Wigmore, Herefordshire

Wigmore is a village and parish in the northwest part of the county of Herefordshire, England. It is located on the A4110 road, about west of the town of Ludlow, in the Welsh Marches. In earlier times it was also an administrative district called a hundred.

Name

The placename is attested as Wigemore (1086), Wiggemora (1165), from an Old English *wicga-mōr, the element wicga likely denoting the yielding quality of the moorland, thus "quaking marsh" or similar."when combined with the second element, it may indicate a specialised term for an unstable marsh in which 'blister' bogs appear and disappear" Archaeological Investigation Report Series A1/14/2002 ; "Wigmore" A Dictionary of British Place-Names. A. D. Mills. Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

Wigmore has usually been identified as the Wigingamere of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (s.a. 917, 921) in 19th century scholarship, but Wigingamere is now known to have been in Newport, Essex.The misidentification goes back to Edward Lye, who recorded a Wicinga-mere (introducing an association with Vikings) as a villa in agro Herefordiensi.Dictionarium Saxonico- et Gothico-Latinum (1772), cited by Joseph Bosworth, A dictionary of the......
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