Mere (lake) - Derivation of The Word - Signification

Signification

The word once included the sea or an arm of the sea, in its range of meaning but this marine usage is now obsolete (OED). It is a poetical or dialect word meaning a sheet of standing water, a lake or a pond (OED). The OED's fourth definition betrays a confusion between mere and wetland such as fen in the minds of users of the word which is reflected in the lexicographers' recording of it. In a quotation from the year 598, mere is contrasted against moss (bog) and field against fen. The OED quotation from 1609 does not say what a mere is, except that it looks black. In 1629 mere and marsh were becoming confused. But in 1876 mere was 'heard, at times, applied to ground permanently under water': in other words, a very shallow lake. The online edition of the OED's quoted examples relate to:

1. the sea: Old English to 1530: 7 quotations
2. standing water: Old English to 1998: 22 quotations
3. arm of the sea: 1573 to 1676: 4 quotations
4. marsh or fen: 1609 to 1995: 7 quotations

From this it is clear that the balance of the way the word has been interpreted has changed with time but that the 'lake' view of it is the predominant and persistent one.

A good indication of what people of the past thought the word meant can be found in place-names. Though care must be taken to avoid confusion with words derived from the same root as the Latin murus (wall) which generally include the concept of 'boundary'. Also, the Anglo-Saxon ‘mŏr’, from which the modern 'moor' derives, also refers to low-lying wetlands (such as Sedgemoor, SW England) of which people are no longer generally conscious because they were almost all drained long ago. It is only in place names such as Morton that they are preserved. Conceivably, the Cheshire meres take their name from ‘mŏr’, In the traditional Lancashire, this is unlikely since the nomenclature in that part of the country tends to be Scandinavian rather than Anglo-Saxon so that the lowland moors were called mosses. In early medieval England, its neighbour Cheshire was more of a cultural borderland. However, the mere, Bar Mere is a neighbour of Willey Moor, both well below 500 feet altitude. The Mercian Angles who settled there appear to have recognized the difference. It is also near Bickley Moss, so it appears that the Scandinavians who followed them also found lowland moor but the mere remains a lake.

However 'meres' are found in the south western part of England and were called meres meaning lake despite that the lakes dried up there just before the Roman period, suggesting a possibly Germanic language that developed into old English was spoken in the area. Moors and Meres mean different things and settlers knew this. Also names are hard to change once established especially geographical features, so in Lancashire a change from an Old English name to a Viking one would be difficult considering original names usually stick as is the case for most placenames and names of rivers, streams, mountains etc.

The name Windermere makes it clear that the narrow meaning adopted by this article has not invariably been taken. Windermere is a lake as much as sixty metres deep in a glacially over-deepened valley. In summer there is a distinct thermocline (M&W). On Wimbledon Common in London, there are two meres, Rushmere and Kingsmere which almost certainly result from gravel extraction by hand as deeply as the ground water permitted. Kingsmere is beside the A3 road, the king's road from London to Portsmouth. They are quite uniformly shallow. In the same place however, Queensmere is dammed in a small valley so that it is a little deeper and narrower. The pre-drainage Martin Mere, in its shallow depression in the sheets of glacial deposits and the ‘flashes’ of Cheshire, caused by subsidence when underground rock salt deposits have been dissolved away are meres but the archetypal mere is that of fenland which possibly explains the confusion between it and fen. The mere in which Grendel and his mother lived seems clearly to have been of this sort. The Beowulf story, in which we read of them, was probably written in the seventh or eighth century (C-H p. 29 though this date is far from secure). OED (Supplement) quotes use of the word mere in translations of the Beowulf story from 1849 onwards.

The populations from the English Danelaw who settled in Normandy around the 10th Century used the Old Norse marr 'sea' combined with the Old English mere to mean 'stagnant water' or 'pond', that became mare. They dug out such ponds in every property especially in The Caux region and the Roumois region. That is the reason why the place-names ending with -mare in these regions resemble so much those ending with -mere in England . A part of them are composed of the owner's name (mainly Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon), for instance : Alvimare 'Alwin's pond'; Colmare 'koli's pond'; Vicquemare 'Vigi's pond'; etc. or adjectives (Romance or Anglo-Norse) like Brémare 'large pond' or Houllemare 'hollow pond'.