An exploration of the landscape of Anglo-Saxon England, particularly through the prism of place-names and what they can reveal.

Since this work on English place-names was first published in 1961, a great deal of research has been undertaken, and material has been published which is of importance to the interpretation of individual names and the understanding of the significance of groups of place-names. This revised and updated edition explains the technique of place-name study, examines the types of place-name formation, both ancient and modern, and includes a new chapter on modern place-names. It covers names of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and French origin, those with Christian and pagan signifance, those illustrating social and legal customs, and other associations.

The Anglo-Saxon period was crucial to the development of the English landscape, but is rarely studied. The essays here provide radical new interpretations of its development. Traditional opinion has perceived the Anglo-Saxons as creating an entirely new landscape from scratch in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, cutting down woodland, and bringing with them the practice of open field agriculture, and establishing villages. Whilst recent scholarship has proved this simplistic picture wanting, it has also raised many questions about the nature of landscape development at the time, the changing nature of systems of land management, and strategies for settlement. The papers here seek to shed new light on these complex issues. Taking a variety of different approaches, and with topics ranging from the impact of coppicing to medieval field systems, from the representation of the landscape in manuscripts to cereal production and the type of bread the population preferred, they offer striking new approaches to the central issues of landscape change across the seven centuries of Anglo-Saxon England, a period surely foundational to the rural landscape of today. NICHOLAS J. HIGHAM is Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester; MARTIN J. RYAN lectures in Medieval History at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Nicholas J. Higham, Christopher Grocock, Stephen Rippon, Stuart Brookes, Carenza Lewis, Susan Oosthuizen, Tom Williamson, Catherine Karkov, David Hill, Debby Banham, Richard Hoggett, Peter Murphy.

In this significant study,Jill Bourne presents the corpus of all 70 surviving Kingston place-names, fromDevon to Northumberland, and investigates each one within its historical andlandscape context, in an attempt to answer the question, What is a Kingston?She addresses all previous published work on this recurrent place-name, bothscholarship with an etymological focus and contextual scholarship whichexamines the names within their wider context. The core of the work is thehypothesis that names of the type cyninges tun or cyning tun derivenot from independent coinages meaning 'manor/farm/enclosure of a king' in somegeneral sense, or in direct relation to the phrase cyninges tun, as itis sometimes assumed in the literature, as an equivalent to villa regia.The study explores connections between Kingstons and the cyninges-tuns andvill� regales of the documentary sources; considers the concept anddevelopment of early kingship and its possible origins, the laws of theearliest kings, the petty kingdoms, and emergence of the larger kingdoms forwhich the term Heptarchy was coined (but not used at the time); and paysparticular attention to Ancient Wessex, where more than half of the corpus ofKingston names are found, and to the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Hwicceand Magons�te, where a further quarter lie.

From Abbas Combe to Zennor, this dictionary gives the meaning and origin of place names in the British Isles, tracing their development from earliest times to the present day.

Farming was the basis of the wealth that made England worth invading, twice, in the eleventh century, while trade and manufacturing were insignificant by modern standards. In Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, the authors employ a wide range of evidence to investigate how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other agricultural products that sustained English economy, society, and culture before the Norman Conquest. The first part of the volume draws on written and pictorial sources, archaeology, place-names, and the history of the English language to discover what crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques were used to produce them. In part two, using a series of landscape studies - place-names, maps, and the landscape itself, the authors explore how these techniques might have been combined into working agricultural regimes in different parts of the country. A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was recognisably the beginning of a tradition that only ended with the Second World War. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, but infinitely adaptable to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

The question of the British presence in Anglo-Saxon England readdressed by archaeologists, historians, linguists, and place-name specialists. The number of native Britons, and their role, in Anglo-Saxon England has been hotly debated for generations; the English were seen as Germanic in the nineteenth century, but the twentieth saw a reinvention of the German "past". Today, the scholarly community is as deeply divided as ever on the issue: place-name specialists have consistently preferred minimalist interpretations, privileging migration from Germany, while other disciplinary groups have been less united in their views, with many archaeologists and historians viewing the British presence, potentially at least, as numerically significant or even dominant. The papers collected here seek to shed new light on this complex issue, by bringing together contributions from different disciplinary specialists and exploring the interfaces between various categories of knowledge about the past. They assemble both a substantial body of evidence concerning the presence of Britons and offer a variety of approaches to the central issues of the scale of that presence and its significance across the seven centuries of Anglo-Saxon England. NICK HIGHAM is Professor of Early Medieval and Landscape History at the University of Manchester. Contributors: RICHARD COATES, MARTIN GRIMMER, HEINRICH HARKE, NICK HIGHAM, CATHERINE HILLS, LLOYD LAING, C.P. LEWIS, GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER, O.J. PADEL, DUNCANPROBERT, PETER SCHRIJVER, DAVID THORNTON, HILDEGARD L.C. TRISTRAM, DAMIAN TYLER, HOWARD WILLIAMS, ALEX WOOLF