THE VILLAGE SIGN & VILLAGE NAME

The Clavering Village Sign, unveiled in 1997, was designed by Carol Wilkinson, carved by Michael Fisher, painted by Lyn Merrick and with a plinth of flints picked from the local fields and constructed by Tony Revell. The wooden design consists of clover and buttercups, with blacksmith's strap-work on the sides, and the village name in a mixture of old and new lettering.

In the past, people have misunderstood the meaning of the village name, the Domesday Claulinga. In some counties the ending -ing attaches to the name of a stream but not in Clavering; nor does it mean 'violet meadow' as claimed by historian Philip Morant in the 18th century – he got this from an Old Norse word ‘eng’ meaning meadow/pasture – even in the Clavering Village Guide, published in 1970, this erroneous version was still being given. A place-name dictionary, recently republished, suggests it means ‘place of the sons of Clavel’, allegedly someone who came over with William the Conqueror, but this is wrong too.

It's easy to see how such a mistake could be made, because there is another Clavering in Norfolk, an ancient territorial unit, which Tom Williamson in his book on The Origins of Norfolk says was named after a primitive tribe, the Cnaveringas, and so means ‘the people of Cnaval’. This Cnaval had an alternative name, Cnebba, linked with Cnobheresburg (Burgh Castle), named after Cnobheri - these are all the same person. Cnobheri was the son of Icel from whom it was claimed the 7th century kings of Mercia were descended. The Iclingas may once have been a fifth/sixth century dynasty in Norfolk. This is all very grand, but alas our origins are more prosaic.

Part of the confusion comes about because, although there are lots of places whose names end in -ing, philologists (place-name experts) say they have different derivations: some are singular, some plural. The Norfolk Clavering presumably derives from the double -ingas, which meant ‘people of’, while the Essex Clavering comes from a less common single form, -ing, meaning 'place of'. This was added to an Old English (Saxon) word clæfre meaning clover, and hence the true derivation, ‘place where clover grows’. This was given in P. H. Reaney’s Place Names of Essex in the 1930s, and confirmed recently after much scholarly study by Margaret Gelling in Signposts to the Past.

We should not be ashamed to be named after the humble clover plant! Although now regarded largely as a lawn weed, it attracts bees who make clover honey, it forms a useful fodder crop and it had a vital nitrogen-fixing role in the Agricultural Revolution. The Saxons must have appreciated its value, for here at the junction of two valleys they found an abundance of clover and named (or re-named) the settlement thus.

And where were those ancient fields of clæfre? Town Meadow or the old meads of the Hide, or the Dam or Bury meadows? No one knows, nor even whether it was actually what we now call clover – there are other plants that have carried the name. How lovely, though to live in Clauelinga, the place where the clover grows!

© Jacqueline Cooper 2003.

Drawing by Wendy Upson