1) To knock down.
1552 None shall dinge down ackornes of the trees under penalty of 3s 4d, Stubham.
2) In Selby there were ‘dings’ from 1658, and they were evidently two-storey buildings which functioned as warehouses.
In the inventory of 1676 attached to the will of John Chambers: In the chamber over the Saltding, 500 of fir deale … in the Salt Ding, 8 weigh of salt. A rental for Hull in 1527-8 has five entries under The Dyngges each of them a shop, and an earlier rental also lists a shoppe in the Dyngges: an editorial footnote indicates that the name may have been on record there from 1365 when only drapers might lease the shops. They stood at the east end of Holy Trinity church. In Beverley, the history of the word goes back to 1165 at least and it referred there to a hall in the market place. This belonged to the Archbishop of York who held the lordship of the town, and the hall served as both a residence and administrative centre. In 1282, this building was described as Byscopding when it was leased to the townsmen: the archbishop moved his headquarters to Hall Garth, a moated site south of the minster and the property was adapted to other uses. In 1408, the rents issuing from the Dynges in Beverley amounted to 66s 8d and the inference is that the hall had been divided into several tenements that were already being used commercially or as shops. In the Beverley Corporation Book it was ordered in 1722 that no lease be made of any shop in the Dings to any person keeping a blacksmith’s shop, a common bakehouse or a heckler shop: in 1772 the Signe of the Fox was a public-house in the Dings. The buildings were sold by the corporation in the early 1800s. It is worth noting that in 1799 they subscribed 15 guineas towards flagging the Butter Dings for Butter Ding Flags survived as a street name, on the east side of Saturday Market. Until recently there was no satisfactory explanation of this word: A.H. Smith thought that it might be Scandinavian in origin, probably meaning dung or dung-heap, but that never seemed likely given the connection with the Archbishop's residence. A more plausible explanation identifies it as a word derived from Old Norse dyngja, meaning a cellared building. It remains uncertain whether the ‘dings’ in Hull and Selby had independent origins but it seems possible that they were transferred to those places from Beverley, in the way that some other street names passed into more general use. The narrow area in which ‘ding’ occurs, along the Ouse and its feeders, lends some support to that view, with 'salt-ding' as an active vocabulary item in Selby in the 1600s.