Elvendon is a small settlement in

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

and the

Chiltern Hills The Chiltern Hills is a chalk escarpment in England. The area, northwest of London, covers stretching from Goring-on-Thames in the southwest to Hitchin in the northeast - across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Bedfordshire. ...

, near Goring. It includes the grade II listed building Elvendon Priory.

Etymology

The first element of the name is agreed to be the word ''

elf An elf () is a type of humanoid supernatural being in Germanic mythology and folklore. Elves appear especially in North Germanic mythology. They are subsequently mentioned in Snorri Sturluson's Icelandic Prose Edda. He distinguishes "ligh ...

'', either in singular or plural form.Alaric Hall,
Are there any Elves in Anglo-Saxon Place-Names?
, ''Nomina: Journal of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland'', 29 (2006), 61-80 (p. 76).Ann Cole, 'Two Chiltern Place-names Reconsidered: Elvendon and Misbourne', ''Journal of the English Place-name Society'', 50 (2018), 65-74. The second element was long thought to derive from

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

'hill', but reanalysis of the primary evidence revealed that the second element is from Old English 'valley'. Thus at the time when it was coined, the name meant 'elves' valley' or something like it.

References

{{reflist Villages in Oxfordshire