My surname ‘Penny’….it means ‘hill’ in Brythonic.
“Sixpenny was first recorded in 932 as Seaxpenn, and means “hill of the Saxons” (from Old English Seaxe and Brythonic penn). The reference is to the hill now known as Pen Hill east of the modern farm, and probably marks an ancient boundary.”
Other derivations of ‘Penny’ are that it’s do with money, or it derives from the Welsh ‘son of’, as in Pendragon or Penhaligon….but I hadn’t heard of this Brythonic derivation before. To be fair, I hadn’t heard of Brythonic before either.
I was looking up Sixpenny Handley, which is close to the Ancestral Home of Broadchalke
I did once look up the distribution of Pennys across the UK and found that we are concentrated in Wiltshire, and more famously, around Liverpool.
