by Nick Corcos

A search for ‘field-names' produces numerous local examples from the online bibliography of the Royal Historical Society, going back to the early 1920s: http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/bibwel.asp

A crucial source for researchers on the lookout for names of potential archaeological significance are the numerous county volumes produced by the English Place-Name Society, which provide systematic and generally authoritative surveys. Every one of the English counties now either has complete coverage, is partly published, or has work underway. The sole exception is Somerset, which has no coverage whatsoever, and is apparently completely stalled. There are caveats, however. As research methodologies into English place-names developed and improved, it became clear that ideas which seemed reasonable when the series started (with a volume on Buckinghamshire, in 1925), stood in need of sometimes radical revision for later volumes. By and large, the earlier volumes, although still sound basic references, need to be approached with a degree of caution and where possible checked against more recent, published research. Much of this newer material can, for example, be found in Nomina, and in the English Place-Name Society's own Journal, both of which are annual periodicals. The advancement of toponymic knowledge since the early county volumes of the EPNS has been both a blessing and a curse, since it is this which has at least in part led directly to a decrease in the rate at which the volumes are now produced, the subject now being far larger and more complex than it was in the inter-war period. This has also, though, been greatly to the benefit of the field-name researcher: the early county volumes only dealt with field-names on an ad-hoc, sporadic basis; later on, it came to be appreciated that they represent an extremely important corpus of toponymic material in their own right, and the more modern county surveys, as a matter of course, now include reviews of the more significant field-name evidence. Details of the Society's work, a place-name database, and a list of the county surveys published so far, together with a map of the same coverage, can all be accessed via the Society's webpage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/ins/epns.

Nomina, already mentioned, is published by a kindred body, The Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland. Its website can be found at http://www.snsbi.org.uk, and includes a useful index of the contents of issues of the journal from 1999 onwards. Earlier volumes (since Nomina actually began in 1977) will be added progressively.

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