Gunnhild

Female
CPL
4 of 5

Discussion of the name

Gunnhild is a feminine name of Scandinavian origin (ON Gunnhildr), formed from elements (gunnr and hildr) which both mean ‘battle’ (Fellows Jensen 1968: 344, 349). The lack of any lexical meaning in the name may point to a relatively late coinage, and there is no solid evidence that it was adopted in England before the accession of Cnut in 1016. The one scrap of evidence which has been taken as pointing to earlier use, during the Viking settlement of Yorkshire, namely the East Riding place-name Gunby (Fellows Jensen 1968: 115; Mills 2003: 218; Watts 2004: 266), does not in fact contain the name (Ekwall 1960: 207–8): the only spelling which suggests that it does is from a charter identified as ‘palpably fictitious’ (Clay 1965: no 15 at p. 49).

The name was adopted in England primarily through its use in Cnut’s family: both Cnut (Lawson 1993: 109) and his sister had daughters called Gunnhild (Gunnhild 1, Gunnhild 2), named from their great-aunt, King Swein’s sister, who had been among the victims of the St Brice’s Day massacre in Oxford in 1002 (WM GR, I, pp. 300–1). Cnut’s niece lived in England as the wife successively of Earl Hakon (d. 1030) and Earl Harald (d. by 1044), and was a benefactor of Worcester cathedral priory (Hearne 1723: 251–2), but was exiled with her sons in 1044 (JW, II, 540–1). Earl Godwine of Wessex’s use of the name for one of his daughters (Gunnhild 4) must have been in honour of Cnut’s daughter and niece, and Godwine’s son Earl Harold in turn called one of his daughters Gunnhild (Sharpe 2007).

No other landowner called Gunnhild apart from Earl Godwine’s daughter appears in DB, and the name may not yet have caught on among the landed classes, but in the twelfth century it came to be widely used, and not only in areas where Scandinavian naming traditions were deeply rooted (DLV: II, 222; Fellows Jensen 1968: 114–16; Pleas, 1198–1212).

Bibliography

Clay 1965: Early Yorkshire Charters, XII: The Tison Fee, ed. Charles Travis Clay, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series Extra Series 10 (1965)

DLV: The Durham Liber Vitae. London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A.VII: Edition and Digital Facsimile with Introduction, Codicological, Prosopographical and Linguistic Commentary, and Indexes, ed. D. W. Rollason and L. Rollason, 3 vols. (London: British Library, 2007)

Ekwall 1960: Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)

Fellows Jensen 1968: Gillian Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (Copenhagen: I Kommission hos Akademisk Forlag, 1968)

Hearne 1723: Hemingi chartularium ecclesiæ Wigorniensis, ed. Thomas Hearne, 2 vols (Oxford, 1723)

JW: The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. and trans. R. R. Darlington, P. McGurk, and Jennifer Bray, II and III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–8)

M. K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in England in the Early Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1993)

The Durham Liber Vitae: London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A.VII, ed. David and Lynda Rollason, 3 vols (London: British Library, 2007)

Mills 2003: A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of British Place-Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Pleas, 1198–1212: Pleas before the King or his Justices, 1198–1212, ed. Doris Mary Stenton, 4 vols, Selden Society 67–8 and 83–4 (for 1948, 1949, 1966, and 1967)

Sharpe 2007: Richard Sharpe, ‘King Harold’s daughter’, Haskins Society Journal, 19 (2007), 1–27

Watts 2004: The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, based on the collections of the English Place-Name Society, ed. Victor Watts (with) John Insley and Margaret Gelling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

WM GR: William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–9)

Forms of the name

Spellings in Domesday Book: Gunnild, Gonnil

Spellings in Exon: Gonnillus, Gunnilla

Forms in modern scholarship:

  von Feilitzen head forms: ON Gunnhildr

  Phillimore edition: Gunhilda (Som.), Gunhild (Suss.)

  Alecto edition: Gunild

Distribution map of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

List of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

Holder 1066

Shire Phil. ref. Vill DB Spelling Holder 1066 Lord 1066 Tenant-in-Chief 1086 1086 Subtenant Fiscal Value 1066 Value 1086 Value Conf. Show on Map
Somerset 1,18 Creech St Michael Gunnild Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine - William, king - 10.50 9.20 9.20 A Map
Somerset 1,24 Hardington Mandeville Gunnild Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine - William, king - 10.00 12.70 12.70 A Map
Somerset 5,17 Claverham Gonnil Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine - Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances Fulcran 2.00 1.00 1.50 C Map
Sussex 13,29 Southwick Gunnild Gunnhild, daughter of Earl Godwine Harold, earl William de Briouze William fitzRanulph 6.75 7.00 7.00 C Map
Totals