The Cameron Lecture
The biennial Cameron lecture is held in memory of Professor Kenneth Cameron. Cameron was Head of English at the University of Nottingham from 1984 to 1987, and was one of the leading figures in place-name study. In 1967, he became Director of the Survey of English Place-Names and moved the library and offices of the English Place-Name Society to Nottingham, where they remain, now housed in the Institute for Name-Studies.
Lost Villages, Lost Names?
This lecture explores the survival and loss of minor-names and field-names in the context of late medieval and early modern settlement depopulation and desertion. Drawing from a selection of well-documented lost villages in Leicestershire, it examines the impact of population decline and landscape change on local name stocks. It asks whether we can identify a minimum population threshold above which names were more likely to survive or below which they were lost. It examines the effects of different forms of depopulation—rapid and wholesale versus extended and piecemeal, early versus late—on name survival and loss; and, where the precise dynamics of depopulation are unknown, how name survival might potentially inform on those processes. And it asks what kinds of names survived or were lost and why. As might be expected, the picture that emerges is complex, and all the more thought provoking for it.
Dr Richard Jones
Associate Professor of Landscape History, University of Leicester
Dr Richard Jones is a medieval landscape and environmental historian whose research explores the complex relationships that developed between rural communities and their locales/environments in England, Wales, and France across the whole of the Middle Ages (c. 500-1500AD). His work sits within the interstices of several disciplines including history, archaeology, physical and historical geography, and toponomastics. His studies of place-making, agricultural practice, and responses to environmental threats in medieval England and Wales have been conducted at local, regional, and national scales.
The event is free to attend.