The district council ROTHER in Sussex, England

The name of the Sussex district council is taken from the name of the
river that flows through it from its sources near Five Ashes and
south-east of Rotherfield village to the sea at Rye. The river-name is
taken from the name of Rotherfield, and that is a puzzle in itself because
Five Ashes has never been in Rotherfield and the village of Rotherfield is
not actually on the river at all – nor is it in Rother District.

The name Rother for the river first appears on Christopher Saxton’s map
including Sussex published in 1576. Before that, it had been known as the
Lymene. In this Tudor period, there was a fad for making
river-names up
from the names of places that stood on their banks, whatever they had been
called before, so that in Sussex we get the Arun from Arundel, the
Uck
from Uckfield, and even in all probability the Ouse from Lewes.
That is
certainly what has happened in the case of the Rother, and in a fit of
passion for tidiness Saxton also makes Robertsbridge into
Rotherbridge
because it is on what he now calls the Rother. Saxton may well have
given
the idea of how to name a river to William Harrison, whose Description of
England was published in the first edition of Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles in 1577. Either Saxton or Harrison (or both) was a real whiz at
these inventions. Rotherfield itself is recorded in Anglo-Saxon times, in
fact in King Alfred’s will, as æt Hryðeranfelda, a slightly
mistaken form
which in the most scholarly Old English would have been æt
Hrýðerafelde.
This means ‘at the open land associated with cattle’.

Such a form would be expected to become Retherfield or Ritherfield in the
regional English of Sussex. But in medieval English the word for ‘cattle’
became specialized as rother in the language of the law – lawyers wrote
and spoke of rother-beasts. This spelling, which seems to have been
a West
Midland dialect form originally, gradually supplanted Rether- in
the
place-name in documents from the 13th century onwards, since most
documents of the Middle Ages which mention the place are legal or
administrative ones. So when Saxton was trying to work out what the river
might logically be called (and not what it was called), he must have
discovered that Rotherfield was the usual name of the village, at
least
among any legally-trained friends he may have had, and he named the river
accordingly on his map.

Richard Coates