ABSTRACT
Most scholars fully recognize the nature and limitations of evidence and, despite occasional exceptions, the most distinguished scholars are also the most careful in their use of it. Place-name scholars occasionally build too confidently on dubious parallels and insist on derivations which at best are speculative. In an age when books on history, archaeology and place-names are attracting ever-widening circles of readers true scholarship is in danger of being swamped by cheap journalism, and one increasingly hears the most unlikely names quoted as authorities. Sites mentioned in the written record but lost to the historian may be identified by the evidence of place-names and more fully explained by the evidence of archaeology. Linguistic criteria embedded in a copy of a charter or a manuscript of a chronicle will often help the historian to determine the authenticity of his materials by revealing the date of underlying sources.
