1 Jan 1532 Jahr - law

Beschreibung:

As a place-name suffix this derives from Old English <i>hl?w </i> and it referred in literary texts of that period to an artificial mound, one which marked the site of a burial or a place where treasure might be hidden (EPNE248). More generally it is said to have meant a mound or hill, possibly one that resembled a tumulus. It survived as a vocabulary item in the West Riding, certainly into the early seventeenth century, and it is employed there in boundary descriptions, where it referred to a pile of stones, a cairn that is. Such ‘laws’ were probably erected as boundary markers: 1532 <i>and so from that Meer to another Law of stones in Smolden, </i>Kildwick (MD335/2/3/9). In 1594 a marker on the boundary between Midgley and Wadsworth was described as <i>one heap of stones now called Sabile’s Law </i> (WYAS276) and the Ecclesall name Ringing Low was described in 1574 as <i>a great heape of stones called Ringinglawe </i> (PNWR1/200). See mere (1). </br> Not all the examples noted are so explicit. A Meltham indenture of 1571 mentions <i>one rode of land … lyinge on the west side the lawe </i> (G-A) and a Barkisland deed of 1611 has a parcel of land <i>under the Lawe att the Hystondelffe </i> (OWR2/1/36). Nevertheless these almost certainly referred to heaps of stones that had been erected to serve as markers. As a small plan was drawn on the reverse of the Barkisland document we can clearly see what a ‘law’ looked like to our ancestors.

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