Romano-British placenames
I have long been fascinated by placenames and how they change through time. As an undergraduate (twenty years ago, now!), I wrote a dissertation on The Placenames of Roman Britain which I was very proud of. Unfortunately, as I was writing it, a book with exactly the same title, by Leo Rivet and Colin Smith, was published. As a result, I’ve never published the work I did, which I’ve nevertheless been keeping up to date, especially as I disagree on a number of major points with Rivet & Smith.
This link takes you to the index of placenames I have maintained since then.
The Ravenna Cosmography
The so-called Ravenna Cosmography is a work of geography by an anonymous cleric, working in Ravenna around the year 700 CE. He was not a particularly systematic individual, his source materials were in a poor state and, worse, he didn’t have the intellectual abilities to carry out what he was trying to do. Even so, what he recorded for Britain is the largest single collection of Romano-British placenames to be preserved from Antiquity. I’ve been working for some years on an analysis of the document.