Spittlegate, in the Winnibriggs and Threo Wapentake of Lincolnshire, comes from Middle English spitel ‘a hospital, a religious house, a house of the Knights Hospitallers’ and Old Norse gata ‘a road, a street; a right of way; a right of access to pasture-land; a right of pasturage; an allotment of pasture’. The name is first recorded in 1284 and clearly a post-Viking Age formation, though showing the continued use of originally Old Norse vocabulary in name-giving.
