English Village Street Names

Place-names are important evidence about past geographies and geographical change. This article examines the significance of village street names in two settings in the English Midlands: six villages in the relatively rural Vale of Belvoir, and six former villages that are now part of the Nottingham metropolitan area. In the village cores, streets retain traditional names; twentieth- century appellations are rare. A five-part typology is presented as a focus for future research. THE layout of roads and streets is one of the least changing human-made features of the landscape. Most villages in England date from the Middle Ages, and there is no reason to assume that the original street layout in them has changed greatly (Hoskins 1970; Gelling 1978, 1985). The purpose of this article is to investigate the significance of street names in these villages and their role as indicators of geographical changes and evolution over time. The case study presented here comprises two areas in the Midlands (Fig. 1). One is a group of six villages in the Vale of Belvoir, a small agricultural region eight to twelve miles southeast of the city of Nottingham. The other includes six villages that have been absorbed in some way into the urbanized area of this city. This sample is not offered as representative; instead, the villages are examples illustrating how settlements respond to changing cir- cumstance and how place-names, in this instance, of streets, provide evidence about geographical transformations. The Vale of Belvoir is not a valley in the traditional sense. The sandstone Middle Lias escarpment is on its southeastern border, but otherwise it is a low-lying, very gently undulating area of clay, drained by small streams that converge into the River Trent. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, the vale had an estimated population density of 10.3 persons per square mile (Holly 1954, 353-354). The distribution of villages there originated in the medieval pattern of agriculture. The villages in more intensely farmed areas are usually situated about 1.2 to 2 miles apart, with each village having easy access to fields and pastures within a .5- to .75-mile radius. Some large villages in the vale lie on a northeast-southwest axis from Bottesford to Long Clawson. This location may have been determined by a line of springs found at about the 150-foot contour level. Additionally, their territory as shown by the old parish boundaries combined the flat-area clays

Archaeology · Geography · Linguistics · Toponymy · History · Land Use and Ecosystem Services · Landscape and Cultural Studies

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