ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evidence in place-names for manure and manuring in England, draws on records dating from Anglo-Saxon charters through to nineteenth-century Tithe Awards. It begins with the most unproblematic, and earliest recorded, of all the possible terms for manure and dung in the English toponymic vocabulary. The chapter focuses on firmer ground when it comes to a number of terms and compounds which evidently mean 'dung-hill'. Whichever dung-based word might ultimately underlie Byschopdinge and Kyngesdonge, it is enough for one present purpose to note the probable attribution of manure to a bishop and a king. Old English (OE) dung 'dung' is not always as simple a place-name element to identify as might be hoped, or in any major place-name. In the names, therefore, shifting and socially contingent attitudes to manure begin to be revealed, a theme that would merit further exploration through a detailed consideration of the manurial component of the English place-name corpus.
