WHAT'S in a name? asked Shakespeare. He said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but in Evesham would Eof trip off the tongue as easily as Eoves?

It might all be a bit pedantic to the layman, but in scholarly circles there is quite strong feeling about the proper spelling of the name which was responsible for Evesham being the important place it is.

Most people refer to the humble swineherd whose vision was responsible for Evesham Abbey as Eoves, but Councillor Jim Griffiths, of Hampton, who has done not a little research into the subject, is sure his name was Eof.

But back to the beginning of the story. Evesham historian Ben Cox, in his History of Evesham, says legend has it that Ecgwine, the third Bishop of Worcester, who was born of Christian parents in the country of the Hwicce, had a swineherd working for him in the woods where Evesham is now.

One day, while tending his pigs, he saw a bright light and beheld a vision of a virgin attended by two others and that "her splendour darkened that of the sun, and her beauty exceeded all worldly features."

The swineherd hastened to tell the Bishop of what he had seen. The Bishop was so impressed he came to a place called Homme. Walking alone in the woods where his swineherd had seen the vision, he fell prostrate in prayer and, on rising, the same vision was revealed. Ecgwine regarded this as a heavenly intimation that a religious house should be created on the spot to honour the Virgin Mary. Bishop Ecgwine told King Ethelred, who, having himself been converted to the Christian faith, gave the land, by charter on endowment, to Ecgwine so that he could build his first church there.

The rest, as they say, is history. Except that now there is talk of a statue of the swineherd being erected in the town, Coun Griffiths has suggested some independent reliable opinion on the correct form of the name should be obtained "before it literally becomes set in stone."

He says people should not rely unquestioningly on Eoves, the form of the name which appears in May's History of the town.

He points out that The Place Names of Worcestershire, by Mawer and Stenton, published by Cambridge University Press in 1927, attributes the error Eoves to a dubious 16th century manuscript and to even more dubious philological reasoning contained therein.

"Unfortunately, succeeding historians seemed to have swallowed the explanation whole," he said.

In The Book of Evesham by the historian Benjamin Cox, published in 1957, the leading member of the Vale of Evesham Historical Society invariably uses the form of Eof

And in the seminal work Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, the revised edition of which was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1952, Coun Griffiths said: "Saxon names are declined like common nouns and the genitive or possessive case in the singular is formed by adding es."

Coun Griffiths said: "I'm tempted to add QED, but I do think that a definitive opinion should be sought from some independent source, such as an Anglo-Saxon specialist at one of the Oxford Colleges if the Jubilee project in Evesham is to be a statue of our Saxon swineherd."