Thorps in a Changing Landscape extract
Table of Contents
1 Introducing thorps
2 Establishing the corpus
3 Danelaw thorps
4 English throps
5 Thorps: the archaeological evidence
6 Thorps in the landscape
7 Thorps: a hypothesis and its wider implications
Appendix 1: Throp in Anglo-Saxon glosses
Appendix 2: Thorps first recorded before 1300 AD
Extract from Thorps in an Changing Landscape
Taken from the Introduction
Thorps – in some areas throps – are familiar elements in the named landscape of much of England. In many instances they announce themselves to visitors and passers-by proudly and without disguise: Althorp NTH, the focus of national attention in 1997; or Mablethorpe LIN, seaside destination for land-locked Midlanders and inspiration for Tennyson’s eponymous poem. Elsewhere they lie hidden from view behind a variety of spellings, only to be discovered by those who enquire within: Cock-a-Troop Cottages WLT; Eastrip som; Droop DOR; Burdrop OXF; Thrupp, Hatherop and Puckrup GLO.
Unlike places taking other commonly encountered generic name elements, such as -ham or -tun, -worth or -burh, -leah or -feld, thorps and throps are synonymous with the English countryside. When seen on road signs, they invariably point towards villages, hamlets or individual farms. Today only Scunthorpe LIN is a town of any size, having grown from a small village with the establishment of its iron foundry and the coming of the railway, a process captured by the first edition Ordnance Survey map. No other thorp or throp can compete in size with, say, a Birmingham war or a Taunton SOM, a Tamworth WAR or a Market Harborough NTH, a Burnley LAN or a Mansfield NTT. Even places taking the Old Norse term -by, with which the thorps are most often associated, can boast in their midst towns such as Derby DRB, Grimsby LIN and Corby NTH.
By contrast, names such as Ringlethorpe LEI, Scagglethorpe YON, Algarthorpe DRB and Buslingthorpe LIN conjure up images of small, quiet, bucolic places, an impression rarely betrayed if the traveller turns off the major routes and down rural back lanes to visit them. It is unsurprising, then, to find that poets have found inspiration in their peaceful surroundings. Thorps have come to symbolise a bygone age, the lost rural idyll.
Yes, I remember Adlestrop –
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop – only the name.
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.1
The thorp heartland lies north and east of the line of Watling Street, now the A5, and comprises the north-east Midland counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and north-east Northamptonshire. These were the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw, where Scandinavian influence in place-naming is most clear. Some sense of their density in the medieval landscape can be gauged from sources such as the Leicestershire Survey, compiled c.1130: in the small administrative unit of Seal Hundred, no more than a few square miles in extent, we find no fewer than four thorps – Boothorpe, Donisthorpe, Oakthorpe and Osgathorpe.2 Thorps are and were thick on the ground in Yorkshire and Norfolk too...
Although conspicuous by their near-total absence in Cambridgeshire, outlying thorps are found in Northumberland and Cumbria, and some even spill over south and west of Watling Street – but this is really throp (rather than thorp) country, and certainly becomes so the further one leaves the Roman road and the Danelaw behind. There are notable concentrations of such names in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, while surrounding counties such as Dorset, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire have their own smattering of throp names too. Isolated on the south-western edge of their distribution is a single example in south Devon.
This book is about these places. It will challenge the current consensus that thorps have always been marginal settlements in the English countryside. What is presented develops existing work by integrating linguistic, archaeological and topographical approaches and, for the first time, treats both the thorps of the Danelaw and the throps of the south together. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between the thorps and the throps. Do similar name-types represent two distinct and unconnected groups of settlements operating in different ways within the pre-Conquest landscape? Or are they so closely interrelated that they belong together and represent a single settlement phenomenon? We will show that it is possible to suggest a context for the creation of these place-names which locates them – in both time and space – in a rapidly developing English landscape. Far from being simple by-products of these events, we will propose that these apparently unassuming places may have played an integral and active part in the changes that revolutionised agricultural practice across a large belt of the country between c.850 and 1250.
1 A.G. Thomas, The collected poems of Edward Thomas (Oxford, 1978), pp. 71–3. A landscape historian might point out that in 1917, when the poem was first published, Adlestrop station was located on the borders of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. The nearest Oxfordshire bird was one mile away and inaudible!
2 C.F. Slade, The Leicestershire Survey c. AD 1130: a new edition, Department of English Local History Occasional Papers 7 (Leicester, 1956), p. 19.