SNSBI Twenty-fourth Spring Conference – 27-29 March 2015
The SNSBI 2015 spring conference was held at the University of East Anglia in conjunction with the Centre of East Anglian Studies (CEAS).
The theme of the meeting was East Anglian places and people. The programme and abstracts are below, and in those cases where the author has given permission, the title is a link to a pdf copy of the slides. Some feedback has been: Thanks very much for such an enjoyable and useful conference … Many thanks for a wonderful and inspiring conference … Thanks again to both of you for your fantastic work on the Norwich conference. It was an excellent programme, and everything went surprisingly smoothly … Thank you for a great conference, it was really great to see Norwich and to hear all the interesting talks given … Excellent conference … Thank you for organising a splendid programme … Thank you for inviting me – I enjoyed it immensely … Thanks for an excellent conference … congratulations on an excellent, well-organized, and enjoyable conference.
Programme
Friday 27 March
- 2000 Tom Williamson (UEA): Place-names and the East Anglian landscape: problems and possibilities
Saturday 28 March
Session 2: English toponymy
- 0900 Keith Briggs: Some Suffolk place-name puzzles
- 0930 Susan Kilby (University of Leicester): The secret life of the fields: extraordinary ordinary landscapes
- 1000 Robert Briggs (University of Nottingham): -ingas and -ingaham place-names in Surrey
Session 3: Toponymy elsewhere
- 1100 Carole Hough (University of Glasgow): The Scottish Maidenwells
- 1130 Graham Collis (University of Nottingham): The -ingahem names of the Lumbres Canton (Pas-de-Calais)
- 1200 Idowu O. Odebode: Toponymy – a sociolinguistic study of selected place-names in Nigeria
Session 4: East Anglian personal names
- 1400 Patrick Hanks (UWE): East Anglian surnames
- 1430 Paul Cullen (UWE/Nottingham): Locative surnames in East Anglia
- 1500 Veronica Smart: The moneyers’ names of the St Edmund memorial coinage
- 1530 Shaun Tyas: Onomastic problems connected with the study of the reign of Ecgberht of Wessex.
Session 5: Scandinavians in East Anglia
- 1630 Gillian Fellows-Jensen (University of Copenhagen): Looking even more closely at the Nordic element in East Anglian place-names
- 1715 Peder Gammeltoft (University of Copenhagen): East Anglia and Jutland – a comparative place-name study across the North Sea
Session 6: Short project reports
- 2000 Short reports: (1) Kelly Kilpatrick: Suffolk place-name popular dictionary project; (2) Aengus Finnegan: report on new website Placenames Database of Ireland (logainm.ie); (3) Keith Briggs: an index to personal names in place-names; (4) Ellen Bramwell: Mapping metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus.
Sunday 29 March
- 0900 SNSBI Annual General Meeting
Session 7: Scandinavians in England
- 0945 David Boulton (UEA): The geographical context of Scandinavian place-names in East Anglia
- 1015 Johnny Grandjean Gøgsig Jakobsen (University of Copenhagen): Thorps, soils, churches and rent: an interdisciplinary approach for place-name studies of settlement structure in medieval Denmark with comparative aspects for the Danelaw region
Session 8: Microtoponymy & landscapes
- 1115 Eleanor Rye (University of Nottingham): The Scandinavian vocabulary of north-west England’s microtoponymy
- 1145 Edward Martin: East Anglian landscape history and place-names
- 1345 Coach excursion
Session 9: English toponymy
- 2000 Rebecca Gregory (University of Nottingham): Nottinghamshire nomenclature: dialect and development in some Trent-side field-names
- 2030 Kishli Laister (University of Cardiff): From deer to ducks and toponymy to archaeology in medieval Gloucestershire
- 2100 Katie Hambrook (East Oxford community archaeology project): East Oxford place-names and field names
Abstracts
Some Suffolk place-name puzzles
The parish names of Suffolk are mostly purely English and of well understood common types such as names with generic -ley, -ham, -ton, -ford, -worth, etc., with either an OE personal name or an adjective as specific. However, there are a surprising number of names in which the specific is either completely obscure, or has some unusual features demanding a linguistic explanation. There are also a few names apparently ancient (e.g., of Domesday date) but belonging only to farms. This talk will mainly just raise open questions about such names, with a selection from Bealings & Belstead, Bergholt, Beyton, Bulcamp, Harkstead, Hengrave, Livermere, Orwell, Purton Green, Wenhaston, and Wordwell & Worlington.
The secret life of the fields: extraordinary ordinary landscapes
Within current scholarship, field-names are predominantly considered from an etymological perspective on the one hand, and to aid in the reconstruction of the physical landscape on the other. Although problems have been noted with both approaches, researchers have struggled to find an alternative methodology. This paper seeks to address this issue by considering late medieval field-names from the world-view of the peasant, resulting in a more phenomenological application. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, and using a wide range of sources that include documents and material evidence alongside the landscape itself, a group of Northamptonshire field-names is re-interpreted using an anthropological framework that considers the landscape as a repository for folklore, myth and legend. Taking this approach, a seemingly ordinary late medieval environment is reconstructed and presented as a possible memorial to perceived historical events.
The Scottish Maidenwells
In a paper read at the Society’s Falmouth conference in 2009 and subsequently published in Nomina 33 (2010), I presented a case for ‘The Name-Type Maid(en)well’ to be interpreted as a dedication to the Virgin Mary, paralleling other recurrent place-names such as Lady Well and Mary Well. I also drew attention to the geographical distribution, which appeared to be restricted to southern Britain, with none of the corpus of 21 occurrences situated further north than Lincolnshire in England. More recently, additional occurrences have come to light in Scotland, partly through work on the AHRC-funded project Scottish Toponymy in Transition at the University of Glasgow (2011-2014), and partly through the availability of the Ordnance Survey Name Books on the ScotlandsPlaces website. This paper will present a brief analysis of the Scottish corpus, and discuss the implications of the revised distribution pattern.