Margaret Joy Gelling

The following obituary, by Nicholas Brooks, FSA, first appeared in the Guardian on 4 May 2009.

Margaret Joy Gelling, place-name scholar (born 29 November 1924; died 24 April 2009): a leading expert in the study of English place-names for more than fifty years.

Margaret Gelling, who has died aged 84, was for more than 50 years one of Britain's leading experts in the study of place-names; she was also highly successful in making that scholarship available to a very wide lay readership. Her election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998 - a source of great joy and pride - was a rare achievement for a scholar who bestrode her discipline, but had never held an academic post in any university.

Born Margaret Joy Midgley, she came from a Manchester family, but received her secondary schooling in Chislehurst, Kent, before achieving a wartime honours degree in English Language and Literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1945, where Dorothy Whitelock steered her linguistic interests towards place-name study. After a year (1945-6) as a temporary civil servant in London, she found more congenial employment for some eight years in Cambridge as a research assistant of the English Place-Name Society, when the society's base had been moved there from Reading.

In Cambridge she began the work on the names of Oxfordshire and Berkshire which was to lead to the publication of two volumes of The Place-Names of Oxfordshire (1953-4), building on the materials that had been initially collected in Reading by Sir Frank and Lady (Doris) Stenton. Here, Margaret broke new ground not only by presenting a much stronger geological and archaeological background to the names than was to be found in the society's previous county surveys, but also in investigating the field-names and minor names of each parish much more fully.

Margaret was indeed already involving members of local communities in the task of gathering evidence of these names and of local pronunciations. In 1957 she completed a PhD thesis (supervised by Professor Hugh Smith) on 'The Place-Names of West Berkshire' for the University of London.

In Cambridge, Margaret had met and, in 1952, married the young archaeologist Peter Gelling, who came from the Isle of Man and possessed a polymathic range of interests and enthusiasms. When Peter was appointed as a Lecturer in Archaeology in the University of Birmingham, he and Margaret set up their home in Harborne, where she was to live for the rest of her life. That gave her access to a good library and a convenient central location for her place-name studies. In Harborne she became an active member of the local Labour party and created a beautiful garden; there Peter grew the vegetables, which she turned into a constant supply of good food for him and for all visitors to the house. She and Peter had no children of their own, but brought up her nephew, Adrian Midgley, from the age of six.

Margaret joined Peter's excavations in Dorset, the Isle of Man and in Cyprus, and travelled with him to Peru investigating the history of potato use and becoming adept at cooking at altitude in a cave on a fire of llama dung. Her role came particularly to the fore on Peter's training excavations for Birmingham students for many seasons at Deerness, Orkney; for Margaret was in charge of the excavation's camp and responsible for the provision of basic and sustaining food. Generations of Birmingham archaeologists have the warmest memories of the good morale she helped to create.

The 1960s saw Margaret publishing innovative studies of particular place-names: those denoting pagan Anglo-Saxon gods and shrines; those incorporating the element -hamm ('enclosed meadow'); the survival of the Latin settlement term 'uicus' in English place-names using the compound 'wicham'; and the woodland terms found in the Birmingham region. They also saw her undertaking a huge amount of extramural and evening lecturing to groups throughout the Midlands, mostly under the aegis of the University's Department of Extra-Mural Studies (and its successors).

Her three volumes on the Place-Names of Berkshire (1973, 1974 and 1976) consolidated her scholarly reputation and in volume III she broke new ground by mapping detailed interpretations of the boundary clauses of Anglo-Saxon royal diplomas from the archives of Abingdon Abbey. But the volume that put her in an elevated position among English toponymists was her Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England (1978), which set out the transformation that contemporary scholars had wrought in place-name studies and showed us all how we might now understand and interpret the names of our own home areas. It became a fundamental handbook of up-to-date scholarship for all budding geographers, archaeologists and historians. Second (1986) and third (1997) editions met the continuing demand, and the volume is still in print.

From the 1980s and particularly after her husband's death in 1983, Margaret began to play a greater role within the University of Birmingham, whose traditions of 'history from below' suited her political views. She introduced first-year historians to the study of place-names and supervised third-year archaeologists writing 'parish studies' of the archaeology, place-names and settlement history of their own home territory. On the basis of Margaret's growing academic reputation and of the success of Signposts to the Past, other commissions followed.

Her Early Charters of the Thames Valley (1979) completed a series that had been initiated for local historians by Herbert Finberg; and her West Midlands in the Early Middle Ages (1992) provided a toponymist's insights into the settlement history of her home region. She served as president of the English Place-Name Society from 1986 until 1998; as Vice-President of the International Society for Onomastic Sciences from 1993 to 1999; and she was appointed OBE in 1995.

But in these years she was also preparing a further revolution in place-name scholarship. Since the foundation of the English Place-Name Society in the 1920s, the attention of scholars had been focused on 'habitative' names that denoted settlements, which were thought to be earlier and more interesting than other place-names.

As a result of her studies with local groups and audiences, Margaret had become increasingly dissatisfied with this focus. In her Place-Names in the Landscape (1984) and then in revised form with the geographer, Ann Cole, in The Landscape of Place-Names (2000), she focused instead upon the topographical names, seeking to show that when they used particular words for a hill or a valley, the Anglo-Saxons were giving precise descriptions of the land-form that they saw, which we can still detect in the English landscape.

Up until her final illness Margaret continued lecturing to local audiences, to conferences and symposia, whenever she was invited. Extramural groups in Shropshire, whom she had first taught in 1959, became her research field-troops, providing much of the evidence for her five published volumes of the Place Names of Shropshire (1990, 1995, 2001, 2004 and 2006). Volume VI is at proof stage and she was working every day on VII until illness recently prevented that.

In devoting her life to adult education Gelling transformed our understanding of the development of the English countryside and of its nomenclature. Her plain-speaking and warm friendship will be much missed by all who knew her.

She is survived by Adrian and his family.

This obituary, contributed by Adrian Midgley, first appeared in the 14 May 2009 edition of The Economist.

AT WIVENHOE, in Essex, the low line of the hills has the shape of the heels of a person lying face-down. The name contains the shape: a hoh is a ridge that rises to a point and has a concave end. At Wooller in Northumberland, however, the hilltop is level, with a convex sloping shoulder. The hidden word here is ofer, “a flat-topped ridge”. Early Anglo-Saxon settlers in England, observing, walking and working the landscape, defined its ups and downs with a subtlety largely missing from modern, motorised English. Dozens of words, none of them synonymous, described the look of a hill, the angle of slope and the way trees grew upon it. And after the Anglo-Saxons, no one looked at the landscape in quite that way until Margaret Gelling.

She was a neat, keen, merry woman, “prissy” as she described herself, and sensibly shod and clad. The gear was appropriate for slopping through slæp, fenn, myrr and slohtre (the disappointing origin of Upper and Lower Slaughter), or stomping through leah, hurst, holt and græfe, where trees were felled and coppiced and axes rang in the woods. Though she spent much of the time with her nose in one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, tracking the contour lines, she found them a “coarse instrument” for her purpose. When it came to understanding English place names, there was no substitute for donning your wellies and using your eyes.

Mrs Gelling worked for the English Place-Name Society, formally and informally, from 1946. From 1986 to 1998 she was its president. She never held an academic post, but lectured widely, wrote a dozen books and produced three of the county surveys of place names. She was devoted to the proposition that names drawn from the landscape were not trivial or accidental, but original and important. All her passion for argument was employed to prove that hamm, a piece of land almost enclosed by water, was as vital a suffix as ham, a man-made enclosure; that an ending in -den might come from denu, a long and sinuous valley, rather than denn, a woodland pig-pasture; and that the hall in Coggeshall came from halh, a nook or a hollow, not some grand building. Cogg’s nook, a little recess tucked into the 150-foot contour line, was perhaps the best place where he could put his hut. With Mrs Gelling, topography always came first.

No subtlety escaped her. The suffix fyrhth was not simply wood, but “scrubland at the edge of the forest”. The word wæss was not just swamp, but—she was particularly proud of this—“land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly”. She had observed this herself at Buildwas, on the winding Severn in Shropshire, where between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon the flooding river drained from the land “as if a plug had been pulled out”. A feld was not necessarily ground broken for arable, but any open country in the almost all-covering fifth-century forest. And an ærn was not merely a house, but a place where something was stored in bulk and worked on: so that Brewerne, in Cambridgeshire, acquired a smell of beer, and Colerne, in Wiltshire, a dusting of charcoal.

This “obsession”, as she happily called it, seemed to have begun at St Hilda’s in Oxford, where she found her English course boring, but was encouraged by Dorothy Whitelock to look at place names. They appealed immediately to the socialist, even communist, instincts with which she liked to shock her parents. Most of the place names of England had been bestowed not by officialdom, or in deference to knights, earls or kings, but by ordinary peasants coping with flooded pasture or looking over the hills. That habit had long died out; but as a resident of Birmingham (“village of Beorma’s people”) for most of her life, she liked to think that Spaghetti Junction, the giant intersection of roads just north of the city, was a solitary modern example of the will of the people expressed in a name.

She was less egalitarian when it came to the business of sorting out what names meant. There were too many snares and snags involved “to invite general participation in the process of suggesting etymologies”. Who, for example, would catch that Chiswick and Keswick both meant “cheese-farm”, or that the tasty-sounding Fryup, in Yorkshire, meant “Frig’s remote valley”? Who could safely sort out ea, as in Eton, meaning a river, from ey, Old Norse for island? Who would dare to hazard a meaning for Wixhill and Wingfield, if she herself left them as “obscure”?

Nonetheless, she was grateful when locals got in touch with her: telling her, for example, that the stream at Winsor in Hampshire was too tiny to carry the meaning, “river-bank where boats are pulled by a windlass”, she had posited for Windsor in Berkshire. She was delighted to think that the public, reading her books, would suddenly learn to read their habitat, and see it with completely different eyes. At Hartside in Cumbria, for example, a white deer would suddenly flash through the woods; at Earley, in Berkshire, white-tailed eagles would fly above a clearing. And better still, in the soulless suburbs of south London, Penge now marked “the wood’s end”, and Croydon became “the valley where wild saffron grows”.

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 25 May 2009.

Margaret Gelling, OBE, authority on the origins of English place names, President of the English Place-Name Society, 1986-98, was born on November 29, 1924. She died on April 24, 2009, aged 84.

Margaret Gelling made important contributions to the study of English place names, showing that many English villages and towns were named with remarkable precision after topographical landmarks. Thanks in large part to her work it is now thought that some of the earliest English place names were coined with reference to the geographical landscape. Gelling also popularised the subject, was an accomplished lecturer, and served as President of the English Place-Name Society for 12 years.

Gelling studied place names not only from a linguistic standpoint but also in archaeological and physical contexts. She assumed that ancient peoples would have named places by reference to the living that they were making from the land. She saw that it was important to try to think in the same way as the men and women who created the names.

There were two big shifts in the field during Gelling’s lifetime. The first was in the 1960s as she and other scholars overturned earlier assumptions about the impact of Anglo-Saxon settlement of England in the 5th and 6th centuries. This brought a new openness to the issue of which kinds of names constituted the earliest layer in English toponymy, although the fact of extensive Anglo-Saxon settlement itself has never been in any doubt among English researchers — in contrast to the views of some archaeologists.

The second development, in the 1980s, was largely to Gelling’s credit. Overall, place names may fall into two basic types — “habitative” and “topographical”. The former contain a word referring to a settlement such as -cot (cottage), -worth (enclosure), -ham (homestead) and -tun (farmstead). Tun has developed into the modern -ton, as in Newton and Chesterton. Topographical names do not contain any word for a dwelling or habitation but name the place purely with reference to the features in the landscape.

Gelling did much to ensure that the study of toponymy recognised the early importance of settlements named from natural features, such as -dun and -hyll (both meaning hill) and -denu and -cumb (which mean valley). Because the different habitative terms (-cot, -tun, - worth) show patchy or distinct distributions on maps, they seem to make suggestions about the development of Anglo-Saxon naming and settlement when examined across the country as a whole. Topographical names, by contrast, tend to appear all over the country, with no obvious patterns, apart, as Gelling observed, from that determined by physical geography. For this reason the habitative terms had been given more attention by scholars than the topographical ones, even though both types had been documented and analysed in great detail all over the country, in county surveys, since the start of scientific place name study in the early 20th century.

The overall effect was to reduce the emphasis, when using place names to understand the Anglo-Saxon settlement, on individual pioneers each with a band of followers, settling and cultivating a virgin land. More attention was paid to viewing the landscape through the eyes of communities occupying an already ancient farmed landscape, and naming their habitations by reference to that landscape. Thus topographical names such as Woolley (wolves’ glade) and Lambourne (lambs’ stream) whose meanings had long been recognised, came to be seen as typical of the earliest layer of English place names.

Gelling led scholars to pay more attention to topographical names themselves. She looked carefully at the words they contain, and showed that, thanks to the precision with which those words were used, they contain facinating additional information. Names ending in -hoh (heel), -ofer (bank), -hop (valley) and -dun (hill), among many others, refer to specific shapes of nearby hills or valleys. Gelling showed that -hoh refers to sharply projecting pieces of ground while -ofer indicates the tip of a flat-topped hill spur and -hop signifies a “remote place enclosed by hills”. Meanwhile, -dun signifies a flat-topped hill suitable for settlement.

Gelling demonstrated the precision with which place name language was used all over England, and grappling with the fact that place names change over the years, partly through natural developments and changes in the language itself, and partly through corruption or, reinterpretation. When a modern place name ends, for example, in -don she saw how one must find the early spellings to see whether it was originally a -dun (“hill”), a -denu (“valley”), or something else. In discovering how words for particular shapes or other characteristics of individual hills, valleys and streams were used precisely and consistently, Gelling recognised distinctive usages of the word “cumb”, as in Farncombe (ferny combe), and Winchcombe (combe with a bend). Then again, in the far southwest of England, "cumb" came to be the standard word for any valley in place names, so its distinctive usage no longer applied.

Gelling’s work incidentally provided additional evidence for the well-established view that Anglo-Saxon place names cannot be corruptions of earlier Celtic names. If they were, the Anglo-Saxon words would not be so precisely used. The names demonstrate that these words must have been chosen by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, who evidently arrived with a ready-made vocabulary which they developed for describing the different types of landscape which they encountered.

It was characteristic of Gelling’s open-mindedness and her receptiveness to the work of scholars in other disciplines that she was willing to question constructively the inherited assumptions in her field. She was highly productive in the fundamental but slow task of collecting and analysing place name material county by county, having completed, for the English Place-Name Society, the surveys of two counties, Oxfordshire (1953-4) and Berkshire (1973-6), and much of a third, for Shropshire. Her collected materials for the remainder of Shropshire are held by the English Place-Name Society and, it is hoped, will be published in due course.

Collecting early spellings for every village, farm and (where possible) field in a whole county, and then analysing them, requires skill, time and patience. Most toponymists cover one county in a lifetime, if that. Gelling did the best part of three. She was also a successful populariser of her subject, in great demand as a lecturer for local and national bodies and for adult education. Her books, Signposts to the Past (1978), and Place-Names in the Landscape (1984), are among the best and most stimulating introductions to English place names, being lively, innovative and scholarly. Her work is significant, and appreciated, in various disciplines beyond her own, notably archaeology, history and geography.

Gelling’s ideas and approaches and her insights into landscape and human geography have been enthusiastically applied by scholars in Wales and Scotland as well as England. Although she did not officially supervise post-graduate students, she was always supportive and helpful to young workers in the field. She was admired as a teacher, had lively communicative skills, a practical nature and warm sense of humour. Her lifelong enthusiasm for left-wing politics further fuelled her desire to teach and popularise the subject.

Margaret Joy Midgley was born in 1924, and attended Chislehurst Grammar School and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she was made an honorary Fellow in 1993. She earned her PhD at University College London in 1957. She was appointed OBE in 1995, and elected a Fellow of the British Academy (1998), and a festshrift, A Commodity of Good Names, was published in her honour in 2008.