On Words for London Wharves

Abstract

In this article, I review an assemblage of London wharf terms hithe, gate, wharf, bridge, stair, quay, dock, and pier, organised according to date. My purpose is to examine semantic change over time and to identify effects of multilingualism, as speakers of Middle Dutch across the North Sea used cognates hide, gat, werf, brug, steiger, kade, dok; riverside -bridge names shared semantic content with Old Norse bryggja ‘landing-stage, jetty’, and lane-names -gate shared semantic content with Old Norse gata ‘passageway, lane’. I suggest that Scandinavian speakers in London under Cnut’s reign could have interpreted gate in its Old Norse sense of ‘lane’, leading to analogical extension of Old English terms hithe, bridge, stair also becoming the names of both wharves and their lanes, even though these words had no intrinsic ‘lane’ meaning. By contrast, later terms quay, dock, and pier never developed the sense ‘lane’. The earliest reference to bridge ‘jetty’ (ad pontem Wulfuni) occurs 1231–1238. In Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla of c.1230, Lundúna bryggjur are pulled down, and the assemblage of later -bridge names, productive into the nineteenth century, adds weight to the arguments made by previous scholars that the meaning here is ‘jetties’ rather than ‘road spanning water’.