Raptors
Raptors - OE cyta, erne, fealcen, frisca, hafoc, mus-hafoc, putta, puttoc, pytell, stangella, tysca, wealhhafoc, wrocc
As you can see above, early English people had plenty of names for raptors in the Old English vocabulary. A number of these—cyta, erne, hafoc, wrocc—are dealt with separately elsewhere because they more accurately respond to different families or species of raptors more specifically, and these are the names that predominantly appear in place-names. The others, as far as the evidence goes, seem to have been more generalist names, in the way that modern ‘hawk’ is used today in both scientifically specific terms and very loose layman’s terms. Or, rather, the criteria by which particular names were applied to particular species or genera/families under different circumstances cannot be identified by us.
Although OE fealcen existed, it is not well-recorded and does not feature in any old place-names. The same goes for tysca, frisca and wealhhafoc (the first two seem to have been buzzard names, and the third literally means ‘foreign hawk’ (wealh is the root of ‘Wales/Welsh’—the Britons were ‘foreigners’ to the Germanic arrivals), which could be applied to actual falcons received from abroad for falconry purposes (peregrine similarly means, ‘wanderer/traveller’) or to other foreign raptors obtained for same reason (such as the goshawk). Stangella might have been the Old English term for kestrel (‘stone-yeller’, but only based on the fact that ornithologist William Turner, in 1544, gave steingall as an alternative name for this species); it does not appear in place-names. Mus-hafoc could also apply to the kestrel, but conceivably other rodent-hunting birds too; likewise, it does not appear in place-names.
What we can say is that the wide range of names in Old English for one raptor or another reveals that these were noticed and significant birds in the Middle Ages, and it is no surprise that raptors as a whole comprise one of the larger groups of avian place-names. The names below pertain to putta, puttoc and pytell, which all variously convey the idea of ‘putting’, that is throwing, swooping, as so many raptors do when descending upon prey from a height.
Frustratingly, putta was also an Old English personal name, so we cannot be certain of the meaning of the place-names below, beyond what environment the suffix of each name identifies, which may suggest the hawk rather than a person as the more likely referent.
Pitshanger (London)
Pitton (Wilts)
Pudlestone (Heref)
Putford (Dev)
Putley (Heref)
Putney (London)
Puttenham (Herts)
Puttenham (Sy)
Raptors by the names putta/pytell appear in characters relating to the following places: Evesty, lost place, near the Cam Brook, Som (10th cen.), Chieveley, Berks (10th cen.), Crediton, Dev (8th cen.) Doughton, Glos (8th cen.), Ealderescumbe, lost place, county unknown (10th cen.), Little Bedwyn, Wilts (8th cen.), St Martin’s-without-Worcester (historical), Worcs (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.