-wich town

Wich and wych are names used to denote brine springs or wells. By the 11th century use of the 'wich' suffix in placenames associated towns with salt production; seven English towns/cities carry the suffix: Droitwich in Worcestershire; the four Cheshire 'wiches' of Middlewich, Nantwich, Northwich and Leftwich; Sandwich in Kent; and the city of Norwich in Norfolk. John Wyndham based his book, The Midwich Cuckoos as a Wich town.

There is an alternative suggestion for the derivation of the name, which is from the Anglo-Saxon wic which signifies a dwelling place or fortified place. The wic form appears to give two endings, wich and wick (for example Papplewick in Nottinghamshire).

Derivation of the name

Our English salt supply is chiefly derived from the Cheshire and Worcestershire salt-regions, which are of triassic age. Many of the places at which the salt is mined have names ending in wich, such as Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich, Droitwich, Netherwich, and Shirleywich. This termination wich is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea. The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going mediæval people who gave these quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea, evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own time.

— Grant Allen, Falling in Love, with other essays on more exact branches of sciences, 1889