Purposeful Place-Names. Decoding Organization in the Early English Landscape

A fine new copy. The hardback is bound in real cloth with a colour dust wrapper and both editions are properly sewn in sections. This book contains extraordinary revelations. Building on long-term scholarship for the study of place-names, two of the leading scholars in the field have nevertheless presented something of new, ground-breaking importance. The place-name element -tūn seems originally to have described one in a cluster of administrative nodes around a royal centre, structured to oversee functions such as transport, defence and tax collection. This system evolved during the period of the Mercian hegemony, through the reigns of Æthelbald, Offa and Coenwulf (between 716 and 821), and spread to the kingdoms of Wessex and Northumbria. After the collapse of the Mercian polity it acquired a wider usage, especially with the names of estate owners, and long afterwards it evolved into modern English ‘town’. This study confines itself to the examples known to have the earlier meanings. The map on the front cover shows the density of the names’ distribution, heavily concentrated in the original Mercian heartlands and radiating out from there in steadily decreasing numbers, but clearly covering much of Wessex south of the Thames. The book presents all the data available on the relevant place-names, over 1600 of them, in detailed discussions, 40 maps, and an appendix recording each example in tables, and it concludes with an essay by the statistical scholar Giacomo Zanella (who also produced the map on the front) which confirms the mathematical significance of the distribution. There are also 33 pages of colour plates with some further maps in colour and modern photographs of many of the locations. …