Gone Medieval - How Trees Gave Places Their Names

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Trees have been universally important to humanity throughout history - not only as the source of fruits and nuts, but also wood for tools, weapons and buildings, and fuel for transport.So integral were trees to early Medieval society that their names were used for places throughout England - such as Acton (oak settlement) or Ashby (ash farm).In this edition of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman talks to Jessica Treacher whose PhD research has been looking at the environmental and cultural role of trees and what we can learn from place-names about people’s relationship with nature in the Middle Ages.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Trees. We all know how hugely important they are in today's world, not least to protect our environment and in the fight against climate change, but also as invaluable resources we need in our everyday lives. But what about in medieval times? What did trees mean to pass a societies and how are they used and managed? And if we go back to the early medieval period, when we have quite a limited written record, how on earth can we learn about all of this? I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast today, Jessica Treacher, who has just finished her PhD thesis on place name

evidence for the exploitation and management of trees in early medieval England in the school of English at the University of Nottingham. Jess, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast here today. Hi, Kat. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So this is so intriguing actually what you do and how you can tease out so much information from place names and I'm going to get back to that and the sort of nuts and bolts of that in a bit. But I wanted to ask you a slightly bigger question first of all. So, and I imagine this is the sort of question you've had quite a few times over the years. Why trees? Why should we care about the history of trees? And And what can they actually tell us about past societies?

Well, as you pointed out, trees are hugely important to us today. So it is perhaps natural for us to want to look back at them. And I think perhaps universally trees have been important to humans throughout history. We do have a propensity to like to compare ourselves to trees. And we use them as religious symbols. They're very culturally significant. But I think ultimately, at least from my perspective, my work has been looking at how trees are useful to humans, what they can and did provide us. And I think obviously there were trees as sources of food, fruit and nuts, very, very important.

People have been foraging from trees for millennia, probably we're back since we were living in trees, but also as cultivated resources. And then perhaps even more importantly than as a food source, trees in early medieval England were the foundation of material culture. Everything was made of wood at the end of the day. So, you know, you had big things like buildings, roof structures, fencing, scaffolding to create stone buildings like churches. And then the smaller items, so tools, weapons, bows and arrows, spears, shields. for travel, so carts and boats, and it was just completely fundamental.

And also as a source of fuel, we absolutely can't forget the importance of fuel. So for just the common half, but also industry, producing charcoal, which was incredibly important to the development of early medieval societies. So really understanding all of this, how it was managed, how it sort of fitted into society, is actually crucial, isn't it, to understand how those societies worked? Yes, it really, really is. We need to understand their culture, you know, to understand their societies. We need to understand where they got these resources from. But of course, we might have some of these objects and things in the archaeological records, but of course being organic material, the actual objects themselves often aren't preserved, which is one problem. But as I said in the introduction as well, we don't actually have that many written sources from that period. Is that right to say?

Yes. Yeah, there are surprising. few for the fact that timber and wood in general was just so integral. We don't really have much evidence of how they were managing woodland, which trees they were considering important. There are a few hints here and there that oak was particularly important and the oak trees were quite well protected. There are various charters that reference oak. But yes, apart from that, we don't really know. And it doesn't actually start to appear consistently in the historical record until after the Norman conquest. So sort of 12th century, 13th century is when we start to get records of coppice woodland quite frequently and taxes and tithes placed on areas of woodland and certain

protections and laws against damaging woodland. Yeah, so prior to that, there's quite a sparse historical record. So in order to then find out about this period in particular, you've done it with quite a different approach, and that is by looking at place names, which I think will probably surprised people a little bit and how much you can actually find out from them. Can you just sort of explain the basis of that? How on earth can place names tell us about the management of trees? Well, so there are an awful lot of place names that have tree species referenced in them. I'm sure we can all think of a few off the top of our heads. And the majority of place names, at least major place names, so major settlement names, parishes and townships. And they were initially coined

in the early medieval period. So we're getting a little snapshot of how people were observing their environment and what they considered to be important features of their environment or who was important, who was living there. So this is a real value of place name material. So where trees appear, we can see which species they consider to be important of note.

And we can also tease out perhaps how they were using these trees. So with place names, you usually have two elements to a name. You have the specific element, which in this case might be oak, arc in old English. And then you can have the generic element. So, for example, you might have the generic tune, which has become ton in modern English. There's lots of ton names all over the country. And this is an oak farm. And it could be a farm that just has a very particularly notable oak tree.

but as a recurrent name, you know, it appears over and over again. Well, were they just recognising farms that had a particular big oak or were they recognising places what oak was farmed? And I would say that the latter is perhaps more likely when we see these recurrent names. Yeah, that would be one example. At any rate, there are very many, many more to explore. So in your work then, do you mainly look at current placements,

do you look at a map of England and just go through that? do you go back through older sources as well to find those names that are perhaps lost to us now that we're not using anymore? Yeah, well, there's a bit of both involved, really. I think I initially started with the English Place Names Society volumes. So they are comprehensive records of the names and looking back at the very earliest forms of them. So it's a nice collection. It's a good place to go if you want to look at place names. And you get to see the early forms. A lot of the earliest forms are from the Doomsday Book, very invaluable source, as you're well aware, but some of them are earlier, so some of them come from charter bounds, and they can give us a real insight into

very early Anglo-Saxon England, which is quite exciting. And then, yes. So that's sort of how you get a bit of dating evidence as well then, to sort of show that some of these names actually originated in the early medieval period, that they haven't just come in in the 16th, 17th century or whatever. Is that the best way to get the earlier dates? Yes. Yeah, it would be. Sometimes we look at modern names and we might think that there is an element in them. For example, Oak Hampton, which is just down the road from me currently. And it looks like it's an oak name, but it's not. Oh, okay. Yes. So the old English for Oak was Ark. So Acton, as I said before, is an example of this kind of early, almost untouched Anglo-Saxon name. The sound change, the development in Middle English hasn't affected. it. There are lots of oak names where that has happened. But yeah, so you can't necessarily

just look at modern forms or later forms of names and know. There are lots of later coin names, obviously, and lots of those do reference trees as well. But yeah, if we want to look at early medieval evidence, we have to go right back to charters. Yeah, the original source material, what they were writing at the time. Excellent. So when you've done that then, do you then also try to look at the other forms of evidence that we have to try and back it up. What else is there, really, from this period? So archaeology, it's our best, I guess, solid material evidence for trees and what they were using. So we have archaeobotony, we have pollen analysis, which is incredibly useful to know which trees were in in an area. And then we also have archaeological

excavation of structures. And sometimes we're fortunate enough that we can identify the tree species that were found. So in some places where you've got quite waterlogged ground, places like York, London Waterfront, Gloucester, we've got some really beautifully preserved timbers and we can tell exactly which species they were relatively easily. So lots of structural oak, lots of ash, things like that. So let's move straight onto that then. You mentioned these particular timbers and actually the use for building because that seems to me the most sort of obvious and naturally useful for trees really. And you mentioned oak, especially now in some of these names. Have you been able to tease out any more information about how oak was used in this period?

Yes, oak's been a particularly interesting species. I've talked about a few times already. It was an incredibly useful wood. So I went and looked at archaeological surveys and records and looked at how often oak appeared. It is very, very common, by and large, the most common structural timber. And presumably because it was a very strong, hard-wearing, resistant to decay. There are lots of tannins and oak sap that preserve it. And we even have some extant medieval buildings from the early medieval period. There's the 10th century St. Andrew's Church at Greensdale, Essex, which is wonderful oak walls. So I was quite interested in looking at oak and the importance of oak in place names. And fortunately, there are lots of oak place names.

and I've already mentioned this acton, this oak farm compound, sorry, that is very recurrent. It has quite an interesting distribution. The majority of oak names are in the west of England. I found this quite interesting because if you compare it with ash names, so Ashton, ashton names, they do have quite a large westerly distribution, but they're also found in the east. And you also get this similar compound, Ashby, which is an old Norse, so B. is the old Norse, roughly the old Norse equivalent of Toon, so it shows Scandinavian influence in the north-east. So we can assume that these were similar kinds of settlement. So there are

lots of ash-bees in the east, and there are lots of ash-tones in the west, but there are no ac-bees or ick-bees. There are only actans. And I was very intrigued by this. And it's possibly to do with the westerly climate of England. So in the west, there is a high level of rainfall so oak trees can grow quicker they go straighter you get lots of oak woods and that also has something to do with the geology of the soils so it's more acidic in areas of the west where the soil has been leached by the rain so the nutrients leached through oak fares very well on infertile acidic soils so there's less competition for it so you know these lovely oak timber woodlands can spring up in the west as opposed to the east where the oaks tend to grow a bit slower.

So it suggests that these actions were placed in areas where they could best exploit oak woodland. That would also, I guess, suggest, as you were saying earlier, that this refers to somewhere like a farm where they're farming it, rather than just a farm that happens to be near an oak tree because you would have individual oak trees all over the country, but only large-scale woodlands, something that you can farm and actually manage. It really seemed to account for that sort of use of the name.

Is that right? Yes, yeah. It is interesting as well. There are lots of them in Shropshire, an awful lot of Acton's in Shropshire, which is a heavily wooded county. It was back in the Dume's the epic record of woodlands. We know that it was heavily wooded. And a lot of these actins seem to be placed in areas that were heavily wooded. So they were exploiting a natural resource.

They weren't necessarily close to roads, close to areas of convenience. It was almost like they'd been chosen. to exploit this resource that was sitting there right for the taking, as it were. Fantastic. And what about other species? So you mentioned oak and ash. Are they the main species that were used for building timber, or do we have other examples as well?

Yes. Well, oak seems to have been the preferred structural timber. Ash is also used probably the second most common as a structural timber, but perhaps in areas where oak was less prevalent. Yeah, so we also have to think about the importance of, coppiced wood. Copicing is the process where a tree is cut at a stump at ground level, and from there all these shoots will grow up. They'll grow very fast and straight as they reach for the light. And these are really, really useful for tools, for weapons, but also for creating

structures, like fencing and wattle. We know that they use these on the side of their buildings to create walls, roofing, and also not just for buildings, but also for bridges, for things that that needed, you know, weirs, dams, canal revetments, really integral to the infrastructure of early medieval England. And do any of the placements tell us about the coppicing process at all? Does that turn up as a name at all? Yeah, so coppice is interesting. It's a word that we have adopted in English from French. There's no explicit reference to coppice in early medieval England that we know that they used it. And there are some place names that could hint at it. So common place name element

is stock and you've got staff as well. So suggesting that these places were producing poles or staves, you get Stockton's, you get Stavartons, and they were probably woodland that was used for coppice. And then when also you have things like hazel names, hazley and willow. There are lots and lots of different willow elements. These were probably locations where they were recognising the value of these trees to produce coppers woodland. A good example actually of a place where there was lots of coppers were being produced was at Droitwitch, which was a major salt producing centre in early medieval England. And essentially they needed lots of coppice wood to produce charcoal, which burns at a higher temperature than just raw fresh wood. And they would use this to boil the naturally occurring salt

water at Droitwitch and extract the salt. So they needed vast, vast quantities of charcoal. And the parish names and the minor names surrounding Droitwitch do suggest that there was a really important woodland industry in the area. So you have Stockton on team and Stoke and Bradley Parish. They have this stock element, this sort of suggestive of coppice woodland. You also have a, there's a grafton, so a grove farm, a lighter area of woodland. Again, potentially suggestive of some kind of woodland management for coppice. Bromsgrove is a really interesting one, so another grove name, but this time it has the element Brom, which was Broom. And Broom was a really common pioneer species in deforested or cleared woodland. And we know from early

sources actually from Doomsday Book that Joytwitch had to supply 300 cartloads of wood for the saltworks at Joytwitch. So they were producing it there and taking it across to Joyt Witch. And then we have an oakly name in Joyt Witch itself, just south of the town, and perhaps suggesting an oak. I mean, the name means oak clearing, so probably oak coppice wood. And then just north, about six kilometres, there's an Acton. So all of these names together, quite exciting as evidence for this caucus industry. Hi there, I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets,

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To Renaissance and early modern right up to now Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts And that's really interesting as well Because you're showing different industries Actually needing each other So you need the timber to be able to successfully produce the salts It's a sort of yeah How they go hand in hand I suppose

It's really interesting as part of that Yeah yeah really really is And you couldn't have one without the other precisely So another thing that really interests me about this and about trees is the idea of how many of these trees were native. You know, are they actually trees that have been around forever in Britain or have things been introduced? And I think that's something that maybe comes up a little bit more when we talk about food and the fruits and things that we get from them. But presumably this is a good starting point, looking at the names, if we want to look at how these species, I mean, so oaken and all of this, these are native species. are they not to Britain?

Yes, yes, oak is, yeah, all of the ones we've talked about so far, oak, ash, hazel, willow, they're all native. So let's go on to some of the other things then that we can get from trees. So the edible fruits and nuts and things. And I know one of the things you've been looking at is apples, for example, as one of those. How much do we know about apples and what they were used for in terms of place names and things? Yes, apples are another really interesting place name element. apple in old English, apple, epley in Old Norse.

So crab apples are a native species to Britain, but the cultivated varieties are actually imported. And they come from the Middle East originally. And then they were adopted into the Mediterranean by Romans and the Greeks. And there's this wonderful history of apple cultivation. And then they were brought over by the Romans to Britain. at least the current thinking about it. And there is evidence of the cultivation and use of apples in Roman Britain.

Okay, so we know we've got the apples coming in with the Romans. But what about after that? Do we have any written records to tell us about apple use after the Romans? Yes, we have quite a lot of written records, especially in a monastic context. So monasteries had orchards and they had gardens. So they actually called orchards pulmarium. the Latin word for apple. And they also had Appleton's, which again seems to be a word for an orchard used in conjunction with the word orchard itself. So there were lots and lots of terms for places

where fruit trees and apple trees specifically were grown. The name Appleton is very recurrent in place names. I'm sure lots of people have heard of an Appleton and it's still a name that's quite transparent to us today. They're common throughout England and there are also Apple bees. Again, this Old Norse influence dialect of the north of England. So they're suggesting, again, the cultivation of apples, apple farms. We also have Peru and Pieri, which are pear words, and we have plum as well as a recurrent element with tune and bee. And these suggest that they were cultivating other species. So these could have been mixed species orchards, but they were probably recognizing a particularly important type of fruit. Pair names are a really interesting one.

They have a very southwesterly distribution, which actually quite nicely corresponds with what we think of as the orchard counties of today. Westershire particularly has some interesting pear-toon names, and the coat of arms of Worcestershire is a black pair. So they still celebrate pairs in Westerly to this day, which is really nice. So this southwesterly limit of the names of these pair names was probably to do with the climatic limit of pairs. So pear trees don't fare so well and cold the temperatures as apples and plums. But it also, you know, it suggests that they grew very well there.

And these settlements were quite wealthy. So if we look at Doomsday Book Records, we see that they had higher rates of tax and more land than other fruit tree names. and they were more likely to have their own market. So these were really quite prosperous sites. They were producing food as a commodity, perhaps, which is an interesting take on it, I think. And then do the records also suggest more about how they're being used,

or is that something that we don't get so much info about? Are they making drinks cider or are they eating the apples? How much do we know about that? Yes, so they were using the fruit, probably in its raw state, but also they have been preserving it because it's a very perishable food stuff, as we know. And yes, definitely in alcohol. There are certain words such as cider and also Bayard, which is this slightly unknown old English word, but it was, it probably meant fruit wine. So they would have been turning it into wine. And then that would have brought in more

profit as well. So you could get more for your, for your produce if you were selling it as alcohol, than as a raw fruit at harvest time. Okay, so we can look at all of these species and fruits. I love that. I'm going to be looking out for Appleton's and Applebee's now as I drive around the country. But what about the opposite, though? So if the presence of these names proves that they were cultivating them and using them,

does that mean that the opposite is true as well? So if there are certain fruits or certain trees that there are no names of, Does that definitely mean that they weren't using them? Or can we not really say that? Yeah, that's a difficult one because we do certainly know that there are native species that don't appear in the record. So a good example is Hornbeam. Hornbeam is a common British tree.

There's no real evidence of it in place names. It's a difficult one. It is an old English word in itself, horn bayon, so hard, horn-y tree, hard tree. A good example actually is sweet chestnut, which antiquarian thoughts has, sort of placed it as a Roman introduction. But more recent research from Gloucester Uni has suggested that actually archaeological finds of sweet chestnuts have been largely found in a, well, almost

exclusively found in an exotic food context. So there's not real evidence that the Romans were cultivating sweet chestnut. And sweet chestnuts is not a native tree. It's now highly naturalised, but it wouldn't have been common in the landscape. So we only have documentary evidence of sweet chestnut cultivation from the 12th century where they were using it as a form of taxation. So sweet chestnuts would have been provided as tax in the southwest and in Wales. But we don't know exactly when it was introduced, and it doesn't appear in early medieval place names.

The word castanilla does appear in old English glossaries, but that's in a monastic context that doesn't tell us, much about the vernacular use of words, unfortunately. So it is possible. There are some names with the old English word nut too, which is quite hard to say, which literally just means nut. So there are current names with nut.

Perhaps some of these were sweet chestnut sites, so they didn't necessarily have a specific word for this species. So perhaps they were just identifying as a nut producing site. But also they could have been hazelnuts. So it could have just been a place where good nuts could be found. There is potentially an interesting case study with Nutley and Notley names. So Lee was originally Old English Leach, which is a woodland element, that has some kind of sense of a lighter area of woodland.

So usually this can be glossed as a clearing, but it might not always have been a natural clearing. It could have been an area of less densely treed, woodland, as it were. And these knotly, nutly names might find a parallel perhaps with the sweet chestnut groves of early medieval Italy. So they were cultivating sweet chestnuts en masse in northern Italy in the post-Roman period. And it was a very important source of food. And perhaps we're seeing something similar in early medieval England. Maybe it's a stretch. But cultivating nuts in groves where there's lots of sunlight and you can easily access the fruits as they fall.

Perhaps we're seeing something similar. So the one thing from one of this, I guess, that's really difficult, is taking all these bits of evidence. So you can map things, you can see where different things are being used. And sometimes that, as you said, it linked to other industries and so on. Do we have any sense of can we in any way assume from that who is in control of this, whether it's sort of bigger scale? You've talked about the monasteries already.

Do we ever have any evidence of, say, sort of royal involvement in this and sort of local rulers or anything like that? Or is there nothing like that out there? Yes, there is actually some indication that these places were being, perhaps there was a centralised form of management. So with Acton names, for example, a lot of these were smaller dependent settlements. So they were perhaps attached to a manor or a state. Their same can be seen with Appleton, Applebee names. Pair names tend to stand on their own, perhaps suggesting that they, or at least they became parishes and they became centres of commerce earlier. So potentially suggesting that there was more wealth in these areas. So there's a Purton in Wiltshire,

which was attached to Malmnsbury Abbey and paid tithes and was an important fruit producing centre, presumably, and brought in money for Malmsbury. It was wealthy. So there are interesting, examples and hints that there were important connections with centralised systems of governance. So just, I mean, this is also exciting, but it does seem a bit frustrating too because it seems like there's hints and indications and you get sort of little ideas. Is there something in the future, do you think, that will be as a way forward for this sort of study of trees and management of trees that will help us get a little bit further? I absolutely do. And I think the answer really is an interdisciplinary look at trees in the language.

landscape. Place names are really useful for telling us what was there and roughly when it was there, but it can only go so far. They hint at things. And actually, what we really need, we need is more pollen analysis, more archaeology of sites, and it can all help to provide more evidence to back up. So I'd love to look at droid witch and more detail and really see what's going on there and see, you know, with pollen analysis and with more archaeology essentially is what we need. All of the Archaeology. Oh, so exactly what I'd like to hear. Brilliant.

But also, I guess, it's just sort of focusing on that environmental aspect because we, as archaeologists, quite often forget about that. We go for the structures and the artefacts and the objects and the environmental samples, which are a bit more, you know, quite often that isn't prioritised. So this is good to hear. We'll definitely. Keep focusing on those truths. Yeah. Brilliant. Jess, thank you so much for joining me today.

It was absolutely great to hear about your research. Thank you. So that was Jessica Treacher talking about her work on place name evidence for the management and use of trees in early medieval England. That leads us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already so you don't miss an episode. And also to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in our episode notes and it'll tell you all about how to do that. And if you enjoy the podcast, do please leave us a review or a rating because that's,

helps other people discover the podcast as well. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Dr. Kat Jaman. I'll be back next Tuesday with another episode.