back

Spotted woodpecker - OE fina

On the basis that there is another woodpecker name, speot, only recorded in place-names, which is cognate to the word for green woodpecker in other old Germanic languages (e.g., Old Saxon ghronspeht), it is assumed that fina referred to the spotted woodpeckers. There is a spotted woodpecker-type bird labelled fyne in the early 15th century Sherborne Missal, and what looks like a green woodpecker in that manuscript is labelled wodewale (woodwall was a Somerset dialect term for the species into modern times), so it’s certainly possible there were different terms for the British woodpeckers. For green woodpecker, see the separate entry for this species. There is no way of knowing whether early English folk were aware of the two different species of spotted woodpecker, and if they were they might have considered the lesser spotted as a diminutive or juvenile form of the greater spotted. The latter, at any rate, was presumably encountered more often, being the larger, brighter, more conspicuous and more assertive of the two species.

Finborough (Suff)

Finburgh (Warks)

Fynham (Warks)

Finmere (lost, Berks)

Finmere (Oxon)

Finstock (Oxon)

Woodpeckers appear in charters relating to the following places: Bishops Cleeve, Glos (8th cen.).

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

Back to search page