2 - The Landscape of Place-Name Studies

Summary

Landscape Studies and Place-Names

Those concerned with the study and interpretation of place-names in England have for a long time recognised the importance of locating the names within their topographical context. They have also advocated the use of place-names as clues to lost features of the landscape. Thus, already in 1924 in the Introduction to the Survey of English Place-Names, W. J. Sedgefield observed:

in many cases a knowledge of local configuration will be of great help. It may enable us to decide, for example, between confused suffixes. Thus when early forms leave us in doubt whether the original suffix was -hale or -hill, a knowledge of the actual local conditions may resolve our hesitation at once … place-names sometimes record a church or other building which has long ceased to exist. In other cases evidence of a different condition of the surface of the country-side is furnished; for example, of a forest which is now agricultural land or of a fen or moor which no longer exists.

However, despite Sedgefield's positive statement, and although it appears self-evident to most medievalists today, the general relevance of place-names to studies of historical topography has only comparatively recently been acknowledged by those outside onomastics. It is particularly noteworthy that W. G. Hoskins' pioneering book The Making of the English Landscape did not include ‘place-names’ as a category in its index and that in 1955 he could state:

the Old English have left us with almost no word at all about the kind of landscape they found on arrival, that they set out to reclaim from the natural wilderness. They had no eye for scenery, any more than other hard-working farmers of later centuries.