Keik means ‘bent backwards’ and is found in Kexby (meaning Keik’s farmstead). Sometimes nicknames were used, which suggests that they were just as important to Vikings as a given name. Sometimes a Viking would have his settlement named after him, but although we don’t have many records of those early Viking settlers, we do know that a great variety of names were in us, as they were used in settlement names. Ton on the end is usually Old English (the Saxons’ language) meaning an enclosure or farmstead. ![]() Another example is Shelton, which was altered to Skelton, although the -ton on the end would not immediately lead you to think it was a Viking place name. When the Vikings settled in York, they clearly had trouble saying the Saxon name for the city: Eoforwic (which is thought to mean wild boar settlement), so decided to call it Jorvik (thought to mean wild boar creek). Like most conquerors, when Vikings moved to a new area they settled into communities alongside the previous inhabitants, then changed the names they found difficult to pronounce. By far the most common is -by which means farmstead or village. Thwaite comes from the Norse thveit, meaning a clearing or meadow. A thorpe was an outlying farmstead, one that probably relied on a larger settlement nearby for protection. ![]() Whereas the ends of names can still suggest that a place has Viking history, with suffixes such as: -thorpe, -by, -thwaite, and -kirk to name a few. Vikings settled all across the country, but the densest population was found in Yorkshire, where they had their capital city, and it is here where we see more Viking place names than anywhere else. “Up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street”. This Danelaw was defined in a treaty in AD880 between the Viking King, Guthrum and the Anglo-Saxon King, Alfred, as: The land covered a vast area, drawing a line diagonally across the country from London up to Bedford, then following the old Roman road of Watling Street. The majority of locations in England named by the Vikings reside in the area that used to be known as the Danelaw, the place where Danish rule was concentrated in the 9th Century. …from the ruins of houses, to precious objects and even skeletons of Viking men and women, but one key piece of evidence that we see all the time is something we might not even realise is of Viking origin: the names of the places we live.
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