[F.5.205:] Kane-Donaldson, p. 8, note in their description of F that it uniquely reads wycumbe in place of Bx's wy, suggesting that it "may indicate provenance." Ms. Tania Styles of CENS at the University of Nottingham (private communication) was kind enough to supply us with the following note:
The etymology of Wycombe in Buckinghamshire is disputed. The EPNS county volume of 1925 gives the first element as the river-name Wye and the second as OE cumb "valley" (pp. 200-01), though spellings that would indicate this do not appear until
Domesday Book (Wicumbe). Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960) decides on the basis of the OE forms Wicumun and Westwicam that we have OE wīc + hamm/hām ("meadow/homestead with a dairy farm") or wīchām ("Romano-British settlement" < Lat. vicus) in the dative plural, the river-name being a late back-formation from the place-name; in this case, association with OE cumb would be secondary but still early; it seems to have been made in 1086 at least. The latest place-name dictionary (A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place Names (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1991), traces the name from wīcum "at the dwellings," giving the same explanation of the river-name and implying a similar status for the -combe spellings. Margaret Gelling came to this conclusion in Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England, 2nd ed. (Chester: Phillimore, 1988), p. 68, and in "English Place-Names Derived from the Compound wīchām," in Place-Name Evidence for the Anglo-Saxon Invasion and Scandinavian Settlements, ed. Kenneth Cameron (Nottingham: EPNS, 1987): 8-18. This would suggest that any place-names in wīchām or -hamm or simplex wīc in the dative plural may have been assimilated to cumb, either sporadically or consistently, from an early date. This makes all of the following non-Bucks names possible candidates for -combe spellings in the ME period.
Ms. Styles then provided a list of thirty-one possible instances. Three of these, Wickham Bishops, Wickham Hall, and Wickham St. Pauls, are in Essex, the first very close to the point at which the editors of
LALME have located this manuscript. The EPNS volume The Place-Names of Essex, ed. P. H. Reaney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), lists no spellings in -cumbe, -combe for any of the Essex sites. & to wynchestr