This publication completes the parish-by-parish inventory of the society’s most intensive county survey to date, leaving an introductory volume to come. Rooted in Cox’s doctoral research in the late 1960s, its strengths, as with Margaret Gelling’s and Kenneth Cameron’s similarly magisterial work on Shropshire (Reference Cameron1990–2006) and Lincolnshire (1985–2017) respectively – sadly interrupted by their deaths – include treatment of street and pub names (now standard in epns survey volumes) alongside field and other minor local names, and a rolling glossary of elements. Continued support by research bodies and the academy reflects the series’ value to local and regional history and specific narratives of settlement, landscape, society and economy. However, we may have a long time to wait for revision to the same standard of the single volume county surveys from 1923 onwards, whose pioneer compilers, though constrained by limited remit and resources, were giants in their field.

The utility of epns volumes transcends county borders. For example, settlements with ingtūn (a habitative ending), including Castle Donington, form ‘a crescent on the borders of the great heath which once extended westwards from … Charnwood Forest’, a possible eighth-century development. Recurring masculine personal names as their protothemes ‘suggest estates in the holding of a small group of thanes, [perhaps relating] to the growth of nearby Tamworth as the civil centre of … Mercia’. Readers, aware or not of Cox’s seminal discussion of this idea (Reference Cox1980), will be inspired, here and elsewhere, to investigate comparative examples of such thematic clusters in other regions.

As always, rarer names entertain and intrigue: a field-name Cossicles refers to cottagers’ dwellings; Gun Hill, Gungate and other gun names in the north and east Midlands may involve a pre-English word for ‘hill’. Leicestershire’s stratum of British survivals grows: Breedon-on-the-Hill is well known – one of those multiplex names that remind us that adoption of others’ toponyms does not guarantee they were understood – but not so familiar are Mantle and Mindhill, in which Old English hyll became added to a development of what in Wales became mynydd, ‘mountain’, but here a hill or perhaps a hilly district, since the examples include a stream locally called the river Mantle. At the other end of the time continuum ‘Irish Bogs’ for what in 1840 was possibly waste ground ‘used for encampments by travelling Irish tinkers’ is a reminder that issues of identity and immigration are etched in the landscape as well as the psyche.

One observation: translation of swanimote as ‘peasant moot’ (Swannymote Rock, etc) masks such assemblies as forest courts of first instance, in turn indicative that Charnwood was once a formal forest, contrary to the received opinion repeated here.