chapter seventeen hinking hrough the Manorial Aix: People and Place in Medieval England Richard Jones For those interested in the English landscape, double-barrelled place-names such as Staunton Harold in Leicestershire (in the context of this volume we must surely begin here), Chaldon Herring (Dors.), Charlton Mackrell (Som.) and Burton Salmon (Yorks.) catch the eye. For they seem to represent a quintessentially English form of rurality. Such place-names have become the mainstay of iction: few writers who seek to evoke that bucolic sense of a countryside untouched by modernity miss the opportunity to set their stories in landscapes which abound with these kinds of names. One might think of St Mary Mead – arguably the most well-known English place-name around the world; or the geography of Midsomer Murders where we ind Midsomer Deverell, Midsomer Marsh, Midsomer Mallow, Midsomer Wellow, Midsomer Parva and Midsomer Worthy, Morton Fendel, Aspern Tallow, Martyr Warren, Newton Magna and Badger’s Drift. Indeed, so synonymous are these names with a ‘lost’ or fondly remembered English idyll that they have become part of the nation’s mythology and are key components in the building of its identity. More cynically, of course, they have become tools for those who seek to market England’s tradition-rich and heritage-steeped image in a quest to capture the tourist dollar. On these grounds alone, there is a clear justiication for the close study of these names, for it would seem that few other places hold such an important place in the English collective psyche. Of the place-names that take this form by far the largest group are those that carry the name of an individual and more commonly a family that can be historically associated with the place through tenure – either as tenants or as lords of the manor. hese are places that early editors of the county surveys of place-names described as carrying a feudal element, a category of name which extended to forms such as Grafton Regis (Northants.), Upton Archiepiscopi (Notts.), Toller Monachorum (Dors.), Cerne Abbas (Dors.) or equivalent anglicised forms such as King’s Norton (West Midlands.), Bishopsthorpe (Yorks.), Monks Risborough (Bucks.) and Canons Ashby (Northants.). he focus here will not be on these kinds of names but rather on those place-names that carry the names of seigneurial families, that is names with manorial aixes.