Nightingale - OE nihtegale, *hearpe

It would be nice to offer a long list of nightingale place-names below, and in view of the fact that other summer migrants such as the cuckoo and swallow make an appearance, you’d think nightingales would too, especially given how prominently vocal they are on their territories in early summer, and that the beautiful, enrapturing song of the nightingale was already very famous by the Middle Ages (and was made more famous by the medieval love poetry, in songs by the French troubadours, for instance). As with many species whose numbers and ranges have decreased considerably since the mid-twentieth century, nightingales would have been significantly more widespread and common in previous centuries when extensive appropriate habitat (wood pastures, scrubby commons, coppiced woodland, and so on) was available. And yet … England has a serious dearth of nightingale names. Other familiar and widespread (or once widespread) species we might expect to feature in the records are missing too, such as corncrake, robin and curlew, so the nightingale is not alone in this respect, but, nonetheless, its absence does seem strange.

It is not quite true that there are no nightingale places-names in England, but those that do exist, such as Nightingale Farm, Nightingale Copse and Nightingale Hall, are modern (mostly 19th century, by which time nightingale had for some time been a surname), so the fact remains that there are no surviving, old nightingale place-names from the time when nearly all our place-names came into existence.

As an aside, Wales, curiously, has lots of nightingale place-names (eos is the Welsh name). Curious in that the nightingale’s status in Wales has long been questionable (even in the Middle Ages it seems; Gerald of Wales notes the birds absence in the twelfth century), although once they apparently did breed in the river valleys and other suitable habitats in the counties bordering with England. As with the modern examples in England, though, there is no early evidence for these names, although like many Gaelic minor place-names in Ireland and Scotland it is always possible that they are much older than their records.

Having said all that, there is one straw to clutch at. One place-name scholar, Carole Hough, has argued that the presence of Old English hearpe ‘harper’ in some names might actually be a metaphorical reference to the song of the nightingale. It has long been assumed that the ‘harp’ names listed below refer to people playing the harp instrument, which may be the case, but Hough proposes that these names would make much better sense if we interpret the first part of the name as ‘nightingale’. The matter can’t be proven one way or another of course, but it’s a compelling idea.

Harcourt (Shrops)

Harpham (Yorks)

Harpley (Norf)

Harpenden (Herts)

Harpsden (Oxon)

Sources: Carole Hough, ‘Place-Name Evidence for Old English Bird-Names’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 30 (1997-98), 60-76.