FIELD-NAMES OF AMOUNDERNESS HUNDRED

Abstract

OCAL scholars, working under a small committee, are collecting and recording the field-names of Lancashire and Cheshire. The collections for Amounderness already include many thousands of names, but there seems to be no immediate prospect of reaching a stage of completeness sufficient to justify the publication of final lists. Such lists will ultimately be issued for each hundred in Lancashire and Cheshire, but the above committee, being unwilling to suspend all publication for several years, has adopted the policy of issuing a series of interim reports, the first of which deals with the nineteenth century minor names of Amounderness. It is not to be thought that modern field-names can be studied satisfactorily when they are divorced from their earlier forms, but the volume and nature of the collected material dictate some such treatment as the only alternative to delayed publication. One advantage of the present scheme is that a report allows considerably more comment on the names than will be possible in the necessarily brief introductions to the final lists. And the latter will, of course, place in their proper setting the names now discussed. Unless another source is specified all the minor names quoted below are taken from the Tithe Award Schedules, which were compiled after the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. 2 They run