Projects

Landscapes of Governance is a three-year interdisciplinary research project bringing archaeology, place‑names and written sources together in a national study of early medieval assembly sites.

Early medieval western Europe developed in the shadow of the classical Roman world. While substantial traces of the organizational capacity of the Roman Empire can still be seen in Britain, for example the Roman road network and Hadrians Wall, evidence for power and authority in the centuries following the Roman occupation is much more subtle. Arbitration, negotiation and dispute settlement were fundamental to the formation of kingdoms and ultimately the nation state of England, but the places where such activities occurred have never been comprehensively studied as archaeological sites, their names investigated only once in the last 80 years by the Scandinavian scholar O. S. Anderson.

Assembly sites were important at many levels of early medieval society, royal, regional, local and urban, and they provided a means whereby royal and official prerogative met with local concerns. Place‑names of assembly sites and their associated districts indicate varying origins, in some cases referring to pre-Christian gods, including Woden and Thor, while other terms relate to monuments of earlier ages, such as burial mounds and standing stones. Other meeting-places are named after seemingly mundane features such as crossroads, bridges and settlements.

Only a dozen or so English assembly sites have been investigated by detailed archaeological survey and excavation. Studying meeting-places and their surroundings can reveal much about their relationship to other social functions and places. Form, layout, accessibility and viewshed are among the attributes to be examined by the project.

The research will generate scholarly publications, a downloadable recording pack to facilitate and encourage local studies and a comprehensive web-based resource (The Online Anderson) to serve the widest possible range of users.

Principal Investigator

Dr Andrew Reynolds, UCL Institute of Archaeology

Co-Investigators

Professor Barbara Yorke, Department of History, University of Winchester

Dr Jayne Carroll, Institute for Name‑Studies, University of Nottingham

Research Fellows

Dr John Baker, Institute of Name Studies, University of Nottingham

Dr Stuart Brookes, UCL Institute of Archaeology

Go to the Landscapes of Governance website

The Impact of Diasporas on the Making of Britain is a major multidisciplinary research programme funded by The Leverhulme Trust. The overall aim of the project is to conduct research into the impact of ancient diasporas on the cultural and population history of Britain and how these events have shaped identities in the British Isles both in the past and in the present. What makes the programme unique is that its principal purpose is to bring together the expertise from a number of different disciplines in order to create a fuller picture of the complex origins of the British people. The programme, which runs from five years from January 2011, is based at the Unviersity of Leicester but also funds related research within the Institute for Name‑Studies. The progamme's PhD student, Eleanor Rye, is based at the Institute. Further details are available from the Impact of Diasporas website.

The Survey of English Place‑Names, a British Academy Research Project, aims to examine the origins and development of all of England's names. The published work is arranged by historic counties: the first volume, covering Buckinghamshire, appeared in 1925; the eighty-sixth, dealing with part of Leicestershire, came out in 2011.

The Survey is the principal project of the English Place‑Name Society (EPNS). From its inception the Survey has received the generous support of the British Academy and, latterly, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Further details of the Survey are available on the EPNS pages.

The Vocabulary is an alphabetically-arranged dictionary of the words that make up England’s place‑names. These words—or place‑name elements—reflect the rich diversity of England’s linguistic history and derive from Norse, French, British Celtic, Irish and Latin, as well as from English in its various stages of development. The Vocabulary is a contribution to the historical study of all those languages. Its material is also of great interest to many historians, geographers and archaeologists concerned with the landscape, settlement and society of England over many centuries.

The Vocabulary aims to take the place of A.H. Smith’s English Place‑Name Elements, published by the EPNS in two volumes in 1956, which itself replaced Allen Mawer’s Chief Elements used in English Place‑Names of 1924. Periodic revision in this way is valuable because it takes account of the masses of new material published in the Survey of English Place‑Names, and also of the decades of new research published by editors of the Survey and by many other scholars. The Vocabulary offers not only a thorough revision of Smith’s work, but also a considerable enlargement of its scope to include much material from ‘minor’ names (field-names, street-names, etc.). The intention is to record all vocabulary found in any place‑name recorded before c.1750.

Three volumes of the Vocabulary are available in hard copy. A draft version of the entries from the letter M is available on the Vocabulary of English Place‑Names page.

This project was generously supported by the AHRC and ran from September 2005 to August 2010. One of the main aims of the project was to publish five new volumes of the Survey of English Place‑Names. These volumes cover areas of County Durham, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Dorset, and Shropshire. The research also helped set the agenda for a major international conference on place‑name study in England and related neighbouring lands (including Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands). The conference was held in Nottingham in June 2010; the keynote lectures will be published in the Perceptions of Place volume, to appear in 2012.

The Key was initially developed in 2004 to 2005, and generously funded by the AHRC. It is a database searchable through a clickable map and dialolgue boxes, and is intended to provide an up-to-date guide to the interpretation of the names of England's cities, towns and villages, drawing on the work of the English Place‑Name Society (itself housed within the institute) and other researchers. To discover the origins and meanings of hundreds of England's place‑names, visit the Key to English Place‑Names page.

This project, based at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester, was established to investigate the pattern of medieval settlement in an area covering 11 parishes straddling the Northants/Bucks boundary. It involved close collaboration between archaeologists and historians – the Institute for Name‑Studies also gave some advice on place‑names. In addition, we established a postgraduate studentship, which was awarded to Eleanor Forward. She completed her thesis, on the names of the Whittlewood area, in 2007, under the direction of Dr David Parsons.

Go to the Whittlewood Project website

The project was based at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. It aimed to investigate the landscape of military organisation in England in the late Anglo-Saxon period, combining archaeological and onomastic approaches. In Nottingham, Dr John Baker completed a 3-year research fellowship (2005-8) with this project, under the direction of David Parsons.

Go to the Beyond the Burghal Hidage website