When Research Means Leaving Well Enough Alone

 My most recent novel is Book 2 of 2 in the Tales of the Iclingas series, which began with Cometh the Hour and the story of Penda, the last pagan king of Mercia and his struggles against the oppression of Mercia by Northumbria.

The Sins of the Father is the follow-up, and focuses on the next generation, in Mercia and in Northumbria, and how the children of the great warlords cope with the legacy left by their fathers. Some try to emulate their father, some try to forge a new path, and some resort to murder just to get noticed…

Penda of Mercia was seemingly unusual at this time for having married only once and, if that’s the case, then he and his only wife had a great number of children. (There are nine of them in my stories, although one is the son of Penda’s wife by a previous marriage, a boy whom Penda adopts as his own. And I made two of the girls twins, to give their poor mother a break from all those pregnancies.)

Tracking them down is not easy because very little was written about Penda himself, beyond his dealings with Northumbria, and even that was written by a Northumbrian (Bede) so is not always favourable, as you might imagine!

So in order to establish who his children were, we have to start elsewhere and join up the dots. We might not be told that they are Penda’s sons and daughters, but sometimes we do know that they were, say, the brother of one of his children, or we hear of a granddaughter of his, and her maternal aunt, and thus we know that aunt was Penda’s daughter, so we work backwards and voila!

I don’t mind wavy lines between those dots when it comes to writing fiction, but some just didn’t match at all. It’s at that point that you have to decide to leave people out of your story, no matter how intriguing they might be…

Osweard

This man was supposedly a brother of Penda’s son Ethelred (again with the backwards info!)  He is mentioned in two charters of AD714 in relation to land granted to a bishop, or rather, how the bishop came by these lands. These charters are unlikely to be genuine and the only other mention of Osweard was in the account of the bishop’s life which essentially repeats the information, saying, ‘A short time later, I acquired another estate with this one from Osweard, the brother of the aforementioned king [Ethelred]’. I think it’s safe to say that the bishop, like so many before him and afterwards, was trying to make a case for land ownership which probably wasn’t as water-tight as he might have wished.

Window in St John's Church, Chester, depicting
Ethelred of Mercia. Accreditation Link

I also think nine children is more than enough, even for a saga that spans two books and three generations, so Osweard didn’t get even a walk-on part. I had some more fun with the next generation though.

Rumwold

There is a curious story concerning a supposed grandson of Penda’s, a certain Saint Rumwold. According to tradition, he was a baby who died at just three days old. The Vita Sancti Rumwoldi, the eleventh-century account of his life, says that he was able to speak at birth, preached on wisdom and the Trinity, and predicted his own death, giving precise instructions regarding where his body was to be laid to rest.

St Rumwold's Well, Buckinghamshire
Accreditation Link

It is said that he was the grandson of Penda and the son of an unnamed king of Northumbria. In which case, he can only have been the son of one of Penda’s daughters married to the Northumbrian line. Except that only one of Penda’s daughters married a Northumbrian, and he was never king of the whole of Northumbria, though he was, briefly, a sub-king of its southern portion. There doesn’t seem to be any corroboration for this tale, so I left the precocious Rumwold out of the story.

Ruffin and Wulflad

There is no doubt that Wulfhere (known in my story as Wulf to his family) was a son of Penda’s. But there’s a  curious seventeenth-century anecdote which tells that, along with his children Werburgh (Werbyra in my novel) and Cenred, he had two sons called Wulfad and Ruffin. These two boys were, according to the story, baptised by St Cedd which so offended their father that he ‘killed them both with his own hands.’ Wulfhere was horribly tormented by what he had done, and ‘could find no ease’ until he went to St Cedd, who absolved him if he would suppress idolatry and establish Christianity throughout Mercia. It also says that the king built many churches and monasteries, among them Peterborough, although it is likely that the monastery there (Medeshamstede) was founded earlier, and by Wulfhere’s elder brother.

Detail of a 14th-Century Charter transcription of an Anglo-Saxon
Charter which purports to show Wulfhere's founding of Medeshamstede
Public Domain Image

That’s not the only problem I have with this story though. Little Werbyra became an abbess and saint, Wulfhere himself was a Christian, and it seems highly unlikely that he would have killed two of his sons because they’d been baptised. Since this was a period when couples could separate to take up the religious life, you’d think his wife would have left him if he'd murdered two of her children, or even step-children, yet she didn’t. When Wulfhere discovered that another king had apostatized and gone back to his heathen ways, Bede tells us that Wulfhere sent a bishop to ‘correct their error.’ Improbable then, that he would kill any Christian children of his own. It could, of course, have happened before his own conversion to Christianity, but it all seems very unlikely to me. I left them out of the book because the murder of two children by their father the king would have taken my story in an entirely different direction…

St Werburgh's Pilgimage Badge
Public Domain Image

Sometimes, when doing historical detective work, it’s best to leave the bodies right where you find them, and walk away!

About The Sins of the Father

A father’s legacy can be a blessing or a curse…

AD658: The sons of Penda of Mercia have come of age. Ethelred, the youngest, recalls little of past wars while Wulf is determined to emulate their father, whose quest to avenge his betrayed kinswomen drew him to battle three successive Northumbrian kings.

Ecgfrith of Northumbria is more hostile towards the Mercians than his father was. His sister Ositha, thwarted in her marriage plans, seeks to make her mark in other ways, but can she, when called upon, do her brother’s murderous bidding?

Ethelred finds love with a woman who is not involved in the feud, but fate intervenes. Wulf’s actions against Northumbria mean Ethelred must choose duty over love, until he, like his father before him, has cause to avenge the women closest to him. Battle must once more be joined, but the price of victory will be high.

Can Ethelred stay true to his father’s values, end the feud, keep Mercia free, and find the path back to love?

[A version of this article first appeared on author Charlene Newcomb's blog in 2021]

Adding some Atmosphere

I've had some lovely compliments recently about the world-building in my novels, so I thought I'd share some aspects of 'Anglo-Saxon' life here with you today.

In my novel Cometh the Hour, I imagined the Sutton Hoo burial and mentioned the lyre that was included in the grave goods. But in all my novels, I've written scenes set in the mead hall during a feast, where invariably there is a scop telling tales, riddles, and playing music.

My photo of the reconstructed lyre at Sutton Hoo

Here's a link (the image of the inside of the mead hall is not strictly accurate) to a piece from Grendelcynn on Youtube, played on a similar instrument. It will give a flavour of the kinds of sound one might have heard at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_GVjcVBiP4

Of course, lyres weren't the only musical instruments. There were also wooden and even bone whistles, or flutes. The Malham Pipe was originally thought to have been Bronze Age, but is now thought to be post-Roman, and it might have sounded something like this:

https://soundcloud.com/pittriversound-1/malham-pipe-jig-eric-todd-1951

I'm very lucky in that the Thegns of Mercia specialise in reconstructing the earlier 'Anglo-Saxon period'. They are constantly inspiring me, and if you've read Cometh the Hour and/or the follow-up, The Sins of the Father, and want an idea of the wrap-over coats that my characters wear, well, here's an image, with kind permission from Æd Thompson and with credit to Jon Wylie of the Thegns:

Please do visit their site or catch them on Twitter and Facebook for more wonderful photos and reconstructions.

Of course, we all know that people at this time loved their 'bling'. Those who've read 'Sins' might recall that a Kentish bride was wearing a rather lovely, and rather large, brooch. My inspiration for this piece was the Kingston Brooch which, I think you'll agree, is also rather lovely:

Image via Wiki Commons: Link

This has been dated to the seventh century and was found near Kingston in Kent, so I'd say it's a pretty perfect fit for my seventh-century royal Kentish bride to wear on her wedding day!

Sadly, there are no surviving examples of Anglo-Saxon wooden buildings, but to get a sense of what they looked like, you could do worse than visiting West Stow Anglo-Saxon Settlement, where they have examples of various styles of buildings:

Via Wiki Commons - Link

There are a few surviving stone churches, however, and whilst it's fair to say that in the early conversion period the churches were also built of wood, there is a remarkable stone built church which has been dated to around the time that my main character in The Sins of the Father, Ethelred, became king of Mercia. This one is in Northumbria, land of his enemies, but let's not hold that against this beautiful building, which I was lucky enough to visit in the spring when the blossom was out:

My photo of Escomb Church, Bishop Aukland, Co Durham

So these are some of the sights, but what about the sounds? The characters in my books would all have spoken local dialect versions of Old English, which sounds like a language far removed from our own, but there are lots of recognisable words, if you look closely.

I wrote a post a little while ago, looking at the words of the Lord's Prayer, and how we can decipher some of the Old English words. 

The Lord's Prayer in Old English - written 
for me by calligrapher, reenactor, and friend,
Dawn Burgoyne

However, perhaps to get a flavour of the seventh-century mead hall we'd be better off listening to a lovely reading of the epic poem Beowulf - which might have originated in Mercia! - by Heiðniborg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CpKlEiahtI

A page from a copy of Beowulf

Outside the mead hall you'd hear various sounds, none louder than thunder. Animals, the clanging from the forge, and conversation (in Old English, of course). Whilst putting together this little blog post I came across this fun website. It's a bit too 'modern' for our purposes, but I reckon if you set the sounds to this pattern, you'll get an idea:

Click HERE to visit the site

Of course, one thing I can't do is bring you the smells of Anglo-Saxon life. In my books, I try to focus on the more pleasant aromas - cooked food, flower blossom, herbs - but I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that some other smells might have been distinctly unpleasant, so perhaps we should be grateful that blog posts can't yet bring Smell-0-Vision to the world!

My two-book series, Tales of the Iclingas, is complete and available now:

Cometh the Hour:

The Sins of the Father:

And you can find my other novels, stories, and my nonfiction books HERE

Tamworth - Ancient Mercian Royal Residence

Last time, I wrote about the site of Bamburgh Castle,  which features in both of my Tales of the Iclingas novels. This time I thought I’d explain some of the background to my choice of the main Mercian setting in both books: Tamworth. This is where Penda, the last pagan Mercian king, and his family, whose stories are told in the books, had their main residence.

There’s some debate about whether Tamworth can truly be described as the ancient capital of the midland kingdom of Mercia, because Repton also claims that title. On a recent BBC Radio 4 programme, Gareth Williams, the British Museum's Curator of Medieval Coinage, said that the notion of ancient capitals is "a product of nineteenth-century antiquarianism." If we think in terms of 'royal centres' though, I think both places have a claim, up to a point, and I’ll explain why.

Though the kings at this time were itinerant, moving from royal vill to royal vill, it seems clear that they had their favourite, or main, residences and these changed according to which family was ruling. 

Mercia, more so than the other kingdoms, grew from, and to an extent remained, a federation of smaller kingdoms and tribes which gradually became part of Greater Mercia, and it suffered from dynastic disputes which played a significant part in its eventual demise. Even in the later part of the period, its administrative system differed from that of its neighbour, Wessex, in that the leading men of the Witan and those charged with the business of local government, tended to be leaders of those tribes and smaller kingdoms, rather than being appointed centrally by the king.

And so, we find that a later king, Cenwulf (depicted left), seemed to favour Winchcombe in modern-day Gloucestershire and used the abbey there as a repository for royal documents. Meanwhile the mausoleum at Repton housed the remains of King Wiglaf and his family, as well as being the base for King Burgred, who was ousted when the Great Viking army made camp there.

The crypt at Repton

Offa, in the eighth century, seems to have favoured Tamworth, building a ‘palace’ there. So I think it’s fair to say that at different times, different places were the ‘capital’ of Mercia, but all were situated  within the core area of the original ‘kingdom’. I chose to make my character King Penda part of the Iclingas, Icel being the supposed founder of the royal house of Mercia. In one genealogy, he appears five generations above Penda (Anglian Collection).

Repton and Tamworth both fell within the territory of a people called the Tomsæte, ‘the dwellers by the River Tame’ and the Iclingas perhaps began as the leaders of these people, who established themselves in "an open meadow by the Tame" which they called "Tomworðig (Tomworthy). The settlement straddled the River Anker (which flows into the Tame). Bede described the Mercians as being the people who lived north and south of the River Trent, and it should be noted of course that the Tame flows into the Trent at Alrewas in Staffordshire, so to talk of the Tame Valley Mercians and the Trent Valley Mercians is to refer to a small enough area. In fact, Tamworth to Repton is a distance of only just under 23 miles. 

However, since we don’t know where Penda came from, for my novels I opted for Tamworth as his base which, of course, is not far away (11 miles or so) from where the Staffordshire Hoard was found - a crucial element of my tale. If we assume that Penda was one of the Iclingas, and that the Iclingas absorbed or were part of the Tomsæte, then Tamworth seems a fitting main residence. 

From the roof of the castle, the view of
St Editha's Church

The current castle sits high on a mound but dates back no earlier than the 12th century, while the original motte was built in the eleventh. The picture below shows the beautiful Norman herringbone brickwork. The location of Offa's palace has never been identified, although excavations north of Bolebridge Street in 1968 revealed what appeared to be the outline of a large Saxon building.

In the 1970s excavation work, also in the Bolebridge Street area, uncovered a water mill, dating from the 9th century or perhaps earlier. Remains of a second mill were also found. “Among the finds were the sole-tree of the mill, with its steel bearing; one of the wheel-paddles; many fragments of millstones, of local stone and imported lava; fragments of the clay bed in which the lower millstone was set; and the residues of lead window-cames. Grain and grain impressions include oats and possibly barley. The second mill was destroyed by fire.” [Archaeology Data Service] 

A few generations after Penda’s rule and that of his immediate family, the succession switched to another branch of the royal house. Then, in the eighth century, Offa appears to have favoured Tamworth while later kings based themselves elsewhere as I’ve mentioned. There was a period where no Mercian rulers were able to base themselves there, for Tamworth was occupied by the ‘Vikings’ in the ninth and early tenth century.

Which is why (and if you’ve read my novel about her life you'll know), Æthelflæd seems to have lived in the southwest - and thus the free area - of Mercia, with strong links to Gloucester and Worcester. However, in 913 her forces liberated Tamworth and it was here that she died in 918, still on campaign. The statue of her just outside the castle was erected in 1913 to mark the centenary of her victory over the Vikings. 

In 2018 there was a conference and a literary festival held at Tamworth to mark the 1100th anniversary of Æthelflæd’s death. I was there, giving a talk about the Lady, and even met her myself.

There was much talk about her, quite rightly, and mention of Offa, of course. But I also spent the weekend wandering around looking for the site of the excavated water mill, and imagining Penda and his family living in the town which would, of course, be unrecognisable to them now. But there is something there which just might catch their eye: Tamworth Castle now houses the largest collection of pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard outside Birmingham. And, as I said, the hoard plays a crucial part in my tale… 

Cometh the Hour

The Sins of the Father 

[All photographs taken by/copyright of the author. Promo Graphics by Avalon Graphics]

You can find all my books, fiction and nonfiction, at

http://viewauthor.at/Annie-Whitehead

The Early Fortress of Bamburgh

The ancient fortress at Bamburgh has featured heavily in my two-book Tales of the Iclingas series, because it’s where all the baddies live!

Actually, that’s not completely true, but Northumbria was certainly no friend to Mercia during this period.

'Modern Day' Bamburgh Castle - photo courtesy of 
David Satterthwaite

I thought I’d talk a little today about the history of Bamburgh itself. It’s famous, and has been used as a backdrop in many film and TV dramas, but what were its origins?

The first warlord of Bamburgh about whom we have any detailed information was Æthelfrith, and the Britons called him Flesaur, or "the twister.” What came to be known as Northumbria was initially two separate kingdoms: Bernicia in the north, centred around Bamburgh, and Deira in the south, centred around York.

Æthelfrith seemingly had designs on Deira, and launched an attack during which the king of Deira was killed, Edwin (possibly the king’s brother) was driven into exile and Acha, his sister, willingly or not - I suspect not - was then married to Æthelfrith. In time, their progeny would bring the two Northumbrian kingdoms together, but it was a long road, one that began with Edwin taking a circuitous route out of exile and seeking revenge…

Via Wiki Commons - Attribution Link

According to Bede, Bamburgh (Bebbanburh) was named after Bebba, first wife of Æthelfrith. Who was Bebba? No one knows. That’s the only mention of her. Whether she was still alive when Æthelfrith popped home with new wife Acha in tow, we don’t know. 

She might not even have been ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ How these people, specifically the Angles, came to be ruling this area isn’t clear, but it seems that it had previously formed part of the kingdom of the Gododdin, a Brittonic people of the Hen ogledd (old North).

The island of Lindisfarne is just off the coast of Bamburgh and when Oswald, son of Æthelfrith, came to power, he sent for Aidan from Iona to found the monastery there.

(It was here that the exquisite Lindisfarne Gospels were produced in around AD700. You can read more about them HERE. Sadly, Lindisfarne was of course, also the victim of a devastating Viking raid in 793.)   

In my novel Cometh the Hour we see various Northumbrian kings in residence at Bamburgh and in The Sins of the Father it is once again the central location in the north. However, kings at this time were wont to move around, visiting their estates. For ease, and to prevent scene after scene of royal courts on the road, I kept the scenes in the north almost exclusively set at Bamburgh. Although, in Cometh the Hour, Yeavering is shown being built, and you can check out a blog post about Yeavering HERE 

It’s not hard to see, when you look at photos of Bamburgh, or when you’re there in person, why this site lends itself so well to a royal fortification. Sea for protection? Check. Rocky outcrop? Check. Commanding view of the area? Check.

"Bamborough Castle from the Northeast, with Holy Island in the Distance,
Northumberland" by John Varley (1827; Metropolitan Museum of Art

The site is 150ft above sea level. Recent excavation has revealed that in pre-Conquest times, there was a timber hall on the edge of the site near steps which came up through the cleft in the rock. The Bamburgh Research project has details of St Oswald’s Gate, which formed the entrance to the fortress from at least the latter part of the eighth century and probably gave the only access to the fortress at that time. It would have given access from the stronghold to the settlement that lay to the west - probably where St Aidan’s church now stands, and perhaps also provided access to the sea via the beach, where there might also have been a harbour. 

Not surprisingly, this royal vill would have been quite the centre of industry. Archaeologists have also found evidence of an ‘industrial mortar mixer’ indicating the presence of a major stone-built building. 

Stunning archaeological finds have included two pattern-welded swords, one a two-strand, and one a six-strand. Pattern-welding is a method of making sword blades by twisting strands of metal together. This process produces blades with shimmering patterns. The six-stranded weapon was probably wielded by someone of very high status; perhaps the king himself. In the photos below you can see one of the swords and what it would have looked like when it was new (images from Janina Ramirez on Twitter)

Another find was the famous Bamburgh Beast, a small zoological design in gold. It seems there was a stone carved chair, which would have served as a gift-stool (a throne, essentially). 

Excavation has not just revealed artefacts though and the area is now well-known for its bodies.

First revealed by a violent storm in the 19th century, the Bowl Hole graveyard is hidden within the sand dunes a few hundred meters south of Bamburgh Castle. Dozens of individuals were uncovered during excavations between 1998 and 2007. These remains have been analysed and you can find out more HERE 

One skeleton found at Bamburgh was that of a young man, whose left shoulder was sliced away and his pelvis had been sliced all the way down to his left knee. It is possible to envisage how he was standing, with his left arm slightly forwards, in a defensive pose. Another skeleton was of a youth who was seriously disabled, with a malformed right knee which would have inhibited walking. He was buried though in a high status cemetery, a mark of how much he was cared for during life.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the castle has been used many times as a filming location. I was aware of some, but here’s a link to a list - and it’s a longer one that I imagined!

Cometh the Hour:

The Sins of the Father:

You can find all my books, fiction and nonfiction, at

http://viewauthor.at/Annie-Whitehead

English Place Names

I often drive through a town or village and wonder about its name. There are some strange ones out there - Chapel-en-le-Frith, Stoke Poges, Egremont, Kingston Bagpuize, Ashby de la Zouch... 

Also odd are the ones that aren't pronounced anything like they should be. Happisburgh in Norfolk, for example. Yep, that's right, it's pronounced Hazeburra. Oh I know, let's not even get started on the boroughs, and burghs, some of which are pronounced burra, and some bruff! (Although I shall return to them later and maybe clear up the confusion.)

With a lot of place-names, it's easy to break them down into their constituent parts and work out what they mean.

The OE (Old English) place names seem to be are straightforward. In an earlier blog post about Wulfric Spott I mentioned his mother, Wulfrun, who gave her name to Wolverhampton.

Her personal name forms the first part of the town name, and the rest consists of ham and ton:~

Ham = farm, settlement, homestead (ON Toft) but we'll see that this is not quite so straightforward...

Ton = enclosure
So it would seem that many place names contain elements of OE or ON (Old Norse) which are simply words to denote topographical or geographical features.

Wic (OE)/By (ON) = market

Thorpe - secondary settlement
Leigh/ley (OE) = woodland clearing- so my fictional village of Ashleigh in Alvar the Kingmaker is 'clearing in the ash forest'
Thwaite (ON) = clearing in Old Norse
Ing (OE) = people

As you can see, the above village name has the elements ing and ham. Great Massingham is in Norfolk. In Cumbria there are a lot of place names with ON origins : Kirkby Lonsdale, Kirkby Thore, Seathwaite.

So far, so straightforward. But all is not as it seems. In her Signposts to the Past, Margaret Gelling dispels a lot of the accepted thinking.

To go back to the element ham:~ Another OE word was hamm, which was not connected. Kingsholme near Gloucester does not mean king’s home, but Kyngeshamme, a water meadow on the royal estate.

“The uncompounded name Ham offers no problems, as it always derives from the topographical term hamm, which has been considered to mean ‘land in a river (bed), promontory, dry ground in a marsh, river-meadow. It may be used on its own, as in East and West Ham, or in a first element, as in some instances of Hampton, but it occurs most frequently as a final element. The habitative term hām, (village, estate) is not used as a simplex place-name and only occurs as a first element if the name derives form a compound appellative like hāmtūn, hāmstede.”

Another pair of similar words which cause trouble are būr (bower) and burh (fort) - and we need to distinguish beorg, from burh, and its dative byrig. Had they been differentiated in Middle English beorg would give berrow or barrow, and burh would mostly give borough while byrig would give bury. Archaeological evidence is needed in these cases to establish exactly how the place-names developed.

Burh can mean not only a hill fort but also a defended manor house as well as the later 'town'.

In the country as a whole, Bury is more common than Borough, Burgh or Brough. The OE final -h could develop into -f in pronunciation but not spelling, as in laugh and tough, and this led to burh becoming Burf as in Abdon Burf, and sometime Berth.

Later on there are instances of byrig meaning manor house:~ Bibury, from Beage, daughter of Leppa, and burh meaning monastery. In the case of Fladbury, this is probably derived from Flæde’s byrig, possibly a manor house built by a widow. In the case of the element ing, it had always been assumed that newcomers took what land they chose, and that places such as Hastings (followers of Hæsta) and Reading (followers of Réad) were believed to mark those settlements. But Gelling says these were not 'primary settlement' place-names but actually came much later.

Ing sometimes has no filial relationship at all – Clavering in Essex comes about from the element ing being added to clœfre (clover) to give place where the clover grows. The same construction applies to Docking in Norfolk, from docce, the place where dock grows.

There has been a suggestion in recent times that some names came about because the Anglo-Saxons settlers mispronounced the Celtic names they discovered, much as the English in WWI pronounced Ypres as Wipers. Gelling is not convinced that the newcomers had such poor linguistic skills, and she points out that this was not the fate of all the Celtic place names.

Some tun names might have come about because of the Mercian administrators who might have been in the habit of describing places which had Celtic names as the ea-tun (river settlement) and that these names eventually stuck, but this is only a theory.

Where the Celtic, or Pre-Celtic names have been preserved, it is largely in the names of rivers. 

The use of the word walh to mean slave is probably a misconception, and it's more likely that it means ‘a Celt’; however, the reality is that most slaves would have been (descendants) of British who had that status under the Romans. 

The seventh-century king of the Magonsæte, who appears in my latest novel, Cometh the Hour was Merewalh, which has been translated as 'famous Welshman'. That being accepted, it seems unlikely that walh meant 'slave'. 

If the Angles and Saxons had problems with the place-names they encountered, the same was certainly true of the Norman invaders.

The initial sound Y was a problem for the Normans, so Yarrow became Jarrow, Yesmond became Jesmond. These are fairly easy to spot once armed with the knowledge that the letter J was not in use in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet. So too the letter Z, which appears in names such as Belsize.

The initial sound in words such as thorn was unknown to the Normans, and they replaced it with T so that Tilsworth probably would have developed into Thilsworth had the conquest not happened.

Wic, the element identified as meaning market, was borrowed from Latin vicus. Before it was used as salt-working centre and ‘dairy farm’, it might have been used by the earliest English speaking people to refer to Romano-British settlements, or to Roman administrative units.

Gelling points out that more than 75% of the instances of places called wīchām were situated directly on or not more than a mile from a major Roman Road.

Often  tūn (ton) developed where an estate was once part of a larger demesne. An estate given to a thegn named Wulfgar came over time to be called Aughton (Aeffe’s estate, Aeffe being Wulfgar’s widow. Likewise an estate granted to Sibba becomes Sibton. Some ton names are more general, Preston (priests), Charlton, (ceorla-ton, enclosure of the the ceorls).

Grim is a nickname for Woden, but not all Grims- are of this origin. Grimr was a common ON personal name. So we cannot assume that all Grims are the devil.

And speaking of personal names, they aren’t all. Whitchurch could be Hwīta’s church, but it could also simply be the white church. 

Another key place in my new novel is Oswestry, universally believed to have developed from Oswald's tree, the site of his killing. But Warburton developed from Wærburg’s farm or estate, where the religious house was dedicated to St Werburgh, probably because the name suggested it, and the same logic should, according to Gelling, be applied to Oswestry, where the dedication of St Oswald probably arose from a place name which did not originally refer to the saint.

Sometimes the ON and OE elements are hard to differentiate.
Brunum or Brunnum in ON corresponds to burna (OE), which gives us the modern burn. Similarly, Lythe could be from ON lith, (slope) or from OE hlith, with the same meaning.

Beck - ON

But there are some words which have no English cognate. Going back to Cumbria we find Wasdale and Watendlath, containing vatn (lake,) Fossdale containing fors (waterfall,) and thveit, (thwaite -clearing.)

Many Scandinavian settlement names of eastern England can be divided into three main categories -by, -thorp, and those combined with English tun combined with a Norse personal name.

PH Sawyer argued that Norse place-names did not denote the settlements of a victorious army, but more likely inferior land. Older villages were probably already on the best sites.
Alford, for example, is much larger than the surrounding places with -by and -thorpe names.

Kirby/Kirkby generally denotes a church village, and is usually borne by places with desirable locations and it is likely that it replaces an older English, or perhaps Celtic name. It might have simply been that kirkby was an appellative applied to any village with a noteworthy church.

Mitchelgate (gate=ON gata - road) in Kirkby Lonsdale

Moving into the the post-Conquest era brings us the wonderful place-names such as Ashby de la Zouch and Egremont. But many of the French names were just stereo-typical descriptions, giving us beautiful seat, beautiful place, beautiful hill. (Belvoir, Beaulieu, Beauvale, Beaumont)

So, next time you drive past a place-name sign, don't assume the obvious; there may be more to the story of the name than meets the eye...