That place-names often contain clues to the origins of settlements has been long recognised. Most projects will take account of them at some stage, but few start with them. Most archaeological studies of early medieval settlement have begun by looking at settlement shape when deciding where to work, largely because it has been the question of village nucleation, and more recently settlement dispersion which has dominated the academic agenda. Place-name scholars, on the other hand have tended to work in other ways, seeing the utility of studying places that share common name elements as a group. This provides an interesting framework in which to work, because it starts with the premise that these places must have shared something in common for them to have been named in the way they have. Many place-names, of course, have transparent meanings - thus everyone knowns that caesters take their cue from the survival of Roman walled defences. Some are more difficult to establish such as names which take their point of reference from the surrounding landscape. But careful topographic study has revealed the meaning of many, such as ofer, ora, and shelf, all terms for different shapes of low ridge. The precise meaning of other name elements, particularly those termed as 'habitative names; remain elusive, names such as those in - stoc and -worth,-ham and -tun.

Inorder to provide a wider context for local studies we have begun to assemble on these pages the latest thinking about a selection of key place-name groups, such as thorps and bys, burhs and wics. This also extends to common compounded names such as Prestons and Kingstons, Uptons and Mortons. Your work, of course, may help to change our ideas about these places, but for the time being this seems like a good place to start.

One of the great hopes of this project is that as more information become available we will be also able to say something about other name groups which currently do not feature here.