A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
thwaite
A thwaite is a clearing, a piece of ground cleared of trees and brought into cultivation. The word survives almost entirely in the place names of northern England, where it appears in the hundreds as a village name and as a farm name: Bassenthwaite, Braithwaite, Applethwaite, Rosthwaite, Satterthwaite, Crosthwaite.
Etymology
The word is Old Norse and came into England with Danish and Norwegian settlement, which is why it is distributed exactly where the Norse settled and nowhere else. Its English counterparts do the same job with different words: -ley and -leigh mark a woodland clearing in Old English, assart is the Norman-French term for the act of clearing, and ridding is the northern English one.
Notes
Reading a map for these elements gives a rough picture of who cleared what. A district thick with thwaite names was cleared by Norse-speaking settlers; one thick with -ley names was cleared earlier by English speakers; and the first element of each name usually says what was there or who did it. The Lake District has both in quantity and the boundary between them is visible on a sheet.