Top of page Discussion Bibliography Forms Distribution Map Property List People of this Name Bottom of page

Sol

Discussion of the name

The name Sol has been regarded as ambiguously Welsh (Redin 1919: 23–4) or unequivocally obscure (von Feilitzen 1937: 368). The three letters of the name are perfectly clear in the manuscript, but unusually the scribe left a gap large enough to accommodate two or three more letters before writing tenuit . T.R.E. (GDB fol. 181r., col. 2, lines 10–18). Intentional gaps in DB are generally meaningful, and it is worth emphasizing that throughout the rest of Herefordshire there is no similar gap between the name of the TRE holder and the next word; a wider search would undoubtedly show the same in other counties. The gap after Sol must mean that the scribe was expecting to add a few letters, and we can infer that he was puzzled by the name he had just written, or had not been able to read his exemplar properly, or both. He might well have been baffled by a personal name which he read as Sol, the Latin word for the sun. There were no other personal names starting Sol– anywhere in the entire corpus of material which he redacted (Keats-Rohan and Thornton 1997: 195, where Solidarius is the common noun meaning ‘paid soldier’ rather than a personal name: Norf. 31:37). There seems to be no record of a personal name in Sol– in either Old English or Old Welsh; although we might have expected the biblical name Solomon to be in use in Wales alongside other Old Testament personal names, there is no evidence that it was.

Although the name cannot be resolved, continuing puzzlement over the name Sol simply echoes the puzzlement of the Domesday scribe.

Bibliography

Keats-Rohan and Thornton 1997: Domesday Names: An Index of Latin Personal and Place Names in Domesday Book, comp. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and David E. Thornton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997)

von Feilitzen 1937: Olof von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica 3 (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1937)

Forms of the name