Benson, Oxfordshire Beggarsbush Hill 1606
EPNS Oxfordshire, p.118, gives Beggers Busshe and Beggars Bushe from a Survey of 1606/7 in PRO. It is a lane leading from Nuffield to Benson, forming part of the old road from Henley via Wallingford to Oxford, now redirected around the RAF airfield. It runs about 1 mile south of Ewelme, and about 1 mile north of Coldharbour Farm, near which is a Starveall.
P H Reaney The Origin of English Place-Names, London, 1964, mentions this a “minor” name in the parish of Benson, and connected with the Domesday vill of Crowmarsh.
It is listed Kearsley’s Traveller’s Entertaining Guide through Great Britain, or, a Description of the Great and Principal Cross-roads (1801) and also in Paterson’s Roads (1811 edition, p.94).
Further Reading
Posted: April 10th, 2011 | Filed under: Places | Tags: Benson, Coldharbour, Oxfordshire | 3 Comments »
There is something peculiar about the use of beggar in place names. I can see the use of bush = common or heath, as in Bushey, Herts, or Chesham Bois (French for bush) or even in Shepherds Bush (on the line of a major drove road into London and Smithfield) but beggar is something else. There was a Beggars Bridge on the road between Slough and Eton, not across the Thames but across one of many streams flowing into the Thames in this part of the world. Why was it called Beggars Bridge. I’ve heard it may originally have been a reference to the fact the bridge builders, the local burghers, were forbidden to collect tolls on people passing over the bridge.It was after all on a road to Royal Windsor and had traffic concerning the Kings business etc. As such the bridge builders were reduced to asking for money in order to keep the bridge in repair etc. In Hertfordshire we have Bulbeggars Lane – where did that come from?
Dear Carol
Yes there is something peculiar about the use of beggar in place names.
Although on this website I have restrcited myself to Beggars Bush I have also been looking into other Beggars place names. In part that is because too many more would be unmanageable, but also because identifying the source of any specific place name with any confidence is very difficult.
I am aware of the Beggars Bridge in Eton and the story you give would fit with my general view of the usage of beggar in place names before c.1850 i.e., that the beggars were the owners/occupiers. Do you know the source of the story?
For an explanation of the usage before 1850 and why it changed please see #
I think Bulbeggars is different – I have four sites where it is used as a place name. OED has 1584 Reginald Scott, Discoverie of Witchcraft: “and they have so fraid us with bull beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, fauns, slans, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphs, changelings, Incubus, Robin Good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oak, the hellwain, the firedrake, the puckle, Tom Thumb, Hobgoblin, Tom Tumbler, Boneless, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our own shadows”. [my emphasis]. (cited by Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London, 2000), 160).
See Anthologies – ‘Why the OED and Brewer’s Dictionary were wrong’ in the Speculations section.
I have an article awaiting publication in Nomina which addresses this in more detail.