Place-names and Anglo-Saxon communities on the Yorkshire Wolds
Stuart Wrathmell
This contribution outlines current work being carried out for the Wharram Research Project. It focuses on the place-names associated with about thirty communities (including Wharram Percy) occupying an area of the north-western Yorkshire Wolds and the adjacent southern part of the Vale of Pickering. The presentation will explain the methodology used to relate the place-name evidence to the patterns of medieval vills, and to the archaeological evidence for Middle Saxon settlements in this area.
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Polities and place-names: a workshop
Brian K Roberts
The essence of this workshop is that cartography is more than a presentational method: it is a powerful research tool. Within modern GIS systems maps acquire an archival quality and can be accessed and re-used time and time again. In all maps - and here Old English place-names will be my primary exemplar - there will inevitably be data that needs re-working, misinterpretations and even plain errors, but maps represent repeatable experiments, with all that this implies in terms of methodology and long-term research strategies.
We can think of five fundamental scales of enquiry: national [1:2,000,000], macro-regional [1:250,000], local regional (county) [1:50,000], neighbourhood [1:25,000 / 1:10,000] and site [1:2500 / 1:500] - the bracketed notes indicating characteristic map scales. At each level in this hierarchy there are descriptions to be undertaken, questions to be posed and explored, corrections made, explanations postulated and models generated and it is the interlocking of these within the matrices of space and time that generates a historical geographical methodology. This is a variation on the approaches used by other branches of scholarship; not weaker, not better, just different, and part of our wider tool kit.
These arguments will be considered using (1) a national map of pre-Conquest woodlands and more recent common wastes; (2) a direct extract from this used to define early polities and explore place-name distributions in north-eastern England; (3) a map of the woodland, habitative and topographical names in County Durham, (4) the same for a local region along the eastern sector of the Roman Wall, and finally (5) - drawing background data from (3) - the enigmatic territory of Werhale, within which the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow were planted. In effect, all these studies are conjoined by the pragmatic concepts of scale within which historical materials and linguistic evidences must all be assessed.
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Settlement names and settlement types: defining OE tūn
John Baker
OE tūn is the most common generic in English place-names, yet it is perhaps one of the least well understood. Over the years, ‘farm’, ‘farmstead’, ‘settlement’, ‘village’ and ‘estate’, or sometimes combinations of these, have all been offered as possible meanings of the term in individual place-names. In some ways, the vast body of tūn data complicates the matter. There is evidence of its use as an active place-name-forming element throughout the Anglo-Saxon period and even after the Norman Conquest, and it is natural that the precise semantic significance of the word as a toponym should have changed during that time. Its geographical distribution is just as broad, and it may be dangerous to assume that tūn had exactly the same meaning when applied to a place in Cornwall as it did in East Yorkshire. Nevertheless, there is much that can be learnt about tūn as a place-name element from consideration of the term’s use in Old English documents, from examination of its geographical distribution, from comparison with archaeological and topographical evidence, and from the types of specific with which it forms place-names. These areas of investigation may help to reveal the types of settlement tūn was most likely to denote, their physical and organisational characteristics, the forms of land-use that gave rise to them, and how settlements called tūn differed from those given other habitative place-names.
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Mapping historic settlements – case studies from the HEFA CORS project.
Carenza Lewis
This paper will present and review data from currently occupied rural settlement sites which have been investigated by archaeological test pitting since 2005 carried out by large numbers of volunteers in a project that is still ongoing. Settlements investigated to date lie within 20 parishes distributed widely across eastern England and have ranged widely in their present size and form from large nucleated villages to single farms. The paper will consider (a) the ways in which the recovered data have increased the accuracy with which the form, extent and development of settlements in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval countryside can be mapped, (b) the implications the results have on the use of conventional non-invasive methods of historic settlement reconstruction and (c) the implications this has for our future capacity to understand more fully the development of rural settlement in the past.
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Problems in the study of English rural settlement in the first millennium
Andrew Reynolds
This paper offers a critique of the ways in which non-urban settlements in England have been studied over the last 50 years. It considers how early Anglo-Saxon settlements have been explored almost in isolation from later medieval settlements, while the archaeology of both periods has developed in very different intellectual traditions.
Current chronological frameworks are being questioned by several authors, and the paper further explores the validity of rigid chronological parameters and definitions of settlement type on archaeological grounds. A key issue is that recent interest in high- status - or 'productive' - settlements has obscured our knowledge and understanding of English rural settlement between the later 6th and 10th centuries, arguably the most crucial phase in the development of the Anglo-Saxon countryside.
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The oral tradition of place-names
Mark Gardiner
It is easy to forget, because we derive so much of our evidence from written sources, that place-names have had a long prehistory before they ever came to be written down. Before they were committed to paper they existed only in the memory and usage of people. It is difficult for us to appreciate the character of oral memory because we live in a society in England which relies, not upon recollection, but upon written sources of information. The population, even the rural population, is now relatively mobile and the chain of memory about place has been too often broken.
If, instead, we look to more traditional societies we can begin to begin understand the extraordinary ability of communities to preserve memory of place. This is widely recognized in Iceland, for example, where the Örnefnästofnun (Place-Names Institute) has files which record the names and their traditional associations farm by farm across the country. In our research we have benefited from this local knowledge by talking to Icelanders about places on their farms and they have a deep knowledge which go back at least four or five hundred years and often more.
Memory allows change and reinvention, and the second aspect to be investigated is the comparison of place-name usage with historians’ conceptualization of tradition. Tradition was far from a fixed pattern of ritual and practice, but a form of behaviour which represented these behaviours as ancient, while at the same time allowing them to be develop so that they could continue to serve a useful purpose. Place-names can be compared with traditional practices and we can consider how they usage changed so that they continued to have a function.
This paper argues that we cannot study Anglo-Saxon place-names without an understanding of the way in which they have been transformed over the last millennium and more.
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Changing names, changing functions?
Jayne Carroll
The small corpus of place-names recorded as mint-signatures on Anglo-Saxon coins includes a significant number of names which appear to have alternative or additional generics. Examples include Axanport, Axanbrycg [Axbridge]; Hamwic, Hamtun [Southampton]; Hæstingas, Hæstingaport, Hæstingaceaster [Hastings]; Hereford, Herefordport, Herefordtun [Hereford]. This contribution will investigate the possible significance of such alternative names, and in particular what the recurrent use of particular 'alternative' elements in such contexts might signify. Time permitting, it will also touch upon the evidence that the mint-signatures and complementary sources offer for the migration of place-names.
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Thorps in a changing landscape
Paul Cullen
Thorps – in some areas throps – are familiar elements in the named landscape of much of England. When did they appear? What did they denote? What can they tell us about settlement and society?
The current consensus suggests that thorps are minor settlements, dependent in some way on more central places. This study develops existing work by integrating linguistic and archaeological approaches and, for the first time, uniting the thorps of the Danelaw and the throps of the south. It proves possible to suggest a context for the creation of the place-names which relates them to fundamental changes in the English landscape between ad 850 and 1250. Far from being marginal to settlement-patterns, it is proposed that thorps may have played an integral part in the changes that revolutionised agricultural practice across a large belt of the country at that time.
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Tuns by the Wayside
Ann Cole
Work on the place-names that are associated with major routeways reveals that, besides the ones describing the roads and the river crossings, there are groups of names apparently describing the facilities en route for travellers. These take the form of (topographical) element + tun, the first element giving some indication of the function of that particular corpus - hence the term 'functional tun'used to describe these types of name. The facilities a traveller might need are water, lodging, an Anglo-Saxon version of the AA or RAC, grazing/fodder for animals and payload. All of these seem to be indicated by one or other of the functional tun names considered here. How this consistent naming system arose and became applicable countrywide is an unsolved problem.
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OE hearg and weoh: can we understand these place-name elements in archaeological and topographical terms? Further thoughts.
Sarah Semple
The OE terms hearg and weoh have been interpreted by scholars in various ways. Hearg is often suggested to represent a ‘pagan temple’, a ‘hill-top sanctuary or an ‘idol’ (see for example Stenton 1971; Meaney 1995), whilst weoh is variously translated as ‘shrine’, ‘altar’ or ‘idol’ (Wilson 1985; Meaney 1995, Blair 1995). These are rare survivals in the English place name record and when they are identified in the landscape with any kind of precision, the interpretations are often speculative and reliant on particularly late name forms.
Never-the-less, this small group of problematic place names represents some of the most exciting, evocative and contested of English place names. They are considered by many to refer to locations or places of pre-Christian religious activity: temples, sacred groves and hilltops, places with ‘pagan’ idols and shrines. Needless to say, archaeologists, myself included, have been drawn to such data, enthused and excited by its possibilities, only to become frustrated at the many difficulties this type of data presents.
In a recent publication, I made a preliminary exploration of the archaeological and topographical profile of a selection of hearg sites, and suggested that they shared certain attributes: hill-top positioning was common to most and has long been recognised, but in addition most sites shared an archaeological profile that included quite extensive activity of late Iron Age to Romano-British date. This I argued attested to the possible long-term significance of such sites – leading to their sacred status or role in the pre-Christian, early medieval era.
This paper continues this study and explores both hearg and weoh sites further, offering for discussion the archaeological methodology used to explore such place-names and their environs; but also asking a series of pertinent and problematic questions: are these really locatable in the modern landscape? Could these terms mean a range of different things? What kind of activity is actually present on these sites? If these names reflect active Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian sacred places, why did these names survive the Conversion? How can we be sure these are not retrospective names – reflecting myths and legends rather than realities? Should we consider the hearg and weoh to be no more than the imaginings of Christian communities about the past?
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Eccles place-names: what do they denote and why this distribution?
Clare Stancliffe
A short paper that will use a series of case studies to explore the context and meaning of the place name element eccles.
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Churches and place-names on a border: early Christianity in Ergyng.
David Petts
Ergyng was a small Welsh kingdom which lay in an area that is now part of south-west Herefordshire. Evidence for the place-names from this area appears in the Book of Llandaff, an early 12th century dossier created at the behest of Urban, Bishop of Llandaff, to support his claims in an on-going dispute about territory and jurisdiction in south-east Wales. Place-names related to Ergyng appear in both the cartulary that comprises a major component of the Book, and also a section listing churches consecrated by Urban. The names listed were all originally of Welsh origin. However, in later periods some locations appear to have been replaced by English names, whilst others retained their Welsh originals. The majority of the names listed are of religious origin. This paper will explore what these place-names can tell us about the organisation of Christianity in 11th and 12th century Ergyng and consider the factors influencing the continuity and change in place-names in this area.
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Sacred sites in pagan and Christian Scandinavia. The toponymic evidence
Stefan Brink
In Scandinavia place names are the most important source for our knowledge of the pagan cult sites. In this corpus there are some elements, which indicate cult, such as vi/vé/væ, hof/hov, harg/horgr combined with elements denoting natural features, often a grove. These place names in many cases obviously denote cult sites. These names can then be extended with the theophoric place names, hence names with a god's or a goddess' name as the qualifier but a neutral second element, e.g. Torsberg 'Thor's hill', Odensfors 'Odhin's rapid'. A study of the latter names show us that the cult of deities in Scandinavia must have been regional, indicating that the mythology and pantheon mentioned in the Edda and by Snorri in his Edda, were not pan-Scandinavian phenomena. A most interesting result from archaeological excavations in the last decade is that we have been able to excavate obvious pagan cult sites in places with names that include the -vi and –lund elements. We have thus now got some indications of what a Viking Age cult site may have looked like, and we have also excavated some of the first known cult houses. As for the Christian cult sites, the church sites, we can see that in Scandinavia these show no homogeneous picture. In southern Scandinavia we seem to have a Continental and Insular situation, where private churches have been built on royal strongholds and on estates. There seems to have been no spatial consideration by the church builders when choosing sites for the church. Northern Sweden differs. Here many early churches have been built on what was the communal assembly and cult site for a district.
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Bishopton, Monkton and Preston: meaning, date and distribution
Tom Pickles
Margaret Gelling identified a category of place-names called ‘X’s tūn’ names, where the name of an individual or a group was combined with the OE element tūn; she hypothesised that such names were coined in the later Anglo-Saxon period and often replaced earlier names for the places to which they refer. This paper will consider the dating, significance and distribution of three such place-names: biscopes-tūn, ‘tūn of the bishop’; muneca-tūn, ‘tūn of the monks’; and prēosta-tūn, ‘tūn of the priests’. Ecclesiastical names provide a valuable dataset to test this hypothesis for two reasons. Firstly, the historical development of ecclesiastical property conventions can be reconstructed to provide a likely context for the coining of the names. Secondly, as Church lands, an unusually high proportion of the places to which they applied have associated written documentation. Ultimately, the paper will support Gelling’s hypothesis, suggesting that these names were often coined in the later eighth, ninth, tenth or eleventh century. It will be argued that they often signified portions of land set aside for the use of bishops, monks and clergy as a result of two parallel processes: royal and episcopal expropriation of religious communities and their estates, and movements to reform religious communities. The distribution is considered to reflect regional differences in levels of ecclesiastical landholding in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, which seems to add weight to this hypothesis. Finally, two historical implications of these names are discussed: the scale of expropriation and reform, and the nature of ecclesiastical organisation in the Danelaw.
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Kir(k)by: a place with a church or an ecclesiastical estate?
Tom Pickles
Evidence survives to suggest that forty-four places across the counties of the Danelaw were at one time called kirkja-bý(r). This is a compound place-name combining two ON elements: kirkja, ‘church’ and bý(r), ‘farmhouse, estate, town’. Early spellings often take the form ‘chercheby’, apparently preserving an inflexion; but, unfortunately, this might reflect a number of cases – the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative singular. Gillian Fellows-Jensen has considered the distribution, characteristics and historical implications of kirkja-bý(r) names. Fellows Jensen observed that places with kirkja-bý(r) names often preserve evidence for earlier occupation; that they occupy desirable locations with good soils; that they usually gave their names to the parish within which they were located; and that they often have good documentary or material evidence for churches dating to the eighth, ninth, tenth or eleventh centuries. Based on this evidence, she argued that kirkja-bý(r) meant ‘farm/estate with a church’ and was coined by ON speakers for places at which there were churches when they arrived. Building on these observations, this paper will note that kirkja-bý(r) was often applied to parts of estates that had formerly been in the hands of religious communities and that such names could be applied to several places in relatively close proximity but with no descriptive ON term to distinguish between them. Having reviewed this evidence, it will be proposed that these names were coined for places where there were no ON speakers at all or places where an OE speaker owned an estate with an OE name on which ON speakers were working. It will be suggested that kirkja-bý(r) could mean either ‘farm/estate with a church’ or ‘farm/estate of the Church’. Either meaning may suggest churches that continued to function for a significant time after ON speakers settled in a region; the second meaning might help to identify religious communities that retained lands for a significant period after ON speakers settled.
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Early medieval landscapes in the west: places and names in Christian landscapes
Sam Turner
This contribution investigates the possibility of combining settlement-names, archaeological data and landscape history to create detailed models of the development of Christian landscapes in the early Middle Ages. Using case-studies drawn from Cornwall and south-west England, I will endeavour to map successive changes in landscapes of settlement and agriculture in order to better understand the contexts of early medieval churches and monasteries. In particular, I will investigate the distributions of Romano-British sites, early medieval tre- place-names and medieval settlements and field systems. I argue that the historic landscapes of this region provide unusually rich sources for understanding the place of churches in the everyday lives of early medieval people.
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The instability of early medieval British place-names, and what it means for studying religion and belief
Alaric Hall
This paper looks at some fundamental questions about Anglo-Saxon onomastic data in relation to place-name evidence for traditional religion and belief. The key issues addressed are the extent to which our attested place-names are likely to date from the pre-conversion period, and the degree to which place-name data represents the language and world-views only of particular sections of society. Beliefs in supernatural beings will be addressed, along with their roles in shaping people's sense of place.
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Place-names and the Church: an oblique look from a Scottish perspective.
Simon Taylor
Together the five major languages which have contributed to the toponymy of different parts of modern Scotland (British, Gaelic, Norse, Pictish and Scots) have left a wide range of place-names referring explicitly to the Church, in their generic, in their specific, or in both. For more details, see attached document A; and for a comprehensive bibliography of Place-Names and the Church in Scotland, see attached document B. However, in this paper I want to look past this sometimes bewildering array of ecclesiastical place-name vocabulary to a group of names which have nothing intrinsically ecclesiastical about them, but which, from non-toponymic evidence, such as material remains, annals and hagiography, we know to have been amongst the earliest and most important churches of all. Examples from Scotland are: Abernethy, Culross, Deer, Dunkeld, Govan, Iona, Kingarth, Kinrymonth (later St Andrews), Lochleven, Melrose, Monymusk, Mortlach, Rosemarkie (and its related site Fortrose), Tarbat. Very few such names (and none in this list) contain an ecclesiastical element. Others, such as Inchcolm or Applecross, contain a topographical generic qualified by an explicitly religious specific (respectively a saint’s name and - probably - an Old Gaelic or Pictish word meaning ‘cross’, a loan-word from Latin). In fact, place-names with ecclesiastical generics recorded in non-charter sources before 1100 are extremely rare.This forms an interesting parallel with settlement-names, the earliest ones of which are now recognised as being topographical, with those containing explicitly habitative elements coined later, and in some cases standing in some kind of subsidiary relationship to the topographical ones. In other words, some kind of primary-secondary relationship may be perceived between the topographical settlement-names and those containing habitative elements. In my paper I would like to explore the implications of this in connection with topographical names referring to early ecclesiastical sites, and possible relationships between these ‘primary’ sites, and those place-names which contain ecclesiastical elements.
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The significance of burh place-names in Anglo-Saxon England
Simon Draper
English place-names containing burh are common and may be interpreted in several different ways, from prehistoric fortifications to medieval manors and towns. In all these definitions the underlying root meaning is generally assumed to be ‘stronghold’ or ‘fortification’, but archaeological and documentary evidence discussed in this paper argues instead for a more fundamental association with ditched enclosures. In particular, a link is found between some burh place-names and enclosures surrounding high-status settlements of Middle and Late Saxon date.
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Grimston hybrids, býs and thorps in England. When and why did the names arise?
Gillian Fellows-Jensen
When I began to work on Danish place-names recorded in England about 40 years ago, my views were heavily influenced by Kenneth Cameron's three pioneering studies of the names in the Five Boroughs (1965, 1970, 1971; all reprinted in 1975), I was convinced that Cameron was correct to look upon many of the Grimston-hybrids as being English settlements taken overand partially renamed by the Danes. I was also not averse to looking upon the býs as reflecting the development of virgin land and to thinking that
the presence of the thorps strengthened the argument for peasant settlers needing more land than had hitherto been available for cultivation.
Already in 1972, however, my work on Yorkshire had convinced me that thepartial and complete renaming of settlements did not imply the seizure of settlements and dispossession of the English inhabitants but rather the taking over by the Danes of the rents, dues and services pertaining to them, leaving the earlier settlers to go on working the land. I also found various types of evidence showing that many of the býs and thorps must also have been inhabited and their lands under cultivation long before the arrival of the Danes.
In the course of time I have also found some more evidence pointing to the existence of earlier 'large estates' and I am confident that the bý-names in particular were all formed to mark a change in the status of the settlements, presumably in connection with taxation.
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Eastry: Early Anglo-Saxon archaeology and the eastern district of the kingdom of Kent
Tania Dickinson
The village of Eastry in east Kent preserves in its name the existence of an early (presumptively pre-7th-century) Anglo-Saxon organisational district or folk territory, one of three in the area named with the suffix –gē . The village and its immediate hinterland is also the focus of a remarkable number (even in Kent) of Early Anglo-Saxon burial sites and finds, which still constitute the only contemporary source for casting light on the beginnings and nature of this ‘eastern district’. This paper will begin by outlining the textual evidence for the place-name and associated royal vill (centre?), before summarising results from a British Academy supported project currently being undertaken by Andrew Richardson (Canterbury Archaeological Trust), Chris Fern (York) and the author. This combines publication of burials recently discovered in small-scale interventions within the village with critical re-assessment of antiquarian finds made in the 18th and 19th centuries, and puts these into the context of old and new finds in the neighbourhood.
The origins of the ‘–gē’ districts of Kent can be discerned in the distribution of communities displaying the earliest (mid 5th- to early 6th-century) ‘Anglo-Saxon’ material culture and burial practices, primarily along the lower fringes of the chalk dip slope and in valleys draining into the Wantsum Channel. A cemetery in the south of Eastry village (Eastry I), beside the Roman road from Dover to Richborough and Canterbury, and another at Ringlemere, about 2 km to the north-west may signal founder communities of the ‘eastern district’. Within a 2-3 km radius of Eastry, well-known cemeteries, such as Finglesham and Gilton (Ash), as well as others even closer indicated recently by metal-detecting, testify to the emergence by the 6th century of some very prosperous, even leading, kindred. The role of Eastry, and the Roman road, as a centralising force is further demonstrated by the distribution of casual finds of Early Anglo-Saxon metalwork, and, in the later 6th century, by the placing of wealthy graves, probably under barrows, both in the north of the village and, we would argue from re-assessment of the antiquarian evidence, on Updown to the south. Here, we have reconstructed a late 6th-/early 7th-century ‘horse-and-warrior’ burial, one of a number of possible forerunners to the large ‘Final Phase’ cemetery on Updown (Eastry III), and as wealthy as any male grave from Kent: it is a plausible candidate for a local aristocrat and royal familiar, such as might have held authority in an early folk district. Although there is no archaeological evidence for a contemporary royal settlement in the village of Eastry (and so uncertainty on when the district name was fixed to it), the possibility that Woodnesborough on the Roman road just north of Eastry embodies a 6th-century royal Woden cult, and the concentration of Early and Middle Saxon coins within the parish of Eastry, add to the case for this area being the centre of the ‘eastern district’.
Select bibliography
Behr, C. 2000. ‘The origins of kingship in early medieval Kent’, EME, 9, 25-52.
Hawkes, S. C. 1979. ‘Eastry in Anglo-Saxon Kent: its importance, and a newly-found grave’, in S. C. Hawkes, D. Brown and J. Campbell (eds.), ASSAH 1, BAR Brit. Ser. 72, 81–113.
Welch, M. 2008. ‘Report on excavations of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Updown, Eastry, Kent’, ASSAH, 15: 1-146.
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Custodians of Continuity
David Stocker and Paul Everson
Our project looks at the validity of the term ‘ritual landscape’. It does so through assessing the impact of the creation and dissolution of a medieval monastic house on an extensive and diverse local landscape, which exhibits partly-understood ritual behaviours starting in the later Bronze Age. The chosen monastery is the Premonstratensian abbey of Barlings, located on the island of Oxney within an embayment of the Witham Valley east of Lincoln. Its continuous landscape – built up and consolidated by acquisitions, exploited through a suite of granges and manorial holdings, and serviced through churches, chapels and other forms of religious provision – extended from the peatlands of the Witham Valley north into the rich claylands of the tributary catchment of the Barlings Eau and west up the limestone dipslope to the sheepwalks of the limestone ridge north of Lincoln.
The sites and buildings that make up the elements of the study survive today in a variety of states – as buried sites, earthworks, as a combination of earthworks and ruins, as substantial medieval fabric buried in a later building, and as buildings in continuing secular and ecclesiastical use. They have been recorded and analysed individually with results of exceptional interest; but their potential is only fully exploited when the complex interrelationship with each other, and with a landscape and its resources, is understood. We argue that the canons of Barlings were, knowingly and purposefully, emblematically as well as practically, custodians of this landscape, forming one phase in a sequence that stretched back into prehistory and forward into the early modern era.
For the purpose of the SPASE seminar, we can take this archaeologically defined ‘ritual landscape’, with its early roots and twin axes at Lincoln in the west and Bardney in the east, and look at its characteristics of name formation, asking to what extent and in what respects naming signals or reflects the distinctive status of this landscape.
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Waltons: balancing the probabilities
Matthew Blake
It is now some thirty years since Kenneth Cameron gave a paper entitled The Meaning and Significance of Old English walh in English Place-Names (later published in the Journal of English Place-name Society, 12, 1980).
In his carefully constructed discussionProfessor Cameron explained that when wrestling with a place-name element such as walh, “one can do no more than balance the probabilities”. With this contribution I intend to revisit Cameron’s probabilities and re-examine them through a series of case studies.
A preliminary exploration will begin with the three Waltons in Staffordshire that occur in Cameron’s corpus of Waltons (namely Walton near Stone, Walton near Eccleshall and Walton on the Hill near Baswich). This paper will also consider other examples within Cameron’s corpus to see if the Staffordshire cases highlight any issues that may contribute to a broader discussion of the context and meaning of walh tūn. To progress the discussion I will reflect on some of those Waltons rejected by both Cameron and Gelling (Place-names of Shropshire) as lacking the philological evidence to be included as genuine walh tūns. I will suggest that it might be possible to find a topographical profile that may help us to suggest further walh tūns and highlight their relationship to the surrounding landscape.
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Interdisciplinary approaches to settlements and estate structures: a north Lincolnshire case-study
Dawn Hadley
This paper focuses on a small group of settlements and estates in north Lincolnshire in the vicinity of West Halton (where I have recently been conducting fieldwork) and Flixborough. There are grounds for suggesting that West Halton was the focal point of this region: it is the centre of the largest Domesday soke in the area, and many of the neighbouring manors and small sokes had evidently been carved out of a once larger territory focussed on West Halton. West Halton was also the location of the mother church of the vicinity and had a number of outlying medieval chapels. Drawing on place-names, archaeological and documentary evidence this paper will explore the combined light that they cast on the issues of settlement status and the development of the Anglo-Saxon estate structure. In the context of this workshop, an issue of particular interest is the extent to which we can use place-names to predict that nature, role and status of particular settlements, or their position within particular estate hierarchies. The archaeological evidence from the case-study suggests that at least of the sites underwent considerable changes in function and status, and the challenges of incorporating this evidence with the insight provided by the written and place-name record will be explored.
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Tun and leah in the rural economy
Ros Faith
These are the two most common place-name elements, both had long periods as active elements, and they are virtually mutually exclusive. One productive way to approach their interpretation is to look at their context in the broadest sense: their natural environment in conjunction with the husbandry practices that people adopted to deal with it. –tons occur in such varying physical and social circumstances, from big estate to small farm, that we should look to the built environment for their common element. By contrast, Della Hooke’s re-interpretation of leah as a area of wood-pasture has made it possible to see the wood-pasture economy as supporting a way of life and a form of settlement which makes the common denominator of leahs more likely to have been their nature as areas of land than their buildings. The differences between these places have implications for the part they played in estate structures.
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The place-name Kingston and its context
Jill Bourne
The place-name Kingston is generally regarded as being of relatively late coinage mainly because, as with the other names in this category (Preston, Bishton, Knighton, Chilton etc.), it implies administrative/ manorial arrangements which belong to a later rather than earlier stage of social organisation in Anglo-Saxon England.* This group of names is also considered to have displaced earlier names. This may have been true of the other examples in the group but does not appear to have been the case with the Kingstons.
What did these names signify? Where are they found? Was a ‘Kingston’ a villa regalis?
There are (so far) at least 75 recorded instances of the name and its variants. Cameron noted that it was almost impossible with the word cyning ‘king’ and the related word cyne ‘royal’to decide between the two words with their similarity of form. All Kingston names in all forms, recorded before 1600 have been included in this distribution study which considers each example of the name in its administrative, historical, and tenurial, context and that of the wider landscape organization. There are a few border-line/probable names which will be discussed in the complete study.
* (Kenneth Cameron English Place Names, p. 133-4 New Edition Revised and Reset 2001; Margaret Gelling, Signposts to the Past, p.184 3rd edn, 1997)
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Wic place-names: their meaning, date and wider significance
Simon Draper
My attempts to discern a Roman and post-Roman significance for wic in Wiltshire place-names, including many where the term is used as a second element in a compound or a simplex, often surviving as modern ‘Wick’ or ‘Wyke’, have attracted not a little controversy. The current view among most place-name scholars is that wic when used in this way meant simply ‘dependent economic unit’ and was just one of many terms for a minor Anglo-Saxon settlement, the later diverse meanings of the word bearing little or no relationship to its origin in the Latin vicus. Whilst, of course, the element did indeed evolve specialized meanings in the later Anglo-Saxon period, many of which are associated with farming, I am not convinced that the default interpretation of other wic names as later Anglo-Saxon settlements, often dairy farms, suffices in all cases. In this paper I will revisit the evidence, as I see it, for a link between some wic place-names and Roman and post-Roman archaeology and attempt to engage with some of the linguistic issues relating to the element's use and interpretation.
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Worth as a farm type
Ros Faith
Worth as a place-name element has been mapped in Roberts and Wrathmell, Atlas of Rural Settlement. Michael Costen’s collection of worth names in Somerset remains the most detailed examination, incorporating vanished worths in field names and charter references, and including minor as well as parish and manorial names. Judie English has looked at worths in Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex, and Surrey. These studies analyse their examples according to broad topographical categories of their location. My short survey includes the wereths in Essex marshland also examined by Steve Rippon and some farms with pre-Conquest names in –worthy on the fringes of Dartmoor. I consider the worth as a widespread form: the ring-fenced farm, appropriate to particular environments where enclosure was important.
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Invisible functions: the place-name Upton
Richard Jones
Some place-names appear to take their cue from the particular social and economic functions performed by those communities associated with them. So distinctive were these activities that they could be used as distinguishing markers of the place itself. This is a dairy farm, this is a market-place etc. As the study of thorps has shown, however, there are other places which carry names that do not immediately encourage us to look to function as the common denominator which unites the group, and yet it is possible to propose that they were engaged in one particular aspect of agrarian life in the early medieval period. Using the methodology developed for thorps, in this paper I will consider the place-name Upton, on the surface an uncontroversial toponym, and show that some telling tenurial and spatial relationships emerge from their investigation. Using these, it is possible to suggest that Uptons had a particular and central role to play in the functioning of early medieval estates and elite life-styles.
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Identity, place-names and non-arable resources
Susan Oosthuizen
Communal access to pasture and other non-arable resources have an ancient history. This paper begins by using the archaeology of common resource management to contextualise identity, place-names and non-arable resources in early medieval and medieval Cambridgeshire. Using material drawn from both fen and upland, the paper explores how place- and field-names, together with other forms of evidence, might assist in exploring the reliability and role of place- and field-names in signalling · the territorial 'rights' of communities and individuals to common resources; and commoner status in the landscape.
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What makes a stronghold?
John Baker
In Old English texts, three terms in particular are used to denote strongholds: burh, (ge)weorc and fæsten. Yet some recent discussion has cast doubt on the Anglo-Saxon military context of place-names containing these elements. Compounding practices can shed light on the functions of such sites and their physical characteristics, and in turn this may help to differentiate those place-names that do refer to Anglo-Saxon strongholds from those that do not.
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Some reflections on tun-compounds such as Barton and Acton
Richard Coates
I will review the evidence for Old English compound expressions with tun as the second element, such as actun and bere-tun, and the hypotheses about what their meaning and significance might be. I favour the view that they are likely to have an economic, rather than a topographical, significance, and will try to be more precise about it on the day.
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Wics in Somerset: hearing voices, seeing things
Sue Fitton
There are numerous places in Somerset containing the element wic; a few exist as parishes, the majority are simply field names. The wide range of uses poses a number of questions about its original meaning, from the possibility of a link with Roman sites through the Anglo-Saxon transition to the more general ‘dairy farm’. This also calls into question whether we should regard it as a habitative element or if there is another explanation for its apparent ubiquity. Since many of the Somerset wics do not necessarily seem to be indicative of permanent settlement, the usual written sources are of little help. I will consider, therefore, what use can be made of the tithe apportionments especially as evidence of oral traditions. There may also be some merit in looking at wics in relation to other features in the landscape. Finally, are there parallels in Ireland which may give us a clue to the role of some of the Somerset wics?
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