Ferreiros
LugoGalicia
From the Galician plural ferreiros 'blacksmiths, smiths', a Galician parallel of Castilian Herrerías. The hamlet, in the O Páramo sierra, was inhabited by a community of smiths documented from the 12th century in the foros of the Samos monastery.
The Galician noun ferreiro 'smith' preserves the initial Latin -f- (from ferrarius) that Castilian transformed into a silent h- in the 15th. The plural toponym Ferreiros designates a guild community devoted to forging: the hamlet concentrated several smith workshops during the medieval period that supplied the agricultural implements of the surrounding parishes. A medieval ferraria, mentioned in the foros of the Mosteiro de Samos around 1158, paid rent to the Benedictine monastery. The metallurgic activity disappeared in the 19th, but the toponym survives. It is the exact Galician parallel of Leonese Las Herrerías, crossed two days earlier by the pilgrim — the Camino preserves the memory of its iron industry on both sides of O Cebreiro.
Evolution of the name
- Ferreiros medieval Galician from the 12th century
Glossary
- Substantivised plural
- A device by which an adjective or noun in the plural is fixed as a place name without the noun that governed it: ferreiros = '[place of] the smiths'. Frequent in Galician and Castilian toponymy of trades and demonyms.
- Castilian F → H
- A Castilian phonetic shift (14th-16th centuries) by which the initial Latin f- passed through aspiration to today's silent h-: ferrum → hierro, filium → hijo, fumus → humo. Galician, Asturian and Leonese did not undergo it and keep the F-.
Sources
- Concello de Paradela · sección de patrimonio (Ferreiros é freguesía de Paradela)
- Cabeza Quiles, F. — Os nomes da terra
- Mosteiro de Samos · Tumbo (siglos XII—XIII)
If you have a correction or an observation about this information,
please write to us through the form at the foot of the site.
We will grow more precise thanks to your contribution.
Camino Francés