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The pattern of Old English burh in early Lindsey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Barrie Cox
Barrie Cox
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 23 , December 1994 , pp. 35 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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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