The likeness of the name Clovesho and Cliff-at-Hoo, is not of a sort likely to suggest identity, except first prompted externally, such as by an actual independent tradition; but after having been thus brought together by external evidence, the structure of the old name can thoroughly justify the identity.
But, however slender may have been this original philological cause of disturbance, it served to carry the question, of the actual place, out into the expansive region of conjecture; where it has been ever since rolling and rebounding, from one end of the land to the other, from that time to this. Every succeeding writer treating the matter as if it had been commissioned to him to choose the place of the synods, according to his own views of the fitness of things. Bishop Gibson first accepted Somner’s conjecture, and so adopting Abingdon, concludes that “no sane man,” who admits the authority of the Abingdon Chronicle, “can stick at it:”[40] the Abingdon Chronicle having never said it except through Somner’s distortion. Smith’s gloss, on the name in Beda is, “Vulgo Cliff, juxta Hrofes caester.” But he continues, in a note, that Somner’s opinion in preferring Abingdon seems not unworthy of observation. He recites Camden, but concludes, “Sed in his nihil ultra conjecturam, & illam certe valde fluctuantem.”[41] A conclusion which is even prophetic. In Dr. Geo. Smith’s map to Beda it is, however, placed at Abingdon. Smith’s note is transcribed as it stands by Wilkins;[42] and again by Sir T. D. Hardy.[43]
Capt. John Stevens, in a note in his translation of Bede, (A.D. 1723,) says, as to the true place being Cliffe, “Of this opinion are the two great antiquarians, Spelman and Talbot, to which Lambard likewise gives in, though with caution.” This must be Dr. Robert Talbot, Canon of Norwich, another early Saxon scholar, reign Henry VIII., who left transcripts of charters of Abingdon,[44] and is, therefore, another early learned witness of the tradition. Spelman’s interpretation is “Cloveshoviæ (vulgo Clyff).”[45] The Rev. Joseph Stevenson[46] recites the option of Cliffe and Abingdon. Of the church historians, Fuller remonstrates against Camden’s doubts, with his usual moderation. Collier merely calls it “Clovesho, or Clyff, near Rochester.”