Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 329

Since the pioneering work of Margaret Gelling, the study of place-names has taken account of local landscapes and economies in the interpretation of linguistic evidence. Here, two place-name experts and a landscape archaeologist join forces to cast new light on the subset of names containing the Old Norse element thorp. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Kenneth Cameron, using East Midland examples, argued that such names were applied to small, dependent settlements that were founded late in the Anglo-Scandinavian era or in the two centuries after the Norman Conquest on poorer soils near the edges of manors and parishes. This hypothesis was reinforced by the detailed work of Gillian Fellows Jensen on all the counties of the Danelaw and it has been generally accepted.

The authors have gathered a corpus of 896 place-names in thorp. The heartland of the name lies north and east of the line of Watling Street, now the A5, within the territories of the former Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. Thorps are plentiful too in Yorkshire and Norfolk and they are scattered elsewhere in the northernmost counties of England. South of Watling Street, a smaller number of throps are derived from an Old English word with the same meaning. The authors settle an old debate by concluding that they are contemporary with the Danish thorps. Great numbers of names in -torp are found in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and other parts of northern Europe, where studies have shown that they tend to be small, often dependent, low-status, outlying places.

In contrast with other habitative generics, such as tun, ham or by, thorps hardly ever grew into towns. Many of them disappeared in later centuries. No thorp has been systematically excavated, but a considerable number have revealed evidence from small-scale digs. The pottery that has been found nearly always dates from after 900, in line with the Cameron hypothesis. Intriguingly, a small number of settlement plans suggest that in their earliest phases thorps were arranged in regular, linear and compact plots of near-equal size, along a single village street, in contrast to the more complex layout of earlier Danish settlements known as bys. This settlement form hints at some special purpose.

In chapter 6, on ‘Thorps in the Landscape’, the authors demolish Cameron’s claim that thorps and throps were sited on poor soils by plotting the distribution of these names against MAFF soil grades. Their maps show that these settlements were mostly found on grade 3 agricultural soils that are considered to be good to moderate in quality. Arable soils were strongly favoured independently of their drainage properties and they tended to be superior to those of the earlier bys. The authors conclude that bys and thorpes may have performed separate economic functions within the early medieval countryside: thorps housed small communities that were involved with arable cultivation while the primary function of bys was livestock farming. Moreover, thorps were placed ‘in the very areas and at the very time that we understand the landscape to have been undergoing fundamental change. The primary factor was a cereal revolution’. Were they founded perhaps for workers in the distant open fields, for ploughmen or even perhaps slaves tied to the demesne? Some names imply groups of youths or workers. Others belonged to royal estates. Were thorps the equivalent of berewicks and bartons elsewhere?

The authors are at pains to point out that other factors influenced the creation and development of these new settlements. The use of Scandinavian personal names as prefixes suggests a high incidence of private, individual tenure or ownership. The development of thorps coincides with the growth of urban markets and the demand for grain. And perhaps the name lost its association with arable farming over a long period of time?

These are stimulating ideas. The arguments are set out with admirable clarity. Readers will want to see which of them apply to their own particular areas of interest. In the case of the present reviewer this is Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Derbyshire has far fewer Scandinavian place-names than the other East Midlands counties, and none of the 17 thorps recorded there before 1300 are found on the carboniferous limestone plateau, now known as the White Peak, even though the villages there had open fields; and only three are located in the Trent Valley, where Midland-type open fields were plentiful. The remaining 14 thorps are all situated within the north-eastern wapentake of Scarsdale. Only two of these were sited on the best cereal-growing lands on the magnesian limestone belt, where farming was organized on an open-field system; the other 12 were on the coal-measure sandstones, where closes associated with hamlets and scattered farmsteads were more characteristic than villages surrounded by small open fields. Nevertheless, the wapentake supported 54 corn mills in 1652, so cereals were clearly once as important as livestock.

The chronology of the South Yorkshire thorps fits that described by the authors, though, as they note, many more names appeared in the West Riding well after 1500, when the original meaning may no longer have applied. We might add that a complicating factor in the history of these secondary settlements is that some of the so-called ‘lost’ thorp names were simply renamed: Renathorpe is now Hatfield House, Canonthorpe is Falconer House, and Streetthorpe is Edenthorpe.

South Yorkshire had 30 thorps recorded before 1300, of which twelve were named in Domesday Book. All were sited in the central part, well away from the Pennines in the west and the lowlands of Hatfield Chase in the east. Of the seven on the magnesian limestone and the four immediately to the east, only four were recorded in 1086. The majority of thorps were again in the mixed farming district of the coal-measure sandstones, which was characterized more by wood– pastures than by open fields (though each village and hamlet had its small ‘townfields’). However, support for the idea that thorps were associated with arable farming comes from the distribution of another Old Norse place-name element. South Yorkshire has twelve thveits, the -thwaites that were clearings, meadows or paddocks associated with pastoral farming. They too are found only on the coal-measure sandstones and on or just off the magnesian limestone belt near Doncaster. Thorp and thveit appear to be describing two different types of outlying farming communities.

This book is a fine piece of collaborative research that suggests new ways of looking at the transformation of medieval agrarian economies and the creation of settlement patterns that still characterize much of the present landscape. It will be warmly welcomed by readers of this Review.