ABSTRACT
What follows aims to illustrate some attempts to ‘doubt wisely’ the use of written records in reconstructing Old English. The discussion is based (though not exclusively) on selected and at times interconnected issues relating to interpretations of spelling-forms of personal names. As Coates remarks, name study is ‘an intensely satisfying discipline’: ‘its subject matter is central to human life, of deep anthropological and social significance, and touching all sorts of other disciplines’. 1 As well as onomastics, I will, for instance, be invoking numismatics, philology, and linguistics, and, to some extent, social and political reconstruction. One of the issues addressed specifically concerns the Kentish dialect, and prompts a pursuit of non-onomastic material in relation to an apparent anomaly in the prevailing characterisation of this dialect.
