Leyland takes to the road

Talking of semantic chains* (which we were a few posts ago when we discussed 'types' and 'typical', though I didn’t use the term then), I have just come across another nice specimen.

* I have just coined the term ‘semantic chain’ (which means a word’s chain of meanings), but I expect I shall find that someone else has got there before me.

It started when I spotted opposite a rural post office (there is still one left near - but not actually in - our village) a house with the nameboard ‘Leylandii’. Why ? Well, any passer-by can see clearly that the house is named after the species of tree that forms its well-kept garden hedge.

The hybrid tree Cypressus leylandii originated on the estate of Haggerston Hall* in Northumberland, and clones of it have been distributed widely, forming satisfactorily dense hedges for those who can keep control of them, or else infuriatingly huge sun-shaders or view-obscurers when they get out of hand.

* About 7 miles south-east of Berwick-on-Tweed

This new species was given the specific name leylandii (no capital letter, please) because the owner of Haggerston Hall in the late nineteenth century was a Mr C.J.Leyland. ‘Leylandii’* is the genitive case of the Latinised version of his name, and means ‘of Leyland’: so Cypressus leylandii means ‘Leyland’s Cypress’.

* Ah, but we give it a capital letter here because the word comes at the start of a sentence.

Mr Leyland was most likely (someone may be able to confirm this) a member of the north of England family of Leyland who took their name in the middle ages from the Lancashire village (now a substantial town) of Leyland, situated just south of Preston alongside the present M6. Other members of the family may have been the naturalist Roberts <sic> Leyland of Halifax and his son Joseph, who became a distinguished sculptor; and John Leland or Leyland, the famous antiquary who was Henry VIII’s librarian and who was given the task of touring England to seek out and record as much as possible of the histories, documents and properties of the nation’s monasteries, towns and stately homes. Luckily most of his notebooks have survived, and have since been published.

The town of Leyland must have got its name (spelt 'Lailand’ in the Domesday Book of 1086) from the old English words laege (meaning fallow or unploughed - compare our farming terms ‘lea’ and ‘ley’) and lond or land (meaning ground or land).

Incidentally, Leyland also gave its name to the well-known commercial vehicles assembled at its factories in the twentieth century. The town now has, as we might expect, a museum of commercial vehicles; and also a really excellent website.

So the links in the semantic chain start with a plot of unploughed land, then a village name, then the surname of a family that lived there, then a tree named after a member of that family living in Northumberland, then the name of a bungalow in Norfolk whose garden is hedged by these trees; all with a Tudor antiquary, a nineteenth-century naturalist, his sculptor son, and a range of commercial vehicles attached.

Leyland takes to the road