Introduction Landscape reconstruction is often an important aspect of the work of local historians in uncovering the history of a parish. For many English parishes in particular, tithe and enclosure maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—alongside contemporary field-books, surveys and terriers—help researchers to take the first steps in recreating the historic environment. Local history groups embarking upon this work often generate useful material and deposit this with county record offices for the benefit of all. However, continuing back beyond the modern period can be problematic, especially for those without the specialist skills to read and decipher medieval records. This paper recognises the important contribution that volunteer researchers make to the discipline of local and regional history and, using material developed in conjunction with volunteer groups at the Staffordshire Record Office, provides a set of guidelines and resources designed to help non-specialist researchers to access medieval documents. Specifically, these resources aid local historians in finding and recording the abundant minor landscape- and field-names written in later medieval charters. 1 The paper is also designed to illustrate the value of this work for place-name scholars, especially those working on the English Place-Name Society’s (EPNS) Survey of English Place-Names, 2 and for historians of all kinds. Volunteers and the English Place-Name Society The work of volunteers has underpinned the EPNS Survey from its very beginnings. The first of the county volumes (Buckinghamshire, 1925) acknowledges in its preface the work of many more individuals than the two men named on the title page, A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton. 3 This work was various, and included transcribing unpublished manuscripts, extracting name-forms from manuscripts and published sources, ‘carding up’, building gazetteers, and dealing with ‘questions of situation and pronunciation in which the man on the spot, who has lived in the district itself, is always the best guide’. 4 Volunteer input has remained of primary importance throughout the almost hundred-year history of the Society. The preface to The Place- Names of Northamptonshire, published in 1933, reveals an increased and systematic use of volunteers: the editors recorded their thanks to the Northamptonshire Education Committee for its help in securing the services of around 200 of the county’s schools to collect modern field-names. 5 The editors of The Place-Names of Cumberland (1952) benefited from similar help from ten schools: the appeal ‘was made at a difficult time, when the staffs were faced with war-time problems, and though only a few schools were able to help us, that help was of great value’. 6 The EPNS survey of Shropshire owes its very existence to the efforts of a group of volunteers, students at a 276 © British Association for Local History 2019 Preparing the ground: finding minor landscape names in medieval documents JAYNE CARROLL AND SUSAN KILBY