NUTTER-L Archives

From: <>
Subject: [NUTTER-L] Fwd: Meaning of the Nutter Surname Page
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 14:21:14 EDT

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--part0_900872474_boundary
Content-ID: <>
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

--part0_900872474_boundary
Content-ID: <>
Content-type: message/rfc822
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
Content-disposition: inline

Return-Path: <>
Received: from relay16.mx.aol.com (relay16.mail.aol.com [172.31.106.72]) by
air14.mail.aol.com (v45.13) with SMTP; Thu, 02 Jul 1998 02:01:03
-0400
Received: from linux.cottagesoft.com (linux.cottagesoft.com [205.240.70.2])
by relay16.mx.aol.com (8.8.8/8.8.5/AOL-4.0.0)
with ESMTP id CAA06464 for <>;
Thu, 2 Jul 1998 02:01:01 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from 205.240.70.119 (19.tul-max.cottagesoft.com [205.240.70.119])
by linux.cottagesoft.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id BAA13330
for <>; Thu, 2 Jul 1998 01:00:58 -0500
Message-ID: <>
Date: Thu, 02 Jul 1998 01:09:14 -0600
From: "Gregory F. Rose" <>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Macintosh; I; PPC)
To:
Subject: Meaning of the Nutter Surname Page
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit

Dear Sir:

I read your Nutter homepage with interest, particularly since my wife's
maiden name is Jane Terry Nutter. I am a professional historian and am
very pleased to see the careful attention to the extant documentary
record which your contributors have given. I do have a few serious
qualms, however, about some of the etymological discussion in the page
on the meaning of the Nutter surname. I work primarily on Anglo-Saxon
England and know the archaeology of pre-Conquest Lancashire reasonably
well. The traditional wisdom that Scandinavian settlement east of the
Pennines was Danish and west of the Pennines was Norweigan has been
refuted by both archaeological and placename evidence. Certainly the
closer one gets either to the Irish Sea or the North Sea, the more
pronounced the tendency to Norweigan- or Danish-predominant settlement,
but the evidence is strong that both Danish and Norweigan settlement
took place, sometimes in the same village, in the West Riding of
Yorkshire and eastern Lancashire. Recall that the Norse kingdom
centered on York in the early 10th century had close ties both to the
Norweigan settlement around Dublin and to Denmark. Furthermore, there
is some evidence that Erik Bloodaxe pursued a policy of mixing
settlements. The Nutters of Lancashire could well have been Norweigan
or Danish in origin (and, frankly, there is no reason to exclude on
current evidence that there were Anglo-Saxon nor Brittonic -- recall
that Lancashire was a component of the Brittonic kingdom of
Strathclyde).
I would dispute the claim that the names Leet, Hallmoot, and Wapontake
point to a Scandinavian origin. All these names are modernized forms of
terms which occurred in Old English and which were well-familiar to
Anglo-Saxons. They happen to share antecedents in Old Germanic (and in
Indo-European before that) with the forms which appear in Old Norse and
Old Icelandic. Indeed, I would argue that the particular philological
rules by which these names evolved into Middle and Modern English make
it extremely unlikely that they were back-borrows from ON or OI rather
than Old English words.

Best wishes,

Gregory Rose

--part0_900872474_boundary--

This thread:

• [NUTTER-L] Fwd: Meaning of the Nutter Surname Page by <>

  • Re: [NUTTER-L] Fwd: Meaning of the Nutter Surname Page by <>
  • [NUTTER-L] Meaning of the Nutter Surname by <>