Lloyd, Abigail
(2025)
When is a hill not simply a hill? Investigating nuance in (early) medieval place-names.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
Landscape terminology is ubiquitous in historical place names throughout England. Such terminology reveals much about the perceptions of historical occupants of the land, as well as how they lived and used that land. Place-names offer a unique insight into historical, socio-economic and cultural conditions. The information they reveal is not limited to the upper echelons of society, but informs our understanding of those living locally in a place, at all social levels.
Inspired by the work of Margaret Gelling (latterly with Ann Cole), this thesis selected three place-name elements: OE/OScan berg, OE/Brittonic crug and OE dūn (with potential links to Brittonic and Goidelic elements). Previous understandings of these elements were analysed, including lexical usage outside of the toponymicon. All the elements had been thought to represent some kind of hill. A national corpus of all available berg-, crug- and dūn-names was assembled from available published and some unpublished sources. The database, including linguistic and etymological analysis, was combined with other archaeological, historical, topographical and geological datasets in a mapped GIS interface, available on a website designed specifically for this research.
Armed with this mobile research tool, hundreds of site visits were carried out, alongside desk-based analysis. The results illuminated important philosophical questions surrounding human identification and perception of features in the landscape, as well as visibility and navigation in the landscape, with wider implications for understanding place-naming practice and motivation as a local, non- centralised phenomenon. The value of physical fieldwork was demonstrated. Computational approaches were shown to be an important heuristic tool but not a substitute for such fieldwork. Following the campaign of fieldwork, it was clear that a single, uniform and diagnostically recognisable profile was not present for each of the elements throughout the country, as had been suggested by Gelling and Cole. Therefore, such a profile was not the essence of meaning for these elements.
Nevertheless, the distribution patterns for the elements across the country demonstrated that there was rich nuance to be understood in their onomastic use. Compound place-name analysis, looking closely at the other elements collocating with berg, crug and dūn in compound place-names, yielded a better understanding of why these elements might have been used in particular place-names. Although not anticipated as part of the original research agenda, the study shed light on patterns of OScan-influenced naming, which differed starkly from OE-influenced naming. It also highlighted a strong diachronic shift in meaning in the understanding of OE dūn. The results have a range of implications for understanding some of the earliest surviving OE names for settlements, farming and land use, for contrasting quantity and nature of OScan-influence in central regions of the country compared with those further away from OE-dominant zones, and for glimpsing Brittonic and Goidelic influence on place-name elements in certain areas. In essence, the study demonstrates the motivation behind historical naming using these three elements, shedding new light not just on the historical landscape but crucially on the identities of the people naming the landscape and the ways in which they made use of that landscape.
Word count: 100,520 words
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