Divining medieval water: the field-names of Flintham in Nottinghamshire

[From Introduction] Back in 1984, Margaret Gelling launched her mission to rehabilitate topographical placenames, successfully arguing that they were worthy of renewed scholarly attention, and repositioning them as an important but neglected source of landscape evidence for the medieval period (Gelling 1984: 1; Gelling and Cole 2000: xii). Other topographical names, both field-names and other minor landscape names have, until recently, largely been ignored by scholars of the medieval landscape. Whilst there have been a number of studies of individual elements, hitherto there were few surveys featuring whole corpora of microtoponyms by scholars of the medieval landscape. Some early onomastic research tended to focus, unsurprisingly perhaps, on etymology and classification, rather than considering these names within their landscape context, as Gelling and Cole did (Cunnington 2000: 41-6; Daniels and Lagrange 2002: 29-58). More recently, like topographical place-names before them, microtoponyms have been having their own Renaissance moment, and they are increasingly being considered as an important element in reconstructing medieval perceptions of landscape (Baines 1996: 163-174; Semple 1998: 109-126; Kilby 2010: 72-7; Gardiner 2011: 16-30; Mileson 2016: 84-99; Jones et al 2017).