Via Catriona Kelly’s Facebook post (with some nice photos) I learn of the best church name ever, Saint Vedast-alias-Foster:
Saint Vedast Foster Lane or Saint Vedast-alias-Foster, a church in Foster Lane, in the City of London, is dedicated to St. Vedast (Foster is an Anglicisation of the name “Vaast”, as the saint is known in continental Europe), a French saint whose cult arrived in England through contacts with Augustinian clergy.
And if we follow that Vedast link, we discover that he’s called Saint Gaston in French. You first, my dear Gaston!
It’s not obvious to me how to pronounce this fine saint. VEE-dust? Vi-DAST?
“FOS-ter”
A lot more here, including many variations, of which my favorite is St. Zawster.
The chapter concludes, “It must be admitted that the Saint’s anxiety about the pronunciation of his name was fully justified.” But it still doesn’t answer DE’s question.
It’s not even the best church name in the City of London. How can you beat St-Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe?
VEE-dust?
So says this chap, for what that’s worth.
It’s Frankish for beer.
(There are many more versions of this stupid ad.)
@JenInEd (and hope you feel better soon): Medieval London had so many churches within the bounds of the old City that one doesn’t want to exclude the awesomely-named ones that are no longer extant (e.g., St. Nicholas Shambles, St. Mary Axe, and/or St. Dionis Backchurch). Of the ones that still exist, I am partial to St. James Garlickhythe, which I actually attended services at once, probably in the late 1990’s.
St. Nicholas Shambles was presumably so named because it was adjacent to one or more slaughterhouses.
@Brett. Well yeah. It can be amusing w/o needing to be semantically opaque. The overall point may be that in a city of a certain size where there are no more than X separate churches subject to the same bishop (or other authority structure) the bishop may be able to make sure that all names are unique in terms of which saint or other namesake is selected, but past X that becomes unworkable and thus somewhat ad hoc ways of distinguishing multiple churches named for the same St. N will develop. And in medieval times these disambiguations often developed in a grassroots/vernacular kind of way, rather than by the Proper Authorities coming up with high-toned and edifying ways of disambiguating them.
I wouldn’t have immediately recognized the sense of shambles involved, had I not recently (just this morning, in fact) been reading something where that sense featured prominently. I mentioned in another thread that I was rereading The Traveller in Black. Having finished it, I learned from the Internet that John Brunner had written a fifth novella about the traveller, after the first publication of the fixup novel edition. So I also read that, “The Things That Are Gods,”* and found that “shambles” featured prominently in the plot, although Brunner seemed to use the word more to refer to a regular event at which animals were butchered in large numbers than the location where it was done.
* I was generally disappointed with the story. It seemed to be much weaker than the four earlier novellas. Brunner was clearly trying to do something a little different with the traveller in black, but I didn’t think it worked. On the other hand, rereading the whole cycle it was clear that there had been a constant evolution in Brunner’s conception of the setting. Sometimes the changes worked, sometimes not so much.
“And our time is flying
See the candle burning low
Is the new world rising
From the shambles of the old?”
–Attr. J. Page & R. Plant, no later than 1972 and possibly earlier.
“ VEE-dust?
So says this chap, for what that’s worth.”
Let’s not overlook that chap’s pronunciation of St.
Sunt
a regular event at which animals were butchered in large numbers
What’s wrong with “hecatomb”? Is some peever going to count the cows?
Let’s not overlook that chap’s pronunciation of St.
Segmentally, it’s fine, and standard RP for the word when used before a saint’s name like this.* It sounds weird, however, because the speaker puts full stress on it and pauses after it.
* This is how I pronounce it myself, and is therefore Absolutely Fine and standard by definition.
@de
Except in very slow speech I would expect e.g., Sun Peter, Sun Francis, compare St. John > Sinjun, so perhaps Sun V. Maybe the ‘t’ is there but very weak.
Something about this had me looking up the medieval parishes of Edinburgh while awake in the middle of the night, but I have no idea now what I thought I was going to say about them.
There’s a nice oddity in that the oldest religious site in Edinburgh is in what is now the New Town, but the names are ordinary enough – Canongate for the Holyrood end, St Giles’ for the middle, St Cuthbert’s for the Castlehill end. I’m really just posting to see if it triggers the spark of thought again…
@Rodger C: I think the religious implications of hecatomb would have been pragmatically wrong for the story. The shambles in “The Things That Are Gods” was a monthly civic event, a centralized slaughter at which taxes were also levied. Since the plot of the story concerns, in part, the transformation of the mundane bloodletting into an evocation of various dubious divinities, it would not have suited the story to have called it a “hecatomb” from the beginning.
There’s a nice oddity in that the oldest religious site in Edinburgh is in what is now the New Town
New College in Oxford was founded in 1379. It is something of parvenu compared with e.g. University College (1249), Balliol (1263) and Merton (1260-odd), though.
Glasgow seems to have missed a trick in not having St Mungo-alias-Kentigern, though. And then there’s Saint Enoch/Teneu/Thaney, who I have mentioned before
The least Christmassy parish in Ireland is Kill Saint Nicholas in Waterford.
Oh! my name is John Wellington Wells,
I’m a dealer in magic and spells,
In blessings and curses
And ever-filled purses,
In prophecies, witches, and knells.
If you want a proud foe to “make tracks” –
If you’d melt a rich uncle in wax –
You’ve but to look in
On the resident Djinn,
Number seventy, Simmery Axe!
The French Wikipedia has something on the etymology of the name Gaston which discusses the name Vedastus. Note especially this:
As for the Gaulish etymology… Here are the treatments of the first two possible elements mentioned in Xavier Delamarre, Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise of 2003 (some references omitted silently for clarity):
However, Delamarre himself make no such proposal about the name Vedastus such as the one found in the Wiktionary, at least that I can find. The name Vedastes/Vedastus is not found in the index of his work, Les noms des gaulois (2017), which treats at least 1000 names and their variants. Delamarre’s treatment of the Gaulish names in -stus in “Notes d’onomastique vieille-celtique” Keltische Forschungen 5 (2012) section 13, p. 120ff, available here. Vedastus isn’t mentioned.
On the possible second element -astus in Vedastus, there is also the following, in Johannes Hubschmid (1966) “Die -asko und -usko Suffixe und das Problem des Ligurischen” Revue internationale d’onomastique 18, no. 2, which treats onomastic suffixes sometimes thought to indicate a Ligurian or pre-Gaulish but Indo-European substrate in the Gallo-Roman region. From page 101, discussing a name Badastus attested very late, only from the 2nd millennium CE:
As for the Germanic etymologies mentioned in the French Wikipedia… As far as I have found, no real advance for the etymology of Vedastus on the Germanic side seems to have been made since Jacob Grimm (1848) Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, p. 541, discussing Frankish onomastics and some names that appear in the Historia francorum of Gregory of Tours (italics added):
The Widogast that Grimm mentions in connection to the name Vedastus is here in the prologue of the Pactus legis salicae (edited text, glossing over many textual variants, with a quick translation):
Grimm doesn’t mention it, but Gregory also tells of a Vinastes, cured of blindness but persecuted by the aforementioned Leudastes, dux of Tours. Gregory tells this story in his Libri de virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi, book II, chapter 23, here. Perhaps a Frankish *Wini-gast “Friend-Guest”?
Still, we are doing better in etymologizing this name than the Golden Legend (mentioned in the treatment of St. Vedast that Y linked to above):
It’s page 47r (page 118 of the image file), right column, here in the Yale Legenda aurea.
Maybe Widogast was named after Widochem, if he came from there. (That one looks like “Woodhome”, as in “Waldheim.”) Like his pal Salegast from Salechem.
The Franks seem to have liked their -gast names:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Arbogast
andedion uediíumi
I can’t help but hear this as the start of a hexameter, though it’s obviously not. One wonders what Gaulish poetry was like…
You really don’t want to know.
[ɣ]
Vedast alias Foster alias Gaston alias Zawster alias … A great mass of translations. Any attempt to explain his name should also include an attempt to account for the variation.
“Gaston” strikes me as fairly easily accounted for, at any rate.
The initial g for w is familiar from many Frankish loans like garder, (loup-)garou; loss of medial d and the preceding vowel is regular cf voir, choir, asseoir and English “chain” (from catena via cad-); and the final -on is standard Old French for the oblique case of masculine personal names, e.g. Charles vs Charlon – in some names it got generalised when the case system collapsed, and/or both forms survived as separate variants.
Yes, w ~ g is very easy, and the suffix is just that. It’s the other forms that are weird.
Nowegian has f- for Latin v- in the (rare) name Faltin < Valentinus. I imagine that to be a very early borrowing. That, or a late one through German.
Also Sylfest < Sylvester and (one step to the left) Sevast < Sebastian. There are probably more.
Vedastus, from vere dans aestus [‘truly giving fires’], because he truly imposed the fires of suffering and penitence upon himself, or from vae distans
Etymology used to be so creative…
Norwegian has f- for Latin v- in the (rare) name Faltin
Similarly, the appearance of the F- in Foster (for Vedastus) can be understood easily if the antecedent of this variant is a borrowing into Old English. The appearance of foreign v as f in later loanwords into Old English is unproblematic; see here, referring to Cambpell, Old English Grammar (1959), referring to Förster, p. 131, who in turn approves Mezger, p. 50. The problem of the vowel remains, though.
(Another thought… I wonder if, in English, there were any reverse spellings of etymological Norman or medieval Latin /v/ with f, as an effect of the late Old English voicing of initial /f/ and /s/ in the South (as persists in vane, vat, vixen, and zax in standard English), so that the current Foster simply has a spelling pronunciation of an f once used to spell /v/. That is, the /v/ of a Norman Vaast was ‘undone’ as /f/, perhaps under the influence of ME foster ‘sustenance’ and foster ‘forester’?)
Don’t English borrowings from the Germanic adstrate in Norman/ONF regularly come as w-? William, war, warden, …
Not always: guard, guarantee, guile …
Indeed they do, but in that aside, I was reckoning with learned influence from the Latin form (this being a 6th-century saint with a widely diffused cult), or another such complex interaction such as seen in vagrant (some forms in the AND, and an account here of the etymology usually given, which remains problematic, of course).
vagrant
Fascinating! I’d just (so far as I’d thought about it all) assumed it was from Latin vagari somehow, though in hindsight that clearly couldn’t have worked at all.
Xerib: vagrant
Heh. Surely that’s a hyper-latinization, and it could easily have happened if and when the word was primarily a legal term. Contamination with vagare is mentioned. I’ll add vagabond.
Not always: guard, guarantee, guile …
All of those are from Central (i.e. ordinary) French, but their /w/-cognates can be native like ward or borrowings from Normand like warranty and wile. You can’t tell in general without looking at the sources (or, in these degenerate days, EtymOnline or Wikt or the OED). In this specific case, however, Warte ‘watchtower’ also points to a native word.