Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2008
In Lincolnshire as a whole, place-names which have Old English burh ‘a fortified place’ as their generics fall into two distinct geographical groups (fig. 1). In the northern half of the county, the locations of these names suggest that a comprehensive system of defence was eventually created for the territory of the Lindisfaran. In the far south, the two isolated instances of burh may signal original strongholds of Middle Angles styled in The Tribal Hidage the Bilmigas (but who on place-name evidence are more correctly to be called the Billingas) and the Gyrwe. It is, however, the burh names in that region defined as Lindsey in The Lindsey Survey of the reign of Henry I (1100–35) which are the focus of this paper.
1 The county is deemed to be that prior to the 1974 local government reorganization which deprived it of the areas assigned to Humberside.
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14 This point was made by Alan Binns, an experienced Humber and Trent sailor, in a paper on early Trent navigation read at the Flixborough seminar, University of Nottingham, 8 May 1992. The staithes are recorded as Flixburghstather in 1299, Calendar of Inquisitions post mortem (Public Record Office), in progress. Compare neighbouring Burton upon Stather whose affix is also Scand. stϱðvar, the plural of stϱð ‘a landing place, a staithe’.
15 I am very grateful to Professor Kenneth Cameron for access to unpublished materials in his place-names collection for Lincolnshire.
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35 The limited range of the migrations of English families in the Middle Ages and early modern period is illustrated in neighbouring Rutland where some twenty-five per cent of the county's village names are compounded as surnames in field-names alone within the county, but away from their locations of origin by the last quarter of the seventeenth century. See Cox, B., The Place-Names of Rutland, EPNS 67–9 (Nottingham, 1994), 445Google Scholar. The Wrawby and Glanford Brigg instances are: Lincoln, Lincolnshire Archives Office, Bishop's Transcripts MF4/310, Will 1674/140 and Inventory 176/151. I am grateful to Dr. J.A. Mitson for drawing these Lincoln records to my attention.
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