One may add to these samples of places named from persons, two or three that very probably take us back to mythical personages. Woodnesborough (Wodenesbergh 1465, Wynsbergh 1496), was named by the Jutish conquerors after their god Woden, whom they commemorated among the Teutonic names they bequeathed to our names of the week. There is another Woodnesborough in Wilts, and Wednesbury and Wednesfield in Staffordshire. And we note that the next parish is Eastry. For the name of this very old and important place in Saxon time various derivations have been proposed, but it is more than possible that it is the town of Eástor or Eostre, the goddess of Spring, whose name survived when the conversion of the heathen Saxons gave a new light to the festival in the Spring, which henceforth was to celebrate a greater Resurrection than that merely of the flowers. And possibly a third instance may be found in the name of Aylesford, which is Egelesford in the _Saxon Chronicle_, and Elesford in Domesday. Amongst various possible derivations that of Eigil, the Teutonic hero-archer or demigod, is worthy of consideration, since it is found as naming places elsewhere; for example, Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, which in the _Saxon Chronicle_ appears as Ægelesburh. Absurdities in Derivation. When a language is not pure, but the result of the intermingling and interaction of several tongues as distinct as Celtic, Saxon and Norman; and when, by the wear and tear of daily use through centuries, place-names have altered in detail of spelling and pronunciation; and when for a long time spelling and reading were arts known but to a small minority of the population, it is plainly inevitable that the original form and real meaning of a place-name should often be difficult to trace. But always in an enquiring mind there was the insistent WHY? which is a characteristic and a glory of man as a reasoning animal, and hence often a meaning was given to a word that is simply a sort of pun, an endeavour to explain a word by what it looks like in current speech or dialect when there was not the knowledge of earlier times and older tongues which elevates mere guessing into the science of etymology. Some Kentish examples of this source of error may be useful. Thus, when we trace Maidstone back into the earliest records we find that it has nothing to do with either Maid or Stone, but comes through many variations from the Celto-Saxon Medwegston, or town on the Medway. Yet though Lambard knew and quoted this in 1570 he suggested also a meaning of “mighty stone, a name given for the quarry of hard stone there!” So, too, Hasted thinks Loose is so called because the stream loses itself underground (like the Mole in Surrey) for some eight hundred yards at Brishing! He might as well have ascribed the name to Loose and Detling having been long only Chapelries of Maidstone, but at last having been cut loose and made into separate parishes in Elizabethan times!