At Brandon is Broomhill; the words _bran_ and _broom_ will be subsequently shown to be radically the same, and I shall suggest reasons why this term, even possibly in Old Stone times, meant _hill_.
During recent years the study of place-names has been passing through a period of spade-work, and every available document from Doomsday Book to a Rent Roll has been scrupulously raked. The inquirer now therefore has available a remarkably interesting record of the various forms which our place-names have passed through, and he can eliminate the essential features from the non-essential. Although the subject has thus considerably been elucidated, the additional information obtained has, however, done nothing to solve the original riddle and in some cases has rendered it more complex.
The new system which is popularly supposed to have eliminated all guesswork has in reality done nothing of the kind. In place of the older method, which, in the words of Prof. Skeat, "exalted impudent assertions far above positive evidence," it has boldly substituted a new form of guesswork which is just as reckless and in many respects is no less impudent than the old. The present fashion is to suppose that the river _x_ or the town of _y_ _may_ have been the property of, or founded by, some purely hypothetical Anglo-Saxon. For example: the river Hagbourne of Berkshire is guessed to have been _Hacca's burn or brook_, which possibly it was, but there is not a scintilla of real evidence one way or the other.
If one is going to postulate "Hacca's" here and there, there is obviously a space waiting for a member of the family on the great main road entitled Akeman Street. As this ancient thoroughfare traverses Bath we are, however, told that it "received in Saxon times the significant name of Akeman Street from the condition of the gouty sufferers who travelled along it".[44] One would prefer even a phantom Hacca to this _aching man_, nor does the alternatively suggested _aqua_, water, bring us any nearer a solution.
There sometimes appears to be no bottom to the vacuity of modern guesswork. It is seriously and not _pour rire_ suggested that Horselydown was where horses could lie down; that Honeybrook was so designated because of its honey-sweet water, and that the name Isle of Dogs was "possibly because so many dogs were drowned in the Thames here".[45] In what respect do these and kindred definitions, which I shall cite from standard authors of to-day, differ from the "egregious" speculations, the "wild guesses," and the "impudent assertions" of earlier scholars?