by Nick Corcos

Introduction

UK graduate courses in archaeology do not, by and large, give much training to students in the use of historical evidence for the location and characterisation of archaeological sites. This is a great shame, because there are certain classes of evidence within this category which, if used with judgement and care, can yield information on sites which is simply not achievable in any other way. In particular, the predictive identification of past occupation, when all other avenues of enquiry appear to fail, is one of the great strengths of this kind of evidence. And foremost among these historical sources for archaeological purposes is toponymy, the study of place-names and field-names.

It is worth saying from the outset, since it is clear that many ‘traditionally-trained' archaeologists are not aware of the fact, that there are certain categories of toponyms that are tantamount to having a large, flashing neon sign in a particular area saying ‘archaeological feature or occupation site here'. This is a powerful technique, but is grossly underrated in the general archaeological literature on practical methodologies. The literature on place-names is voluminous, and archaeologists, taking their cue from the place-name specialists, have long recognised that many ‘major' names (ie the names of currently-occupied settlements, which are often also the names of ancient parishes) have archaeological implications - it seems, for example, quite clear that the Old English word ceaster, apparently a direct borrowing from the Latin word castrum, was applied quite specifically by English speakers to places which they knew had possessed stone-built defences in the Roman period (I) . It is fair to say that archaeologists are, however, far less familiar with the idea that so-called ‘minor' names (ie names below the level of parish names or of currently-occupied settlements of any size, even hamlets or individual farms) may have a great deal to tell us about the location of former occupation sites or types of land-use. It should be said that local historians in particular have been aware of, and usefully applying, this kind of evidence for years (ii). However, what must be one of the earliest systematic attempts to make archaeological sense of medieval and later field and furlong names, from an area of Warwickshire which had formerly lain under open fields, was a wide-ranging study by W J Ford published nearly 30 years ago. Ford suggested, among other things, that certain minor names which were still recoverable from the historical record, were highly indicative of former occupation sites long-since abandoned (iii).

There have now been enough studies carried out, marrying the place- and field-name, and the archaeological evidence, which show beyond doubt that in some cases there is a direct, causal relationship between the two. This has led to the formal adoption of toponymy as a central plank of research methodologies within modern campaigns of historic landscape survey, and indeed, there have been occasions where sites have been targeted for the deployment of ‘conventional' archaeological approaches (usually geophysics followed by excavation) specifically on the basis of indicative toponymy (iv). In addition, the use of place- and field-names as archaeological indicators of proven reliability is now acknowledged within an increasing number of local authority HERs, where the occurrence of an indicative name alone is enough to prompt a designation on the HER as a potential archaeological site. Indeed, it is now possible to go so far as to say that if there is an early form of an indicative name available (ie at least 16th or 17th century and preferably medieval), then in the absence of all other indicators (e.g. aerial photographic evidence, known archaeology as reflected in the local HER, historic map and/or other documentary evidence), then it is the name which should be believed and which should be targeted for further investigation.

As an illustration of this principle, the author can cite, from his own experience, the example of the field-name Oldbury (in this case, almost certainly OE ealdan byrig) from a parish in Somerset on the edge of the Somerset Levels. Specialists regard this as a highly indicative name, meaning as it does, ‘the old fortified place', but probably applied by English speakers in a rather more general sense of ‘old, defended and probably high-status site'. This form is well attested as a major name, sometimes attached to places where some obvious feature, such as an Iron Age hillfort, can be identified as the source; Oldbury on Severn in Gloucestershire, and Oldbury near Mancetter in Warwickshire, are examples (v). Where it occurs as a minor name (ie a field-name), it is likely to retain a similar, highly diagnostic affinity (vi). In the case of the present example, the name persisted long enough in the local landscape to be recorded on mid 19th century maps, and its location is confined to a group of fields atop a low but prominent bluff looking northwards over the Levels. This represents a classic ‘ecotone' or resource interface, a transitional area between two or more different ecological environments, which would have given earlier occupants of the site access to a wide variety of exploitable resources within a relatively short distance, including wetland, arable and woodland. The site is also well above the general level of flooding. However, all the ‘usual' archaeological indicators were completely blank. Nothing was known to the county HER at this location, there was no indication of any potentially archaeological features on either aerial photographs or even LIDAR data, and fieldwalking a small sample area produced very little pottery of any kind. Historic maps and documents provided the field name and its location, but otherwise gave no clue at all that the site may in any way be archaeologically significant. But while the appearance of the name on a 19th century map rang initial alarm bells, the most important reason why it is to be taken seriously as an archaeological indicator, despite the lack of other evidence, is that it is recorded, in essentially the same form, in a document dating to the early 14th century. This is crucial, and in a case such as this, it enables the name to be privileged, with a high degree of confidence, above almost all other forms of evidence as not only indicative, but almost certainly predictive in terms of archaeology. As has already been stressed, where it has been possible to test indicative minor names by ‘conventional' archaeology, they have almost never lied, although the sample of such sites is extremely small, and far more work of this type is needed. Be that as it may, for that reason, the writer remains convinced that this particular site is archaeologically significant.

This also emphasises one of the fundamental principles of toponymic study: going back to the earliest possible spelling. The reason for this is that names can change and ‘mutate' through time, in the course of transmission down centuries of both oral and written tradition, and with the possibility for errors and misunderstandings every time the name is either copied afresh or passed verbally from one generation to the next. Over short periods of time, these changes can be subtle, but they are cumulative, and their eventual effect can be to garble the original form of the name. Bear in mind also that name forms are more likely to change as their original purpose or meaning becomes lost - for example, a name coined originally to refer specifically to a ruined Roman stone building, will lose its connection to the site as the building decays and disappears, so that a few generations on, a form of the name may persist, but because it no longer has any connection with a physical feature, its immediacy within the collective memory, usually expressed through the oral tradition of the local community, is lost (vii). If, of course, the name can survive long enough in popular use to be recorded in documents, and therefore become ‘fixed' in a formal sense, there is from that point onwards a fair chance that it may persist long enough to appear on early maps, although there are all kinds of reasons, too numerous to explore here, why minor names can be lost altogether. The main point, then, is that tracking down the earliest possible form of the name will provide a far better chance of studying it in its least-changed form, and therefore of deciphering its original meaning.

This throws up another potential problem with the use of minor names, and that is that they were not necessarily ‘fixed' in the landscape, but could, and did, move around; so that, for example, an otherwise ‘classic' archaeologically indicative name recorded as a field name on, say, a 19th century map, may not accurately reflect the physical position of the feature which the name was originally coined to identify. A name once applied only to a small area might later become part of a much larger field, so that the locational accuracy becomes lost as the name is ‘diffused' throughout the entire area of the new plot. This can, for example, occur through the process known as ‘engrossing', i.e. the bundling together of a number of smaller plots, sometimes by boundary removal, to make larger fields which in later periods (and particularly from the 18th century onwards) were considered more efficient for modern methods of farming. There is no way around this other than by careful scrutiny of as much evidence as possible, and sometimes it will simply not be possible to pin down an otherwise archaeologically indicative name to an area small enough for practical fieldwork. This would be unusual however, and once a potentially useful name has been identified, careful scrutiny of as many other types of evidence as possible (all available early maps, aerial photographs, documentary evidence, LIDAR (viii) will often yield enough information to narrow down the original position of the name at least to the level at which geophysics, soil chemical analysis and fieldwalking might stand a chance of actually locating the site in the local landscape (ix).

The question of why historically, some fields, or more correctly, areas of agricultural activity, have names at all, is covered authoritatively and at length elsewhere (x), but it may be worthwhile making some general observations here. Archaeologists, and specifically prehistorians, will be very familiar with modern theoretical approaches to perceptions of landscape as it was directly experienced by people moving through it, and with the ways in which those people may have viewed their relationship to particular tracts of terrain. Ideas of cognition are at the forefront of some of these concepts (xi), and although they have not been without criticism, they have for the time being at least entered the prehistorians' canon of valid approaches to be tested through fieldwork. A key element of the argument is that people in pre-industrial societies moving around the landscape, carried in their heads highly effective mental maps of terrain, which were themselves predicated on the identification of features, be they natural or man-made, that were in whatever sense regarded as ‘memorable'. And although this is difficult or impossible to prove for prehistoric periods, it is highly likely that naming lay at the very core of establishing the ‘landscape mnemonics' which underpinned these mind maps of the prehistoric traveller, and it represented, effectively, the mental ‘satnav' of the day.

Increasingly, researchers in later periods are beginning to appreciate that some of these approaches may usefully be applied to their own areas of interest; the early medieval period is a case in point, since it was at this time that the overwhelming majority of our current major names, and many of our recoverable field-names, were initially coined (xii). It becomes clear that what many field-names represent, whether archaeologically-indicative or not, is the highly localised mind map of the early medieval farmer, which have survived through generations precisely because they have, through continual usage, become ‘locked' into the local topography as traditional landmarks and aids to navigation, even when the original, named feature has long vanished, and with it any understanding of why the name is actually there; although it is also clear that the meaning of some names is so obvious that their implications must have been fully appreciated even generations after their original coining (xiii). The same principle can, indeed, be extended to those field-names which can only have been coined in relatively recent times (possibly replacing earlier and completely different names), but which express exactly the same kind of functional or topographical ‘specialness'. Fields called ‘lime kiln', ‘windmill' or ‘quarry', for example, will almost inevitably do exactly what they say on the tin, and should be regarded as important to the archaeologist as names surviving from much earlier strata of human activity (xiv). It is, however, rather pointless knowing about the potential clues to archaeology which may lie locked in field-names, without knowing where to look for them in the first place. So before turning to the most archaeologically-useful categories of names themselves, we need briefly to survey, mainly by reference to the secondary literature, the most important, commonly-used, and easily-available sources for their discovery.

Sources for Field-Names 

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