The disciplines of place-name study and archaeology have long been central to our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon landscape. However, place-name scholars and archaeologists have not always seen eye-to-eye and mutual mistrust has occasionally prevailed. In this chapter I aim to demonstrate that the study of place-names in conjunction with archaeology can reveal new and important relationships between places and people in Anglo-Saxon England. Case studies are drawn from Wiltshire, where place-names containing a variety of Brittonic and Old English elements inform our understanding of such topics as the British cultural presence and the form and location of Anglo-Saxon settlements.

Place-Name Study and Archaeology: A Personal View

One need only turn to the introduction to the first edition of Margaret Gelling's Signposts to the Past to discover that place-name specialists and archaeologists have not always appreciated each other's point of view:

As a landscape archaeologist with a keen interest in place-names, I am often frustrated by the apparent tensions between the two fields and wonder where and when the problems evident in the above quotation began. The answer appears to lie with the ‘great revision’ of the 1960s, when place-name scholars sought to distance themselves from the ‘clean sweep’ view of Anglo-Saxon England held by leading archaeologists and historians of the day.