Tuesday 28 October 2014

An early Anglo-Saxon sorcerer at Teversham, Cambridgeshire?

An earlier post on this site looked at some possible place-name evidence for pagan priests and Kultverbände or cultic groups in early Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire and East Anglia. The following post briefly examines a further place-name that may be of some relevance in this regard.

The location of Teversham, set against a map of the post-Roman landscape eastern England and some of the Willingham and Ingham names discussed in the previous post (drawn by C. R. Green).

The place-name in question is Teversham, near Cambridge, a name that contains the Old English element hām, 'estate or homestead', and so is of a type that is often thought to date from the early Anglo-Saxon period, perhaps being coined in the fifth or sixth century.(1) Early forms of this name include Teuuresham (1042x66) and Teuresham (1086) and it is usually stated to involve either an Old English personal name *Tēofer or, more commonly, an occupational term *tēafrere/*tīefrere, 'painter', combined with hām. So far, so prosaic, one might be inclined to think. However, the first element in this name is rather more interesting than it might first appear to be. As Victor Watts has observed, 'the cognates of both Tēofer and tēafrere are associated in other Germanic languages with magic', a point reinforced by John Insley, who remarks that Old English *tēafrere, 'painter', is 'a word which belongs to the same root as Old High German zoupar n. "magic, sorcery"'.(2) Similarly, Eilert Ekwall long ago commented that:
Old English tīefran ['to paint'] corresponds to German zauburn, Dutch tooveren 'to practice sorcery', and Old English tēafor 'red pigment' to Old High German zoubar, Old Frisian tāver, Old Norse taufr, 'sorcery'.(3)
As such, all may well not be quite what it seems with regard to the first element in the place-name Teversham. In this regard, it should be noted that Watts clearly considers the meanings sorcery/to practice sorcery/sorcerer and so forth 'to have been the original sense' here, indicating that the meanings of red pigment/to paint/painter and the like are probably a secondary, later sense and 'developed from the practice of staining magic runes this colour [i.e. red]'.(4) Given the fact that the name Teversham is usually believed to have had its origins very early within the Anglo-Saxon period, this must be considered a point of some considerable significance. Indeed, Ekwall does, in fact, carry on from his analysis quoted above to argue in his discussion of the place-name Teversham that 'Old English tīefran may well have been used in the sense "to practice sorcery", and tīefrere in the sense "sorcerer"'.(5) In other words, a consideration of the likely meaning, usage and history of the first element of Teversham suggests that this place-name can perhaps be best understood as meaning originally 'the estate/homestead of the sorcerer', an etymology that has been endorsed as a real possibility by not only Ekwall, but also both Watts and Insley.(6)

A potential origin for Teversham in 'the estate/homestead of the sorcerer' is, of course, most intriguing. With regard to the interpretation of such an etymology, it is worth reiterating the point made at the start of this post, namely that Teversham is a major place-name of a type often thought to date from the early Anglo-Saxon period, perhaps being coined in the fifth or sixth century—or 'the pagan period', as it was once more commonly known.(7) In consequence, if Teversham does indeed mean 'the hām of the sorcerer', as argued above, then the name would probably have been meant literally: that is to say, that it would have denoted a significant estate (or homestead) belonging to someone who was considered a sorcerer in the early Anglo-Saxon period. Needless to say, in such circumstances, John Insley's suggestion that Teversham is 'a name... with possible cultic implications'(8) would certainly seem worthy of some serious consideration.


Notes

1    See, for example, B. Cox, 'The significance of the distribution of English place-names in -hām in the Midlands and East Anglia', Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 5 (1972–3), 15–73; J. Kuurman, 'An examination of the ‑ingas‑inga‑ place-names in the East Midlands', Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 7 (1974–5), 11–44; B. Cox, ‘The place-names of the earliest English records’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 8 (1976), 12–66; M. Gelling, ‘English place-names derived from the compound wīchām’ reprinted in K. Cameron (ed.), Place-name Evidence for the Anglo-Saxon Invasion and Scandinavian Settlements (Nottingham, 1977), pp. 8–26; K. Cameron, English Place Names, 2nd edn (London, 1996), pp. 70–1, 141; J. Insley, 'Siedlungsnamen §2. Englische', Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 28 (2005), 344–53, especially pp. 346–7.
2    V. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge, 2004), p. 605; J. Insley, 'Siedlungsnamen', 347. Note, the abbreviations included in these quotations and those that follow are expanded here for the convenience of the reader.
3    E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn (Oxford, 1960), p. 464.
4    Watts, Cambridge Dictionary, p. 604.
5    Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary, p. 464.
6    Ekwall, Oxford Dictionary, p. 464; Watts, Cambridge Dictionary, p. 605; Insley, 'Siedlungsnamen', 347.
7    As in Cox, 'Distribution of English place-names in -hām', passim.
8    Insley, 'Siedlungsnamen', 347.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2014, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Sunday 26 October 2014

Anglo-Saxon archaeology, Late Roman provinces & the landscape of post-Roman eastern Britain

The first aim of this post is simply to share an interesting map of post-Roman Britain. The map in question plots 'Anglian' cremation-predominant cemeteries against both 'Saxon' artefacts of the second half of the fifth century and the Late Roman provincial boundaries (after J. C. Mann), and is one of a pair of images that were designed to illustrate a brief discussion of the supposed early Anglian and Saxon cultural areas and the potential relationship of these to the Late Roman provinces of Britain.(1)

The distribution of early Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries, represented by filled squares, plotted against Saxon artefacts of the second half of the fifth century, represented by stars, and the Late Roman provincial boundaries. Image credit: C. R. Green; published as Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, 2012, fig, 21a.

This map is, I hope, reasonably self-explanatory and requires little detailed comment here, other than to note that the distribution of the Anglo-Saxon material depicted in it would indeed seem to offer a degree of support to suggestions that early Anglian and Saxon settlement in eastern Britain may have been, initially at least, influenced by the Late Roman provincial arrangements.(2)

The above map was, of course, made using the modern coastline as a background. Whilst this perhaps enables patterns to be seen more easily and the reader to locate themselves more quickly, it is worth recalling that the landscape of eastern Britain in the post-Roman period is likely to have looked rather different to that of the twenty-first century. The second aim of this post is therefore to share another map, newly created, that is designed to give an idea of what the landscape of this region in the post-Roman period may have looked like. For the sake of convenience, it once again shows the Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries plotted alongside the Late Roman provinces, but now sets this material against the likely post-Roman landscape.

A very rough draft of a map of the likely post-Roman landscape of eastern England, drawn by C. R. Green. Dark blue represents the sea, green permanently dry land, and light blue the wetlands and salt-marshes; the siltland around the Wash is striped to reflect its low-lying nature and origin as marine deposits in this period. Also shown are early Anglian cremation pre-dominant cemeteries (black dots) and the Late Roman provinces (dotted lines).

This image has a number of significant differences from the modern map. For example, it features the offshore coastal barrier islands that once protected the coast of Lincolnshire, before their probable destruction by the sea in the thirteenth century.(3) It also depicts the post-Roman wetlands in the Fenland, the Humber Wetlands, the Lincolnshire Marsh and the Norfolk Broadland (the latter had probably largely become wetland—rather than estuary—by c. AD 500, aside from in Breydon Water).(4) And, finally, it features an adjusted eastern sea coast that takes account of erosion and coastal change in Holderness, the Wash area and East Anglia since the early medieval period.(5) Needless to say, the resultant map offers a rather different view of post-Roman eastern Britain and will form the base map for any future posts that look at this region in that period.


Notes

1    The map included here was published in Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 (Lincoln, 2012), as fig. 21a (the other image mentioned was published as fig. 21b in the same volume), which also discusses its sources and implications in more depth at pp. 93–5, 113, 152; further details of Britons and Anglo-Saxons are available here. The map reproduced here has also been used, with permission, by N. J. Higham & M. Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven & London, 2013), as their fig. 2.27a. The depiction of the Late Roman provinces on this map and the following one is after J. C. Mann's important article, 'The creation of four provinces in Britain by Diocletian', Britannia, 29 (1998), 339–41.
2    See further on all of this Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, pp. 93–5, 113, 152, and also B. Yorke, 'Anglo-Saxon gentes and regna' in H-W. Goetz et al (eds), Regna and Gentes: The Relationship Between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World (Leiden, 2003), pp. 381–408 at 397–9.
3    These coastal barrier islands were first suggested by H. H. Swinnerton, 'The post-glacial deposits of the Lincolnshire coast', Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 87 (1931), 360–75. See also D. N. Robinson, The Book of the Lincolnshire Seaside (Buckingham, 1981), pp. 13, 17 (map), 20; Institute of Estuarine and Coastal Studies, Humber Estuary & Coast (Hull, 1994), p. 33; and Natural England, NA 101: Bridlington to Skegness Maritime Natural Area Profile (Sheffield, 2013), pp. 11, 21.
4    For example, A. Crowson et al (eds), Anglo-Saxon Settlement on the Siltland of Eastern England (Heckington, 2005); R. Van der Noort, The Humber Wetlands: The Archaeology of a Dynamic Landscape (Macclesfield, 2004); R. Van der Noort, 'Where are Yorkshire's "terps"? Wetland exploitation in the early medieval period', in H. Geake & J. Kenny (eds) Early Deira: Archaeological Studies of the East Riding in the Fourth to Ninth Centuries AD (Oxford, 2000), pp. 121–31; H. Fenwick, The Lincolnshire Marsh: Landscape Evolution, Settlement Development and the Salt Industry (PhD Thesis, University of Hull, 2007); J. Albone et alThe Archaeology of Norfolk’s Broads Zone: Results of the National Mapping Programme (Dereham, 2007), pp. 5–6; B. P. L. Coles & B. M. Funnell, 'Holocene paleoenvironments of Broadland, England' in S.-D. Nio et al (eds), Holocene marine sedimentation in the North Sea Basin: Special Publications of the International Association of Sedimentologists (Oxford, 1981), pp. 123–31; J. Peterson, 'Some new aspects of Roman Broadland', The Annual: The Bulletin of the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group, 16 (2007), 23-35.
5    See, for example, N. G. Berridge and J. Pattison, Geology of the Country Around Grimsby and Patrington (London, 1994), p. 64; T. Sheppard, The Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (London, 1912); Crowson et alAnglo-Saxon Settlement, p. 5; Peterson, 'Roman Broadland', p. 23; K. Pye & S. J. Blott, 'Coastal Processes and Morphological Change in the Dunwich-Sizewell Area, Suffolk, UK', Journal of Coastal Research, 223 (2006), 453–73.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2014, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Friday 10 October 2014

Villas, barrows, DMVs and roads: viewing Lincolnshire's archaeology from the air using Google & Bing Maps

This is really just a very quick post to highlight how the satellite imagery offered by Google Maps, Google Earth and Bing Maps can be useful to archaeologists and historians working in the UK, just as much as it is to those interested in, say, Afghanistan. Although no substitute for proper aerial photographs of the type used by the RCHME, these easily accessible archives of satellite imagery provide a quick and simple way to check out interesting sites with relatively little effort. Four examples are offered below.

The first is from Bing Maps, which includes a beautiful image of one of the best preserved Deserted Medieval Villages in Lincolnshire, that at Brackenborough near Louth:

Brackenborough Deserted Medieval Village; click here for a larger, zoom-able version of this image.

The second is from Google Maps and is a cropmark Roman villa found to the south-west of Scamblesby; the Roman road leading to the east coast lay just to the north of this site, as did a possible settlement, including lanes, which was identified here by Dilwyn Jones and which may be associated with the villa:

Cropmarks of large rectangular enclosure complex—a probable Roman villa site—at Scamblesby, Lincolnshire: click here for a larger, zoom-able version of this image.

The third image is of the prehistoric Bully Hills barrows at Tathwell. Bully Hills is a chain of seven round barrows that still survive up to a maximum of three metres high and between fifteen and twenty-five metres in diameter, and Google has images of these both from the air and from the road:

Bully Hills round barrows, Tathwell, Lincolnshire; click here for a larger, zoom-able version of this image.
Bully Hills round barrows, Tathwell, Lincolnshire, from the road; click here for a larger, zoom-able version of this image.

The fourth and final image is of a cropmark road running north-west from Louth. This appears as a dark line meandering its way from south-east to north-west across the aerial photograph below and is a track once known as 'New Lane Road'. New Lane Road was stopped up by the Enclosure Commissioners at the start of the nineteenth century and the line visible on the photograph below is replicated on David Robinson's 1979 map of pre-enclosure Louth (drawn from the Enclosure Award of 1805 and the Surveyor's Plan). The name of this track might suggest that it was of fairly recent origin. However, given that it ran by the large South Elkington–Louth Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery on the hill above the town, it is possible that it may have been, in origin, a track or footway of some antiquity:

A cropmark track once known as New Lane Road runs from Louth (right hand side of image) in a roughly north-westerly direction across this aerial photograph; click here to see a larger, zoom-able version of this image.

The content of this page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2014, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

Monday 6 October 2014

A brief note on Willinghams and Inghams: Anglo-Saxon pagan priests and Kultverbände in Lincolnshire & East Anglia?

The following brief post is not intended as a rehearsal of the full corpus of place-names thought to make reference to early Anglo-Saxon pagan deities and temples/shrines, nor as an examination of the argument that many of these names may reflect late-surviving pagan sites that continued in use after most other such sites had been repressed or Christianized.(1) Instead, its aim is simply to draw attention to recent research on two small groups of names that could have some relevance to the study of early Anglo-Saxon paganism, but which haven't, so far, tended to feature in most discussions of this.

The first group consists of places named Willingham, where this place-name derives from Old English *Wifelingahām. There are six parishes in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire which currently bear the name Willingham. Three of these Willinghams—South Willingham and Cherry Willingham, both in Lincolnshire, and Carlton cum Willingham in Cambridgeshire—derive from an original *Willingahām, 'the estate of the *Willingas, the people/dependants of Willa'. The other Willinghams—Willingham by Stow and North Willingham, both in Lincolnshire, and Willingham in Cambridgeshire—appear to have a different origin, however. In all three of these cases, the early forms point to an original *Wifelingahām, rather than *Willingahām.(2)


The main place-names discussed in this post, set against the current coastline (drawn by C. R. Green).

The first element in this name, wifel, is actually found in a large number of English place-names and has been discussed several times in recent years. Peter Kitson and Gillian Fellows-Jensen have made a strong case for considering that the Old English insect-term wifel, 'weevil or beetle', is probably present in a significant proportion of these names, although some could perhaps instead reflect wifel as a known variant of Old English wifer, meaning here 'a trapping spear' (as proposed by Carole Hough for Wilsill in Yorkshire, Wifeles healh in c. 1030).(3) Nonetheless, most commentators agree that early Old English habitational names like the three Willinghams in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire require a different explanation. In this context, an unrecorded Old English personal name *Wifel formed from the insect-term wifel has often been suggested—despite scepticism from a number of researchers as to whether it is really plausible that an early Anglo-Saxon personal name might be formed from Old English wifel, 'weevil or beetle'—making *Wifelingahām simply 'the estate of the *Wifelingas, the people/dependants of *Wifel'.(4) However, such a solution is not the only possible explanation of these three place-names, as John Insley has argued in recent years.

Insley's alternative, and highly intriguing, interpretation of the significance of those place-names that derive from *Wifelingahām was published and reiterated in a series of contributions to Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde between 1999 and 2005.(5) He notes there that the Old Norse personal names Véseti and Vífill were originally terms for heathen priests and that an Old Swedish *vivil—attested in place-names—was also a designation for such a function. With regards to *vivil, Insley cites the place-name Vivilsta in Markims socken, Uppland < Vivils-Husar, 'portion of an administrative centre assigned to a pagan priest', and Fellows-Jensen further notes in this context the two early Scandinavian runic words for a pagan priest, wiwaʀ (c. 500) and wiwila (sixth century), and observes that several names derived from *vivil occur in the Mälaren region, these having been recently studied by Per Vikstrand.(6) In light of the Scandinavian evidence, Insley suggests that the three *Wifelingahām place-names (North Willingham, Willingham by Stow and Willingham in Cambridgeshire) are thus not, in fact, normal ‑ingahām names involving an unrecorded Old English personal name *Wifel. Rather, he considers that they are better seen as containing a cognate of Swedish *vivil, 'pagan priest'—which would take the form *wifel in Old English—as a specific, and so denote Kultverbände or cultic groups under the leadership of a pagan priest.

Such a possible origin for the three Willinghams is, of course, of considerable interest, and it is worth noting that these may not be the only place-names from eastern England to make reference to early Anglo-Saxon Kultverbände and pagan priests. Another potentially significant group of names from this perspective are those with the modern form Ingham, of which four examples are known (located in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Oxfordshire). These place-names are now all usually considered to represent significant early Anglo-Saxon centres and were re-examined as a group in 1987 by Karl Inge Sandred, who demonstrated that the former derivation of Ingham from *Ingan-hām, 'the estate of a man named *Inga', is unlikely to be correct. Sandred argued instead that the Ingham place-names probably all reflect Germanic *Ingwia-haimaz, which he reads as 'the estate of the Inguione', a tag to mark places as the royal property of a king who claimed to be of an Inguionic dynasty.(7) However, as with the *Wifelingahām place-names, this is not the only explanation of this original form that is possible. In particular, Kenneth Cameron and John Insley have more recently offered an alternative interpretation of an original *Ingwia-haima-, seeing it instead as a name meaning 'the estate of the devotees of the deity Ing'.(8) Needless to say, if Cameron and Insley's reading is correct, then the four Ingham places-names would again indicate sites where early Anglo-Saxon Kultverbände were based, these groups being concerned with the cultic reverence of Ing, a god who Richard North has argued had some considerable significance in the early Anglo-Saxon period.(9)

In sum, although the evidence is limited and there remains considerable room for debate and alternative interpretations, recent research and commentary suggests that there is at least a case to be made for adding the three Willinghams (< *Wifelingahām) and four Inghams (< *Ingwia-haima-) discussed above to the corpus of Old English place-names that may have something to tell us about early Anglo-Saxon paganism—the first group of names potentially denoting Kultverbände or cultic groups under the leadership of a pagan priest, and the second potentially indicating estates belonging to Kultverbände concerned with the cultic reverence of the pagan god Ing. In this context, incidentally, it is interesting to note that the Lincolnshire Ingham actually lies just to the east of one of our Willinghams (Willingham by Stow), separated from it only by the small former parish of Coates, which had close historical connections with Ingham.(10) If the place-names Willingham and Ingham do indeed both contain references to early Anglo-Saxon Kultverbände—rather than one or both of them instead simply deriving from another of their possible meanings, i.e. 'the estate of the people/dependants of *Wifel' or 'the estate of the Inguione'—then we would have here an intriguing coincidence. Of course, quite what the significance of any such coincidence would be is not entirely clear. However, in such circumstances it would perhaps be worth asking whether it might not reflect a situation wherein both of these near-neighbouring parishes were once been part of a single estate belonging to an early Anglo-Saxon Kultverband that was led by a pagan priest, Old English *wifel, and concerned with the worship of the deity Ing.(11)


Notes

1 See, for example, M. Gelling, 'Further thoughts on pagan place-names', reprinted in K. Cameron (ed.), Place-name Evidence for the Anglo-Saxon Invasion and Scandinavian Settlements (Nottingham, 1977), pp. 99–114; M. Gelling, Signposts to the Past. Place-names and the History of England, 2nd edn (Chichester, 1988), pp. 158–61; J. Insley, 'Kultische namen', Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 17 (2000), 425–37.
2 K. Cameron, A Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-names (Nottingham, 1998), p. 139; V. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge, 2004), p. 681; E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn (Oxford, 1960), p. 520; G. Fellows-Jensen, ‘The Weevil’s claw’ in A. van Nahl et al (eds), Namenwelten (Berlin, 2004), pp. 76–89 at 82–4. North Willingham was Wiuilingeham and Wiflingeham in 1086 and c. 1115; Willingham by Stow was Welingeham and Uiflingeheim/Wiflingham in 1086 and c. 1115; and Willingham in Cambridgeshire was Vuivlingeham and Wiuelncgaham in c. 1050 and 1086 (Fellows-Jensen, 'Weevil's claw', pp. 82–3; Cameron, Lincolnshire Place-names, p. 139; Watts, Cambridge Dictionary, p. 681).
3 For Old English wifel, 'weevil or beetle', being present in many of these names, see P. Kitson, 'Quantifying qualifiers in Anglo-Saxon charter boundaries', Folia Linguistica Historica, 14 (1993), 29–82 at 75–7, and Fellows-Jensen, 'Weevil's Claw', pp. 76–82, 86, supported by Insley, 'Kultische namen', 426–7. For Carole Hough's suggestion, see her 'Wilsill in Yorkshire and related place-names', Notes and Queries, 50.3 (2003), 253–7, although see Fellow-Jensen, 'Weevil's claw', pp. 86–7, for some some scepticism as to the general applicability of this idea.
4 Cameron, Lincolnshire Place-names, p. 139; Watts, Cambridge Dictionary, p. 681; and especially Fellows-Jensen, 'Weevil's Claw', pp.83, 84 and 86. Fellows-Jensen makes it clear that she assumes that an Old English personal name *Wifel would be a 'by-name meaning "beetle"' rather than anything else (p. 86), but Peter Kitson and Carole Hough both consider an Old English personal name *Wifel formed from OE wifel, 'weevil or beetle', to be intrinsically unlikely and 'improbable': Kitson, 'Quantifying qualifiers', 75–7, and Hough, 'Wilsill in Yorkshire', 254 and 257 (quotation at the latter location). Note, place-names involving ‑ingahām are often believed to have their origins in the early Anglo-Saxon period: J. Kuurman, 'An examination of the ‑ingas‑inga place-names in the East Midlands', Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 7 (1974–5), 11–44; B. Cox, 'The significance of the distribution of English place-names in -hām in the Midlands and East Anglia', Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 5 (1972–3), 15–73; K. Cameron, English Place Names, 2nd edn (London, 1996), p. 71.
5 J. Insley, 'Gumeningas', Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde,13 (1999), 191–3; Insley,  'Kultische namen', 426–7; J. Insley, 'Siedlungsnamen §2. Englische', Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 28 (2005), 344–53 at 347.
6 Fellows-Jensen, 'Weevil's claw', pp. 84–5, especially 85, citing Per Vikstrand's Gudarnas platser. Förkristna sakrala ortnamn i Mälarlandskapen (Uppsala, 2001).
7 K. I. Sandred, ‘Ingham in East Anglia: a new interpretation’, Leeds Studies in English, 18 (1987), 231–40. Barrie Cox considered the case convincing in his review of the volume that Sandred's article appeared in (Saga-Book of the Viking Society, 22 [1986–89], 313–14) and references it in his study of early Anglo-Saxon place-names in northern Lincolnshire, observing that '[t]he most obvious villa regalis was surely in the west at Ingham, with its place-name derived from the pagan Germanic god Ing whose name in greater Germania was used as a tag to mark places as royal property' (B. Cox, ‘The pattern of Old English burh in early Lindsey’, Anglo-Saxon England, 23 (1994), 35–56 at 48). See also Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–650 (Lincoln, 2012), pp. 101–03, 162, 262.
8 K. Cameron, Dictionary of Lincolnshire Place-Names (Nottingham, 1998), p. 69; K. Cameron, The Place-Names of Lincolnshire, VI (Nottingham, 2001), p. 184; Insley, 'Siedlungsnamen', 347. It should be noted that this interpretation of the name Ingham is largely adopted by Watts, Cambridge Dictionary, p. 331, for Ingham (Suffolk) and Ingham (Lincolnshire), although somewhat confusingly he offers Sandred's interpretation for Ingham (Norfolk).
9 R. North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1997); for some criticisms of the latter work, see, for example, Karin Olsen's review of North's book in TijdSchrift voor Skandinavistiek, 19.1 (1998), 187–93. For a possible example of a Kultverband focussed on a pagan Anglo-Saxon deity other than Ing, see perhaps Tewin, Hertfordshire—(terram) Tiwingum in 944x6 and Teuuinge in 1086—which can be potentially interpreted as '(settlement of) the worshippers of Tiw' or similar, another Anglo-Saxon pagan god, although '(settlement of) the people/dependants of *Tīwa' is the more usual interpretation of this name: Watts, Cambridge Dictionary, p. 605; T. Williamson, The Origins of Hertfordshire (Hatfield, 2010), p. 75; A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-Names (Oxford, 1991), p. 323.
10 P. L. Everson, C. C. Taylor & C. J. Dunn, Change and Continuity: Rural Settlement in North-West Lincolnshire (London, 1991), pp. 10 and 11.
11 The full extent of any such estate is entirely uncertain, of course. However, it may be worth noting that Cox has suggested that '[i]t can be no coincidence... that eventually the great Anglo-Saxon church at Stow grew up so near [to Ingham]' ('Pattern of Old English burh', 48). The large medieval parish of Stow—which encompassed the townships of Stow, Stow Park, Normanby by Stow and the now-separate parish of Sturton by Stow—lies immediately to the south of Willingham by Stow and to the east of Coates/Ingham (Everson et al,Change and Continuity, pp. 10, 11). Although the present church at Stow is of Late Saxon date, an earlier origin for it, potentially in the Middle Saxon period, has been suggested: N. Field, 'Stow church', Lincolnshire History & Archaeology, 19 (1984), 105–06; K. U. Ulmschneider, Markets, Minsters, and Metal-detectors: the Archaeology of Middle Saxon Lincolnshire and Hampshire Compared (Oxford, 2000), p. 148; K. U. Ulmschneider, 'Settlement, economy, and the "productive" site: Middle Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire A. D. 650–780', Medieval Archaeology, 44 (2000), 53–79 at 68.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2014, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.