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In this text, the author presents details of her research on the way in which numerous place-names are strongly rooted in the physical features of the land. Using a thematic approach, she describes how varied physical characteristics, such as hills and valleys, trees and forests, marshes, moors, springs and lakes have shaped place-names and establishes a general picture of a people in possession of a vast and topographical vocabulary.
Place-names are important to the historian and the archaeologist. Quite apart from the inherent interest of the original meaning of a place-name, the fact that in England there are six successive layers of language reflected in the stock of place-names means that they provide vital evidence for dating and, indeed, for estimating the mixture of races in the composition of the nation. The author, as President of the English Place-Name Society, has succeeded in bringing the story of English place-names to a wider public in this fascinating general study. The response to the first edition demonstrated the book's appeal to the reader with an interest in the evolution, meaning and significance of ...
Norman Scarfe explores place names, the Sutton Hoo ship burial, the coming of Christianity, and the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, concluding with an evocative study of five Suffolk places - Southwold, Dunwich, Yoxford, and Wingfield and Fressingfield. The modern landscape of Suffolk is still essentially a medieval one, though much of it is even earlier: the five hundred medieval churches and ten thousand 'listed' houses 'of historic or architectural interest', and the 'Hundred'lanes going back at least to the tenth century, are often found to be set in a landscape created before the Roman conquest. Suffolk in the Middle Ages opens with a discussion of the earliest written records, the place-name...
Victor Watt's reference work comprises a completely new compilation, based on the archives of the English Place-Name Society. It reflects the most recent scholarship for all names of cities, towns, villages, hamlets, rivers, streams, hills and other geographical locations included in the Ordnance Survey Road Atlas of Great Britain (1983), with many more recent additions. The Dictionary will be of interest to geographers, historians, historical linguists and language scholars.
This volume draws together a series of papers that present some of the most up-to-date thinking on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England more broadly. In honour of one of early medieval European scholarship’s most illustrious doyennes, no less than twenty-nine contributions demonstrate the indelible impression Barbara Yorke’s work has made on her peers and a generation of new scholars, some of whom have benefitted directly from her tutorage. From the identities that emerged in the immediate post-Roman period, through to the development of kingdoms, the role of the church, and impacts felt beyond the eleventh century, the rich and diverse character of the studies presented here are testimony to the versatility and extensive range of the honorand’s contribution to the academic field.