Where did Somerset get its name?

A person speaking right now on the BBC Radio 4 'PM' programme has just asserted, following the extreme rainfall, that Somerset got its name from the fact, in pre-Roman times, that it was only fit for habitation in summer.

Is there any substance in this?

Solution 1:

According to this source, to which I personally give credit, the name was a "translation" by the Anglo-Saxons of the name given by the original Celtic population that had settled there. The Celts were in Britain well before the Romans and the Anglo Saxons ever set foot in Britain. Those Celts who had settled in the area further north of Somerset (what is now called Wales) had named this part of the country they could see across the Bristol Channel Gwlad yr haf ('land of summer') because they could see the vast area of green land where they would be able to go to once the winter floods had receded.

I would say what you heard on the radio is only partly correct in the sense that this part of the country probably wasn't much populated but it's too vague as to how the name Somerset has come about. Implying Somerset is a pre Roman name is impossible as AshStuart and Janus Bahs Jacquet point out, because the Anglo Saxons arrived much later.

Solution 2:

It appears the answer to this is ‘no’.

For one thing, there’s nothing etymological to suggest such a thing. The name does derive indirectly from the name Somerton, which in turn quite likely means simply ‘Summertown’ (with the original meaning of ‘town’, i.e., ‘homestead, farmstead, village, fortress’), but while some have suggested this means the place was only inhabited or inhabitable in summer, there is nothing historically or geographically to support such a claim; Wikipedia has the following to say about it:

However, Somerton is not down on the levels—lower ground, where only summer occupation was possible because of flooding—but on a hill where winter occupation would have been feasible.

There are some places in that general area of the country where floodings would make the land unfit for habitation in spring and autumn especially, but Somerset is not one of them.

More specifically, there appears to be a kind of anachronistic vein to your BBC Radio 4 speaker. It is highly unlikely that Somerset (an Anglo-Saxon name) would be given because of circumstances that reigned in pre-Roman times. The Germanic languages did not enter Great Britain until hundreds of years after the coming of the Romans, and if the implication in your speaker’s argument is that the Romans brought to the place an infrastructure that enabled permanent settlement in the area, there is very little chance that the Germanic peoples who arrived, much later, would give the place a name that had no longer even been relevant for centuries.

It is equally likely, in my opinion, that the place was called ‘Summertown’ simply because the settlers thought of it as a very summery place (at least when they settled it); or that it was originally mainly or only inhabited during the summer months for other reasons.

Solution 3:

The word summer is an Anglo-Saxon term, so it's very unlikely, based on what we know of Anglo-Saxon migrations to these regions, that it that word itself has pre-Roman origins (the Saxons have settled these places much after the Roman presence in Britain.

If you read about this in the etymological dictionary here you will see that it refers to a summer settlement, so it's likely that it was fit for habitation only in summer, or, more likely, given the British propensity for complaining about the weather, it was seen fit for habitation only in summer.