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@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson 1. The Norman Conquest resulted in large-scale reallocation of landholdings. Yet place-names remained relatively stable. Alaric Hall concluded that ‘By the late 11thC English place-names had almost entirely stabilised: of the place-names that made it into the DB, over 91% ....
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson 2. .. are still in use as settlement names. But more than 30% of place-names from around 700 have been lost. This suggests that early Anglo-Saxon place-naming worked in rather different ways from later on, & that names were more fissile.’ s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.d…
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson 3. The same patterns can be seen in personal names. @chegchenko’s recent paper sugg that ‘in the decades preceding the Conquest ... the English personal naming system was no longer the classic Old English dithematic one’ which resulted in a great variety of names ...
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko 4. He goes on ‘People were not selecting & combining themes in the aim of preserving name uniqueness, even tho there were enough name themes still in use to do so. Instead, people's names had begun to display a far greater degree of homogeneity...
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko 5. ... both in terms of names, & in their constituent name themes.’ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11… (not open access, alas). Was this a consequence of the Norman Conquest?
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko 6. .@chegchenko sugg. not: ‘a process I hope to have shown was already well underway by the time of the Conquest. The changes that took place in England were therefore part of a Europe‐wide transformation’ between about 850 and 1100.
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko 7. He says, too: ‘the naming system of England was undergoing the same process of transformation as that of continental Europe, & at more or less the same time. Rather than choosing individual naming themes in order to create unique names ...
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko 8. ... people were making naming choices that were beginning to coalesce around a few popular names.’ That is, @alarichall & @chegchenko sugg that patterns for naming people & places became more constrained in the later AS period. The Norman Conquest ...
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko @alarichall 9. ... may have been less influential than previously thought. Instead, these appear to be European rather than insular changes. So, to come back to the replacement of Brittonic/vernacular Latin place-name elements by OE elements, how reasonable is it to assume this ..
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko @alarichall 10. .. is the result of conquest/colonisation? I’m not arguing that it was not. I am saying that making an assumption without evidence for it may so restrict the argument that we end up in a blind alley. If we want to know what really happened in the past ..
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko @alarichall 11. .. we need to be sure that our assumptions are as well-founded in evidence as possible. The rule of Occam’s Razor sugg that the explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct. 
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko @alarichall 12. Lots of assumptions are needed to explain early AS place-name change in terms of conquest/colonisation - eg: the supposed political & social dominance of the settlers requires, given their acknowledged small no’s., that their supposed ‘cultural characteristics’ were superior
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko @alarichall 13. .. to those supposed to be exhibited by the Romano-British elite they are believed to have replaced. That is an awful lot of assumptions. The big Q is whether or not they are well-founded. When we start exploring the answers to that Q we may be a bit closer to understanding
@TokenxEffort @DrFrancisYoung @DrLRoach @P_G_Anderson @chegchenko @alarichall 14. ... the processes underlying place-name (and other cultural) changes in AngloSaxon England. Currently we make too many assumptions to be sure of as much as we think we are. END
