What's In A Name?
| NORTH YORKSHIRE |  | | | CLEVELAND | | | COUNTY DURHAM | | |
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Ripon – the empire of the ‘Hrype’
THE cathedral city of Ripon needs
no introduction: but the origins of
its name most certainly do, for
they take us into a very different
world from that evoked today by
the minster and Ripon's narrow
streets.
The first thing to consider is that
Ripon was named before Christianity
had arrived in the north,
sometime, indeed, in the Dark
Ages, a period when Germanic
tribes flooded over eastern England,
settling that territory.
These tribes that are called the
Anglo-Saxons had in their ranks
tens of different peoples, including
Alani from the Steppes of Asia,
Swedes from Scandinavia and
Goths from central Europe and
many other nations besides, including
the long-forgotten
founders of Ripon.
These tribes, of course, renamed
the areas that they settled, North
Yorkshire among them, with their
Germanic-sounding names: most
English names today date back to
this epoch of renaming and the
modern English are ultimately the
descendants of these invaders.
And sometimes they named the
territory around them with their
own tribal names.
Hence it was that Ripon was originally
called Hrypis (from which,
via Rypum, our Ripon) or the territory
of the Hrype'. Now we know
nothing of the Hrype other than
that they were a minor continental
people coming from maritime
Germany, where the long neck of
Denmark protrudes into the
Baltic.
But they are recalled in several
other northern English placenames
including Ripley to the
south, and Repton in Derbyshire.
There was even at one point in the
Dark Ages a Riponshire that dissolved
in the melting pot of invading
peoples, leaving only traces of
the Empire of the Hrype, including
of course beautiful Ripon.
1:10pm Friday 14th March 2008
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