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Electronic Anderson

The only comprehensive study of Anglo-Saxon assembly-places in England for more than 70 years has been Olof S. Anderson's three volume English Hundred-Names (1934-39). This work established name etymologies and considered meeting-place locations, making possible analyses of topographical preferences of assembly-sites. A major outcome of the Landscapes of Governance project is to create an updated, comprehensive, online database (Electronic Anderson) of all named districts and their locatable meeting-places based on Anderson's ground-breaking work.

The Electronic Anderson database will provide structured information relating to assembly-places drawing on the systematic examination of the available evidence: written sources for the period, archaeological evidence, place-names and landscape evidence, to serve as a research tool suitable for specialists in these diverse areas. The database should be used alongside English Hundred-Names, which provides a more thorough excerption of early sources and detailed citations.

We are grateful to the Anderson (later Arngart) family and Lund University for granting permission to make the full text of English Hundred-Names available here as an electronic download:

  • O.S. Anderson, English Hundred-Names, Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, 30.1, Lunds Universitet, Lund (1934). Preliminaries [552kB]
    [11.2mB]
  • O.S. Anderson, The English Hundred-Names: The South-Western Counties, Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, 35.5, Lunds Universitet, Lund (1939). Text [12.8mB]
  • O.S. Anderson, The English Hundred-Names: The South-Eastern Counties, Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, 37.1, Hakan Ohlsson, Lund (1939). Text [10.8mB]

Electronic Anderson will be launched in 2013 via the Archaeology Data Service website.

County Maps

Maps for each of the Domesday shires can be downloaded here. These show the boundaries of the hundreds and wapentakes, derived by aggregating evidence from nineteenth-century administrative boundaries (courtesy of the major project at the University of Cambridge 'The occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911'), the Alecto Domesday (Thorn 1992), and revisions. The LoG project is very grateful to Martin Williams for producing these maps.

 
  

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