Land, labour and people, 1042–1350

Land, labour and people, 1042–1350

Journal qf Historical Geography, 17, 4 (1991) 457464 Review article Land, labour and people, 10424350 H. S. A. Fox H. E. HALLAM(Ed.), The Agrarian...

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Journal qf Historical

Geography,

17, 4 (1991) 457464

Review article

Land, labour and people, 10424350 H. S. A. Fox H. E. HALLAM(Ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales Vol. II 1042-1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, Pp. xxxix + 1086. E90.00) The publication of every part of The Agrarian History is an occasion to celebrate, so elaborate and comprehensive is the scope of the series; appearance of the volume covering the years between 1042 and 1350 is no exception. For historical geographers interested in regional variation, in social relationships, in human ecology and in changing landscapes this volume is packed full with new material. We should not complain too much that some of the chapters were written rather a long time ago: “the hazards of composite volumes are great and unpredictable”.l’l Nor must we complain that, in places, some oarsmen of this great galley appear not to be pulling in the same direction, with a few crabs caught as a result; the volume might have been the blander, and therefore the poorer, if uniformity of viewpoint had been imposed. This, then, is a work to be celebrated. For certain specialist topics England at large is dealt with as a whole by an expert on the subject. Three central concerns of agrarian history - advance and retreat of settlement and cultivation, farming techniques and the social structure of rural populations - are dealt with regionally by regional experts. It is to these chapters that readers will at once turn for a verdict on the cleverest of all interpretations of the era covered by the volume, that of M. M. Postan. Put at its bluntest, the Postan thesis argued that, around 1300, “people found that they had reached the limits of the land’s productivity; not only because they were reclaiming new, poor soils but also because they had been cultivating old land for too long”.121Yields suffered, reclamations were abandoned, growth of population came to an end. The concept of abandonment of marginal land, essentially an ecological one, is best examined at the level of the natural region. In this volume there are some regional examples of marginal systems in difficulty, but there are also striking exceptions. In a lively account of the Weald Brandon finds “an unmistakeable atmosphere of bustling activity generating an expanding economy into the 1330s and 1340s”; Hatcher writes convincingly of a “remarkably late burst of vigorous new settlement” in the South-west, especially around her granitic moorlands. 1’1These examples bring to mind Bailey’s fine recent study of the Breckland where agrarian specialization and commercialization and many non-agricultural sources of income, helped by excellent links to markets, gave this apparently marginal region a good deal of resilience during the early fourteenth century.14] Likewise, Brandon considers that in the Weald “the young medieval woodland economy rose from mere self-sufficiency with the help of cloth and iron” while in Devon and Cornwall Hatcher finds “a strong link between colonization . . . and . . periods of rapid expansion of tin production”. Perhaps we should think of two types of margin in the High Middle Ages. First there were the resilient, lively frontiers where diversified economics protected the colonist of poor soils. Second were what might be 0305-7488/91/040457

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called the relentless or monotonous frontiers, without diverse resources and distant from large markets; some of the moorlands of Northern England may come into this category, and also the remote downlands of north Wiltshire and north Hampshire from which Postan liked to cite evidence of “the growing inability of the new lands to redress the balance of the old”.[51 Postan drew not only the new land but also old-settled land into his model of nemesis, cleverly connecting the two: old land suffered twice over at the end of the High Middle Ages, through over-cultivation and by being deprived of manure from animals which once grazed the pastures and the woods but which could no longer do so now that these had been largely reclaimed. In the regional chapters of this volume of the Agrarian History there is certainly some evidence of abandonment of old land around 1300. Dyer’s personal interest in the advance and retreat of settlement means that, of all the contributors, he investigates the subject most formally and therefore to greatest effect.r61 For the West Midlands he concludes that signs of agrarian recession can be found not only on new land but in “old-settled districts that . . . often had a pre-medieval settlement history”. For the East Midlands Raftis argues that agrarian crises occurred “upon the more productive as well as the marginal lands”. Hallam’s verdict on Eastern England is quite different and unequivocal: “genuine agrarian regression is hard to find” anywhere in the eastern counties. There, he claims, freedom (“free inheritance customs . . . privileged tenures”) was the motor which “produced a rapid rise in population” and “progressive and technologically advanced” farming systems capable of supporting large numbers of people. Postan rarely looked for evidence east of the Cam; his ideas, Hallam implies, were much influenced by heavily manorialized episcopal and monastic estates in Southern England (pp. 289, 1004-8). There are no entries in this volume’s index and bibliography under “Brenner, R.” But Hallam’s arguments, with their emphasis on freedom, were used by Brenner to fuel his thesis that the outcome of pressure of population on the land need not necessarily be a punishing over-cultivation; the outcomes depend partly on class relations, particularly the degree to which peasants were exploited by lords. c71Hallam supports his interesting convictions, very similar to Brenner’s, by observing that many manors in East Anglia enjoyed large numbers of people surviving on minute holdings and by claiming that evidence on population from the East apparently “provides no support to the theory of decline after 1280” (pp. 517, 1007-8). Detailed local studies give some credence to his model. Thus Campbell, in an expert study of Coltishall (Norfolk), shows that population continued to grow right up to 1348 and argues that this buoyancy resulted from light manorialization combined with a pressurized agricultural system, early medieval High Farming, with high inputs and high outputs. [*IIMcIntosh’s equally expert study of Havering (Essex) suggests that there was perhaps some growth of population there in the early fourteenth century; this may be linked to the wide range of privileges enjoyed by tenants and their exceptionally light rents, fines and labour services.t’l These two local studies go a long way towards supporting the view of Hallam, and Brenner, that agrarian decline was not inevitable under conditions of population pressure on some manors in eastern England. It is some manors because other local studies from the eastern counties have revealed a downwards trend in population movements before the Black Death. ti”lClearly, the great chunks of country into which England is divided in this volume of the Agrarian History are not the best units for research into the links between degrees of manorial exploitation and degrees of agrarian regression on old-cultivated land. Because what is at issue is the debilitating, or enervating, effect of lordship on people the only appropriate level of analysis here is the manor (studied comparatively) and, within it, holdings of differing sizes and types. And methods of analysis must from the outset pierce right through to the heart of the problem, namely what “light” and “heavy” manorialization actually meant, on holdings of different sizes, in terms of cash payments and, especially, in terms of the types of flows and eddies in the labour market which were set up by differing manorial regimes.

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In the period covered by this volume of the Agrarian History the whole subject of rural labour is a poorly researched topic. [“I But even the most simple consideration of differences in the composition of the labour force between manors with heavy and light labour services opens up new perspectives on the supposed agrarian crisis of the High Middle Ages. A student asked to portray a manor prone to crises triggered off by sagging productivity of “old” land h la Postan might present a picture of a place with many small to middle-sized holdings near the margins of subsistence; populations on a manor with holdings of a more substantial size might have fared better. But if the two hypothetical manors are compared from the viewpoint of provision of labour the conclusion could be the very opposite. In a highly manorialized village with a large demesne and (as one so often finds alongside large demesnes) with a good number of substantial holdings each burdened with heavy week work, the resulting gush of labour into the demesne must have set up dependent flows into the large tenancies. On such a manor one often finds, too, large numbers of landless cottagers who presumably made up for deficits of labour on the large holdings. On such a manor one might also expect other types of labourer, usually all but invisible in the sources: “undersettles”, for example, whose dwellings could in some senses have been the medieval equivalents of tied cottages and the more mysterious anilepimen and anilepiwymen (single men and women), their celibacy perhaps associated with what a later age was to call service in husbandry. Here a run of poor harvests, grain shortages and high food prices might well provoke severe agrarian disruption, extending even to the larger holdings as labourers were laid off or declined in number to produce those “shortages” of workers sometimes complained of in manorial accounts.t’*l The population of a manor with a smaller demesne, light labour services and many small to middle-sized holdings - and therefore fewer dependent labourers - might better be able to weather the storm. This is of necessity a purely hypothetical example simply because, for the end of the period covered by the volume under review, we have not yet used the available sources to full effect to reconstruct the surpluses and deficits of labour which existed on holdings of different sizes under differing manorial regimes. It would not be very difficult to model the approximate required labour inputs of peasant holdings of different sizes: the known labour requirements of demesnes must be scaled down and full use must be made of contemporary estimates (such as Walter of Henley’s) of the costs of various agricultural operations and of known daily wage rates (given in this volume by Farmer). Some idea could thereby be gained of how much extra labour might be required by a large holding burdened with heavy services, and of the relative advantages where services were light. The agenda is clear, sources exist in abundance and the prospect of our being able to answer these questions is an exciting one. Once “heavy” and “light” manorialization are quantified in this way, rigorous comparisons between manors, which look equally at labour, land and people, should help us to say with some certainty that relative degrees of freedom or oppression lay behind the variegated pattern of crisis around 1300 or, alternatively, that there must be some other explanation-possible the old ecological model of Postan. And another chapter will then have been written in the agrarian history of England and Wales. These remarks should serve to show the wealth of topics for further speculation which are raised by the stout regional chapters in this volume of The Agrarian History. The topical chapters fascinate likewise. The editor begins with an interesting chronological introduction, stepping a long way back into the Anglo-Saxon period: reculer pour mieux sauter. Then Harvey provides a snapshot of agrarian England at the time of Domesday, an exceptionally thoughtful piece, always taking an original stance, questing into the types of agricultural organization which lie behind the enigmatic formulae, arriving always at new answers. Early medieval rural buildings are also left to topical experts, appropriately Hurst on England and Butler on Wales. Two chapters by the editor, on “Population movements” and on “The life of the people” contain much very valuable material. Inevitably, he tries his hand at estimating the minimum size of holding needed

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to maintain a peasant family towards the end of the thirteenth century.[‘31 Farmer does the same in his crucial chapter on prices and wages, and a little more realistically, for at least he takes into account the lord’s expropriation of a proportion of a tenant’s output.t’41 But both of their models are faulted in being based largely upon the yields and nutritional value of wheat and barley. This volume contains much material towards a geography of early medieval “farming regions”-regions whose rationale was in many cases subsistence as much as commercialization-and makes it quite clear that wheat and barley did not everywhere dominate local diet. Retracing our steps to the regional chapters, we find in the excellent accounts of Wales by Jack and of the North by Miller that oats predominated in many places (“the great mainstay”, “a massive preponderance”). The same was true in parts of Derbyshire, the South-west and around the Fens. Oats yielded much less than barley and gave foodstuffs of much less bulk. When Farmer and the editor agree that a family subsisting on wheat and barley could be maintained on about 10 to 15 acres, there must be severe errors in their calculations because, using the same parameters as they do, one can estimate that where oats made up local diet the family would apparently need about 40 acres-an unrealistic figure. Do we gravely under-estimate yields on intensively managed tenant holdings, or badly neglect the nonfarinaceous element in diet, or, again, forget the contribution that wage labouring could make to peasant budgets? The topical chapters of this volume, then, offer much that is thought-provoking. But to those who consult them I would offer two warnings: on population statistics and on place-name statistics. Following important contributions to medieval population studies made in the 1950~,t’~lProfessor Hallam’s aim in this volume is to give figures for the total population of England at various dates between 1086 and 1348. His methods are ingenious and, as he admits, experimental. He begins by supposing 2 000 000 for the total population in 1086, an estimate which uses a family size of 4.7 and is by no means unreasonable when compared with totals guessed by other scholars. He then turns to a large sample of medieval surveys, sources which normally list only those people who held tenures directly from lords, and for each place with a surviving survey (usefully tabulated in a huge appendix) he compares the number of tenants listed with the number enumerated in Domesday Book. These comparisons give multipliers for the Domesday figure of 2 000 000: total population increased by a multiplier of 2.48 between 1086 and circa 1230 and by a multiplier of 3.15 between 1086 and 1317 to give a figure of 6 300 000, apparently with a slight drop to 6 125 000 in 1348.[161 A population of about 6 millions just before the Black Death is, as it happens, a very acceptable one among most experts in the field, including Postan, Miller and Hatcher and Smith.[“] They have based their estimates on methods of back-extrapolation from the poll tax of 1377, a non-tenurial enumeration which netted in many people who did not hold land directly from lords, as we know from documents surviving from its faulted and ill-fated successors of 1379 and 1381: servants, for example, and even the homeless who, according to a statement from Shrewsbury, were harried in a modern manner “from street to street” before the very rods of the collectors.[“l The two methods cannot both be correct for they produce the same figure for total population in 1348 even though they are very differently based. Because of recent advances in our knowledge of the level of accuracy of the first, novel, relatively light and unstratified poll tax we should have some confidence in a method which works backwards from 1377.[19]By contrast, a method which works forwards from 1086 by counting tenants on tenures immediately runs up against the most thunderous of opposition. From Postan, for example: “most historians are now agreed that . . villages in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contained a category of men who were tenants of the lord’s tenants . . . not as a rule . . listed in the manorial surveys”. Or from Miller and Hatcher: “the number of landless or near landless men grew . . . screened from our view ” .[201These are not mere arguments from silence about what is probable. Very occasionally the screen falls away completely, as at Waltham (Hants.) in about 133 1 where a small group of 19 tenants held between

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them 70 cottages and houses, no doubt mostly sub-let; or at Havering (Essex) in 1352 where 187 tenants had under them 253 sub-tenants; or at Rougham (Suffolk) in 1286 where 30 tenants harboured at least 14 sub-tenants “with their houses” and where even some of the sub-tenants had villeins under them. [*iISuch quantitative evidence helps to make sense of other references, where the screen still partially obscures, to unenumerated and uncountable, but perhaps very numerous, sub-cottagers, “undersettles” and the like.[22l It may help to make sense of the behaviour of fourteenthcentury prices and wages; these, according to Bridbury, are explicable only by “the existence of this submerged and pullulating throng which, like the stars that were visible to astronomers only in their effects on the orbits of neighbouring bodies, can be perceived only in the influence it exerts on other factors”. It helps us to reinterpret the status of men and women whose names appear only very occasionally in a manor’s court rolls and who have been wrongly designated as transients or marginals by a certain school of medieval social historians. And it helps us to understand the concern felt by contemporary jurists to recommend the means by which lords could best demonstrate ownership of resident villeins who held no land directly from them.t23l Few would doubt the contention of Miller and Hatcher, cited above, that numbers of sub-tenants grew during the period covered by this volume; growth rates must have varied from place to place according to the nature of local resources, the intensity of labour services (as mentioned above) and the policies of lords, or custom, towards subdivision of visible holdings. Yet sub-tenants, let alone the landless, have no place in Professor Hallam’s calculations except in so far as some of them, but surely not all, may be subsumed within his families of 4.7 persons, a figure carried through in his calculations from 1086 onwards. How, then, did he arrive at a quite plausible total of about 6 million people in the early fourteenth century? It is difficult to say, but a preliminary inspection of his figures suggests geographical bias in his sources as a possible source of error. Quite understandably, the surveys which he uses are unequally distributed around the country. Hallam’s solution to this problem is to adjust his figures so that each province is represented by an equal number of manors. For example, in the sample which gives the “population” figure for 1317 (on which the ultimate total for 1348 is based), 44 manors stand in for the South-east, representing 155% of the total number of tenants in the count. The South-east experienced a high rate of multiplication of tenures. For the East Midlands, the same number of manors, 44, is used, representing 11.9% of the tenants in the count. This province had a particularly low rate of multiplication of tenures. But the South-east as defined by Hallam had only 9.7% of England’s total enumerated rural population in 1377; for the East Midlands the figure is 14.7%.[241In other words some provinces with a high mutiplication of tenures may contribute too much and some provinces with low multiplication of tenures may contribute too little to the fictitious “population” total for 1317. Turning to the measurement of the pace of new settlement before 1086 we again encounter a highly novel and experimental methodology involving in this case the throwing together not of surveys but of place-names. The thesis is that one can count the number of Domesday names bearing “new” elements and then proceed to rank counties according to how active colonization was in this period. The approach violates all of the cardinal principles which I would stress to any excited novice setting out to exploit the almost limitless potential which place-names have for studies in early historical geography. In a national study of any type of place-name we must expect some large blanks on the map simply because elements which were current or fashionable when one part of the country obtained its names had become obsolete and outmoded when nomenclature elsewhere was being coined. Certain types of “place-name” originally applied not to points but to areas, so woebetide he or she who is too intent on bland statistical analysis. Place-names must be studied not as abstractions but as language in situ, at the scale of the region and estate. In many parts of England no advance can be

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made simply by studying the names of parishes or Domesday manors in isolation from so-called “minor” names which can have an equal significance. If we translate these principles into practice doubt can be cast on Hallam’s use of at least three types of place-name which contribute massively to his county tables. First, the element

-z’ngas (yielding

names

like Hastings)

is not to be expected

in those large parts

of the country which were relatively little affected by the English language until after the latter part of the seventh century, simply because this element appears by then to have largely died out in name-forming practice. Moreover, despite Dodgson’s pioneering paper they are today not thought of as representing new settlements but rather the creation of territories (“administrative districts” in Campbell’s words) within which there may have been many places, of a great variety of ages.[251Second, names such as Shapwick (“place known for ovine dairy produce”) or Ryton (“land suitable for rye, or contributing rye to a food-farm”), included by Hallam in his “new” category, need careful local study which often demonstrates that they were component parts of composite estates; they certainly have no “new” connotations. Third, I would have doubts about including all names in -worth or -worthig (“enclosure”) in the new category. The crucial question here is: do these elements imply the act or the fact of enclosures, “farmland so named because seen in the process of being enclosed from the wild” or “settlement nucleus (or farmland) environed by an enclosing bank”? It is not difficult to argue for the latter. Some Midlands parishes with names containing these elements were places of great importance, no mere scrubby intakes from the wild: a great minster (Brixworth), a royal palace (Tamworth), the site of royal burials (Northworthy, now Derby), an important estate centre (Market Bosworth). tz61 In these cases “settlement environed by a bank”-a monastic, royal or seigneurial enclosure-is surely the correct interpretation. Likewise, where worth or worthig occurs in the names of farm or hamlets (as, notably, in the West Country in scores of “minor” names) it does not necessarily imply land newfy enclosed, but a particular type of enclosed farm.t”l Many names need to be subtracted from Hallam’s table showing “new” settlement before 1086. Some scholars might argue that other types of names should be added to the table, those incorporating Scandinavian -by in particular.tz81 One could thus severely demote Sussex from the high position it enjoys in the table (on account of the consellations of -ingas names along the coast); one could move up Leicestershire (with many -by names) from a middling position-and shoot it through the roof. But this would be to play a bizarre type of snakes and ladders with abstractions of settlements and, in this context, abstract areas-whereas faithful agrarian history, or agrarian historical geography, in the period covered by this volume should be sensitive to real regions, to settlements in the landscape, to patterns of authority and to the work of all who laboured in those fields so strangely full of folk. University of Leicester

Notes [l] M. M. Postan, preface to ia’em (Ed.), The Cambridge economic history of Europe, vol. 1, The agrarian life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge 1966) vi [2] M. M. Postan, The economic foundations of medieval society, in his Essays on medieval agriculture and general problems of the medieval economy (Cambridge 1973) 15 [3] Page numbers for references from the volume under review are given only when readers might find difficulty in locating the passage which is being referred to [4] M. Bailey, A marginal economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 1989) chs 3 and 4 (5) M. M. Postan, The medieval economy and society (London 1972) 65-6 [6] See also his Deserted medieval villages in the west Midlands Economic History Review 2nd ser. 35 (1982) 19-34; ‘The retreat from marginal land’: the growth and decline of medieval rural settlements, in M. Aston et al. (Eds), The rural settlements of medieval England (Oxford

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1989) 45-51; Hanbury: settlement andsociety in a woodland lanclscape (Department of English Local History Occasional Papers 4th ser. 4, Leicester 1991) [7] H. E. Hallam, The Postan thesis, Historical Studies (Melbourne) 15 (1972); R. Brenner, The agrarian roots of European capitalism, in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Eds), The Brenner debate (Cambridge 1985) 266 [8] B. M. S. Campbell, Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenthcentury peasant community, in R. M. Smith (Ed.), Land, kinship and ltfe-cycle (Cambridge 1984) 87-134; also his Agricultural progress in medieval England: some evidence from eastern Norfolk Economic History Review 2nd ser. 36 (1983) 2646 [9] M. K. McIntosh, Autonomy and community: the royal manor of‘ Havering, 120(-1500 (Cambridge 1986) 40, 96, 1267 [lo] L. Poos, The rural population of Essex in the Later Middle Ages Economic History Reviekr 2nd ser. 38 (1985) 522; R. M. Smith, Demographic developments in rural England, 130@48: a survey, in B. M. S. Campbell (Ed.), Before the Black Death (Manchester 1991) 45 [ 111 With the following notable exceptions: M. M. Postan, The famulus: the estate labourer in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries ( Cambridge 1954); E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the agrarian history of England in the thirteenth century (Oxford 1956) ch. 6; R. M. Smith, Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250-l 800 in his Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge 1984) 22-28 [12] M. M. Postan and J. Z. Titow, Heriots and prices on Winchester manors Economic History Review 2nd ser. 11 (1958-9) 407 [13] Construction of model “peasant budgets” of the outputs of medieval holdings, unlike the estimates of labour inputs called for above, has a long pedigree, going back to Thorold Rogers and including work by Gras and Gras, Bennett, Kosminsky, Titow, and Howell. The latest contribution is C. Dyer, Standards ofliving in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 1989) 109-50 [ 141 This volume, 845, 966 for Hallam’s calculations and 722 for Farmer’s, which are based on J. Z. Titow, English rural society 12OG1350 (London 1969) 8990 [I 51 H. E. Hallam, Some thirteenth century censuses Economic History Review 2nd ser. 10 (19578) 340-61 and Population density in medieval Fenland Economic History Review 2nd ser. 14 (1961-2) 71-81 [16] This volume, 537 for figures based on surveys clustering around the years 1149, 1230, 1262, 1292 and 13 17; this volume, 513 for the figure for 1348. which is apparently a guess based on that for 1317 [17] M. M. Postan, Medieval agrarian society in its prime: England, in idem (Ed.), Cambridge economic history of Europe, vol. 1, 562; E. Miller and J. Hatcher, Medieval England: rural society andeconomic change 1086-1348 (London 1978) 29; R. M. Smith, Human resources, in G. Astill and A. Grant (Eds), The countryside of medieval England (Oxford 1988) 191 [18] J. C. Russell, British medieval population (Albuquerque 1948) 122 [ 191 Poos, Rural population of Essex, 528 [20] C. N. L. Brooke and M. M. Postan (Eds), Carte nativorum (Northants. Rec. Sot. 20, 1960) xxxix-xl; Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, 55 [21] Titow, English rural society, 86: McIntosh, Autonomy and community, 1067; Lord Francis Hervey, The Pinchbeck register (2 vols, 1925) vol. 2, 124-8. See also A. Jones, Caddington, Kensworth and Dunstaple in 1297 Economic History Review 2nd ser. 32 (1979) 324-5 [22] Ironically, one of the best discussions of undersettles and the like, using the Ely evidence, is by Hallam in this volume, 619-20. I review the whole question in my forthcoming paper, Chevage of the landless and the garciones of Glastonbury: a new source for medieval demography [23] A. R. Bridbury, The Black Death Economic History Review 2nd ser. 26 (1973) 590; L. R. Poos and R. M. Smith, ‘Legal windows onto historical populations? Recent research on demography and the manor court in medieval England Law and History Review 2 (1984) 1345; Britton, ed. F. M. Nichols (Washington D.C. 1901) 166 [24] Figures calculated from this volume, 593 and, for 1377, from R. B. Dobson, The Peusants’ Revoh of 1381 (London 1970) 55-7 [25] J. McN. Dodgson, The significance of the distribution of the English place-name in -ingas, -ingain south-east England Medieval Archaeology 10 (1966) l-29; J. Campbell, Bede’s words for places, in P. H. Sawyer (Ed.), Names, words andgraves (Leeds 1979) 48. See also M. Gelling, Towards a chronology for English place-names, in D. Hooke (Ed.) Anglo-Saxon settlements (Oxford 1988) 66, 72; S. Bassett, The origins of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (London 1989) 18.-23

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[26] It could possible be that for Tamworth we have an earlier name form in tun, the ~x~rth having been substituted when the earliest phase of the royal enclosure had been constructed, perhaps in the eighth century: B. Cox, The place-names of the earliest English records English PlaceName Society JournaI 8 (1976) 37 [27] H. S. A. Fox, Approaches to the adoption of the Midland system, in T. Rowley (Ed.), The origins of open-field agriculture (London 1981) 867. See also M. Costen, Huish and worth: Old English survivals in a later landscape Landscape History forthcoming [28] See the confusion summarized in H. S. A. Fox, The people of the welds in English settlement history, in Aston et al. (Eds), Rural settlements 9&4