Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 315

Many scholars and researchers, both amateur and professional, working on a project which involves the landscape, will turn to field names as a source of information. The first question to ask of this book is: ‘does it provide information and guidance about field names and their use as data?’ The answer is certainly ‘yes’. The late John Field’s excellent English Field Names: A Dictionary (1972) is a book which has been recommended to countless students. This new dictionary will supersede it. It is essentially two books. The first part is an introduction to the study of field-names by Rebecca Gregory, which provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject.

Gregory begins by discussing the way in which field-names can convey so much information about the landscape history of an area or even a particular piece of land, and in addition give us insight into local farming practice, industries, buildings and into language and usage. She follows this with a long and well-illustrated discussion of the content of field-names, demonstrating just how complicated they can be in structure and how much they can convey, for instance, about their position relative to the community which used them, what the land they named was like to use or how their user felt about it (Zululand!). She also points out how field-names can convey information about belief in magic and spirits – ‘elf hall’ (p. xi) – as well as references to executions as in ‘gibbet’, or the presence of finds of ancient hoards – ‘goldhord’. As she makes clear, field-names can be complicated and convey much disparate information in a short form, as well as varying enormously in the date at which they originated.

Under the heading ‘Using field-names’ Gregory discusses how to collect them and continues with a comprehensive and very useful survey of recent work in field-name research, which clearly links the study to the wider work of the English Place-Name Society in its county place-name surveys. The material referenced in the footnotes here will be of the greatest use to anyone setting out on collection and on a survey of their own. A later section on ‘Additional sources of field-names’ provides an important pointer to printed and manuscript sources as well as information now available online.

There is a useful discussion of the survival of field-names and a reminder that ‘we can prove that names survived, but we cannot prove they did not’. We do not know how much information we have lost about farming practices, social organization and landscapes. However, recent studies show that field-names have a much better survival rate than was hitherto imagined, so that they can often be used to aid in a reconstruction of past practices and landscapes, provided that the evidence is not pushed too far. In practice of course, it is not unusual to find a parish or estate within which there is little surviving field-name evidence prior to the commencement of the nineteenth century, while estates with a long history of ownership by a powerful figure or more probably a monastery, can retain a wealth of information stretching back into the fourteenth century or earlier. We need to remember that the social, economic and landscape history of such places may not be much like the history of some much less well documented settlements.

There is also a sharp reminder for southerners that languages other than English also had an influence on field-names. Norse, in particular, clearly had a strong impact on the naming of parts of the late Old English landscape and a useful summary of work on the topic is included. English also, even in the later middle ages was far from uniform across England and field-names reflect that. The sheer volume of available material provides an enormous reservoir for the study of the history and archaeology of landscape as well as providing a source for lexicographic and onomastic studies.

The second part, by Paul Cavill, with 45,000 attestations in the dictionary is almost twice the size of John Field’s work. These field-names are grouped under 2,500 headwords and this provides the opportunity to show methodically the relationship between different surviving forms of the same root-word. The entry ‘Quiddams’ is a good example, found at Grafton and Radcot in Oxfordshire with a form Quedham of 1278-9. The variants ‘Quidham’ in Shrivenham, Berkshire and ‘Great and Little Quidmore’ at Great Horksley in Essex as well as other examples lead to the OE word cwead, dirty or muddy land. This suggests that ‘Quab lane’ in the reviewer’s parish contains the same element. The references to Old English, Middle English and Old Norse roots found in field-names is then aided by a glossary of field-name elements. For example, the headword ‘Wrang’ leads us to a long sequence of field-names which include the word. Wranglands, in Bardsey (West Riding), Ringlands in Warter (East Riding) and Wrongway Field, in Wesham, Lancs, all contain the Old English wrang, ‘crooked’ or Old Norse vrangr, with the same meaning. Kindly, on the next page, under the heading ‘The Wrong’, we are directed to ‘Wrang’.

There is no doubt that a strength of this dictionary is that the examples quoted are drawn widely from all over England. The parish for each example and its county are clearly indicated and examples are drawn from Cornwall, Kestles in Tintagel, ‘land with or near a castle, village or tor’, to ‘Delf,’ in Newbottle, Durham, ‘a quarry’, OE (ge)delf. The many examples following this last headword illustrate the frequency with which of some of the field-names listed occur: no less than 25 are given.

There is, of course, a major problem faced by the dictionary compiler. When to stop? The volume of field-names available in the sources discussed earlier in the book is vast and much of it is still unexplored, so an enquirer should not be too disappointed if the field-name they wish to elucidate is not offered. No doubt another edition will extend and amplify the corpus.