My question is narrow in scope [topic] and broad in scope [language] but it is confined to one group, the Anglo-Saxons.
I was reading a history book online [PDF format] and it had this:
|| :| |Lloyd House, Lloyd Farm, in Penn, 4 m. S. of Wolverhampton. |The root is perhaps A. S. lead, leode, M. E. lude, which has a variety of meanings, e. g. men or people of the country, a prince or nobleman, sometimes ' a country, or district/ apart from its inhabitants. The difficulty here is in the application of any one of these meanings to a pi. n.
At first, I thought it was Welsh llwyd "gray", which often becomes Lloyd in some contexts, and Mercia being close to Wales.
At that time there would have been Anglo-Saxons like Wulfrun in existence, and Wigstan, who was a Mercian prince [I know there is a town called Wobaston, meaning "Wigstan's town", from the Old English personal name + tun "farm"].
The Old English dialect at the time was Mercian, which probably explains why Wall is from Mercian waella instead of Old English wella.
How does some of the Old English get corrupted and twisted so it gets confused with Celtic [at the time of the Anglo-Saxons there were probably a few Celts living there, am I correct?].
I'm trying to understand the Anglo-Saxons [Mercia region] for several reasons - historical research and creative works [worldbuilding/alternate history/videogame with historical settings, although those fall outside the purview of this subreddit].
The book is obviously a secondary source, but it uses place-names from historical rolls/Onomasticum [I believe that was a Latin book at the time] from 1100s/1200s, which are primary sources.
I've used Google Street View to try and understand the landscapes for topography, not sure if that helps or not for place-name meanings.
I'm doing some basic research into history/placenames, but other than these books, where are good places to start? I don't really want to get into paywalled educational resources, but I do know my local libraries don't have as many place-name books as in the early 2000's, so it's a bit harder to research there now.
Finding good websites to research is the harder bit, as I'm trying to treat them as a source that's being assessed too [wrong mindset?]
Obviously, I can't really gain access to the primary sources due to fragility of them, so the books as secondary sources are the next best thing.
I would appreciate any input from historians on interpreting and understanding these sort of secondary sources, and place-names in general.
So your answer lies in both the ethnographics of early medieval England and the sociocultural impact of the Anglo-Saxon arrival, and the political realities of Mercia.
The Anglo-Saxon 'conquest' of England is a gradual process that takes roughly a century to spread from the east coast across England. As 'Englishness' spreads, so Brythonic and Anglo-Saxon material and linguistic cultures mix, and bilingualism is likely to have been quite common. Instead of the genocide that Gildas and Procopius would have you believe, the Anglo-Saxons did not wholesale replace the Romano-British population, but rather established themselves as a sizeable minority. Indeed, modern DNA evidence suggests that roughly 30% of the population is Germanic in origin.
Mercia itself functioned as a sort of tribal-federal model, with a series of allied subkingdoms acting in conjunction with the Mercian heartland states centred on Shropshire and Staffordshire. These subkingdoms included tribes like the Hwicce and Mægonsaete, both of which are thought to have been still Romano-British well into the late Anglo-Saxon period, although still conversant officially in English. This would have meant that Brythonic would have had plenty of time to insinuate itself into placenames and personal names.
It's also worth considering that, as with the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, upon arriving in a new area, would simply have coopted the preexisting Brythonic names for significant landscape features or settlements.