Vikings in North East England: A Re-Assessment of the Place-Name Evidence

Abstract

This thesis presents a comprehensive account of the place-names that provide evidence of the nature and extent of Viking-age Scandinavian settlement in what is now County Durham and Northumberland, in the North East of England. In doing so, it addresses the fact that previous work on this subject has been spread piecemeal across several separate sources that focus primarily on other topics, resulting in conflicting accounts of the place-name evidence and of the nature of the settlement, both across and within sources. The project offers a detailed analysis of two kinds of material: (1) the small number of modern studies, and even smaller amount of medieval writing, that deal with Old Norse place-names and Scandinavian presence in the North East, and (2) novel place-name data, compiled from sources not consulted in previous studies of the region. This material is considered in relation to the far larger body of work that addresses the same issues of Scandinavian settlement and place-name evidence in the context of other regions of England. The toponymic data consists of place-names of possible Old Norse origin or influence extracted from place-name dictionaries and maps. The dictionary sources comprise the standard general dictionaries of English place-names (Ekwall 1960; Mills 1998; Watts 2004), in combination with those that focus specifically on Northumberland and/or County Durham (Mawer 1920; Watts 2002a). The map sources comprise six-inch to the mile and 25-inch to the mile first edition Ordnance Survey maps (1890s-1920s) covering selected areas that allow for a comparison between parts of the region where Scandinavian influence is expected and parts where it is not. The material extracted from these sources was compiled in a database of place-names of potential ON origin or influence in the North East, highlighting various factors that can be attributed to the names, organised into several categories. Subsequent analysis of the database focused on identifying any patterning in the place-names in terms of these key factors, and/or in relation to their distribution across the regions under investigation. iii The most significant result of the analysis is that a large number of minor names (e.g. names of very small tributary streams, names of hillsides) can be linked to the influence of ON, particularly in specific areas. In conjunction with socio-historical evidence, the analysis of the toponymic data points to possible Scandinavian rule and presence in parts of what is now County Durham, but not Northumberland, other than in two related, small areas. This suggests that County Durham may have been a frontier zone between areas of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influence in Viking Age England. In this context, I also propose that the River Tyne is a more appropriate candidate for the approximate northern boundary of the Danelaw, rather than the River Tees, as is commonly suggested, and therefore that what is now County Durham effectively lay within the Danelaw.