A penance, a picture and a question

I owe you a post from last week, but I am still on holiday just now, and I didn’t think when packing to bring the notes that would source the next real post (or even a record of what it is, though I think it’s about Chris Wickham redefining what we should mean by feudalism).¹ The next thing that I have written up would probably be a professional liability to publish, so I won’t; but I should put something up.² So what should it be?

Well, here’s an idea I won’t use. Years ago, the erstwhile blogger Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval invented a sort of blog post called a Google Penance, in which one atoned for occasions when people found your blog via search terms that made clear they were really very much looking for something else, by posting something at least slightly related.³ The challenge, of course, was to keep it clean, and that wasn’t always easy. I’ve just checked my stats, and find that I’m in the middle of such a bad search moment; the hits on my recent post ‘Name in Print XXX: the other parcel from China‘ have lately gone through the roof. On due inspection this seems to be because it’s been circulating via social networks in Pakistan, as well as to other places from there, and that the reason for that is that something or someone was searchng for ‘China XXX’ or variants thereof and that is what started coming back. A hidden danger of Roman numerals for you all to consider! But other than suggesting some reading about Chinese knowledge of Roman science, I can’t think of anything safe to say that would answer that search query in some respect, so let’s move on.⁴

‘Nestorian’ priests in a procession on Palm Sunday, in a seventh- or eighth-century wall painting from a ‘Nestorian’ church in Qocho, China, by Daderot – Own work, CC0, Link, with snigger quotes all to be explained below

Then I thought, hey, if I can’t write a proper post from the point in 2019 when the blog’s backlogged to, maybe I have an image I downloaded then which is worth a post. Over lockdown I sorted out my image files, so this was an easy question to answer: I basically wasn’t downloading academic images in early 2019, and the only ones I did already went into a post here, the above being one of them. This is, I suppose, a picture of people in China, which is at least part of what my websearchers were after, so maybe it is the required penance, but it’s not really a post.

So instead here’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask for literally years. I only realised a few months ago that I’d accidentally deleted the stub I’d left to remind myself to do so. Since then I’ve been trying to remember, and this seems like the occasion. Shortly before I started this blog, as part of the same attempt to give myself an academic presence quicker than publication could, I put up a personal website. Some of you may have looked at it; it’s usually no more than a few months out of date. Now, one of its sections is a list of academic works I have notes on. I suppose that I thought it might be useful for people assembling bibliographies, but mainly of course it was supposed to demonstrate that I was doing the academic study thing and knew some stuff. And I have maintained it, in my normal obsessive-compulsive fashion, because it became part of my note-taking routine: copy up useful references, index item in my bibliography file, add it to website, and now make entry in Zotero. But in the sixteen years I’ve had that site up, no-one has ever been in contact with me about those notes pages, and I don’t have access to logs at that level so contact is the only way I could know if anyone was using them. And they are work to maintain, which quite possibly I have never really needed to do. So I just thought I’d ask you, my captive audience: have you ever used those pages, are they, you know, any use to you or anyone? Would you miss them if they, you know, went away? Just asking…

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1. If I’m right, it’s a report on an early presentation of what became Chris Wickham, “How did the Feudal Economy Work? the Economic Logic of Medieval Societies” in Past & Present no. 251 (Oxford 2021), pp. 3–40, which is a game-changing piece of thinking.

2. It arose when a then-promising undergraduate asked me about academic careers, and I gave them the usual warning speech and then said, out of some sense that the case required it, that I would log my next week’s work for them so that they could see what the job involved. Having done so, in a period of quite bad industrial relations, I decided I couldn’t let the student have it, in case someone publicised it and I got into trouble. Industrial relations are now arguably worse, and I think there are better things I can do with such a log than stick it here. Plus which, it’s probably not actually very interesting reading!

3. Carl’s now-inaccessible blog was proudly but not unjustly described by him at a conference years back as ‘kind of a big deal’, and although it was easier then to be one he was leading the pack. Some reflection in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Blogging the Middle Ages”, in Brantley L. Bryant, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (New York City NY 2010), pp. 29–42, which was actually also my first print citation…

4. If you do want this, try Matthew P. Canepa, “Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran and Sui–Tang China”, ed. by Canepa in Ars Orientalis Vol. 38, Theorizing Cross-Cultural Interaction among the Ancient and Early Medieval Mediterranean, Near East and Asia (Washington DC 2010), pp. 121–154, and Krisztina Hoppál, “The Roman Empire According to the Ancient Chinese Sources” in Acta Antiqua no. 51 (Budapest 2011), pp. 263–306, DOI: 10.1556/AAnt.51.2011.3-4.5.

Surely you’re mistaken II

I am on holiday this week, and so probably have time but have little inclination to write you a long and technical post just now. Happily, student assessment comes to the rescue, or rather did in January to June 2019, over which time I collected, as some form of relief from marking, some more of my then-students’ best and brightest errors of fact, judgement or meaning on the two first-year modules I then taught, a full medieval and a late antique survey. All these students have now long since left our care, hopefully have their degrees and I don’t, in any case, know who they were as they were marked anonymously. I very much doubt they can remember writing these things, if they should ever read this. So I think it’s OK to let them lighten your summer as well. I shall group them and apply commentary where, well, where I think it’s funny…

Not quite thought through

“The impact of Constantine’s Christian implementation can be seen during the fourth and fifth centuries, whereby a widespread depiction of Christian art was displayed. For instance, churches became decorated with images of clear Christian origin and meaning, which conveyed an apparent Christian message.”

I mean, aren’t churches the last place you’d expect a Christian message to appear?

From one answer on the Black Death (that wasn’t really supposed to be about the Black Death):¹

“However, the BD [sic] also led to the emergance [sic] of the Middle Class, ending the war for resources as the peasantry lessened and people could afford to feed their family.”

Damn peasants! We’d have so much more food without farmers!

“Many bodies were buried in the same grave but there were also many graves – this was a damage to the rural land and reduced possible crop-growing land therefore reducing the positive effect of the middle class emergance.”

Also dead people! So inconsiderate with the space they take up!

Similar vein, different paper, no way to know if it was the same student:

“… the growth of the bishops was not necessarily the main cause of the cities’ decline…”

But they just eat so much at that stage!

I know what you started with, but I don’t know how this happened to it

From the same answer on the Black Death as above:

“Public health, due to the Black Death, was instantly improved. In a short-term effort, people knew to isolate the sick from the cities and often used catapults to expel them.”

The source here must be an old story that the Mongols, while besieging the Venetian colony of Caffa in the Black Sea, catapulted their dead from the plague into the city. This may even have been true, though the source isn’t great, but it’s not true as it ended up here!²

And lastly…

“Britain was home to key Renaissance figures such as Chaucer and Diptych and also saw the spread of grammar schools across the country.”

But of course it wasn’t till the secondary moderns came along that we could develop thinkers like Triptych or Quadbyke.³ And that’s all, folks!

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1. I have discovered, in my years of teaching across several institutions, that if you run a full medieval survey and don’t include assessment questions on the Vikings or the Black Death, you’ll get answers on them anyway. They are apparently the two things even the weakest students are interested enough by to revise.

2. See Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa” in Emerging Infectious Diseases Vol. 8 (Atlanta GA 2002), pp. 971–975, DOI: 10.3201/eid0809.010536.

3. My colleague who did the Renaissance lecture on this module liked to use Jan Van Eyck’s diptych of the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement, which see here, as an example of Renaissance art not all being from Italy. I hardly need to say that that colleague did not relocate it or Van Eyck to Britain, but even if they had, this student had more that they could add…

Surely you’re mistaken I

Happy 2020 to all my readers! By way of light relief from my old holiday pictures, here is something I’ve had in store until it was safe to use, another small stash of ‘classic’ student answers to questions of great weight, from years back. There’s one superstar here, but the supporting cast also contributed a great deal. I didn’t check who these students were until after I’d marked these things and by now I have no idea; they will, however, all have safely graduated by now, hopefully after having left this period behind for one they were happier in. Enjoy!

I know what they meant, but…

“With the emergence of Mohammed, Islam exploded in popularity and in influence.”

It had been struggling before, I seem to recall…

“Constantius was an Aryan emperor and when he came to power he attempted to make Aryan the official religion of the Empire.”

There’s probably no safe joke to make about this.

Latin with unexpected results

The fourth century as seen by Goscinny

“[Constantine’s conversion] led to the edict of Milan in AD 313 in which Constantine and Licentius legalised Christianity and other religions.”

Unintended satire

“Firstly, Emperors of the time were considered as ‘Profitis Maximus’ which means ‘the head of religion’.”

Just not sure what happened here

“Justinian took succession of North Africa in the Vanadic War as well as moving out the Frankish and Swedish.”

Reference to a hitherto undocumented migrant crisis?

And most difficult of all, Christianity

Several important contributions by that unknown guest star, to whom both word choice and understanding Christianity seem to have been more challenging than perhaps they realised.

Word choice is important

“The infamous Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, still one of the most famous religious buildings to this day…”

I think you can only have one of those adjectives, sorry.

Religion is confusing

“During the thirteenth century the Pope wanted the masses to believe in the all-powerful superior civil leader God….”

Previously someone less all-powerful had been in charge so the popes were less clear about their wishes, I guess.

“The Greek church had laws for the archbishoprics, bishoprics and the intermediate class, their laws were directed at everybody and everyone was on the same level. Each person was an equal. Compared to the Latin church which was very top heavy, mainly aimed at archbishoprics and bishoprics and that was it.”

Besides which, with all those bishoprics on trial the courts were very full anyway.

“Which ended up spuring on Greek nationalism to such an extent that there was no going back, so in Constantinople they tried to get Hagia Sophia on the throne.”

Perhaps in the form of one of those models emperors carry around in mosaics? Otherwise I’m not sure how this happened either…

Anyway, I try to keep glorious moments like these when they occur; they make the marking easier… Hopefully these have either been a diversion, or, if you’re a student, a warning, and either way may it start off a happy New Year for you and me both!

Mistakes not to make

Teaching resumed on Monday, and who knows how long I can keep up blogging under one of my heavier loads so far in this post? But I have one post ready, which I put into draft in the beginning of April 2016, when I was clearing messages off an old phone. Some of the messages came from a period when I was marking exam scripts by first-year undergraduates completely new to medieval history—not at my current institution I should point out, but long in the past—and as anonymous to me then as they are to you now. I evidently had to share the pain with someone, and now it seems wrong not to disperse it more fully before they pass into oblivion. I mean, each one is a gem in its way. I have grouped them by their particular sort of failing. All spellings were authentic and hopefully still are. I hope I didn’t teach any of them and wish them all well in their current lives.

Sadly not really getting it

These are probably our fault as teachers, really, but we certainly had help.

“Christainity often faced mass persecution in early medieval era. In 64 AD the first account of Christain persecution took place as Christains were blamed for the Great Fire of Rome.”

“Without the Silk Roads, the development of the world may not have been so fast.”

Words that sound about right

“There is evidence of this available from primary sources such as Byzantium coins being found in areas of China during the Confucian dynasty…”

Yes, Confucian is what this smells of to me too.

Unhelpful caution

I don’t think these were our fault, though, I think these were students being afraid of us marking them wrong.

“The emergence of Christianity would have been a great change as many places had been pagan prior to their conversion.”

Almost all, really!

Of Muhammad:

“… arguably the most important prophet of Islam…”

It’s hard to think of one more so!

“It is possible that in the eighth century there was a different view on what was true.”

That is indeed a problem we face.

Not what you meant

Here, if anyone is to blame, it’s whoever taught the writers writing.

“Muslim women had a great hurdle in overcoming their participation in the intellectual and political institutions of Islam…”

Some of them, indeed, never managed it. And this one is my favourite of all.

“Buddhists were not large enough to cause mass conversions.”

No comment needed.

What do you mean?

“The advent of Muslim women’s success in overcoming their challenges was hindered at the advent of Prostitution and that it was widespread in Provincal cities that had monitered brothels.”

I understand most of where this came from, except how the Muslims got back to Provence so quietly, but I don’t understand where it was trying to go.

“With a long-lasting peak of 1600 years, the Silk Routes, or Silk Roads, are heavily attributed for their ability to connect the unknown world.”

Good to know. I think.

Over time, I have developed a reputation as a tough marker. I offer these, then, as partial explanation of how I might have got that way and ask for the ones that weren’t funny enough to quote also to be taken into consideration…

A Black Country Motte-and-Bailey

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As I mentioned a few posts ago, one of the last things I did before leaving Birmingham professionally behind me in August 2015 was squeeze in a visit to Dudley Castle, which came as something of a surprise to me. … Continue reading →

Beat this for impact!

In the English academy it’s all about impact these days, unless it’s all about networks or public engagement, those are very hot too. But mainly impact, by which we mean, for those not reading in the language of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (may it live forever?), changes in the way people outside the university environment do things on the basis of our work. This is sometimes seen as hard for medievalists to produce; not a lot of people do things on the basis of their understanding of the Middle Ages in the first place, so first we have to make them do that. Of course we do produce this effect via both our teaching and our book sales outside the Academy but we’re not allowed to score those, don’t ask me why. So this is rightly attacked as not fit for purpose yet we still look, desperately, for ways in which we might be able to show impact as so defined. Well, check this out for a direct influence on modern economic behaviour from my work:

Ovelia modiale, nou nascut

“Ballachulish has given birth to a new Ripollesa lamb, born yesterday:

“I’ve named her Ovelia Modiale in honour of my brother-out-of-law, Jonathan Jarrett whose paper on the use of cows, sheep and possibly pigs as monetary units in 10th century Catalonia is a must read. Our tiny new lamb (3.8kg at birth, so small) probably is not yet worth a modius of grain, but I’ll love her all the same….”

And you can click through the picture for more details should you really want them; he refers, of course, to my most recent actual publication, a while ago now and something I hope will be changing soon. Now, admittedly there are problems with this as an impact case study. Firstly, it’s in Catalonia, though the people involved are still UK voters; secondly, as far as I know they only named one animal on the basis of the paper, so it’s not exactly public policy; and thirdly, of course, this was December 2014, so loved or not that lamb is still long-eaten chops by now, though you could claim that that just represents the propagation of the effect of my work into the local environment… But still: I’m betting not many other medievalists can claim this kind of impact! Thankyou to the Crofter and the Croft…

Seminar CLXXIX: mocking Irish clergy in the tenth and eleventh centuries

Once returned to the UK after the trip to Catalonia lately recounted, I was happy to be heading back to the Institute of Historical Research, whose Earlier Middle Ages Seminar has in these last two years run to a shortened programme in the summer. First up in the summer 2013 series on 22nd May was Elizabeth Boyle, an old acquaintance from Cambridge. I would therefore have been down to London for this anyway, but her title, “Lay Morality, Clerical Immorality and Pilgrimage in 10th- and 11th-Century Ireland”, also intrigued. Since the IHR has been in exile for some years now, it took some finding, but finally with us all gathered in a huge basement room where we could hardly see people come in to find us, Lizzie told us a couple of excellent but odd Irish stories and drew some tentative points of bigger social import out of them.

“Book of Leinster, folio 53” by Áed Ua Crimthainn et al (12th century) – Laighean53a at web site of Trinity College, Dublin. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The common links between the stories are firstly that they are next to each other in the so-called Book of Leinster, secondly that they both involve unnamed kings acting to correct the morals of Irish clerics fallen into sin, and thirdly that they relate to pilgrimage, which was where Lizzie had come in as she was at this time working on a project comparing contacts with Rome between England and Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries.¹ This seems to have been a period in which there was both a substantial rise in pilgrimage (which has certainly been detected in Catalonia too, though there it could be just more evidence; not so in Ireland, where there is actually far less evidence than in the centuries before) and also a current of scepticism about the practice.² This was neatly expressed in an anonymous ninth-century verse Lizzie gave us in the handout (in both Old Irish and her translation, but I shall stick to the latter because I can’t really even pronounce the Celtic languages, let alone understand them):

“Going to Rome:
great hardship, little benefit.
The King you seek here:
if you don’t take Him with you, you won’t find Him there.”

These stories are in something of the same vein. In the first, Cethrur Macclérech (‘Four Junior Clerics’), the protagonists, whom Lizzie compared to gap-year students, head for Rome and are put up by ‘a renowned man of the Franks’, who makes roughly the above point to them and persuades them to accept a living from him in exchange for their prayers. They go to Rome anyway but when they come back he throws a local hermit out, who is obviously delighted by this further adversity (apparently really),³ and they are just moving in when one of them says, “May it be lucky,” at which point the king responds: “‘Out of the country with them! they are heathens! Let them not even drink the water of the country.'” So they head off dejected, but next day while washing in a stream a box floats down to them and bounces into the arms of their leader (called a bishop, now) and he sends it back to the king. It turns out to contain six bars of silver and one of gold, all of equal weight, and the king expounds this as an allegory on the days of the week and Sunday observance, but accepts the clerics back as long as they never think of “‘luck'” as long as they live. It looks as if there were several moral points knocked into a single story here, but the point about luck being superstition is the one the scribe ran with.

This is really nothing to do with the post, but it came up as I searched for medieval images of Rome and is just too much fun not to include, Rome shown as a widow during the residence of the papacy in Avignon. Seriously: how many of the Avignon popes were good husband material, Mrs Allegorical Rome? Consider your options! “BNMsItal81Fol18RomeWidowed“. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The second interested me more, since I found in it faint points of contact with other stories I know dimly, not least from Chrétien de Troyes, that feature a King of the Greeks (and there are five more of these in the manuscript, apparently).⁴ Here, that king is the unfortunate butt of the story, but certainly its moral champion. A bishop who has gone to Rome on pilgrimage determines to go on to Jerusalem, and meets a “wonderful king” of a land on the way who points out to him that “God is in every place” and installs him as the royal confessor, and indeed also treasurer. Because the king was frequently out, the bishop heard the queen’s confession more often than the kings and eventually wound up, er, giving her something worth confessing, an incident that quickly becomes habit-forming. The king is told and comes back and besieges his wife and the bishop in their ‘stone mansion’. She won’t open up and in the night the bishop repents, does 300 prostrations and faints, and the angels come and carry him to his church, where he wakes and gratefully starts celebrating nocturns. The king then hears and realises his suspicions are misplaced, so goes to abase himself before the bishop, who is at least conscious that he hasn’t really deserved this break (“It is not upon me alone that disgrace from the devil has been exercised”) and resumes his pilgrimage. The real winner here is the queen, to whom the king had to pay compensation for false accusation so that she would remain with him (which is Irish law, not Roman, as Lizzie noted). The point here is supposed to be that we can’t know what God will or won’t forgive, but again it seems clear that there’s a lot of other points you could make with this tale.

A stone mansion of the sort imagined by our story-teller? The early medieval Gallerus oratory in County Kerry. The linked page gives you a handy short account of the debate over the Céli De.

The points that Lizzie chose to emphasise, at least, hung around the purity of the clergy. This is a fairly obvious target of both these stories, albeit perhaps an incidental one, but there was at this time in Ireland some dispute over the peculiarly Gaelic clerical movement known as the Céli De, ‘clients of God’, who do not easily fit into our categories either of reformers or hermits, being something of both and not enough of either for the Gregorian Reform movement and those moving within it to be quite happy with them.⁵ They did undertake lay ministry and confession, and these were far from the only tales about how that could go wrong (a style of story I attempted to classify as “swyve or shrive?” in questions, gleefully ignoring the fact that this only works in a different dead language). Whether the clerics here are actually supposed to be Céli De is unclear, however (though the bishop of the Gaels in the second story is so called in its last line) and the manuscript context may even suggest that these were tales in which Céli De poked fun at their mainstream, travel-happy brethren. In the end what was mainly clear here is that there were some moral arguments going on that the writers and users of this manuscript and those who copied its tales were pursuing through low humour, and anything we might want to say beyond that about authorship, purpose and reception was hard to settle. But medieval use of humour is itself worth remembering, and unlike many these stories’ fun has held some of its meaning.⁶

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1. The Book, or Lebor na Nuachongbála to its old friends, is Dublin, Trinity College MS H 2. 18, and is printed as R. I. Best et al. (edd.), The Book of Leinster, formerly Lebar na Núachingbála (Dublin 1954-1983), 6 vols, or so says Lizzie’s handout. Meanwhile, investigation by web reveals that this paper is now published as E. Boyle, “Lay Morality, Clerical Immorality, and Pilgrimage in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Ireland: Cethrur macclerech and Epscop do Gaedelaib” in Studia Hibernica Vol. 39 (Dublin 2013), pp. 9-48, so you can follow up the references and see if the conclusions changed from what I heard if you like!

2. The locus classicus here is Kathleen Hughes, “The Changing Theory and Practice of Irish Pilgrimage” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History Vol. 11 (Cambridge 1960), pp. 143-151, but I guess there must be more now, and that Lizzie will be providing yet more shortly! The Catalan side of things is covered, again classically, in Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans, Biografies catalanes: sèrie històrica 1 (Barcelona 1958, repr. 1980), pp. 302-313.

3. Lizzie’s translation has it as: “‘I give thanks to God’, said the hermit: ‘My earthly king ejecting me; my heavenly king coming into it.'”

4. Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. P. Kunstmann in Base de français médieval, online here, last modified 31 July 2013 as of 27 April 2014, ll. 43–58. For interpretation I’m only immediately able to proffer Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, “Alexander and the Conte du Graal” in Arthurian Literature Vol. 14 (Woodbridge 1996), pp. 1–19, but there must be something more general about the world of the Greeks in romance… Aha! Regesta Imperii proffers Rima Devereaux, Constantinople and the West in medieval French literature, Gallica 25 (Cambridge 2012), which I haven’t seen but must at least be relevant.

5. Lizzie cited the work of Westley Follett, Céli Dé in Ireland: monastic writing and identity in the early Middle Ages (Woodbridge 2006) here, but her handout also offers Aubrey Gwynn, The Irish Church in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, ed. G. O’Brien (Dublin 1992), which may be what Follett is kicking against? I dunno guv’, this is really not my field!

6. Jokes are a medium hard to interpret over a thousand years and a linguistic divide, but that doesn’t mean they should be forgotten: here Lizzie cited, as would I have, Guy Halsall, “Introduction: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got the key'” in Halsall (ed.), Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge 2002), pp. 1-21.

An alternative manifesto for this blog

“If I could live in any decade, it would definitely be the 960s.”

Probably as thinking humans you all read The Onion already and saw this when it was new, or when Another Damned Medievalist also linked it (though I can’t now find where she did so), but it appeals on so many levels…

“… Everyone was in this vibrant period of transition between Byzantine autocracy and fealty to large landowners, just trying to discover themselves. For a brief moment you had this optimism that made you feel like you could just stick your thumb out, hop in a passing cart transporting waterfowl, and go. Didn’t even matter where—you’d just take it easy at the next fiefdom and figure it out. Who was going to tell you no? The king? Edgar the Peaceable was on the throne and he didn’t care. It was a simpler time…”

I mean, I’m probably more a fan of the 970s myself—so many exciting possibilities as Europe begins to have access to gold again, even if it comes with a side-order of Muslim military campaigns of terror in Spain and Southern France, Norman ones of opportunity in Southern Italy and Viking ones of conquest in England… But the arts were so much more ambitious!—but he’s totally right about the 980s. That can only seem like a good decade if you don’t remember it!

Flat out for Sutton Hoo

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The Easter holiday was short in the UK last year, but this didn’t stop some of us making good use of it, and for me this included, somewhat to my surprise, an Anglo-Saxonist roadtrip. This excellent idea was one of … Continue reading →

Trust some of the experts, some of the time

Partly because I had forgotten pretty much any of what was in it, and therefore how much use the students would find it, and partly because I owned a copy thanks to a patron’s generosity and it was annoying me that being true as well as the former, I was over the summer reading Margaret Gelling’s Signposts to the Past, an attempt to write an accessible account of what we can safely gather from English place-names and to stop people reading them wrong. This often comes close to being, and in the introduction is explicitly, an appeal to people to just take the experts’ word on trust because it’s too complicated for laymen, a stance that I never warm to, being more of the persuasion that if one can’t explain something in ten minutes in a pub one doesn’t understand it.¹ However, Dr Gelling did provide one excellent type case that I thought merited recounting, its ethnic essentialism not withstanding:

The Anglo-Saxons had three words derived from the same stem as the verb ‘bury’ which they occasionally used in place-names to designate tumuli. These are byrgen, byrgels, burgæsn…. Either byrgen or burgæsn (probably the former) is found in two minor names in Oxfordshire, Berring’s Wood in Glympton and Berins Hill in Ipsden. There are early spellings for both these names, and the derivation is certain in the first instance and probable in the second. This etymology was put forward for both names in Gelling 1953, superseding a long-standing antiquarian association of Berins Hill in Ipsden with St Birinus, the apostle of the West Saxons, who was the first Bishop of Dorchester on Thames. There was an unexpected sequel to this when, by the sort of ghastly coincidence which place-name students must always look out for, an important pagan Anglo-Saxon cemetery recently came to light at a spot now called Berinsfield north of Dorchester OXF. This discovery led to immediate speculation about the derivation of Berinsfield from byrgen, which would have proved continuity of tradition about the cemetery from early pagan times. The caution prompted by the failure of the name Berinsfield to appear in any of the sources consulted for the place-name survey of Oxfordshire proved justified, however, and inquiries revealed that Berinsfield had been invented by a local historian for the benefit of the airfield situated there, and that he intended it to commemorate Bishop Birinus. Although the false derivation from byrgen had a short life, it managed to appear in at least one Ph.D. thesis, and the incident makes a salutary cautionary tale…. It is worth noting the circumstances in which this name, although of quite recent invention by a very well-known local historian, took root and appeared genuine to a team of archaeologists who knew the area initimately. The sequence of events appears to have been: (1) the antiquarian association of Berins Hill near Ipsden with St Birinus of Dorchester; (2) the invention of the name Berinsfield for an airport near Dorchester, presumably on the model of Berins Hill; (3) the alternative derivation of Berins Hill from byrgen in Gelling 1953; (4) the discovery of the cemetery at Berinsfield by archaeologists who knew that Berins- could be from byrgen.²

The archæologists just knew too much! A little knowledge is a dangerous thing! and so on. I think the thing I love most about this story is the way she could describe the discovery of a major new site as ‘ghastly’, but if I’d got implicated in a foul-up like that I might also feel the sting some time afterwards. I assume Dr Gelling was also involved in examining the Ph.D., and I would hate to have been that student, though it was hardly their fault either. But what’s the moral from the point of view of the local historian, whoever they were, that’s what I can’t figure…

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1. M. Gelling, Signposts to the Past. Place-names and the history of England (London 1978, repr. 1979), e. g. p. 13: “Because place-name etymology abounds with snares of this kind, it is not possible to invite general participation in the process of suggesting etymologies. The rules have been objectively established: they are not arbitrary, but they are intricate, and few non-specialists master them well enough to be on safe ground in this branch of the study…. It is therefore important at the outset to ask people who have no special competence in the history of the English language to accept specialist guidance about the meaning of place-names…. Etymologies should be accepted from the philologists, or only revised with philological consent.” There’s probably a form you have to fill out.

2. Ibid., pp. 140-141, citing M. Gelling, The Place-Names of Oxfordshire vol. I, English Place-Name Survey XXIII (London 1953).