Historical clues to town name

On the face of things, the answer is easy: Stroud is derived from Old English 'Strod' meaning 'marshy place overgrown with brushwood'. But anyone who knows Stroud, or has studied its history, immediately sees a problem: Stroud is nowhere near the marshy area - not, after all, a very likely place for a town to be established but high up above it, on the hillside.

In fact, it was only after the arrival of the canal in the late 18th century that Stroud began to make any move down the hill away from its old centre around the parish church and The Cross.

So how did it get such a name? One possibility is that the proposed derivation is not correct.

But all the early records of the name give it as Strod, Strode or La Strode, leaving little scope for other interpretations.

However, the occurrence of that version with the definite article - La Strode - may provide a clue to the mystery.

The document of 1304, which gives us a reason for celebration in the coming year, is about an agreement between the "records ... ecclesiae de Bisseleye" and the "habitatores capellae de Strode", that is, between the already long established Minster church of Bisley and a minor chapelry that was beginning to assume a degree of importance.

We have to realise that for hundreds of years before the date of that document, what we now think of as the Stroud district had been seen through the eyes of Saxons living in Bisley, which was the centre of their local universe.

If we look at a modern map, we see, in a circle around Bisley and at a distance of two to three miles from it a large number of place-names preceded by the definite article - or which possessed one until quite recently.

For our current purpose, we will ignore the Vatch, the Scrubs, the Frith, the Taut, the Heavens and the Horns, and just consider the ones that are (or were) on the main routes out of the town.

If the Saxon inhabitants of Bisley followed the road north-westward towards Painswick, they came to the Slad. In a more northerly direction they reached The Camp. The old Cirencester road took them to the south-east and to The Trench, while a south-westerly journey would bring them to The Bourne.

All these are names of features of the landscape, not of places of habitation.

Apart from Bisley itself, the area in pre-Conquest times was probably only sparsely populated.

We do not find there a single example of the classic Saxon settlement suffix -'ton' (Foston's Ash being a recent corruption of Forster's Ash).

Thus The Slad refers to the small valley, The camp to the great field (a pre-Norman name from Latin campus, not French champ), The Trench to the ditch (which may be a man-made defensive earthwork but is usually considered to be a natural depression in the land) and The Bourne to the river (Old English burna), possibly the Toadsmoor stream. but more probably the Frome.

For someone living in and travelling to and from ancient Bisley, The Slad, The Camp, The Trench and The Bourne were the only examples they know of those kinds of features - places they would refer to in talk of journeys and locations.

Each one named some distinctive landmark which characterised a peripheral part of the Hundred of Bisley.

Does this give us a clue to the origin of the name Stroud?

If our Saxon inhabitants of Bisley wanted to head for the Severn Vale, they would travel in a westerly direction and begin what is initially a gentle descent towards the junction of the Frome with the Nailsworth, Slad and Painswick streams.

And, just as on their journeys in other directions, they would have been looking out for unique landscape features such as The Camp or The Bourne, here the distinctive sighting would be of the Strod - that great expanse of scrubby marshland which stretched out below them as the incline steepened and they approached the valley.

And when, in later years, a settlement grew up at that sighting point, the name would become attached to it.

Just as The Slad is named for the small valley into which they looked on their way to Painswick, The Camp for the big field they crossed on the Birdlip road and the Bourne for the place where the main stream of the area came into their view, Stroud is named for the great marsh they sighted as they made their way to the Vale.

And the fact it achieved a Norman spelling - La Strode- tells us that it became an inhabited place of some importance in relation to Bisley.

But with changes in patterns of commerce and communication, Bisley was, over the years, to lose its status as the focal point of the area.

The Bisley to Cirencester road, once so well used, no longer exists.

And today Stroud too, after its era of dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looks likely to follow the fate of Bisley as motorways now take over from railways as the preferred means of transportation. (Will the new century see Stonehouse replace Stroud as the centre of the district, just as Stroud replaced Bisley?).

Perhaps our 2004 celebrations should be a time when the people of Stroud try to learn from the example of Bisley about ways of coping with or, with imagination, benefiting from a decline in economic importance?

Certainly, it is to be hoped that Bisley will play a major role in the festivities.

Without Bisley, Stroud would not be called Stroud and, after all, it was Bisley that was the major player in that agreement of 1304.