Names 317

personal names found in the Bible (1 Kings 9:28). And any common expression may court properhood by being used of unique objects such as The Milky Way or The Great Barrier Reef, being proper only if none of the possible literal inferences derivable from the expression is intended at the moment of usage, e.g. ‘there exists a way which is milky’ or ‘the reef is a barrier’ (Coates, 2000).

6.2English onomastics

Current onomastic work in the United Kingdom seeks to explain the linguistic origin of personal and place-names or to assess the historical significance of their distribution, and in the latter case as applied to personal names it is a tool of genealogy, and genealogical methods help refine historical-linguistic analysis. There have been small amounts of recent work on the social psychology of personal naming and nicknaming. There is sporadic work on literary onomastics (dealing with proper names for characters and locations in fictional works), but more in North America. In English-speaking countries beyond the British Isles, and indeed also in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, there is considerable interest in the heritage of names derived from languages that have been partly or totally displaced (for instance in North America and Australia), and in the cultural contexts in which naming has taken place, information about which tends to be of greater interest than in England, where the contexts of naming that generate most interest are medieval. In the words of William Bright: ‘American onomatologists . . . have given greater emphasis to “the motivation of the namer” – to the “human activity” of naming.’

The Anglo-Saxon (AS) period yields chronicles, coins and ‘charters’ (often writs and land grants or confirmations). Domesday Book (DB) may be regarded as the final collection of AS evidence and the first medieval collection. It is indispensable for many areas where it represents both the first and the last evidence for AS names, especially in the north of England. DB is actually a set of books, but they portray the facts of landholding immediately preand postConquest. Those responsible for carrying out the survey were Norman French speakers accustomed to writing in Latin and had little or no experience of English except for what local informants might tell them. That makes it a frustrating document; it offers many obstacles to the interpretation of the names. In addition, some of the returns of the commissioners who toured the country to establish what the Conqueror’s tax-base was have been reworked. We may therefore be at several removes from an actual mention of an English name when we find it on a folio of DB. Spelling is a severe problem, with scribes not conversant with