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Lapwing and plovers - OE gifete, hleapwince, hulfestra, *tewhit

We know that hleapwince referred to the lapwing - fortunately there are enough records of that name from early on and there is a traceable evolution of that name over the Middle Ages to be confident of species identification. Exactly what hleapwince meant, however, is another unsolved conundrum. The esteemed W. B. Lockwood suggests that the hleap part, because it matches with other old Germanic words presumably applied to the same bird, but which in one case is also applied to the hoopoe, must therefore, in meaning, have some thing to do with the crest which the lapwing and hoopoe share. I’m not so sure; it seems no less likely that the word was applied to the lapwing and was then also applied to the hoopoe because of the similarity in their head plumage. More likely, as is usually suggested, that the word is related to Old English hleapan, the verb from which we get ‘leap’. That very nicely describes the lapwing’s aerobatic display flights. Lockwood assigns the second part of the name to Old English wince ‘a winch’, referring to the up-and-down movement of the crest. Again, I’m for the more traditional interpretation here, which is that wince derives from wincan, the verb meaning ‘to wink or make a sign’, which could well describe the semaphoric signals of the lapwing’s distinctive black and white wings in flight. Or, as the Victorian (and impressively-bearded) philologist Walter William Skeat, notes, a likely earlier meaning of wincan was ‘to totter, stagger’, which is no less appropriate. Whatever the name means, the lapwing’s stunning plumage and immediately arresting display flights and calls will certainly have been noticed early peoples, being that the bird was much more common in the extensive wetlands and the unimproved pastures of bygone Britain, and it does not seem unlikely at all that such a bird was a place-defining species. For discussion of the other plover terms, see the individual place entries below.

It should be added that all three names below are uncertain—plover/lapwing has been suggested for all, and in the case of Iffley is generally accepted, but ambiguity remains.

Iffley (Oxon)

Lapford (Dev)

Tivetshall (Norf)

Plovers appear in charters relating to the following places: Cowley, Oxon (11th cen.), Tisbury, Wilts (10th cen.).

Sources (see ‘About’ page for the full bibliography): Watts, Cambridge Dictionary; Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary; Gelling and Cole, Landscape of Place-Names; epns.nottingham.ac.uk; Hooke, ‘Birds, Beasts’; langscape.org.uk.