Talk:Æscleah

RFV discussion: June 2022–January 2023
Old English given name. Equinox ◑ 03:31, 7 June 2022 (UTC)


 * The Survey of English Place-Names has some early attestations of places called Ashley, but none of the early spellings look like Æscleah.
 * It's not in Bosworth-Toller, which does have other given names (example) and localities (example).
 * My suspicion is that this is best treated as a reconstruction. 70.172.194.25 03:46, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Given that the entry was created by UtherPendrogn, who was notorious for making stuff up, I'm tempted to speedy this. Also, I don't think Ashley as a given name goes back all that far, except for a few rare cases where the surname was used as a given name. For that matter, I wonder if one can really describe names of that period in terms of given names and surnames.. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:56, 7 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's extremely doubtful that Ashley was a person-name in OE times. But I don't think the form Æscleah is even attested for the toponym. It looks like someone saw the (well-supported) etymology of Ashley, +, and then blindly appended those OE words together; but you won't find Æscleah in any manuscript. The closest you'll get is stuff like Ascelie in the Domesday book, etc. Not sure how liberal we are with normalizing things like that.
 * It is certainly not necessary for resolving this RfV, but it might be interesting to track down when Ashley was first used as a surname or given name. says the given name usage dates from the 16th century, which would be Early Modern English, but it doesn't provide any definitive start date for the (presumably earlier) surname. 70.172.194.25 05:11, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Not in Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum either. The closest is Æsclac, but the morphemes aren't equivalent. 70.172.194.25 21:32, 24 December 2022 (UTC)


 * RFV-failed. 70.172.194.25 02:09, 7 January 2023 (UTC)