The Place-name Kingston and Royal Power in Middle Anglo-Saxon England

Book excerpt: In this significant study,Jill Bourne presents the corpus of all 70 surviving Kingston place-names, fromDevon to Northumberland, and investigates each one within its historical andlandscape context, in an attempt to answer the question, What is a Kingston?She addresses all previous published work on this recurrent place-name, bothscholarship with an etymological focus and contextual scholarship whichexamines the names within their wider context. The core of the work is thehypothesis that names of the type cyninges tun or cyning tun derivenot from independent coinages meaning 'manor/farm/enclosure of a king' in somegeneral sense, or in direct relation to the phrase cyninges tun, as itis sometimes assumed in the literature, as an equivalent to villa regia.The study explores connections between Kingstons and the cyninges-tuns andvill� regales of the documentary sources; considers the concept anddevelopment of early kingship and its possible origins, the laws of theearliest kings, the petty kingdoms, and emergence of the larger kingdoms forwhich the term Heptarchy was coined (but not used at the time); and paysparticular attention to Ancient Wessex, where more than half of the corpus ofKingston names are found, and to the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the Hwicceand Magons�te, where a further quarter lie.