Some recent research and a re-appraisal of already available documentary evidence has led me, after long and careful consideration, to believe that an estate known as Oesewalum was not actually situated in what became the old parish of Nonington in East Kent, but was in fact located near Harrow in the modern county of Middlesex. Therefore, the posts and articles I have written over the last couple of decades placing Oesewalum in the old parish of Nonington now have no relevance. I have therefore removed from the website any references to Oesewalum as being in or having a connection to the old parish of Nonington. The full reasoning behind my change of mind regarding the location of Oesewalum will be put up on the website in the near future.
I have previously proposed that the name Nonington, applicable to the settlement around the village church, had its origins in the ownership in the late 700’s and early 800’s of four aratra [sulungs or hides] of land “aet [at] Oesewalum” by Selethryth, the abbess of the convents of Minster-in-Thanet and Lyminge, and that this settlement was on these four aratra of land. The most logical conclusion therefore appeared to be that Nonington evolved from the Old English Nunne-ingtūn, meaning the nun’s settlement or estate, with the nuns in question being from Minster-in-Thanet and Lyminge, but the fact that the settlement site was not actually on the land “aet Oesewalum” owned by Selethryth invalidates this conclusion. It also means that St. Mary’s Church did not evolve from a chapel founded to provide alms to seven paupers at Oesewalum as specified in the will of Werhard the Priest.
An alternative origin for the name Nonington is therefore required. However, there is still a connection to nuns!
One possibility is that the Nunne in Nunne-ingtūn was in fact the name of an Anglo-Saxon settler and the settlement was named after him. The settlement’s name could have derived from the Old English personal name “Nunne”; with the suffix “ingtūn”; Nunne’s farm, village or estate. The prevailing widespread current opinion amongst place name scholars is that “ing” is a singular suffix which, when paired with “tūn”, meaning a farm, village or estate, had an associative function, i.e. “called after”.
The Old English name Nunna was a masculine personal name originating from the Old English word nunne, meaning “nun” or “holy woman”, which, despite the feminine definition, was used for men. It was most likely to have been used as a nickname to denote a person associated with a religious community or convent life, possibly as a feudal tenant or perhaps as a reeve or bailiff.
This use of “ingtūn” as a suffix would probably date the naming of the settlement to the late eighth or early ninth centuries as early credible examples of “ingtūn” seem only to begin to appear in Mercia or its West Midlands territories in the second half of the eighth century and do not appear in charter descriptions of estates in Kent until in the late 780’s, around the time that Mercia consolidated its control over the previously independent Kingdom of Kent.
An alternative origin of Nonington could be that the land actually was owned by a convent such as Minster-in-Thanet or Lyminge and that when these convents closed due to Viking raids in the early to mid 800’s the convents lands were appropriated by Wulfred and later Archbishops of Canterbury. The name would therefore derive from the Old English for nun, which is “nunne”; which derives from the Ecclesiastical Latin “nonne”, with the suffix “ingtūn”; making it the nuns farm, village or estate.
Much of the land in the old parish of Nonington belonged to the Manor of Wingham, which was a personal fiefdom of the Archbishops of Canterbury until 1538 when Archbishop Cranmer exchanged the manor and attached lands with King Henry VIII for other property.
