Hooo boy, toponyms, every medievalist's favourite! Toponymics is a massively double-edged sword when looking at early medieval history, largely because of a very real tendency for linguists - and linguistic historians - to get bogged down in the gritty details rather than focusing on the cogent points and then moving on. This is particularly problematic when looking at early medieval England where many places have rival Old English, Danish and Brythonic names and words, all with potentially equal 'right' to a site. And therein lies the problem: arguably the actually important part of any medieval toponym is in the suffix, or in a compound noun, that tells us the actual function of a site instead of who (maybe) owned it. That's not to say that that in itself isn't a hugely fraught field: there's a continuing debate between John Blair and, well, practically everybody else about the use of the toponym burh for example.

The Old English word burh simply denotes an enclosure, meaning that it's an incredibly common toponym across England, mostly in reference to agrarian sites - cattle enclosures or a pallisaded village for example - but following the mid-ninth century, it also has a very specific meaning as a royaly-mandated fortifed garrison site, civic centre and proto-Urban centre. As you can imagine, this can lead to a great deal of debate as to whether a location is a lost fortress, or simply some kind of livestock farm. Other toponyms are far more useful, especially when used in conjuction. Ham (village), tun (settlement/town), vil (royal manor and attendant settlement), wic (trading centre), weard (lit. 'to ward or guard, with a general defensive context), tot (a watch, or look-out), stoc (place), lea (hill), hlāw (confusingly sometimes both hill and dale) or ceastra (fortress, from the Latin castrum), for example, all give us useful information about a settlement's practical origins and how it may have related to neighbouring settlements and the landscape.

Bristol, for example, starts life as Barton apuđ Brygestoc, the enclosed/walled town at the place with the bridge. Totterdown, now in East Bristol, was tot-earn-dūn; the watchman's house on the hill. Similarly Burwardsley in Cheshire (burh-weard-lea) is the walled defensive enclosure on the hill, a site likely part of a defensive network established in response to the Viking threat. Southampton starts at Hamwic, the settlement at the trading post, Droitwich as Saltwic, a settlement predicated on the extraction and selling of salt. In comparisson, the "who" is somewhat less useful. The important thing to learn from Bedminster, for example, is that there was a minster church there, not necessarily whether it was used to carry out baptisms (beydd) - what church isn't - or whether it was established by a clergyman named Bede, or even venerated 'The Venerable' Bede, of Historia Ecclesiastica fame.

Another problem with using toponyms to establish a historical heirarchy is that it relates to one person at one point in time, and somehow often implies that only one person with that name existed. The Grim who founded the by (farm) at Grimsby, for example, was just as likely to be a farmsteading small landowner, perhaps of 'freeman' rank - particularly in a rural agrarian context - than a major chieftain or warlord. A much more useful way of establishing who the important people are at any given time in a particular polity is to look at the attestations and beneficiaries of royal charters. Early medieval kingship is largely itinerant in nature; the king toured the country, dispensing justice, holding court, carrying out matters of state and generally doing kingly stuff, and charters written along the way would be witnessed by the local elites who would have come to attend on the monarch.

When Alfred came to Malmesbury in 871, for example (S 356 in the Sawyer archive), he grants land to his minister Dudig. This charter is witnessed by a bishop, Wulfric, two dux, Æthelhelm and Æthelnođ, the king's sons Æthelwald and Eadward, and a host of lesser nobles; Beorhnað, Elfhere, Deormod, Beorhthelm, Ceolwulf, Wulfric, Werulf, and Ecgwulf, who are likely to have been thegns, reeves or even hundredmen.

Broadly speaking, don't put too much stock in personal toponyms, but don't discount toponyms entirely as a valid historical source as they can be very valuable. To get a real picture of society's elites, look at our surviving literary evidence and charters. For a really good overview of Anglo-Saxon history, I'd always recommend Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England, Higham and Ryan's The Anglo-Saxon World, and I always recommend Whitelock's version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.