Rebecca Gregory

The Journal of the English Place-Name Society 50 (2018) was published in March 2019, edited by Paul Cavill and Rebecca Gregory. The contents page is available here, and abstracts are available on the Journal page of the English Place-Name Society website (epns.org).

The Journal of the English Place-Name Society 49 (2017) was published in October 2018, edited by Paul Cavill and Rebecca Gregory. The contents page is available here, and the print journal is available from the English Place-Name Society (see epns.org).

Viking Nottinghamshire describes the county as it was throughout the Viking Age, through the various stages of Scandinavian settlement. It uses a range of historical evidence, including documents, place-names, artefacts and sculpture, to explore the impact and contribution the Scandinavian settlers made to the character and history of Nottinghamshire.

The book examines this era of history in a fresh light, reflecting trends in modern scholarship, focusing on cultural interaction and integration rather than a story of invasion, rape and pillage.

This is a major new dictionary of field-names drawing on the collections of the English Place-Name Survey and the pioneering work of John Field, and on scholarly work in field-nomenclature of the last twenty years.

With some 45,000 field-name attestations and nearly 2,500 headwords, it is the most comprehensive work on English field-names available.

Names are given in standard and variant forms, and dated early spellings where possible. The meanings of the names are briefly discussed with a range of information relating to naming practices, land-use, shape and size, flora and fauna, history and archaeology, etc.

The book has an accessible introduction by Rebecca Gregory, a user guide, and a list of linguistic elements appearing in field-names.

Introduction to my AHRC-funded doctoral research project, ‘Minor and field-names of Thurgarton Wapentake, Nottinghamshire’, completed in 2016. Created for display at the Cameron Lecture 2017, a biennial public lecture held at the University of Nottingham in memory of Prof. Kenneth Cameron.

Introduction to the Staffordshire Place-Name Project, a volunteer project run by the English Place-Name Society and Institute for Name-Studies (University of Nottingham) with the Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service. Created for display at the Cameron Lecture 2017, a biennial public lecture held at the University of Nottingham in memory of Prof. Kenneth Cameron.

It has been convincingly argued by various scholars that the elements used in English major place-names frequently have very precise meanings. This is most easily demonstrated, perhaps, in landscape terminology, but is also the case with elements indicative of travel, industry, and defence, among others. Research on English microtoponyms has been a more recent focus, with a constantly increasing corpus of attestations (both published and unpublished), and the work which has been conducted using field- and minor names is naturally selective, and often localised. My own research on field-names in a small area of Nottinghamshire has created a corpus of roughly 6,000 names and over 10,000 attestations. This paper will use these data to examine whether the same semantic specificity can be found in these Nottinghamshire field-names as in England’s major names, using as examples several of the most commonly-occurring generic elements in my corpus.

The study of place-names is an invaluable tool in researching medieval history, and this paper will examine the relationship between onomastics and archaeology, and how place-names can be used as historical artefacts alongside historical evidence and material culture. Every record of a name marks a moment in time, and the development of a name demonstrates a progression reflecting cultural, sociological and linguistic change both in the geographical area to which it is tied, and across society. When using one kind of evidence in isolation, however, it is easy to make mistakes and misrepresentations which could be remedied by interdisciplinary research: the paper will use examples of the way archaeology has fundamentally changed our understanding of some of the earliest English place-names (Dodgson 1966), of the role name-studies can play in an archaeological excavation (Gelling 1976, 1993), and demonstration of how my PhD research into Nottinghamshire field-names was shaped by archaeology.

The study of microtoponymy is widely acknowledged to be a valuable tool for dialect research. Using minor and field-names collected from several Nottinghamshire parishes, this paper will discuss the different language influences apparent in the local dialect as represented in its naming vocabulary and some of the problems in identifying these, as well as the longevity of names and the productivity of elements, with a particular focus on some of those elements usually classed as “generics”. It has long been apparent that place-name elements can have different meanings and connotations when used in minor names from their use in settlement-names, dependent on local topography and context. It is therefore reasonable to expect an even more specific usage of vocabulary when considering minor names in a local context. Numerical analysis will be used to explore the relationship between elements deriving from different languages which, despite near-identical equivalent terms in Modern English, are each productive in Nottinghamshire names from the Middle English period, and attested into the twentieth century. Based on this analysis, the suggestion will be made that, in some cases at least, the Old Norse or Old English elements may indeed have acquired dialect-specific meaning in their Middle English forms, and that thorough and systematic analysis of microtoponymy is essential to further investigate this vocabulary in other regions.

References:

Dodgson, J. McN. 1966. The significance of the distribution of the English place-name in –ingas, –inga– in south-east England. Medieval Archaeology 10, pp. 1—29. 
Gelling, M. 1976. The place-names of the Mucking area. Panorama 19, pp. 7—20.
– 1993. The place-name Mucking. In Hamerow, H. Excavations at Mucking. Volume 2: The Anglo-Saxon settlement. Swindon: English Heritage (English Heritage Archaeological Report 21), p. 96.

The SNSBI spring conference returns to Nottingham for the first time since 1996. The University of Nottingham is home to the Institute for Name-Studies and has a long-standing connection with the field, housing the library and offices of the English Place-Name Society for over fifty years.

The conference will open on Friday evening with a paper ‘Laxton: England’s Last Open Field Village’, given by John Beckett, Professor of English Regional History at the University of Nottingham, who has published extensively on the history of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands. On Saturday evening, the SNSBI will co-host the Institute for Name-Studies’ biennial Cameron Lecture. The lecture is held in memory of Professor Kenneth Cameron, one of the foremost scholars of English place-names, who was Director of the English Place-Name Survey from 1967 to 1992 and Head of English at the University of Nottingham from 1984 to 1987. This year’s lecture will be given by Lesley Abrams, Emeritus Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Oxford, Honorary Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

The provisional programme is available here, and booking is live at https://store.nottingham.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/conferences/schools-and-departments/english/snsbi-spring-conference-2019. Abstracts for the papers and public lectures can be found on the SNSBI website, at http://www.snsbi.org.uk/2019_Nottingham.html.