London, neither necessarily signifying ‘landing-place’ so much as merely ‘waterfront’. He suggests that both terms originally meant areas of reclaimed riverside and only secondarily ‘landing-stage’, and questions whether wharf had some early connexion with berthing that was not shared by quay. The etymology of wharf, as we have seen, is a root to do with turning around and so does imply berthing, whereas the etymology of quay has more to do with the physical process of facing embanking with boarding, as the shared Indo-European root also gave English haw ‘enclosure, hedge, fence’. The immediate source was Anglo-Norman, although quay would also have arrived in London via its Middle Dutch cognate, and has also entered the German and Scandinavian languages.¹⁵⁰

In 1559, the Act of Frauds (1 Elizabeth c.11) established the Legal Quays—that is, specific designated wharves in port towns where goods could be assessed for customs duty—which had the effect of restricting the word quay in London to the City wharves. In London, the designated Legal Quays were situated between London Bridge and the Tower, as given in Table 10. The word quay remained limited to the City until the late eighteenth century, when it also became applied to Pigs Quay at Whitefriars and Browns Key by Hermitage Stairs Wapping (Horwood’s map, 1799–1819). Thus, legislation had the effect of curtailing the use of quay as a specific, although it continued in use in London as a generic wharf term.

TABLE 10 LEGAL QUAYS IN THE VICINITY OF LONDON, ORDERED BY FIRST RECORDED DATE

Legal Quay	Recorded Date	Notes
Stew Quay, Clare’s Quay	1525	Survey of London^151
Jefferays Key	1562	Survey of London
Lyon kay, Somers kay, Smarts kay, Andrew morice kay	c.1561–1570	Agas map, between London Bridge and the Custom House (possibly the Andrew Morres who was paid for wharfage in the Bridge House accounts of 1537–1538)^152
Chester’s Quay	1638	Survey of London
New Key	1676	Ogilby and Morgan’s map, between the Tower of London and All Hallows Lane
Galley Quay, Brewer’s Quay, Aquavite Quay	1683	Survey of London
Billingsgate-key, Brewers-key, Chester-key, Cox’s-key, Customhouse-key Galley-key, Great-bear-key, Great-dice-key, Little-bear-key, Little-dice-key, Little-sommers-key, Porters-key, Ralph’s-key, Smart’s-key, Sommers-key, Wiggin’s-key, Wool-key	1732	From New Remarks of London, 398, a directory listing keys, wharves and docks^153
Custom House Key, Bear Key Stairs, Brewers Key, Chesters Key, Cox’s Key, Galley Key, Gaunt’s Key, Gilly Key, Great Bear Key, Little Bear Key, Great Dice Key, Little Dice Key, Hammond’s Key, Lyons Key, Porters Key, Ralph’s Key, Smart’s Key, Temple Key, Wiggan’s Key, Young’s Key	1746	Rocque’s map, between Tower Dock and Queenhithe

Middle English dokke, Sixteenth-Century Dutch docke

Unlike hithe, gate, wharf, and quay, the term dock usually indicated an indentation in the waterfront: OED dock, n.³ 4. a. ‘an artificial basin excavated, built round with masonry, and fitted with flood-gates, into which ships are received for purposes of loading and unloading or for repair’, first dictionary attestation 1486. The etymology is unclear. Dock occurs in sixteenth-century Dutch and English in the sense of the hollow made by a vessel when lying aground at low water, which would seem to be the primary semantic sense although attested later.¹⁵⁴ The first attestation of the word dock in London of which I can find record was the dokke excavated at Deptford in 1417–1418, providing an antedating, with the bridgehous dokke in Southwark extant by 1499.¹⁵⁵ The Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks’s New Remarks of London of 1732 lists Billingsgate-dock, Dowgate-dock, Execution-dock, Hermitage-dock, St. Catherine’s-dock, Limehouse-dock, Puddle-dock, Queenhith-dock, Ratcliff-dock, Sabs-dock, Saviour’s-dock, Savory’s-dock, Scotland dock, Tower-dock, Wapping-dock, Whitefryars-dock.¹⁵⁶ Rocque’s map labels twenty-three docks, most depicted as basins or inlets of some sort.

?Anglo-Norman pere

Bridge in the sense of ‘landing-place at the end of a jetty’ lasted into the nineteenth century, as watermen’s fares were still being listed from London Bridge to Cuper’s Bridge in Leigh’s directory of 1827, although according to an Act of Parliament of 58 George III, Cuper’s Bridge Stairs were to have been stopped up in 1818 in preparation for the building of Waterloo Bridge.¹⁵⁷ However by 1818, the term -bridge ‘landing-stage at the end of a jetty’ was about to become replaced by pier. In mediaeval London, the term pier was used only in its late Old English sense of ‘supportive foundation of a bridge, pillar’, of uncertain etymology although perhaps a variant of Anglo-Norman piere ‘stone’. The sense ‘pier in harbour, mole, breakwater, structure that provides sheltered anchorage’ is first attested in a document of 1391.¹⁵⁸ A search of The Times Digital Archive reveals that pier was used in what may be the ‘landing-stage’ sense rather than ‘pillar’ in the context of quays (‘The Pier at Bridlington Quay has given way’, 13 May 1799; ‘a pier at the break-water at Plymouth Sound’, 20 February 1812), but I cannot find pier meaning ‘landing-stage’ on the Thames in London until the commencement of steamboat passenger services. In Langley and Belch’s London directory of 1817, pier occurs only in the context of the arches of Westminster Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, and Vauxhall Bridge, and as this directory includes a comprehensive list of Thames-side wharves and stairs it might be expected to have listed pier ‘landing-stage’ had it been in common use.¹⁵⁹ In order to determine general, rather than river-industry specific usage, I searched the newspapers of the day. In 1825 the General Steam Navigation Company began a London–Yarmouth passenger service ‘from off the Customhouse’ (The Times, 4 January 1825), followed by ‘from off the Customhouse or the Tower for Calais … Ramsgate … Yarmouth … calling at Brighton Pier when the weather will permit’ (The Times, 28 May 1825). In 1828, the words ‘pier dues included’ began to appear in steam packet company advertisements from London to Margate (for example, in The Times on 29 August 1828), as Margate Pier charged a levy for landing. The first mention I can find of piers referring to landing-stages in the Thames occurred in autumn 1828, as plans were announced to create a Thames Tunnel and steamboat pier:

The object of the design is to connect a pier with the tunnel, for the landing of passengers, &c., to and from steam-boats, formed by means of raising a shaft, 60 feet diameter, in the centre of the tunnel to above high water mark, with convenient stairs inside, and surmounted by an extensive circular colonnade and landing gallery. By this plan the steam-boats will have sufficient space to lay round the pier and discharge the passengers, who will have the convenience and advantage of being landed in perfect safety on either side of the river, by descending down the shaft and passing through the tunnel.

Note that this proposed landing-stage was midstream, not affixed to land. A year later, the Common Council of the City of London received a petition ‘from Mr. David Geary, the inventor of a model of a floating pier, to be moored at the distance of 30 feet below low water-mark, for the convenience of persons passing to and from steam-vessels’ (The Times, 4 July 1829). A year after that, ‘the Navigation Committee of the city of London met for the purpose of viewing the site of the proposed new pier at the east end of the Custom-house, for the embarkation and disembarkation of passengers on board the steam-boats’ (The Times, 14 June 1830). The City Navigation Committee moved slowly and did not, at that meeting, approve the necessary driving of piles ‘11 feet beyond the piles at present placed there, which would make a projection of 71 feet from the side of the wharf’; the requirement being ‘thirty feet beyond the space usually occupied by vessels loading from the wharf’; so that ‘The watermen on shore having learned what had taken place, were in high glee, and exclaimed, “They won’t do us with their d–d pier”.’ Although it was to put the watermen out of business, London piers were eventually built, and this word for a landing-stage on a jetty reaching out over the foreshore became generally uptaken. The late 1820s, then, is when word pier began to be used of London landing-stages built out into the Thames.¹⁶⁰ The earlier term for this had been bridge as has been detailed, but steamboat terminology was conditioned by the General Steam Navigation Company and the Gravesend Steam Packet Company’s services to Brighton Pier and Margate Pier. By the end of the century, Bacon’s New Large-Scale Ordnance Atlas of London and Suburbs labels Victoria Docks Pier, Blackwall Pier, East Greenwich Pier, Cubitt Town Pier, Old Swan Pier, Allhallows Pier, St Pauls Pier, Steam Bt. Pier (at Westminster Bridge), an unnamed pier by Lambeth Bridge, Vauxhall Rd Pier, Grosvenor Rd Pier, Pimlico Pier, an unnamed pier by Victoria Railway Bridge, Battersea Park Pier, Cadogan Pier, and more.¹⁶¹ Pier continues to be the common term for London passenger riverboat landing-stages.

Wharves and Lanes

This final section returns to the discussion of the names of hithes, gates, wharves, bridges, and stairs signifying adjacent lanes as well as portions of the river frontage. Dyson presents the hypothesis that -gate originally signified a gate or opening in the Roman riverside wall; that is, that the word gate in this context was Old English geat in its primary sense of ‘opening’. He supports his argument by means of spatial layout: the named gates cluster in two groups (the unnamed watergates which lay at the extremities, the western and eastern ends of the gate assemblage, are not found before the 1270s and so he does not consider them to be relevant). The western cluster consists of Kingesgate, Daneborgate, and Duuegate to the west of Queenhithe, and 400 metres downstream of Queenhithe the eastern cluster consists of Wolsiesgate, Ebbegate, Oystregate, Rederesgate, Billingesgate, Aubreyswatꝰgate. Dyson deduces that between these two clusters the Roman wall had been long gone, so that there was no context for gate ‘opening' names in that stretch, just hithes and wharves:

The streets leading down to the river from the interior of the city at this earliest period, Bread Street, Bow Lane and Botolph Lane, would therefore have encountered the riverside wall rather than Thames Street, which was only subsequently to evolve along its northern side. This seems to offer the best available explanation of the term ‘gate’ which was applied to several of the landing places at the foot of these streets, and it may be that its use, instead of the more usual ‘hithe’ or ‘wharf’, is an indication of the survival of the wall at these particular points as an obstacle through which gates were necessary for access to the foreshore.¹⁶²

These attestations of gate names are embedded in Medieval Latin texts, where the Latin word porta is the equivalent of gate. Dyson says

The formula porta vocata le Watergate usefully confirms that in this context the vernacular ‘gate’ shares the modern meaning of a portal or access way through an obstacle, and not ‘street’ as for example in York and other part of the country once subject to Scandinavian settlement.¹⁶³

However, it is not the case that the meaning of ‘lane, passageway’ would never have applied, or at least not to all speakers. The names Billingsgate and Dowgate appear to predate the Norman Conquest of 1066, recorded in post-Conquest copies. Words change meaning over time, and a scribe writing several hundred years after the bestowal of a gate name would have had no means of knowing what gate had meant to the original namers. Porta vocata le Watergate in a text of 1343 recording a survey of riverside obstructions and impediments simply tells us how a scribe in 1343 glossed a riverside -gate name, and such a scribe would not have belonged to river-workers’ community of practice, so that texts to do with boundaries and property ownership reflect the language of the law rather than the multiple languages of the riverside. Dockside workers received ships coming from across the North Sea with crews speaking various dialects of early Scandinavian, Middle Low German, and Middle Dutch, as well as dialects of Romance languages and other languages from elsewhere. London was under a period of Danish rule at the point when hȳð, brycg/bryggja, hweorf, and geat/gata were all still in use and applicable to riverside construction (although hȳð may no longer have been productive by the end of the Old English period, it continued in use as a name). Their cognates in Germanic languages would have been transparent to varying degrees depending on what languages/dialects speakers were familiar with. Had a riverside -gate been under Danish ownership in the early eleventh century, it cannot be assumed that Danish meanings of gata would have been suppressed rather than ‘layered’ (that is, an accretion of senses), so that the mediaeval riverside gates designated openings through a wall onto the river frontage for some speakers, wharves for others, and included or even foregrounded the lane leading up from it for others.¹⁶⁴

This idea can be examined from another angle: alternatively, it could be posited that Danish speakers referred to narrow passsageways leading up from wharves as gates when speaking to English-speakers, and this word was then retrofitted to other wharves on analogy with earlier -gate wharf-names Billingsgate and Dowgate, with no implication at all of referencing original gaps in the Roman wall. If so, Kingesgate, Daneborgate may never have been wharf-names, just lane-names alone. Thus Botulfigate could have referred to a wharf already in existence by St Botolph Billingsgate but Daneborgate may simply have recorded the dwelling of Danes in the lane.¹⁶⁵ Dating allows it: ‘The development of the waterfront area south of Thames Street, between the bridge and Billingsgate, can be seen within the context of the late tenth- and early eleventh-century development of the immediate neighbourhood and of the city as a whole.’¹⁶⁶ If this is when the area was developed, then this is when names were bestowed, which if under Danish ownership, would have included early Scandinavian, as reflected by bridge ‘jetty’, stulp ‘post’, the churches dedicated to Scandinavian saints, and maybe Daneborg and possibly Billing. Analogical extension of Old Norse gata to streets named -gate did occur elsewhere, long after the early Scandinavian settlement period, and in areas where Scandinavians did not settle in any density. Gillian Fellows-Jensen reports that the word gata does not occur frequently in early written sources in either Scandinavia or Britain but became the usual word for an urban street in Denmark and southern Sweden, where it probably also had early meanings of ‘opening’. Of Britain, she concludes that ‘Many of the names in -gata are probably to be explained as post-Viking names coined on analogy with the original formations in the Danish kingdom of York’, including some in York itself. She calls these ‘analogical gata-names’, and gives as examples Carlisle’s Bochergate and Rickergate, with personal names that post-date the Norman Conquest, and Kirkgate in Wakefield (1298) and Leeds (1320). Analogical gata-names continued to be productive into modern times: the name of Kirkgate, Huddersfield, was bestowed around 1800 and Deangate, York, in 1903.¹⁶⁷

Analogical extension (by analogy with local City waterfront lane-names, rather than the Danelaw street-names of York as discussed by Fellows-Jensen) provides an answer to the question of why only lanes leading up from wharves were named gate and not other streets further inland, although presumably it could be countered that lanes inland may have indeed been known as gates during Danish occupation but restored to lane afterwards (Ekwall specifies that lanes changed their names ‘far more readily than streets’).¹⁶⁸ It could be countered that riverside -gate lane-names invoked an implicit underlying ‘watergate’ sense for monolingual English-speakers, if indeed watergate meant ‘public water access-point’, so that lanes named Billingesgate, Rederisgate, Douegate, Ebbegate, Oystregate, Daneborgate, Kingesgate, Wolsiesgate, Aubreyswatꝰgate were simply expressive of a perception of the wharf-complex. This is the most parsimonious hypothesis, not involving language contact, depending only on the perception of wharves and their lanes as cohesive units. A case can be built that they were so perceived. The contextual terms for terms for the lanes leading down to wharves were venella, vicus in Medieval Latin and alee, venelle in Anglo-Norman. Letter-Book D contains an edict where the quay-names encompass the lane-names: touꝫ les kays vers Thamyse (‘all the quays towards the Thames’) & totes les autres venelles qe tendont vers Thamyse (‘and all the other lanes which lead towards the Thames’).¹⁶⁹ The phrase & totes les autres venelles implies that the preceding quay-names were lane-names too.

Dyson’s hypothesis as to why wharf terms and adjacent lanes share the same name derives from the positioning of the original waterline. Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield discuss the street (vicus) named Tymberhethe in thirteenth-century records which, contrary to all the other lanes that share names with wharves, lies parallel to the river rather than at right angles to it.¹⁷⁰ They deduce that this street (now High Timber Street) marks the original river frontage and consisted of the original wharf named Timberhithe, which was then extended by encroachment further and further out into the river. Thus, wharves consisted of a number of components:

• a waterfront campshed;

• a flattened landing area immediately behind, with facilities such as cranes;

• stairs giving access up from the water or foreshore, depending on tide;

• buildings set back facing the waterfront consisting of homes, solars and cellars, shops, taverns, with facilities such as latrines, yards, gardens;

• a lane giving access from the City past the buildings, yards and gardens down to the water;

• in some cases, a yard area on the City side of the buildings.

As well as Timberhithe, Queenhithe, and Dowgate, Botolphsgate and Billingsgate also had large open areas to their immediate north, and Dyson suggests that these open areas may also mark where land met river at an original quayside. By the gradual process of encroachment into the river, new lanes formed at either side of a wharf. Until neighbouring wharves were extended to the same end-point they would not have been lanes as such, merely staggered adjoining wharf-edges. This process of extending wharves into the river as far as the neighbours’ river-frontage can be seen in MS Journal 7 of 1471–1472 and MS Journal 8 of 1481.¹⁷¹ In Journal 7, 1471–1472, the Craft of Fishmongers proposed to encroach the public way and wharf on the west side of Queenhithe into the river at their own expense. In order to match the St Paul’s Dean and Chapter’s wharf-post lying six feet from the camshide into the river, the wharf of St Mildred Bread Street had to be extended twenty and a half feet. In Journal 8, 1481, a wharf in the parish of St Peter Paul’s Wharf which fell ten feet short of adjoining wharves was to be extended ‘So that the same wharf may be even towardes the Tamyse there with the other wharffes there next adjoynyng to the same wharf’. Wharves were thus extended piecemeal until eventually they arrived at the same end-point, with the result that access-lanes, wharves, and stairs came to constitute a unit.¹⁷²

Thus, a monolingual English explanation of why there were formerly a number of wharves named -gate in the City is reasonable from a physical point of view. However, it does not explain why -gate wharf/lane names cluster in the City and are not found elsewhere. A language-contact explanation, positing a certain amount of early Scandinavian-speakers in the City, blurs the semantic boundaries. The Founder Effect states that newcomers adapt to the language of the people in situ rather than impose their own unless high ratios of young speakers apply, so that the default position would be to regard cognate Old English/Old Norse words as English alone.¹⁷³ But it is reasonable to posit that under Cnut’s reign, English speakers would have used English, Danish speakers early Scandinavian, and multilingual speakers and households that mixed, both languages. It is also reasonable to assume that there would have been more variation or overlap than is apparent in extant texts, such as Botulfigate (1190) and Botulfh Warf (1298).¹⁷⁴ A language-contact explanation does not impose early Scandinavian over Old English so that Old English senses were obliterated; rather, it allows senses prevalent in early Scandinavian to layer onto those already in use. Watergate meaning ‘route to public water access-point’ in London would thus have been influenced by both English and Scandinavian usage. The gate ‘lane’ and bridge ‘jetty’ senses of these Common Germanic words would thus provide a Densemanes’-eye view, that is, from the river to the land.

Summary

Continental Germanic hithe arrived in London earliest, followed by Old English gate (and for some speakers, Old Scandinavian gata) and Old English wharf, with Anglo-Norman quay established by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Evidence for bridge in its Old Norse sense of ‘jetty, pier’ seems to post-date the Norman Conquest but like Old English stair, these structures may have been too insignificant to attract much attention in deeds and wills, the sort of documentary evidence that has survived. By the fourteenth century, wharf ‘turning-around place’ and quay ‘campshed river-frontage’ seem to have become interchangeable (OED wharf, n.¹: ‘qwarvæ sive kayæ’ (c1320), ‘la novell Keye autrement appelle le Wherf’ (1397)). The dock at Deptford occurs in a text of the financial year 1417–1418, of unknown etymology but also found in Dutch, and the possibly Anglo-Norman-derived word pier is first attested in a late Old English text but only occurs thereafter in its sense ‘foundation of a bridge span’, not meaning ‘Thames-side landing-stage’ until the 1820s. The stages and hypotheses presented here are all compatible, that is, some pertaining at some points in time for some speakers and others for others—but the switch from the early Scandinavian meaning of bridge to pier in the sense ‘landing-stage at the end of a jetty’ had nothing to do with multilingual riverside activity but was due to the technological development of steampower resulting in a linguistic transfer from the sea-pier landing-stages of nineteenth-century commercial steamboat services: pier ‘landing-stage’ was a Regency daytripper steaming up the Thames from Margate.

It has been posited that riverside -bridge names in London share their semantic content with Old Norse bryggja ‘landing-stage, jetty’ and that the riverside lane names in -gate share their semantic content with Old Norse gata ‘passageway, lane’. Ashdown, Clark, Jesch, and Finlay noted that the ‘jetty’ sense of bridge makes better sense than London Bridge in the description in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla of c.1230 of Olaf Haraldsson’s early eleventh-century attack on Lundúna bryggjur, given the plurality of bryggjur. Their observations are supported by the long subsequent usage of bridge meaning ‘jetty’ on City, Westminster and Lambeth riverbanks.

Old Norse gata ‘passage, lane’ has been related to the observation that formerly there were more -gate wharf-names than have survived to the present, and more -gate lane-names leading up to the town from these wharves, yet no gate lane-names elsewhere in London (streets leading to gates in the City wall are named -street in early texts, such as Lutgatestrate).¹⁷⁵ It is also noticeable that the term watergate was common enough in London but not so common in other parts of the country. It is suggested here that in the City, Southwark, and environs the word watergate meant ‘lane leading to a public waterside access-point’. It is not possible to draw a robust conclusion from a negative, but bridge ‘jetty’, stulp ‘prop’, campshed ‘riverside revetment’ also had Early Scandinavian cognates, were commonly used in London, but are not so readily found further afield (English Dialect Dictionary camp-shot, sb. and v. reports a Thames Valley, Surrey and Hampshire distribution).

Dyson hypothesised that -gate lane-names originated with gates through the Roman city wall, which ran along the alignment of what was later to be Thames Street, allowing the continuation of Bread Street, Bow Lane, Botolph Lane, through the wall to the foreshore. I hypothesise that these -gate wharf and lane names were reinforced by a Cnut-period Viking influence. If Scandinavian compatriots did either name, or perceive lanes named Billingesgate, Rederisgate, Douegate, Ebbegate, Oystregate, Daneborgate, Kingesgate, Wolsiesgate, Aubreyswatꝰgate as containing early Scandinvian gata ‘passageway, lane’, then by analogy, other wharf-terms could become interchangeable with the names of their associated lanes too, and this is indeed what happened: lanes named hithe (such as the lanes named Queenhithe, Timberhithe, Endiff), lanes named wharf (such as the lane named Fysshwharfe), lanes named bridge (such as the lane named Ivy Bridge), lanes named stair (such as the lane called Faukesteire)—even though bridge and stair did not have intrinsic ‘quayside, wharf’ meanings. I have not noted any lanes named with second-element -quay, -dock or -pier, these terms being the most recent in this assemblage. These -hithe, -wharf, -bridge and -stair lane-names could have developed by analogy considerably later. This hypothesis depends upon a bilingual interpretation of -gate, and a perception of a wharf-complex as a whole—the campshed frontage to the river, possibly with a stulp-propped jetty projecting out into the stream, the flat landing-area giving onto the river, the buildings and yards facing onto the riverside landing-area, the sloping lane leading up towards the City—so that there was no conflict in understanding, say, Timberhithe as either part or whole of the name of wharf, lane, tenements, yards, and loading/unloading areas. By the same token, Dyson’s original hypothesis that Old English geat meant ‘opening in the Roman wall’ could have been applied to the earliest -gate wharf-names but then become transferred by analogy to later watergates. The landing-stages named Irongate on the east side of the Tower, Stongate and Stangate at Lambeth might be instances of this, or they may be references to actual locked gates made of iron and stone.

Finally, some rather under-studied wharf-names have been presented in accordance with Philip E. Jones’ 1955 edict (ad pontem Wulfuni/Olvendebrigge ‘Wulfun’s jetty’, le Campete kaij ‘the campshed quay’). Taken together with such local terms as hythe, foreshore, eyot, some vocabulary has been identified as particularly common to this part of the Thames: stulp ‘post’, bridge ‘jetty’, campshed ‘crest-board’ or ‘bank-board’, watergate ‘way to public river-access’.

Acknowledgements

This discussion stems from a paper presented to the Docklands History Group’s annual conference for 2019 on ‘The Medieval Port of London and River Thames’, held at the Museum of London. My thanks to organiser Chris Ellmers, and to Keith Briggs, John Clark, Richard Dance, and Sara Pons-Sanz for criticisms of earlier drafts. I am most indebted to John Clark for alerting me to Tony Dyson’s work on wharf names, for wharf-term discussion, and for his suggestion that -bridge ‘landing-stage’ is relevant to the interpretation of Old Norse sagas. I am also grateful to Graham Dawson and Martha Carlin for drawing my attention to the watergate by St Olave’s church in Southwark, and to John Clark and Martha Carlin for their generous provision of photocopies and references. I am grateful to Richard Coates and Philip Durkin for their etymological expertise, and also to Arjen Versloot for his advice on Middle Dutch. I am exceedingly indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their sage criticisms, advice, and references.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Wright

Laura Wright is Professor of English Language at the University of Cambridge. ‘London English’, her summary of the history of the London dialect, is in Volume 4 of The New Cambridge History of the English Language. She is the editor of The Multilingual Origins of Standard English (2020), and her most recent book is The Social Life of Words: A Historical Approach (2023).

Notes

1 Philip E. Jones, ‘Street-Names of the City of London, By Eilert Ekwall’, The Antiquaries Journal, 35 (1955), 117.

2 Helena M. Chew, ‘Calendar and Indexes to Escheat Rolls, 1340–89’, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), CLA/040/01/017 (no date); London Possessory Assizes: A Calendar, ed. Helena M. Chew (London: London Record Society, 1965); The London Eyre of 1244, ed. Helena M. Chew and Martin Weinbaum (London: London Record Society, 1970); London Assize of Nuisance, 1301–1431: A Calendar, ed. Helena M. Chew and William Kellaway (London: London Record Society, 1973); The London Eyre of 1276, ed. Martin Weinbaum (London: London Record Society, 1976); Vanessa A. Harding, ‘The Port of London in the Fourteenth Century: Its Topography, Administration, and Trade’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 1983); Anthony G. Dyson, ‘The Early London Waterfront and the Local Street System’, in Aspects of Saxo-Norman London III: The Bridgehead and Billingsgate to 1200, ed. Ken Steedman, Tony Dyson, and John Schofield (London: London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1992); Anthony G. Dyson, ‘The Terms Quay and Wharf and the Early Medieval London Waterfront’, in Waterfront Archaeology in Britain and Northern Europe, ed. Gustav Milne and Brian Hobley (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1981); Anthony G. Dyson, ‘The Medieval Watergates of the Intramural City of London’, in Hidden Histories and Records of Antiquity: Essays on Saxon and Medieval London for John Clark, Curator Emeritus, ed. Jonathan Cotton, Jenny Hall, Jackie Keily, Roz Sherris, and Roy Stephenson (London: London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 2014), 41–44.

3 Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 129–131. I follow the trail blazed by City of London historian Tony Dyson, who has discussed these wharf names in publications spanning the last forty years. Dyson’s purpose was to interpret archaeologists’ findings in relation to manuscript evidence, whereas I focus on the legacies of the various languages spoken in London. With regard to earlier centuries, Rory Naismith, ‘London and Its Mint c.880–1066: A Preliminary Survey’, British Numismatic Journal 83 (2013), 44–74, provides references to Frisian merchants in London as early as 679, and by the early eighth century Bede referred to many peoples coming to London by land and sea.

4 Dyson, ‘Quay and Wharf’, 38.

5 Jürgen Udolph, ‘The Colonisation of England by Germanic Tribes on the Basis of Place-Names’, in Language Contact and Development around the North Sea, ed. Merja Stenroos, Martti Mäkinen, and Inge Særheim (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012), 23–52. There is debate about the topic of Germanic migration and assimilation in fifth- and sixth-century England. For example, Susan Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the English (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), argues that rather than via immigration from north-west Europe, English culture was an adaptation by late Romano-British peoples to their new post-imperial context. Oosthuizen’s evidence is refuted in John Hines, ‘The Emergence of the English. By Susan Oosthuizen’, The Antiquaries Journal, 100 (2020), 464–466.

6 For a summary of early London history, see: Rory Naismith, Citadel of the Saxons: The Rise of Early London (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). For place-name etymologies, see: The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, ed. Victor Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For dating of the Roman river wall, see: Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 14, 96–99, who discuss the drop in river level, the erosion of the wall, and consequent undermining and destabilisation of the embankment behind it, plus a foreshore dangerously littered with protruding Roman timber, as reasons for not immediately repopulating the City. For names of Scandinavian origin borne by early Londoners, see: Eilert Ekwall, ‘Old English Names of Scandinavian Origin’, in Early London Personal Names (Lund: Gleerup, 1947), 73–85.

7 Andrew Reynolds, ‘London into the Age of Cnut: An Archaeological Perspective’, in Anglo-Danish Empire: A Companion to the Reign of King Cnut the Great, ed. Richard North, Erin Goeres, and Alison Finlay (Berlin: De Gruyter/Medieval Institute Publications, 2022), 29–31; Della Hooke, ‘Uses of Waterways in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England, ed. John Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40–41.

8 Udolph, ‘Colonisation of England’, 33–34. For hythes around Britain and riverside hythes of the Humber, Wash, and Thames, see: Ann Cole, ‘The Place-Name Evidence for Water Transport in Early Medieval England’, in Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England, ed. John Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 61–74.

9 I thank Arjen Versloot for the reference to Michiel de Vaan, The Dawn of Dutch: Language Contact in the Western Low Countries before 1200 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017), 442. De Vaan posits derivation of cognates English hithe ‘landing-place’ and Middle Dutch hide ‘fishing port’ from an Indo-European verb *xinþan, ‘to reach for, catch’, with an original meaning for the noun of ‘transfer, place for transshipment’.

10 Keith Briggs notes that hithe could have been in earlier use elsewhere but gone unrecorded, and also Low German hude. See: Adolf Bach, Deutsche Namenkunde, 3 vols (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1952–1956), 2:290–291.

11 Lundentunes hyð: The Electronic Sawyer (https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk) S 98; Eilert Ekwall, Street-Names of the City of London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 35; Cole, ‘Place-Name Evidence for Water Transport’, 73.

12 Cælichyth: Electronic Sawyer S 106; Watts, Dictionary of English Place-Names, 129; J. E. B. Gover, Allen Mawer, and Frank Merry Stenton, The Place-Names of Middlesex, Apart from the City of London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 85; Hooke, ‘Uses of Waterways’, 41.

13 Æðeredes hyd: Electronic Sawyer S 346; Julian Ayre and Robin Wroe-Brown, ‘The Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Waterfront and Settlement at Queenhithe: Excavations at Bull Wharf, City of London’, Archaeological Journal, 172.2 (2015), 195–272; Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 18; Hooke, ‘Uses of Waterways’, 40, 41; Ekwall, Street-Names, 35.

14 Stybbanhyþe: Electronic Sawyer S 1458a; Gover, Mawer, and Stenton, Place-Names of Middlesex, 149–150; Cole, ‘Place-Name Evidence for Water Transport’, 69.

15 Fischuthe: Electronic Sawyer S 940; LMA, Deeds enrolled in the Court of Husting (Husting roll) 20/44, microfilm X109/400-424; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125.

16 Lambehiðe: Electronic Sawyer S 1036; Watts, Dictionary of English Place-Names, 357; Hooke, ‘Uses of Waterways’, 41.

17 Putelei: The National Archives (TNA), Great Domesday Book, E 31/2/1/893, fol. 30; Watts, Dictionary of English Place-Names, 486.

18 Retherhithe: TNA, E 40/7880; Watts, Dictionary of English Place-Names, 357; Cole, ‘Place-Name Evidence for Water Transport’, 69.

19 Terram de Ænedetham: Westminster Abbey Charters, 1066–c.1214, ed. Emma Mason (London: London Record Society, 1988), no. 261; Gover, Mawer, and Stenton, Place-Names of Middlesex, 168; Cole, ‘Place-Name Evidence for Water Transport’, 69. Endiff and Redriff (the traditional pronunciation of Rotherhithe) show th-fronting: like <Endyve>, Queenhithe is spelt <Queenehyue> on the Agas map c.1561–1570, whereby voiced dental fricatives fronted to voiced labio-dental fricatives. The long vowel then shortened and word-final /v/ devoiced to /f/ due to low stress.

20 Ripa Regine anglice Quenhyth: Glasgow University, Hunterian Museum Library, Cartulary of Holy Trinity Aldgate, MS U.2.6, fol. 172v; published in The Cartulary of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, ed. Gerald A.J. Hodgett (London: London Record Society, 1971), no. 977; Hooke, ‘Uses of Waterways’, 41; Ekwall, Street-Names, 29; Two Early London Subsidy Rolls, ed. Eilert Ekwall (Lund: G. W. K. Gleerup, 1951), 332; Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 19.

21 Tymberhethe: TNA, E 40/2684, published in A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the Public Record Office, ed. Henry Churchill Maxwell Lyte, 6 vols (London, 1894), 2:A 2684; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 362, 363; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 19.

22 Garlecheythe: LMA, Letter-Book B, COL/AD/01/002, fol. 125 (facieinversa, v); Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe, 11 vols (London: Francis, 1899–1912), B, 260; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront, 125. These references are to St James Garlickhythe, presupposing an earlier wharf.

23 Briggehuthe: LMA, Husting roll 14/44, microfilm X109/400-424; Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, ed. Reginald R. Sharpe, 2 vols (London, 1889), 2:62.

24 Lo(ng) Hethe: LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fols. 256v, 273v, 274.

25 Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis: Liber Albus, Liber Custumarum, et Liber Horn, ed. and trans. Henry T. Riley, 3 vols. (London, 1859–1862), 2:cix–cxiv. For the common latrine at Temple Bridge in 1360, see: Memorials of London and London Life in the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. and trans. Henry T. Riley (London, 1868), 305; LMA, Letter-Book G, COL/AD/01/007, fol. 88. For the common latrine at Queenhithe in 1370, see: LMA, Letter-Book G, COL/AD/01/007, fol. 285v. For the common latrine at Dowgate in 1429/30, see: LMA, Letter-Book K, COL/AD/01/010, fol. 74. For the common latrine at the stulps at London Bridge in 1461–1462, see: LMA, Bridgemasters’ Annual Accounts and Rental, Volume 3, (1460–84), CLA/007/FN/02/003, fol. 25v. For a discussion of common latrines at Temple Bridge, Queenhithe, London Bridge (1306), Wynwharf (1316), over the Thames at the Westminster wool-staple (built 1353–54), at Baynards Castle (1421), plus many other latrines illegally encroached at the ends of the lanes leading down to the Thames, see: Ernest L. Sabine, ‘Latrines and Cesspools of Mediaeval London’, Speculum, 9.3 (1934), 303–321. See also: Ernest L. Sabine, ‘City Cleaning in Mediaeval London’, Speculum, 12.1 (1937), 19–43. See: Harding, ‘Port of London’, 352, for two latrines in le Kynggeslane in 1343; and see LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fols. 273, 274, for latrines at le Watergate, Ebbegate, Queenhythe, Lekyngeslane in a survey of 1343/4.

26 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (oed.com), gate, n.¹; Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (DONP), https://onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?, gata sb. f. I. 1; Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands, ed. Marlies Philippa, Frans Debrabandere, Arend Quak, Tanneke Schoonheim, and Nicoline van der Sijs (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003–2009), http://etymologiebank.ivdnt.org/trefwoord/gat. Arjen Versloot clarifies that geat is a neuter a-stem PGmc. *gata-, whereas gata is derived from *gatôn-, a fem. n-stem.

27 Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41.

28 Billingesgate: British Library, Cotton MS Cotton Domitian A VII, ‘Liber Vitae’, fol. 20r; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41; Ekwall, Street-Names, 36, 28; John Lindow, Norse Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125.

29 Rederesgate: TNA E 40/7309, Chirograph, not indented, being a grant by N[orman] the prior, and the convent of Holy Trinity, London, to Brunloc, and to his wife, Leuiarda, Aduinus his son, and Leuieua, daughter of Leuiarda, and their heirs of two wharfs (hweruos) with land adjoining at Rederesgate; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; Ekwall, Street-Names, 154–155; venella vocata Retheresgate (1343): LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 273b.

30 Duuegate: ‘Charters of the priors and convent: Nos. 339-49’, in Mason, Westminster Abbey Charters, 185–196, no. 342 (Westminster Abbey Domesday, Muniment Book 11, fol. 486v); Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125.

31 Botulfigate: The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Second Year of the Reign of King Richard I: Michaelmas 1190, ed. Dorothy M. Stenton (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1925), 156; Botuluesgat’ 1200–1201: The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Second Year of the Reign of King John: Michaelmas 1200, ed. Dorothy M. Stenton (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1934), 150; Harding, Port of London, 508; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125.

32 Ebbegate: LMA, Letter-Book I, COL/AD/01/009, fol. 151; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41; Ekwall, Street-Names, 191; venella vocata Ebbegate (1343): LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 273b; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125.

33 Oystregate: LMA, Husting roll 2/55, microfilm X109/400-424; Sharpe, Calendar of Wills, 1:4; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; Ekwall, Street-Names, 192; venella vocata Oystergate (1343): LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 273.

34 Watergate, la Watregate: Oxford, Magdalen College, Surrey Deeds, Southwark 61, c.1250–60, and Oxford, Magdalen College, Surrey Deeds, Southwark 17, 29 August 1297. My thanks to Martha Carlin for these references. For the archaeology of St Olave’s dock, see: Bruce Watson, Trevor Brigham, and Tony Dyson, London Bridge 2000 Years of a River Crossing (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2001), 150–153.

35 Daneborgate: Select Pleas, Starrs, and Other Records from the Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, A.D. 1220–1284, ed. James MacMullen Rigg (London: Selden Society, 1902), 16; Ekwall, Street-Names, 126; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41, 42; Harding, Port of London, 359, 360. DONP, borg sb. f.; OED, borough, n.; Dictionary of Old English, https://www.doe.utoronto.ca, burh; Middle English Dictionary (MED), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/, burgh n.(1)).

36 Kingesgate (venella): Rotuli Hundredorum temp. Hen. III et Edw. I. in Turr’ Lond’, I (London: Record Commission, 1812), 433; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41 (whence date of first attestation is quoted); Ekwall, Street-Names, 191–192; Harding, Port of London, 351–353, Kyngeslane alias Arouneslane (1449). Kingeswatergate: LMA, Husting roll 5/5, microfilm X109/400-424; Tony Dyson, ‘Documentary Survey’, in Medieval Waterfront Development at Trig Lane, London, Gustav Milne and Chrissie Milne (London: London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1982), 5, 8n7.

37 Estwatergate: LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 274b; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41.

38 Wolsiesgate: LMA, Husting roll 2/41, microfilm X109/400-424; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; Ekwall, Street-Names, 132.

39 Watergate: Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41, source not identified, but a wharf is mentioned in 1284–1285: ‘To Robert his eldest son his capital messuage and wharf in the parish of Berckingechurch near the lane called “Berewardeslane”’; Sharpe, Calendar of Wills, 1:69–73.

40 Aubreyswatꝰgate: LMA, Husting roll 5/13, microfilm X109/400; Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41, 42; Maxwell Lyte, Ancient Deeds, A. 7283.

41 Seint Dūstones watꝰgate: Rotuli Hundredorum, 406.

42 Stongate: LMA, Letter-Book D, COL/AD/01/004, 143. Not listed in Dyson ‘Medieval Watergates’.

43 Watergate: LMA, Letter-Book D, COL/AD/01/004, 143.

44 Stangate: Survey of London 23, Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall, 77n2: ‘In the Lambeth Palace Accounts there is a reference 1322–1323 to “mending the wall along the Thames at Stangate”’; Wenceslaus Hollar, Map of London (1675), https://www.bl.uk/picturing-places/articles/wenceslaus-hollar-as-a-map-maker [accessed 27 March 2021].

45 Westwatꝰgate: LMA, Husting roll 87/33, microfilm X109/408; 1359 Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41.

46 le Watergate: Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41, source not identified.

47 le Watergate: LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 273v.

48 Steilwharfgate: TNA, Miscellaneous Inquisitions, (1384–1385), C 145/232: j stoklok en la Olderente de la stielwharf pꝰ j maison de j frowe … lostiel del Gascoign encontre Steilwharfgate.

49 watꝰgate atte wolkeye and watergatestrete anynst Berelane: LMA, CLA/024/01/02/051, Plea and Memoranda Roll A50 m. 7v.

50 William Morgan, London Actually Surveyed (1682), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_actually_surveyed_by_Wm_Morgan_1682.jpg [accessed 28 March 2021].

51 ‘Trial of John Sindal, Anthony Lindsey, Ethelbert Hawks, 26 February 1735’, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div = t17350226-61. The Survey of English Place-Names lists St Toolyes Watergate in a rental of 1656, and Toolies Gate in 1682: https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/Surrey/Southwark/53287105b47fc40c23000846-Tooley + Street [accessed 24 August 2022].

52 John Rocque, Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster and Borough of Southwark, 1746, in The A to Z of Georgian London, ed. Ralph Hyde (Lympne: Harry Margary in association with the Guildhall Library, London, 1981). Toolys Watergate and Edlins Gate are the names of lanes leading up from Cox’s Wharf between the Bridge House and Battle Bridge on Rocque’s 1746 map. A ‘Mr Edlin’s Wharfe’ at Westminster was assessed in London Hearth Tax: Westminster 1664 (2011), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-hearth-tax/westminster/1664/st-margarets-westminster-mr-edlins-wharf [accessed 25 March 2021].

53 Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 93.

54 Ekwall, Street-Names, 143; DONP, billingr sb. m. (cogn.). John Blair, ‘Beyond the Billingas: From Lay Wealth to Monastic Wealth on the Lincolnshire Fen-Edge’, in The Land of the English Kin, ed. Alexander Langlands and Ryan Lavelle (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 390, says the sixth or seventh century followers of Billa in south-east Lincolnshire ‘along the eastern and seawards-facing side of the zone between the Trent and the Wash’, who have left trace in the place-names Billinghay and Billingborough, were probably of mixed Brittonic and Anglian origin.

55 Henry A. Harben, A Dictionary of London (London: Jenkins, 1918).

56 Strande: Electronic Sawyer S 670; Gover, Mawer, and Stenton, Place-Names of Middlesex, 173. OED strand, n.¹; DONP, strond sb, f. I. 1) beach, shore, shoreline, coast.

57 Strande: Domesday Book, https://opendomesday.org/place/TQ3280/southwark/.

58 Stronde: ‘London and Middlesex Fines: Edward III’, in A Calendar to the Feet of Fines for London and Middlesex: Volume 1, Richard I–Richard III, ed. W.J. Hardy and W. Page (London, 1892), 105–152; Gover, Mawer and Stenton, Place-Names of Middlesex, 89.

59 Depford stronde: LMA, Bridgemasters’ Annual Accounts and Rental, Volume 3 (1460–84), CLA/007/FN/02/003, fol. 37Av.

60 Molestrand: TNA, will of Elizabeth Rocket, Prob.11/100/223, fols. 215v–216v.

61 Etymologiebank: http://etymologiebank.ivdnt.org/trefwoord/werf1.

62 Wermanecher: The Electronic Sawyer S 1002: Praeterea addidi loco illi praelibato infra Londoniam, partem terrae de terra illa, uidelicet, quae Wermanecher Anglice nuncupatur, cum hueruo eidem terrae pertinenti, http://www.anglosaxons.net/hwaet/?do=seek&query=S+1002 [accessed 25 March 2021]; Ekwall, Street-Names, 38; Jeremy Haslam, ‘The Development of London by King Alfred: A Reassessment’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 61 (2010), 120; Laura Wright, Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 12, 151.

63 Heiwarft: Feet of fines of the ninth year of the reign of King Richard I, A.D. 1197 to A.D. 1198 (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1898), no. 81; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; venella vocata la Heywharf (1343): LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 273b.

64 Wudewarue: Cartulary of St Mary Clerkenwell, ed. William Owen Hassall (London: Royal Historical Society, 1949), no. 345; wodewayrue: LMA, Husting roll 20/44, microfilm X109/401 (1281–1300); Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125.

65 ffiswarfe (St Magnus): LMA, CLA/007/EM/02/B/049; la fywayrue: LMA, Husting roll 20/44, microfilm X109/401 (1281–1300); Harding, ‘Port of London’, 493–496; le ffisshwharf apd le Hole: LMA, Husting roll 119/166, microfilm X109/414.

66 Brokenewharf: Maxwell Lyte, Ancient Deeds, A 1875; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 361, 367.

67 Stokfiswarf: LMA, Husting roll 32/40, microfilm X109/400-424; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 544–545.

68 Holirodewarf: St Paul’s MSS A16/251; LMA, Husting roll 34/75, microfilm X109/400-424 (1305); Harding, ‘Port of London’, 517.

69 Botulfh Warf: LMA, Letter-Book B, COL/AD/01/002, fol. 95b (xl b); Harding, ‘Port of London’, 508.

70 Stonwarf: LMA, Husting roll 32/40, microfilm X109/402.

71 ffihswarf (Trig Lane): LMA, Husting roll 34/99, microfilm X109/402; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 354–356; Dyson, ‘Documentary Survey’, in Medieval Waterfront, 5, 8n4; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; venella vocata Fysshwharfe (1343): LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 274. Fisshyngwharf: ‘Misc. Roll DD (nos 349-399)’, in Assize of Nuisance, 85–98.

72 Wynwharf: LMA, Husting roll 45/71, microfilm X109/400-424; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 408.

73 Steueneswerf: LMA, Husting roll 45/121, microfilm X109/403; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 480–482.

74 Dibeleswarf: LMA, Husting roll 45/184, microfilm X109/403; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 331.

75 Saltwharf: LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fols. 255, 273v, 274; Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 125; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 375.

76 Wollewharf: LMA, Husting roll 54/110, microfilm X109/400-424; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 549.

77 Herberdes Wharf: LMA, Husting roll 62/52, microfilm X109/404; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 511–512.

78 Cosynesquarf: LMA, Husting roll 63/212, microfilm X109/404; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 421.

79 Pauliswharf: LMA, Husting roll 82/82, microfilm X109/407; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 341.

80 Drynkewaterswarfe: LMA, Miscellaneous Roll EE, Miscellaneous Inquisitions, m. 33d; LMA, Husting roll 97/173, microfilm X109/410, (1369–70).

81 Gladewyneswarf: LMA, Husting roll 89/88, microfilm X109/409; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 359.

82 ffresshfysshwwarf: LMA, Letter-Book G, COL/AD/01/007, fol. 136v; Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III: Volume 12, 1364–1368, ed. Henry Churchill Maxwell Lyte (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1910), 74.

83 Castelbaynardwarf: LMA, Husting roll 94/94, microfilm X109/409, Harding, ‘Port of London’, 327, 329.

84 Frosseswarf: TNA E 40/7309, Endorsed: Contra Branloc & fiT ejus Edwin’ de ij wervis ap[u]d Rederisgate … Frosseswarf Magni martiris (Maxwell Lyte, Ancient Deeds, A. 7309, A. 7361), TNA E 40/7361, E 40/7377 (1371–2). For the Frosh family, see: Ekwall, Two Early London Subsidy Rolls, 193n10.

ffreshwharf: LMA, Husting roll 96/207, microfilm X109/410; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 502.

85 Asselyniswharf: TNA, E 40/2512; Vanessa Harding, ‘From Asselyne’s Wharf to Wiggins’ Key, or, Whatever Happened to Browne’s Place?’, London Topographical Record, 32 (2021), 37–62. Pakemannys wharf: TNA, E 40/1779, transcribed in A Book of London English, 1384–1425, ed. Raymond Wilson Chambers and Marjorie Daunt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 230–232; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 540.

86 Pesokeswharf: LMA, Husting roll 105/23, microfilm X109/400-424; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 548.

87 Pykeswharf: LMA, Husting roll 108/117, microfilm X109/412; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 538.

88 Stielwharf: TNA, C 145/232.

89 Blaunchewharf: LMA, Husting roll 129/106, microfilm X109/415; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 410.

90 Trayersquarff: LMA, Bridgemasters’ Annual Accounts and Rental, Volume 1, 1404–21, CLA/007/FN/02/003, fol. 10.

91 Dentoneswharf: LMA, Husting roll 141/21, microfilm X109/417; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 534.

92 Venureswharf: LMA, Letter-Book K, COL/AD/01/010, fol. 64.

93 Risshewharf: LMA, Husting roll 168/15, microfilm X109/419; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 414.

94 Malteswharf: LMA, Bridgemasters’ Annual Account and Rental, Volume 3, CLA/007/FN/02/003, fol. 29v.

95 Brughous wharf: LMA, Bridgemasters’ Annual Account and Rental, Volume 3, CLA/007/FN/02/003, fol. 32v.

96 Lymewharf: LMA, Bridgemasters’ Annual Account and Rental, Volume 4 (1484–1509), CLA/007/FN/02/004, fols. 200v, 206v.

97 For archaeological evidence of re-occupation of the City at Queenhithe dated to c.890, see: Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 55; for Cnut’s control of London, see: Bruce Dickens, ‘The Cult of S. Olave in the British Isles’, Saga-Book, 12 (1937–1945), 55. For the Anglo-Norman spelling <canute> see: Thijs Porck and Jodie E.V. Mann, ‘How Cnut became Canute (and how Harthacnut became Airdeconut)’, North-Western European Language Evolution, 67.2 (2014), 237–243.

98 Gover, Mawer, and Stenton, Place-Names of Middlesex, 165. Dickens, ‘The Cult of S. Olave’, 64–67, reports St Olave Tooley St, Southwark (in existence before 1085); St Olave Old Jewry (first recorded c.1100); St Olave Silver St (first recorded 1181); St Nicholas Olave, Bread Street Hill (first recorded 1188); St Olave Hart St (first recorded c.1200); St Olave Broad St (first recorded 1244); St Olave in the Shambles (first recorded 1373–1374); and a chantry to St Olave in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1391. Reynolds, ‘London Into the Age of Cnut’, 53–54, explains St Bride as an import via a Scandinavian relationship with Dublin.

99 Dickens, ‘The Cult of S. Olave’, 78; Pamela Nightingale, ‘The Origin of the Court of Husting and the Danish Influence on London’s Development into a Capital City, English Historical Review, 104 (1987), 567–568.

100 ‘brug’, http://etymologiebank.ivdnt.org/trefwoord/brug.

101 Ad pontem Wulfuni: Glasgow University, Hunterian Museum Library, MS U. 2. 6, fol. 39: ‘[c. 1231–8] Grant by Roger Duke to the prior and canons of Legh of land and a residence (capitale managium) with house and ‘kays’ formerly of Roger de Blakesapelton; abutments, land formerly of Goda the Usurer (fen(er)atricis) on the east and the gate of the Thames at the bridge of Wulsun (ad pontem Wulsuni) on the west’; Hodgett, Cartulary of Holy Trinity, no. 222. My gratitude to Richard Coates for identification of the long s/f confusion: Hodgett (or a scribe before him) has read Wulfuni as Wulsuni.

 Weluedebriggꝰ: LMA, CLA/040/01/001, digitised as page 6; Chew and Weinbaum, London Eyre of 1244, 52, read <Welnedebrigge>.

 Olvendebrigge: TNA, E 40/1778: Release by Geoffrey de Schesewick to William de Cumbe, both citizens of London, of 6s. yearly rent issuing from a tenement, formerly Reginald le Sipwritche’s, in the parish of St. Dunstan by the Tower, stretching from Olvendebrigge on the east to the Thames on the south, and King’s Street on the north.

 Holuedebregge: LMA, Husting roll 16/113, microfilm X109/401: watꝰgate que <u> ocat <²> holuedebrigge; Harding, ‘Port of London’, 539, 540, 542.

102 Lauendresbrigge: LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 274.

103 Bochersbrigg: LMA, Letter-Book G, COL/AD/01/007, fol. 233; Sharpe, Calendar Letter-book, G, xxvi, xxviii. For voiding of butchers’ refuse at Bochersbrigge at Blackfriars 1355–1369, and for the East Cheap butchers’ purpose-built jetty at Queenhithe in 1402, see: Ernest L. Sabine, ‘Butchering in Mediaeval London’, Speculum, 8.3 (1933), 335–353.

104 Tempelbrygg: LMA, Letter-Book G, COL/AD/01/007, fols. 316, 318; Sharpe, Calendar Letter-book, G, xxvi, xxviii.

105 Queenes bridge: Civitas Londinum (‘Agas Map’) (c.1561–70), in A to Z of Elizabethan London, ed. Adrian Prockter, Robert Taylor, and John Fisher (London: London Topographical Society, 1979). For the anterior history of the Queen’s Bridge, see: Elizabeth Hallam Smith, ‘From the King’s Bridge to Black Rod’s Stairs: The Palace of Westminster and the Thames, 1189–2021’, London Topographical Record, 32 (2021), 1–36.

106 Preuy bridge: ‘Agas Map’.

107 Yuie brydge: ‘Agas Map’.

108 Lambeth Bridge: Sharpe, Calendar Letter-Book, L, 48n1, in reference to Queen Elizabeth ‘coming by Lambeth bridge into the fields’, as reported in John Strype, An Appendix to the Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 1821), 165.

109 Old Pallace bridge: John Norden, Map of Westminster, engraved by Pieter Van den Keere (1593), https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/John_Norden%27s_Map_of_Westminster_Large_version.jpeg [accessed 28 March 2021].

110 Kinges bridge: Norden, Map of Westminster. For the anterior history of the King’s Bridge see: Smith, ‘King’s Bridge to Black Rod’s Stairs’, 4, recorded as pons regis in 1189.

111 Whitehal bridge: Norden, Map of Westminster.

112 Westminster bridge: Norden, Map of Westminster.

113 Strond bridge: Wenceslaus Hollar, Map of London, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_Q-6-136 [accessed 28 March 2021].

114 Battlebridge: William Morgan, London actually surveyed (1682), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_actually_surveyed_by_Wm_Morgan_1682.jpg, [accessed 28 March 2021].

115 Cuper’s Bridge: Daily Courant, 15 May 1721.

116 Dancing Bridge: Daily Courant, 3 June 1730.

117 Willow Bridge was situated where the eyots labelled Isle of Dogs are positioned on Robert Adam’s map Thamesis Descriptio, BL Add. MS 44839 (1588). See: Laura Wright, ‘On the Place-name Isle of Dogs’, in From Clerks to Corpora: Essays in Honour of Nils-Lennart Johannesson, ed. Britt Erman, Gunnel Melchers, Philip Shaw, and Peter Sundkvist (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2015), 87–115. Laurie and Whittle’s New Map of London (BL Maps Crace Port. 6.211, 1804), labels Willow Br(idge) Sta(irs).

118 High Bridge: Richard Horwood, William Faden’s fourth edition of Horwood’s Plan (BL Maps 33.e.24, 1819). ‘Mr. Thomas Wiggens, Surveyor, at the High Bridge in Greenwich’ (Universal London Morning Advertiser, 12 August 1743).

119 Cheesemonger John Wolvyne, 1327, Letter-Book E, fol. 191; Wolvin Cote, Husting Roll 67/58-63; Sharpe, Calendar of Wills, 2:436–443.

120 Martha Carlin and Victor Belcher, ‘Gazetteer to the c.1270 and c.1520 Maps with Historical Notes’, in The British Atlas of Historic Towns, Volume 3: The City of London From Prehistoric Times to c.1520, ed. Mary D. Lobel and William Henry Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 97.

121 See Woolven in Patrick Hanks, Richard Coates, and Peter McClure, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For loss of /w/ word-initially before rounded vowels: Richard Jordan, Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology, trans. Eugene J. Crook (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 155. For h-variation: Heinrich Ramisch, ‘Analysing Linguistic Atlas Data: The (Socio-)Linguistic Context of H-Dropping’, Dialectologia, 1 (2010), 175–184. Keith Briggs however suggests that it is not the name Wulfwine at all but the noun wholue ‘culvert’, as in Whoulnebregg, Wolvebregg, Essex.

122 For Olvendebrigge and Asselyne’s Wharf, see: Harding, ‘Asselyne’s Wharf’, 50. For John Olvyng, Rector of Godmersham, see: Harding, ‘Port of London’, 540. For Dyson’s suggestion that all Thames-side lanes in the City ended in jetties, see: Dyson, ‘Quay and Wharf’, 38. Saegrímr of Segrim’s Lane is another Scandinavian name, see: Veronica J. Smart, ‘Moneyers of the Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage: The Danish Dynasty, 1017–42’, Anglo-Saxon England, 16 (1987), 261, 263, 266, 307. Saegrímr may have been an Anglo-Scandinavian name as it is not evidenced in the Scandinavian homelands although it appears on English coins from Nottingham and Thetford.

123 Nightingale, ‘Origin of the Court of Husting’, 568. For a discussion of Osgot clapa, see: Timothy Bolton, The Empire of Cnut the Great: Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 20–21, 61–64.

124 MED brigge n. 2 (c) ‘a dock or landing platform’, first attestation ?1406.

125 Judith Jesch, Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 51; Christine Fell, ‘Víkingarvísur’, in Speculum Norroenum, ed. Ursula Dronke, Guðrún P. Helgadóttir, Gerd Wolfgang Weber, and Hans Bekker-Nielsen (Odense: Odense University Press, 1981), 106–122; John Clark, Saxon and Norman London (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1989); Alan Vince, Saxon London: An Archaeological Investigation (London: Seaby, 1990); Matthew Townend, English Place-Names in Skaldic Verse (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1998). I am indebted to John Clark for references to Sturluson’s account. Clark suggested in ‘Saxon and Norman’, that ‘the obscure poem that inspired this account may describe an attack on the “wharf” rather than the “bridge” of London’ (24). He may have been influenced by Margaret Ashdown, English and Norse Documents Relating to the Reign of Ethelred the Unready (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 219n21, who notes that bryggjur usually means a wharf and that brú would be expected were a bridge intended.

126 Heimskringla Vol II: Olafr Haraldsson (The Saint), ed. and trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes (London: University College London, 2014), 9–11. The lines from Óttarr the Black are translated in Alison Finlay, ‘London Bridge is Falling Down: Unlikely Viking Adventures of a Future Aaint’, Paper presented to the Fifth London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (2016). The lines from Þórðarson are from Finlay and Faulkes’ translation.

127 Finlay, ‘London Bridge’; Ólafs saga hins Helga, En kort saga om kong Olaf den Hellige fra anden halvdeel af det tolfte aarhundrede, ed. Rudolf Keyser and Carl R. Unger (Christiania: Feilberg and Landmark, 1849), 7–8. The assumption that Ottar the Black’s verse lies behind the late seventeenth-century rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down’ is scotched in John Clark, ‘London Bridge and the Archaeology of a Nursery Rhyme’, London Archaeologist, 9.12 (2002), 338–340.

128 Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 102–104, 120, 122. John Clark, ‘Early-Eleventh-Century Weapons from the Site of Old London Bridge: A Reassessment’, in Anglo-Danish Empire: A Companion to the Reign of King Cnut the Great, ed. Richard North, Erin Goeres, and Alison Finlay (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 88–92 discusses seven ‘war axes of Scandinavian type’ and spearheads of Scandinavian Ringerike style, of the first half of the eleventh century, found near the north end of Old London Bridge in 1920, possibly on the site of Adelaide House. It is unknown whether they were deposited during the period of Danish attacks c.980–1020 or during Cnut’s reign. Reynolds, ‘London into the Age of Cnut’, says the Cheapside jeweller’s hoard ‘strongly indicate(s) a Scandinavian cultural milieu’ (61). Naismith, ‘London and its Mint’, reports an ‘extraordinary surge in London’s activity’ after 980 with regard to minting coins in response to the Viking levy of tribute and heregeld (68). For a discussion of the earliest archaeological evidence for a post-Roman, wooden London Bridge dated by means of timbers to c.987–1032, see: Watson, Brigham, and Dyson, London Bridge, 52, 57.

129 DONP stolpi sb. m., Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources stolpa; MED stulp(e (n.); OED stoop, n.¹1.a.

130 Wright, Sunnyside, 158, 191.

131 LMA, Letter-Book H, COL/AD/01/008, fol. 86.

132 Trinity College Cambridge, MS O.3.11, fol. 145v, text compiled c.1375, MS dated c.1480; LMA, St Paul’s Cathedral Dean and Chapter, Account Roll of the Collectors of Rents in London and its Suburbs, CLC/313/L/D/001/MS25125/030; LMA, Merchant Taylors’ Company, Master and Warden’s account book, CLC/L/MD/D/003/MS34048/001, fol. 104v; The Medieval Records of a London City Church (St. Mary at Hill), A.D. 1420–1559, ed. Henry Littlehales (London: Early English Text Society, 1905), 167.

133 Reynolds, ‘London into the Age of Cnut’, 57.

134 LMA, Letter-Book I, COL/AD/01/009, fol. 193v.

135 Faukesteire: Ekwall, Street-Names, 192, cites Hundred Roll for London of 7 Edward I (1279), Tower Series I (PRO), of which he had a photostat. This may be TNA, SC 5/London/Tower/22 (7 Edw I), unidentified; or SC 5/London/Tower/8 (7 Edw I),Vintry ward.

136 Bathesteres Lane: Ekwall, Street-Names, 111–112, cites Pauls MSS 1 b, m. 12 (1246–1247), 2 a (1330), which is a reference to Henry Churchill Maxwell Lyte, ‘Report on the MSS. of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s’, Historical MSS. Commission, Ninth Report (1883).

137 Newsteyre: Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 43.

138 Stayer called Maltys wharff: LMA, Journal 11, 1507–1519, COL/CC/01/01/011, fol. 364v.

139 ‘Surveying Causeways, Riverstairs and Ferry Terminals’, City of London Archaeological Society (13 April 2020), https://colas.org.uk/2020/04/13/surveying-causeways-riverstairs-and-ferry-terminals/ [accessed 25 March 2021].

140 LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fols. 273a, 274b.

141 kayum Jordani: LMA, Liber Albus, COL/CS/01/012, (1419), fol. 220b.

142 le Campete kaij: LMA, CLA/040/02/001, fol. 49v. OED campshed | campshot, n., shide, n.; English Dialect Dictionary camp-shot, sb. and v.; Laura Wright, Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 121–122; DONP ²skíð sb. n.; DONP kambr sb. m.; DMLBS cameshida ‘protective board’, first attestation 1573.

143 Kaya Sancti Pauli: Harding, Port of London, 344.

144 kayus Sancti Botulphi: LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fol. 273a.

145 Wolkaye: LMA, Letter-Book H, COL/AD/01/008, fol. 61.

146 Northwychiskey: LMA, Husting roll 138/34, microfilm X109/417; Harding, Port of London, 547.

147 Merlowes Keye: LMA, Letter-Book L, COL/AD/01/011, fol. 25.

148 For Old English camb ‘the crest or ridge of a bank of earth’, see: Richard Coates, ‘An Etymology for campshed’ (forthcoming). For Type C words, see: Richard Dance and Sara Pons-Sanz, ‘Scandinavian Influence’, in The New Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 1, ed. Laura Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press). For the Adelphi site, see: Douglas Killock ‘London’s Middle Saxon Waterfront: Excavations at the Adelphi Building, Westminster’, Transactions of London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 70 (2019), 129–165. For Three Cranes Wharf, see: Gustav Milne, The Port of Medieval London (Stroud: Tempus, 2003), 43–47 and figure 17. For the Trig Lane site, see: Milne and Milne, Medieval Waterfront, 129–165. I am grateful to John Clark for summarising this archaeological evidence.

149 LMA, Liber Custumarum, COL/CS/01/006, fols. 274a, 273b.

150 Dyson, ‘Quay and Wharf’, 38; OED quay, n.; MED keie n. (2); Anglo-Norman Dictionary, anglo-norman.net [accessed 29 March 2021] kaye. See: Wright, Sunnyside, 14, 17, for discussion of London haws.

151 The Survey of London references in Table 9 are to Survey of London, Volume 15: All Hallows, Barking-By-The-Tower, Part 2, ed. Sir George Henry Gater and Walter H. Godfrey (London: London County Council, 1934), https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol15/pt2.

152 London Bridge: Selected Accounts and Rentals, 1381–1538, ed. Vanessa Harding and Laura Wright (London: London Record Society, 1995), 187.

153 New Remarks of London: Or, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, of Southwark, and Part of Middlesex and Surrey, Within the Circumference of the Bills of Mortality (London, 1732), 398.

154 ‘dok’, http://etymologiebank.ivdnt.org/trefwoord/dok1.

155 LMA, Bridge House Accounts Weekly Payments, 1st series, Volume 2 (1412-21), CLA/007/FN/03/002, fols. 252, 264; Wright, Sources of London English, 46.

156 New Remarks of London, 398–399.

157 Samuel Leigh, Leigh’s New Picture of London (London, 1827), 468; The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 7, ed. J. Raithby (London, 1819), 614.

158 MED per(e n.(2) ‘pier of a bridge; a supportive foundation’, first attested a1125 (?OE); DMLBS 2 pera 3 [AN pere < CL petra], ‘pier in harbour, mole, breakwater, structure that provides sheltered anchorage’ (1391).

159 Langley and Belch’s Street-Directory, or Companion to their Improved Map of London, from Actual Survey, to the Present Time, 2nd edn (London, 1817).

160 For early steamboat services, see: John Armstrong and David M. Williams, The Impact of Technological Change: The Early Steamship in Britain (St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2011), 93–94, 101–102. For Margate ‘peere for shyppes’, 1535–1543, see: The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 5 vols. (London: George Bell, 1907–1910), 4:61; Rachael M. Johnson, ‘Spas and Seaside Resorts in Kent, 1660–1820’ (PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2013).

161 George W. Bacon, New Large-Scale Ordnance Atlas of London and Suburbs (1888; London: Harry Margary in association with the Guildhall Library, 1987).

162 Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 131. See also: Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 41–44. Dyson included neither Stongate nor Stielwharfgate.

163 Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 42.

164 For mutual comprehensibility of early Scandinavian and Old English in England, see: Julia Fernández Cuesta, ‘Key Events in the History of Early English. Reassessing the Celtic and the Scandinavian Hypotheses’, in The New Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. Laura Wright (forthcoming). The interpretation of bridge and gate meanings offered here fall into category Type C.

165 Dyson, ‘Medieval Watergates’, 43: ‘As well as being withheld from places that apparently qualified for it, gate status was conferred on places where no street led north from Thames Street. Thus the three cases of Kingesgate … Daneburghgate … and Oystergate … disregarded or forgot the basic premise.’ The basic premise in question is continuation through the Roman wall, indeed irrelevant if -gate in these cases carried the semantics of Old Norse gata ‘lane’.

166 Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 8.

167 Gillian Fellows-Jensen, ‘The Scandinavian element gata outside the urbanised settlements of the Danelaw’, in West over Sea: Studies in Scandinavian Sea-Borne Expansion and Settlement Before 1300, ed. Beverley Ballin Smith, Simon Taylor, and Gareth Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 445–460.

168 Ekwall, Street-Names, 100.

169 LMA, Letter-Book D, COL/AD/01/004, fol. 143; lalee deu(er)s Temese, (1380–10): LMA, CLC/313/L/H/001/MS25121, St Paul’s Cathedral deed no. 113; Wright, Sources of London English, 47.

170 Steedman, Dyson, and Schofield, Aspects of Saxo-Norman London, 19, 124.

171 LMA, Journal 7, (1462–1471), COL/CC/01/01/007, fol. 236v; LMA, Journal 8, (1470–1482), COL/CC/01/01/008, fol. 247v; Wright, Sources of London English, 48, 53.

172 Dyson, ‘Early London Waterfront’, 129–131. Dyson distinguishes between lanes with personal names (which largely terminated northwards at Thames Street) versus -hithe, -gate, and -wharf lane-names (which crossed over this intersection). He infers that personal and proprietal-name lanes, which cluster around Vintry and Dowgate, changed name as ownership changed hands and would have been private.

173 For the Founder Effect hypothesis, see for example: Jouko Lindstedt and Elina Salmela, ‘Migrations and Language Shifts as Components of the Slavic Spread’, in Language Contact and Early Slavs, ed. Tomáš Klír, Vít Boček, and Nicolas Jansens (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020), 275–300, with regard to the homogeneity of the Slavic family; Tjerk Hagemeijer and Jorge Rocha, ‘Creole Languages and Genes: The Case of São Tomé and Príncipe’, Faits de Langues, 49.1 (2019), 167–182, with regard the speech of late fifteenth century enslaved Nigerians causing commonalities in the languages of the archipelago; Paul Kerswill, ‘Dialect Formation and Dialect Change in the Industrial Revolution: British Vernacular English in the Nineteenth Century’, in Southern English Varieties Then and Now, ed. Laura Wright (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2018), 8–38, with regard to London and the British industrial cities.

174 LMA, Letter-Book L, COL/AD/01/011, fol. 25; Stenton, Roll of the Pipe Michaelmas 1200, 150.

175 Ekwall, Street-Names, 90–91.