Lecture 'Lost Villages, Lost Names?'

 The 2025 Cameron Lecture is happening next week in Nottingham. If you're available and interested in coming along for some place-name fun, please do join us! It's free to attend, but registration is required. More info below.

Dr Richard Jones (University of Leicester). 'Lost Villages, Lost Names?'

19.00, 19 September 2025

RSVP: tinyurl.com/cameronlecture

This lecture explores the survival and loss of minor names and field-names in the context of late medieval and early modern settlement depopulation and desertion. Drawing from a selection of well-documented lost villages in Leicestershire, it examines the impact of population decline and landscape change on local name stocks. It asks whether we can identify a minimum population threshold above which names were more likely to survive or below which they were lost. It examines the effects of different forms of depopulation—rapid and wholesale versus extended and piecemeal, early versus late—on name survival and loss; and, where the precise dynamics of depopulation are unknown, how name survival might potentially inform on those processes. And it asks what kinds of names survived or were lost and why. As might be expected, the picture that emerges is complex, and all the more thought-provoking for it.

The Cameron Lectures:

The biennial Cameron lecture is held in memory of Professor Kenneth Cameron. Cameron was Head of English at the University of Nottingham from 1984 to 1987, and was one of the leading figures in place-name study. In 1967, he became Director of the Survey of English Place-Names and moved the library and offices of the English Place-Name Society to Nottingham, where they remain, now housed in the Institute for Name-Studies.