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Page:The record interpreter- a collection of abbreviations.djvu/17

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Preface.
xi

No attempt has been made here to settle the disputed attribution of Roman stations, but rather to give the places for which their names have been used in later times.

Many of the place names and surnames have been found in classes of records which contain documents in both languages referring to the same case, like the Chancery Proceedings, in which bills and answers are in English and writs in Latin. Some of the Latin names in these are due to the ingenuity of officials or clerks, who inserted what they imagined to be a translation of an English word, of the history and meaning of which they were totally ignorant—such as Ventm Morbidus for Windsor, and de Umbrosa Querca for Dimock. Latin inscriptions on brasses, tombstones, and other monuments, many of the sixteenth and later centuries, have afforded many very curious specimens, the English names being supplied by other sources of information.

It is worth noticing how many surnames "assimilate a vernacular origin," to use a phrase of which my honoured school-master, Thomas Hewitt Key, was very fond. For instance, names ending in Latin in villa and in French in ville, are often found in later English with the termination field or well!, as de Strata villa, Streatfield; de Berevilla, Berewell. Similarly, Lotharingus, Le Loreyne, becomes in the course of time Lorrimer, or Lorimer, the English equivalent of Lorimarius, a harness maker. Other cases are Longfellow and Littleboy, whose ancestors were Longueville and Lillebois.

Many surnames taken from the places where their owners