THERE are about ten villages named Butterwick spread over the North of England, from Lincolnshire to Cumbria, including Ryedale’s Butterwick, near Malton.

The second part of the name is wick, an antique English word that is found in one form or another in hundreds of English placenames, including England’s various Wickhams or the towns and villages named Week in Devon and Cornwall. And wick (or week or wic) in turn comes from the Latin word vicus or village, found in thousands of names in Latin Europe – Vigo, Vicchio etc.

One cannot help pitying a word that has been bent through the centuries from lithe Latinate vicus to so many extremities in so many languages.

It might also be noted though that there was, too, some bending of the meaning. Certainly wick here means farm.

Butter, on the other hand, didn’t necessarily mean, well, butter.

Butter fields, for example, meant no more than fields capable of supporting a herd of dairy cattle: in other words, it meant good grazing, rather than that butter or dairy products were actually produced there.

Buttermere in the Lake District is the Lake with Good Grazing, while Buttercrambe near York was the River Bend of Good Grazing. In fact, very often Butter goes together with bodies of water that brought nutrients to the soil.

However, in this particular case, there is not much room for doubt. Butter here is a Farm where Butter was produced and this gives us the earliest medieval record of a diary farm in the North-East.