The Oxford Book of English Place-names gives the meaning of Seal as deriving from the related word shaw meaning trees. The very helpful Key to English Place Names website from the University of Nottingham is useful but brief in its description of seal meaning “a small copse” and breaks down the elements and their meanings as
· nether (Middle English) Down, downward, low.
· uferra (Old English) Higher.
· scegel (Anglian) A small wood.[1]
(The references are given as: Watts; Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names p: 431. A.D. Mills; Dictionary of English Place-Names p: 343 and Cameron; Place-names of Derbyshire p: 645).
The oldest written reference we have for Seale is from Domesday Book, written in 1087 when the villages come under the parish name of Seale. The settlements of the two Seals were considered as a single village with the hamlet of Overseal thought of as exactly that, a hamlet of the wider village, certainly of the wider parish. It is hard to know whether the two villages were differentiated by prefixes and called by their later recorded names Uferra-salh and Nether-salh, and whilst likely, we will probably never know that for certain. Domesday refers to Seale and Alia-Seale, Seale and the ‘other’ Seale, meaning the main village and its outlying northern hamlet. Other parts of the Seale parish, Boothorpe and Donisthorpe, are included by their separate names. Gunby must have been occupied as a farmstead as the name is Anglo-Danish, but within the wider Netherseal village and therefore not recorded as a separate entity at Domesday.
We can investigate the name meaning further as the word seal has a still more direct link to the willow tree, or a sub-species of willow, the sallow. Sallow has the meaning "shrubby willow plant", from the Old English sealh, the Anglian -salh or the Old Norse -selja, all words coming from the proto- Germanic root *saljhon and ultimately from the proto-Indo-European language *sal(i)k all meaning "willow".[2] The Latin name salix for the genera and the modern name sallow hold the key to understanding the village placename and link back many thousands of years to a language no longer spoken.
Understanding the name derivation for the word Seale is complicated by the fact that the Anglo-Saxon word sele could also mean ‘hall’.[3] This gives us the old word sheiling, often used for small shepherd’s huts, sheds or similar buildings, and without further documented evidence the derivation of Seale must be considered in the context of its wider surroundings. This context for us has to be the landscape, and especially the landscape as it would have been in the past, before enclosures allowed modern land drainage and landscape engineering to effectively drain farmland. All of England was much wetter and marshier in the past, meaning that crop and food production, and farmland drainage and irrigation was managed through the use of ridge and furrow. Overseal and Netherseal sit between two particularly wet areas, the Mease Valley and the Woulds. The Mease valley yields especially productive soil and good farmland, across to the Hooborough Brook, beyond which much of the soil becomes a heavy clay and is much more difficult for farming. The Woulds themselves, on a much higher elevation, provided summer pasture for cattle and other livestock animals, along with other plants that yielded much-needed foods, medicines and building materials.
Place name dating tells us that the Seale parish was settled in the second wave of Anglian incursions (not Saxon), probably in the later 6th century (after 550CE) and the Anglian word ‘salh’ (pronounced ‘sale’) gives us our village names. The name is also remembered in the local pronunciation of the word and family name ’Sale’. Locals still pronounce the village names as ‘Ovversale’ or ‘Owersale’, and ‘Nithersale’, and this is a connection to the same root word. What this means for us is that the place name ending “seal” demonstrates that the area was (and still is) readily populated by species of willow tree, sallows. A stroll along the river Mease, or the Hooborough brook, the Kesbrook, Sealbrook, Shellbrook or the other watercourses that drain into the Mease is also a stroll amongst the willows and sallows. (Shellbrook, across the Woulds on the Ashby road is another derivation of seal-brook and is nothing to do with shells). In Appleby Magna the Sale Gutter is a boundary ditch not named after its proximity to the Seales (it is on the far side of their parish from us) but for its value in creating withies from the crop of willows and sallows.
The use of the word ‘settled ‘is probably confusing here, the area was certainly already settled by the British and earlier peoples; finds of Roman or Romano-British origins indicate that the area was settled and farmed, and the fact that Bronze-Age burial mounds occupied one, and maybe more hilltops, along with the Bronze Age axe head nearby suggest that the parish has been dwelt in and farmed for very much longer. What the Bronze-Age, Iron-Age and Romano-British peoples called the parish though is unknown. Settlement by the incoming Anglian invaders may well have been aggressive, although place names such as Walton and Bretby seem to suggest that at least some British people remained. It seems likely that the incoming Anglian people gradually absorbed the natives into their own culture, supplanting it entirely.
Willows and their sub species - osiers, sallows and so on - were of enormous importance in the past as they have a wide variety of uses- from baskets, fences and houses, to fish traps and medicines. Withy baskets of every size were important in every house. The houses themselves were timber framed with withy walls, the wattle, over which was layered a mixture of wet clay/soil/ animal dung and straw or rushes, the daub, giving us the wattle and daub walls. Withy hurdles were vital in livestock management, the open field system required cattle and sheep to be kept off the crop as there were very few hedgerows in the landscape (they are a feature of the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries) and Seale had willows in abundance. For basket making, withies are cut in the winter, boiled for up to 10 hours to soften the bark and loosen the fibres, stripped of their bark and can then be made into baskets of every conceivable size, shape, and use. Hurdles do not need to have their bark removed.
The early English are not thought to have differentiated between the pussy willow and the goat willow, properly known as the Great Sallow and the Grey Sallow, both trees being quite similar in appearance, with similar silky catkins. Charters surviving from the AS period do occasionally use sallows as boundary markers, thane ealde seale ‘the old sallow’ occurs in Winterborne Tomson, Dorset, and tha woche sæle ‘the crooked sallow’ in Pensax, Worcestershire.[4] If the word ‘seal’ or ‘sale’ for sallows was so common in the past it is not unreasonable to expect to see it in use as a place name across the country. It turns out that this is the case, although the word is often hidden in plain sight. Place names referencing sallows abound, stretching right across the country from the Saxon south to the Anglian north and can all be traced to their ‘sallow’ origins. These include Selworthy, Somerset; Selham, West Sussex; Silton, Dorset; Salford End, Bedfordshire; Salehurst, East Sussex; Selwood, Somerset; Selby, Yorkshire; the city of Salford itself is named from sealhford, the sallows by the ford; there are very many more.
By examining the name meanings closely, we can add detail to the more general place name meanings given by the major authorities, a luxury and convenience they do not have, and we may examine our local place names in much greater context by looking around us at the landscape, informed by our local knowledge of the past. Every time someone speaks the word Seale they are using a word from language that has its roots in the earliest language spoken in Europe. That uttered breath carries a very ancient meaning, whether we know it or not. Overseal, being on relatively high ground on the western edge of the Ashby Woulds, is “above the sallows” and Netherseal, low down in the Mease valley, is “below or amongst the sallows”. When we speak aloud the names of our villages we are connecting with our ancient past and the world our ancestors saw and named.
Figure 1. A view across the Woulds. © Mark Knight 2020
[1] http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Derbyshire/Nether%20and%20Overseal Accessed 28th December 2020
[2] An asterisk at the beginning of the word indicates that it has been etymologically reconstructed.
[3] Hooke, D. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore, Landscape. Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2010 p:229
[4] Hooke, D. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore, Landscape. Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2010 p:229
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